IX. All in the Family: Kinship and Statehood

Throughout a broad swath of human history, the accumulation of status was more feasible than the accumulation of material wealth. It is possible that in some, if not many, societies, the family structure evolved to enable the inheritance of status and charisma before it was put in use to facilitate the inheritance of property. In fact, alienable property (the liberal “private property”) long postdates familial descent groups, therefore the kind of property passed on by the family would be usufruct property, the right to use a piece of land belonging to the community. The two kinds of inheritance potentially went hand in hand. A high-status family claiming descent from a charismatic, mythologized personality or from the original founders of a community might claim exclusive access to important roles in community rituals, cementing their status, as well as exclusive access to the best of the commons (the best fields or fishing spots, first pick in a harvest), availing themselves of prime opportunities for the most lavish gift-giving, further producing status within the community.

Two persistent examples that have carried over to modern times illustrate how families can function as mechanisms for the accumulation of status. In the Patum festival in Berga, to name just one of the popular festivals that occur in every town, village, and neighborhood throughout Catalunya, many of the most important functions—who bears which mythical animal in the processional dances, who gets to dress up as what—are hereditary. Nowadays, these roles are a mark of pride, but in stateless, non-industrial societies in which spiritual rituals were one of the most important guarantors of social cohesion, acquiring and maintaining such a role was the contemporary equivalent of sitting on a goldmine.

In his magisterial history of the French Revolution, Kropotkin notes the important class division in the rural villages between citizens and inhabitants. Those who identified as citizens, thus projecting themselves into the same class as the burghers or bourgeoisie of the towns and cities (and in all three etymologies, linguistically attaching themselves to the cities), were the better-off farmers who claimed descent from the original founders of the community. These, in their overwhelming majority, favored the alienation—in privatized, individualized lots—of the village commons: the fields, the forests, the pastures and waste lands, that the peasants collectively tended for their subsistence. The others, the inhabitants, who were often more numerous, were said to be recent arrivals given permission to settle in the community by the magnanimous citizens, though they may have been living there for generations. They overwhelmingly favored the preservation of the commons.

The relationship here expressed pulls us in two interesting directions. Going back, we can imagine how interested parties in an agricultural society, in which communal relations were predominant and hierarchies had little or no material backing, could produce an important development on the path towards greater hierarchy. Against the ceaseless movements of human history, they could insist that outsiders (wanderers or refugees of war, famine, or political domination) be allowed to settle in the community only if they were granted fewer rights to the commons than the native-born community members. Such a social consensus, even though it would lay the basis for an unprecedented level of inequality, could be easily won in a horizontal society. On the one hand, it appeals to the commonsense notion of “first come, first serve” and takes advantage of the fact that the newcomers are asking a favor (acceptance in the community) and are therefore not in a good position to negotiate the conditions of their acceptance.

Clearly, a community that emphasized solidarity and mutual aid would never be so stingy; unless the stream of newcomers were too great to absorb, they would welcome them to form a part of the community with no strings attached. But a community that did not undertake constant efforts to inculcate feelings of generosity would look on newcomers with misgiving and avarice, while the authoritarian-minded would look for a way to profit from the new arrangement. Again we see how important the cultural values of a society are in determining how it evolves.

In the case of the stingy society, the new proto-caste of dependents would be allowed to work the communal lands, but only if they gave away a part of their produce as an obligatory gift. Additionally, they could be appropriated as the dependents of one or another family, as a way to administer their integration into the community. Such a social structure would not break with the communal economy or enable the accumulation of material wealth, but it would accustom members of the society to inequalities in rights and in quality of living, and it would enable the production of even greater inequalities of status as the big families redistributed a part of the production of their dependents. It would also provide a ready mechanism for the accumulation of wealth (productive dependents) once the communal relation were set aside. All of these features depend on the family structure in order to be realized.

And to digress a moment and trace this relationship forward to the present, we unmask an important fraud in the democratic ideology. Rights, as we know, pertain to adult citizens. We are taught that they are universal, and simultaneously trained to ignore the excluded categories as exceptional, minute, and inconsequential. Immigrants may not enjoy all these rights, but we are meant to think of them as a tiny sector, who, in any case, are on the way to attaining their full inclusion.

