A term developed by political anthropologists which draws attention to the fact that ‘the state’ has not always been present in human societies. Hunter-gatherer societies founded on the basis of kinship exhibited forms of political organization but they evolved no formal political division of labour or coercive institutions empowered to exercise force over (and rhetorically, on behalf of) the people. There is fierce debate over whether the impetus for the development of the ‘pristine’ states of the ancient Near East (from which our present-day ‘secondary’ states emerged) was endogenous, a consequence of the development of social stratification and class relations, or exogenous, resulting from military conquest.
The question posed by surviving stateless societies is: How and why do some non-literate societies manage to survive and cooperate without state coercion or authority? Various answers are given, some of them relying on the power of traditional authority and shared norms. An interesting answer of sorts is the evolutionary one: those stateless societies which have survived are the only ones available for the scholar to study; therefore the characteristics which cause a stateless society to collapse cannot generally be observed unless by chance an anthropologist comes on one in the process of extinction, as happened to Colin Turnbull (The Mountain People, 1972), who found the Ik of Uganda in a Hobbesian state of war of all against all.
— Peter Burnham/Iain McLean