In reality, democracy in its origins (as much its mythical origins in Greece and Rome as its institutional origins in England, the United States, and France) has always relied on the exploitation of a substantial underclass. In revolutionary France, the citizens were the well-to-do part of the population. The others, mere inhabitants, were intended to be excluded from the new social contract. In other words, the category of citizen, from the beginning, was intended to be exclusionary, not inclusionary. The fact that it attains a universal aura is only due to the disappearance of that which has been excluded, a process of invisibilization that only intensifies the original exclusion. Such a revelation further affirms the emphasis that anarchist theory places on the marginal as more important than what a society holds to be central in the development of systemic languages, cultures, and logics. [128]

Returning to the question of status and family, we need to work out what kind of family structures enable the accumulation of status, the stratification of society, and the formation of states. We can start by looking at the family structures of resolutely anti-authoritarian societies. They tend to be non-patriarchal, though both matrilocal and patrilocal examples abound. [129] Collective homes, consisting of large extended families, [130] are common among the sedentary, indigenous inhabitants of eastern North America and the Amazon Basin in South America.

We can find an exception among the present-day Mapuche. Traditional communities are resolutely anti-authoritarian and as stateless as conditions permit, and they tend to live in separate residences of nuclear families. Bilineal kinship is a common feature, meaning individuals trace their descent and their relations through both the mother and the father (the matriline and the patriline). Within Mapuche communities, there are traditional positions of status, but they do not adhere to kinship lineages nor do they function as hierarchical status. If we only had the accounts of Western observers, we might have assumed the Mapuche to be another primitive hierarchical society ruled over by chiefs, the longko, but for the resistance and the preservation of their traditions by the Mapuche themselves. In addition to the longko, there are also the werken, who play the role of messengers and organizers in community works and in relations between communities; the machi, a medicine man or woman; the lawentuchefe, who specializes in a knowledge of plants; the gütamchefe, who specializes in the skeletal systems of humans and other animals; pelon, a diviner; the weupife, a community historian; and others. [131] All of these roles bring special recognition and status, but they carry neither coercive authority nor material privileges. In traditional Mapuche communities today, one can observe how being a longko or a werken above all means having responsibilities and working extra hard for the good of the community. Through a Eurocentric, cratocentric ethnology, we would only be familiar with the figure of the chief, and it would be harder to envision the reciprocal, complementary, “circular” ways in which power is shared in anti-authoritarian societies. Though Mapuche family structures may not be the most typical of such societies, the multiplicity and complementarity of power probably is.

In his writings on the various societies of the Amazon Basin, Clastres discusses how these horizontal, anti-authoritarian societies preserve their bilineal tracing of kinship and the separate identity of extended families within a community, as a way to prevent the centralization of the residential community or the emergence of separate lineages and clans (kinship structures associated with greater hierarchy). Adults tend to live in a single community, and they have little contact with the original community of their mother or father (depending on whether they are patrilocal or matrilocal), meaning it would be easy for them to only trace one line of kinship—through the matriline if they are matrilocal and through the patriline if they are patrilocal. Their insistence on a more expansive view of kinship can be read as a method for creating more numerous horizontal ties and preventing the centralization of society in atomized communities or separate lineages. [132]

Referring to the stateless societies of Southeast Asia, James C. Scott describes families that are so expansive and multilinear that many individuals can not only claim kinship with a large number of families and communities, they can even claim multiple ethnicities, a useful resource for peoples who need to assure their survival through horizontal relations, who often have to flee state armies and slave-raiding parties, and who constantly resist state efforts to homogenize potential subjects.

Among nomadic Mbuti communities, Colin Turnbull described the habit of claiming kinship relations with every other member of the community, as well as with neighboring communities, regardless of whether common ancestors or blood relations were a genetic “fact.” Traditionally, kinship relations were deliberately ambiguous, all the adults of a community were parents to all the children, and all the children of the same age group were siblings. In fact, the anthropologist reports that the Mbuti got annoyed when he tried to map out a “factual” family tree of the community to ascertain who, within a Western conception, was related and who was not. [133]

Societies without an anti-authoritarian ethos, we can surmise, treated relations not as an opportunity for everyone’s mutual enrichment, but as a resource to be controlled. And for someone to gain power from access to a resource, they first must make that resource artificially scarce. In fact, the whole Western concept of an “objective” kinship based on shared genetic material, or in earlier terms, “blood,” is little more than a massive mythical justification for limiting familial relations.

Unilineal descent enables a society to break into distinct lineages or clans, and these lineages can attempt to accumulate status until one lineage wins a privileged position. Referring to the hierarchical Lua in Southeast Asia, Scott writes: “lineages are ranked; they jockey for status; and part of the jockeying rests on claims to superiority based on different, and fabricated, origin myths and genealogies.” [134]

Through the unequal accumulation of hereditary status, an authoritarian society can subdivide into multiple ranked lineages, forming a complex hierarchy. With outsiders being given permission to live on the society’s territory on the condition that they accept fewer rights, a caste of dependents could also arise, giving even more privileges, status, and economic benefits to the higher-ranked lineages.

But before such a society could sustain state formation, it would need to undergo other transformations. A society accustomed to inequality and with a hierarchical distribution of privileges still has not sunk low enough to legitimize and normalize coercion, organized violence, against the lowest ranked members of society or to break the fundamental idea of reciprocity or the practice of communal or collective property. The society’s territory still belongs to everyone, and the status of the highest-ranked lineages still depends on their generosity. If they begin to act in an autocratic way, they could feasibly lose their status and drop in the rankings.

There exists a critical difference between a ranked society and a stratified society. [135] A ranked society is still, in many ways, a meritocracy. Whatever the criteria for status, the lineages still have to earn it. Ranked status can and does change, and such a hierarchy is too flexible and unstable a base to support the unwieldy weight of a state. A stratified society, on the other hand, posits an essential and therefore an ostensibly unchangeable difference between the different clans or other social groupings, thus creating a stable, layered organization of castes, classes, or orders. [136] Such an arrangement allows the concept of nobility to emerge, permitting the permanent division of society into nobles and commoners.

What does such a transformation require? The only possible factor I have been able to identify is warfare. The irreparable division of society can only be achieved on the grave of reciprocity. The only way to break the living connection between members of a community is through cold, calculated murder; only such a level of psychological distance could permit one to forcibly change another’s conditions of existence. Permanently dividing society demands the organized spilling of blood and the vanquishing of those populations that will make up the lower orders.

Such a society, in theory, would still practice communal or collective property, though the commoners, as dependents, would be expected to give a part of their produce to the nobles in that distorted, asymmetrical, and coerced version of reciprocity that becomes the basis for the state relationship.

Now, the nobility must advance in their political organization if they are to achieve state formation, for their ability to exercise coercion and to extend their power beyond a single community or town will probably still be limited.

The lineage competition can provide a solution. A charismatic man from a leading lineage, usually both a skilled military commander, an effective orator, and a lucid organizer, can unite multiple chiefdoms into a single confederation (or, just as often, he can create a position of central leadership within a preexisting confederation). Historically, the most likely outcome of such alliances is dissolution and fragmentation, after or even before the death of the charismatic leader. But if his closest collaborators can succeed in creating an effective court of advisers, dignitaries, and functionaries, that court can assure the institutional transition of power, potentially denoting the transition to statehood.

An effective transition may be aided by, or it may produce, a certain innovation that facilitated many processes of state formation: the further subdivision of the nobility with the emergence of a royal lineage, a family group that the other noble lineages legitimize and consider uniquely endowed to rule the entire society. The innovation of royalty brings new stability to the social hierarchy, potentially ending or at least limiting the continued jockeying for rank and status between the different elite lineages.

European royalty were simply noble families, themselves just the evolution of the warrior class in a tripartite system, who succeeded in uniting a large territory (i.e. one that included multiple less effective chiefs or kings) over multiple generations. Among the nomadic Scythians, the founders of the first “nomadic empire,” the clan of the Royal Scyths claimed descent from the most prestigious of the three brothers remembered in legend as the founders of the Scythian tribes. The Royal Scyths not only claimed the best pasture lands, they also furnished the ruling classes in times when the nomads occupied and administered sedentary civilizations they had conquered.

We can call this the royal court state. This model brings us to the cusp of a new category, primary state formation, processes of politogenesis that societies underwent without the guidance or pressure of any preexisting state. The Aryan states in the Indian subcontinent display many characteristics of this model, though it is uncertain if those qualify as primary states or if the Aryans were familiar with the states that had already formed farther west. Given the transformative function of warfare within this model and the expediency of conquering other populations to create underclasses, the royal court state has much in common with the conquest state, already discussed. However, the former tends to be a slower, more fragmented and halting process than the latter. In the case of the conquest state, the warrior class that constitutes the politogen has already received some kind of cultural tutelage from a preexisting state, which allows them to erect their own state more quickly.

The service of an effective warrior class is not the only way a dominant lineage can cement its power. One important source of status in the ranking competition is claimed descent from famous ancestors. These ancestors can be entirely mythical figures or real people whose achievements take on added symbolic importance after their deaths, such as forefathers of the lineage, founders of cities, tamers of wilderness, builders of irrigation or monuments, deliverers from slavery or hardship, conquerors of territory, vanquishers of enemies. They are nearly always men, given that as far as we know, all states and proto-states have arisen from patriarchal societies.

Ancestor worship creates an important circuit in the concentration of power. To increase its own prestige, a lineage that has been able to claim a certain ancestor will intensify their worship of that ancestor, which also means they must make the ancestor ever more worshipable. The result augments both the lineage and the ancestor. It seems almost inevitable that the ancestors eventually attain divinity, either as a god’s favorite mortal, the son of a god, or a god in his own right. It is highly plausible that in at least some pathways of social evolution, the very concept of gods is a civilization effect and a relatively recent invention, resulting from the multigenerational ritual exaggeration surrounding famous ancestors.

Once the prestigious ancestors become divine, the lineage that claims them will need highly specialized, elaborate rituals to maintain their monopoly. And this almost certainly will require specialized priests to honor the ancestors, maintain their favor, and secure their blessings. Powerful ancestors can be credited with bringing rain, fertility, good fortune in trade and warfare, and protection from enemies.

The necessary centralization of power for state formation can be achieved when one lineage and one ancestor (or a limited group of ancestors) easily leads the rankings, and when the male head of that lineage becomes a supreme ruler by transforming into some kind of symbolic reincarnation or exclusive link to the divine ancestor. The society itself may not have made the transition from ranking to stratification, but through the monopolization of a divine ancestor, the god-king and his court of priest helpers have created another impermeable social division: between the divine and the profane. This is the holy father state.

It is unclear to what extent the holy father state and the royal court state constitute separate models. Though processes of warfare and the monopolization of ancestor worship might vary in their relative importance, in all the well documented examples I am aware of—such as the Congo basin states, the early Mayan states, and the Shang and Zhou states in ancient China—religion and warfare both played fundamental roles.

In the Congo basin states, “While the tombs of the paramounts were the objects of special reverence, the priests-keepers of ‘king’s tombs’ were among the most important courtiers.” [137] Symmetrical to the hierarchy of priests and spiritual courtiers who attend to the god-king, a hierarchy evolves among the divine ancestors and natural spirits, such that the supreme divinity gains his own court that serves to naturalize the earthly political institution. The result is a simultaneously mystical and bureaucratic pantheon and social apparatus that transforms power from charismatic, ceremonial performances into a distributive mechanism that successfully delinks power from a set of localized and limited familial relations and binds it to an expansive, mobile, and monopolized claim to the divine. It is expansive and mobile because a revered ancestor has an exclusive relationship to his descendants, whereas an ancestor-turned-god can exercise supremacy and therefore also serve the symbolic half of domination over people of other lineages or other societies. The claim is monopolized because a common person can no longer access it by simply calling on their ancestors, as the king-priest and lesser priests mediate access to the tombs, relics, and energies of the ancestor spirits.

In the Mayan states, where the elite ideology was based on a cyclical view of time,

all the mythological events […] had their exact dates […] organically included into the history of the ruling dynasty […] The key figure which united the myth and history was the ruler. In the ideal model it was the supreme ruler which represented all the polity and as the eldest person in the eldest lineage kept the relations between this world and the supernatural one, between ancestors and the living. [138]

Within this new apparatus, the ruler himself is captive to the intensified symbolic relationships:

A “king-priest” [among the early states of the Congo basin] was believed to be closely connected with the forces of nature and to influence the good things of life. His mode of life was controlled by means of a number of special taboos. Such a sacred ruler must also be physically perfect. There were special trials for his health. When he was found unhealthy during the trial, ritual killing was used. [139]

And in ancient China, Richard Baum writes:

Though he was ex officio Son of Heaven, the king nevertheless had to constantly demonstrate, affirm, and renew his own charisma. And if, in spite of his conscientious attention to duty, the rivers overflowed their dikes or the rains failed to fall, this was prima facie evidence that the emperor lacked the charismatic qualities demanded by Heaven. In such cases the emperor was expected to perform public penitence for his failings. In extreme cases […“failure to perform appropriate sacrifices” or “excessive taxation or persistent neglect of irrigation works”…] the Son of Heaven might even forfeit his claim […] Such forfeiture carried with it the implied “legitimate” right to rebel against—and overthrow—a reigning monarch. [140]

Another limit to the intensive production of spiritual power is described by Max Weber. Not only do spiritual rituals lose their effect over time (paralleling the modern phenomenon of saturation that causes advertizers to lose so much sleep), but, according to Weber, “charismatic authority may be said to exist only in the process of originating. It cannot remain stable, but becomes either traditionalized or rationalized, or a combination of both.” [141] A state that did not wisely reinvest its spiritual capital in military, administrative, and infrastructural capital, would most likely collapse. The Chinese state of the Shang and Zhou dynasties pursued aggressive military and administrative expansions, and during the Warring States period, Confucian scholars secularized what had been an intensely religious conception of power. Mencius conceived the vital Mandate of Heaven in almost entirely secular terms: divine intervention was limited to the investiture of new rulers, who simply had to renew their charisma through good governance.

Hierarchical kinship structures attached to the monopolization of spirituality, as seen in the model of the holy father state, provide a well trodden path to politogenesis. Paradoxically, hierarchical kinship structures also constitute a barrier. [142] We have already looked at examples of states forming in societies with weak kinship organization, such as the Greek city-states, Rome, and the Germanic states. One of the characteristics typical of states is a territorial rather than familial basis for organization. Territory can be more easily used to delimit and unify a society when the state or proto-state results from conquest, most frequently in the case of nomadic groups that take over sedentary societies. But when a stratification process is entirely endogenous, arising from a society’s own kinship structures, family-based ties often prevent the institutional loyalties that states need to function. Often, it is clan elites who foil the designs of state-making elites.

Would-be state-makers need to rupture, at least in part, with the kinship logic so that their claims of sovereignty and authority transcend familial relations and can be extended to a potentially infinite pool of subjects. They also need to use their power to override or supplant the community-level relations of reciprocity that typically remain intact through the reign of chiefdoms and other non-state hierarchies. Weakening community forms of existence can provoke resistance that might spell disaster for the fledgling state, but failing to do so will often lead it to disintegrate back into a non-state society with pronounced hierarchies but only weak forms of coercion and centralized organization. This seems to have been the case with many early states in the Near East in the third and second centuries BCE. [143]

Another sort of collapse related to the limitations of power based in kinship organization occurred in China with the expansion of the Shang and Zhou dynasties. Familial relations were important in the organization of power even before the Shang dynasty. Already in the late neolithic period (ca. 2000 BCE), proto-Chinese cultures used family names (a statist invention that did not reach the part of Europe my patriline hails from until the early-nineteenth century CE). [144] At this time, the Longshan culture flourished in what is now northern and central China. Technologically similar, at a political level, Longshan constituted multiple cultural variants. Warfare seems to have been common between polities, which tended to be grouped together in economically integrated units of larger and smaller settlements. Some of these polities were stratified, with up to three social classes, as at the large walled settlement of Taosi (three hundred hectares in area). The relatively egalitarian Shangdong settlements contained multiple regional centers engaged in production and trade in pottery, jade, textiles, stone tools, fermented beverages, and agriculture.

Though economic stratification and settlement integration varied, these polities can generally be described as “military democracies” with councils of lineage chiefs, popular assemblies, and a supreme military leader who may have been chosen by the chiefs. [145]

The Longshan sites declined dramatically in population around 1900 BCE, shortly before the spread of bronze technology. The strongest polity to arise in the aftermath of this collapse was the Erlitou culture, which probably corresponds to the Xia dynasty referred to in subsequent Shang texts. The Erlitou, which developed from the Wangwang III subset of the Longshan culture, constructed a city of up to thirty-thousand residents on the Yi river, erected multiple palaces, and monopolized bronze smelting in the region. Around the time of urbanization (one hundred years into the culture), it is feasible that a dominant lineage secured a royal status and consolidated its rule over other hierarchically ranked lineages. From 1900 to 1500 BCE, the Erlitou culture existed somewhere on the cusp of statehood, until its quick decline with the establishment of the Erligang city at Zhengzhou, and the rise of the Shang dynasty; however, especially if the documentary account is correct, the Erlitou culture was already defeated and subordinated to the Shang dynasty in 1600 BCE, when King Tang ordered the construction of the city Yanshi just six kilometers from the Erlitou capital.

In any case, the Erligang culture and the corresponding Shang dynasty are well known to have organized on the basis of hierarchically ordered kinship lineages that centralized and monopolized access to divine rites. The kinship system was instrumental to the Shang state’s territorial expansion. Younger male relatives of the dominant lineage or inferior elite lineages (e.g. lineages said to be descended from younger brothers of the mythical ancestor-king, or younger brothers from subsequent kings in the dominant line) would be sent out from the royal capital to found new settlements as a way to secure military frontiers, expand agricultural production, and encourage population growth. Each of these elite males, sent out with blessings from the king and “ritual paraphernalia and ceremonial regalia,” would become the founder not only of a new town but also a new branch of the royal lineage.

In his new settlement, the royal benefice holder would erect an ancestral temple, in which his own lineage tablet would eventually be placed as a founder of a branch clan. In time, new segments would hive off from this branch, forming secondary (and then tertiary) territorial sublineages which were ranked in a sequential hierarchy of descending political and ritual statuses. In this manner, the system of Shang patrimonial benefices—the earliest known form of institutionalized territorial governance in China—reflected gradations of kinship status within a segmented royal lineage, gradations which had themselves been patterned in the first instance after the patriarchy of ancestral spirits. [146]

But when military successes allowed the Shang state and the Zhou dynasty that followed it to continue expanding, this kinship system of territorial administration became “diluted” and “the king was unable personally to conduct all the manifold ceremonial rituals that, as Son of Heaven, he was called upon to perform in each of the central state’s territorial domains.” Ever more degrees of authority had to be delegated to elites who symbolically were inferior but in practice came to exercise supreme power. Additionally, the strategic interests of territorial expansion convinced the king to grant hereditary administrative mandates to unrelated but allied tribes on the periphery who performed military service and swore fealty.

Eventually, growth of the state led to a feudal form of organization in the Zhou period, with hereditary enfeoffment granted to lesser nobles who promised obedience. Unsurprisingly, such a system could not support a strong centralized power, and the unified state disintegrated, giving rise to an efficient empire only after the centuries-long Warring States period. Curiously, though a kinship-based system of state power had seen its collapse in that period of internecine conflict between embattled mini-states struggling “for imperial supremacy, the legitimizing principle of ancestral lineage became so significant as to provide full-time employment for a bevy of itinerant scholar-genealogists.” [147] During the Warring States period, “Confucian ideologists” laid the groundwork for the subsequent Han empire by fusing “the three worlds of ancestral spirits, kinship groups, and the imperial bureaucracy into a single, integrated system of hierarchical social and political authority.” [148]

Subsequently, lines of command were stronger and the monarch could exercise despotic rule, whereas in the Shang dynasty the king could only rule by consulting other priests or the heads of the clans, and in Zhou times the king had to seek the counsel of the Guoren and the Daifu, a popular assembly and a council of elite elders, respectively. [149]

Rulers in the Mayan civilization also used genealogies, as well as titles, claims of divinity, and special forms of clothing and headdresses to assert their legitimacy and compete for status relative to one another. The basis for social organization in Classic Maya were hierarchical communities of three to six nuclear families with a common origin, led by the head of the “eldest” family, who had the privilege of polygamy and monopolized the ancestor cult. Around the seventh and eighth centuries CE, the Maya changed from a system of vassal kings (yahaw) ruling subordinate but semi-autonomous kingdoms in obedience to a divine supreme ruler, to a system of provincial lords (sahal) controlled directly by the supreme ruler. Multiple such early states existed across the Mayan cultural area, competing for dominance and unifying through conquest. [150]

The Polynesian societies of the Pacific provide other histories of state formation in which kinship lineages exercise a key function. The spread of the proto-Polynesian culture across many hundreds of islands at diverse latitudes, from tiny to large, isolated atolls and extensive archipelagos, each of them a laboratory of social evolution, presents a unique theoretical opportunity (although the academic fetish of phenomena in isolation is perhaps out of touch with how things work in the living world, especially if the mythical-scientific belief that a complex system can be understood by understanding its separate components is not entirely accurate). The proto-Polynesian culture that spread to all these islands included a hierarchical social organization led by chiefs, divided by lineages, and fixed genealogically.

It would be an elucidating field for further research, but with the limited data I have access to, it seems that Polynesians developed states on any island that was large enough. This data set, it must be cautioned, does not give us any absolute lower size-limit for politogenesis. The Polynesian pathway for state formation was particular, reflecting one strategy of hierarchical social organization and not any universal human truths. What would be interesting to confirm is whether one common cultural model always evolved into a state, given a land base able to support a sufficient population for complex political hierarchies; what alternatives developed on islands that could not support a large population; and under what conditions, if any, horizontal or non-authoritarian social forms triumphed (for example, on small and isolated islands that could not engage in competitive warfare or cater to chiefly ambitions, and therefore had to re-center cooperative and egalitarian values).

The Hawaiian Islands, the largest population and the most isolated archipelago within the Polynesian diaspora, presents a good case study for state formation through kinship hierarchies. The islands were settled sometime around 400 CE by a flotilla of canoes loaded down with pigs, dogs, and chickens; domesticated plants like “taro, sweet potato, sugarcane, and bananas, and a full assortment of seeds, nuts, and cuttings for coconut, candlenut, medical plants, and fiber plants that would be encouraged to go feral.” [151] As their “transported environment” took root, the new Hawaiians lived largely off of seafood and the flightless birds that populated the islands. Then they dedicated themselves to cultivation, clearing the fertile lowlands and gradually augmenting their population, which by 800 CE numbered in the thousands (at European contact in 1778, it was estimated at 240,000–400,000). Population grew rapidly between 1200 and 1500 CE, when it peaked. Around 1400 CE, settlers began moving upland, clearing forests on steep mountainsides to open up new territory for planting. The new cultivation did not last. Erosion carried the mountain soil down to the refertilized lowlands, highland cultivation was partially abandoned, and population growth stabilized.

Prior to 1400, societies on the islands were materially egalitarian, with little differentiation in wealth. Chiefs probably had to work to feed themselves, same as everyone else. But in the first two centuries of rapid population growth, “chiefdoms expanded in scale,” and in the Consolidation Period (1400–1500 CE), mutually hostile regional chiefdoms divided some of the islands, such as Maui and Hawai’i. Despite the shortage of arable land, uninhabited buffer zones sprang up between them, a consequence of warfare. Also in the fifteenth century, just as chiefly residences “with elaborate terraces and enclosing walls” appeared, there was a “dramatic” increase in the “construction of religious monuments.” [152] After 1500, when the population stabilized, irrigation and other productive infrastructures were expanded and intensified. At this point, political structures on the archipelago could be classified as states, though others (e.g. Earle) consider them very large complex chiefdoms. In any case, the technological reorganization of Hawaiian society was subsequent to the political transformation that took place between 1400 and 1500.

I would hypothesize that the flight to the mountains seen around 1400 was both a demographic effect and a state effect. Those with least status and least access to land would have comprised the refugees who headed upland to begin the arduous task of clearing forests and planting new gardens. But they also would have been people who wanted to gain distance from the increasing arrogance, exploitation, and warfare of the chiefs. These were probably free settlements, since at that time the chiefs likely lacked coercive authority or ownership over unsettled forests.

Flight and abandonment are some of the most common strategies of resistance against emerging states, and each has its analog in modern states, which are now global and cannot be fled in the proper sense (analogs include emigration to less authoritarian states, clandestinity, and drop-out culture or other forms of voluntary marginality). These strategies are among the easiest, but they are not the most effective at stopping the rise of authority, and today humanity as a whole is paying the price for social rebels’ historic preference for the easy way out. In the Hawaiian Islands, abandonment probably constituted an extremely useful release valve at a time when chiefly authority would have been particularly unstable. The runaways evidently lacked erosion-resistant horticultural techniques (such as those perfected by the stateless societies in the New Guinea highlands). [153] When they lost their gardens to erosion, they had to go back to the lowland settlements, which ironically had been refertilized by the eroded mountain soil, and this time they had no leverage to protest growing authoritarianism but presumably had to request permission for access to land, accepting the new property regime that may have come into force around that time. After that point, the basis of power was military effectiveness and access to land, and Hawaiian chiefs did not have to expend as much effort in symbolic production and the building of monuments, though ceremonial performances continued to hold great importance.

Within Hawaiian society, “Ranking is based on the measured distance from the senior line, whereby the highest ranked individual is the eldest son in the direct line of eldest sons.” [154] The majority of the population was made up of commoners who were prohibited from keeping genealogies, which was a privilege of the chiefs, now considered distinct as members of a noble bloodline. In practice, chiefs competed for rank and position relative to the paramount ruler, though “in theory, a chief’s genealogical distance from the paramount determined rights to an office.” [155] A chief governed each community. Other chiefs attended to the paramount ruler, fought in his retinue, or managed the paramount’s lands and labor projects, also organizing the feasts with which laborers were rewarded when work was done.

Land was divided between that belonging to the chiefs and subsistence plots conceded to the commoners. All land was considered to belong to the supreme ruler; in effect, commoners had to periodically work the chiefs’ lands and give annual goods to the paramount in exchange for rights to subsistence plots. Surpluses derived from the new property system were used to feed not only the chiefs but also the chiefs’ retainers: artisans, warriors, and priests. The paramount ruler, for his part, had the privilege and obligation of representing the god Lono, and he had to periodically visit local community shrines and make charismatic performances on monumental stages.

Between 1500 and 1650, dominant rulers on Maui and on Hawai’i unified their respective islands through military conquest. Later, these two islands “fought repeatedly with each other in an attempt to fashion inter-island politics,” a project the Hawaiian monarch continued successfully with access to European weapons and ships. [156] We can hypothesize that if colonization by the United States had not interrupted this process, state power would have soon disintegrated and then reorganized in the Hawaiian Islands, as kinship hierarchies proved insufficient to project centralized political power across multiple islands.

The Aryan peoples who migrated into the Indian subcontinent in the centuries after the decline of the Indus Valley civilization provide an interesting example of caste structures giving rise to a proto-state hierarchy, with military conquest constituting something of a catalyst. Their process shows elements of both the conquest state and the royal court state.

The Aryans arrived as stateless, semi-nomadic herders, their livestock consisting primarily of cows. They wandered or lived in villages, and did not practice agriculture or build cities. Before their migration they were no doubt influenced by state effects, with warfare and slave-raiding from the state formation process in Mesopotamia having far-reaching consequences, but it is unknown if they had any firsthand knowledge of states. In any case they had not received any detailed tutelage in statecraft, which would make them atypical among conquest states.

In a tripartite division typical of the Indo-Europeans, which as we have seen also left its mark on state formation in the European subcontinent, Aryan society was divided into warriors, priests, and laborers. The latter included herders and craftspeople, such as copper or bronze smiths, pottery makers, carpenters, and weavers. Rather than constituting the bottom of a hierarchy, the laborers were one of three complementary pillars. Some of them were highly honored, such as the smiths or the carpenters, who made chariots and later plows. [157] Before the emergence of the caste system, professions were not hereditary and there was no taboo on mixing; at this point it seems that Aryan family structures were not divided into hierarchical lineages. If this was in fact the case, it shows that there are multiple pathways for the evolution of castes (out of professional divisions or out of kinship and clan divisions), just as there are multiple pathways for the evolution of states.

The Aryan tribes had an elected chief or king, but power remained with two tribal assemblies, the sabha, which was the council of the elders, and the samiti or general assembly. Some tribes had only these two assemblies, and no elected monarch. The tribes were bellicose and, if not patriarchal, patrilocal (with women joining the families of their husbands). The chief was primarily a war leader. Early wars basically consisted of cattle-raiding and related disputes, or aggressive takeovers of territory from the indigenous inhabitants.

The Aryans gradually adopted agriculture, which would have already been well known in the plains and the Ganges River Valley where they settled. Their priests composed the Vedas, which depict their spiritual universe, record histories of gods and of Aryan wars with neighboring societies, explain rituals, and preserve mantras. They were first recorded orally, starting around 1700 BCE, and written down at the end of the millennium.

The Aryans warred with the Dasas and the Panis, the indigenous inhabitants of their new territory. The former, they eventually incorporated as slaves, turning their tripartite labor division into a caste system. The Aryans felt a well documented contempt for the darker-skinned indigenous inhabitants, and promoted taboos against intermarriage. In fact, “the Sanskrit word for caste, varna, actually means color.” [158]

It might be important to note that there was nothing inevitable about this hierarchical development. We can contrast the Aryan example with that of the Bini, mentioned in Chapter VII, who, even though they were militarily superior to the Efa who preceded them in the territory that they took as their home, promoted an ethos of coexistence and mixing.

Initially, the caste system was arranged as follows: the Kshatriyas were warriors and aristocracy; the Brahmans were priests; the Vashiyas were cultivators; and the Shudras were Dasas and mixed race people. Each caste also allows for a good deal of internal hierarchy (between a young, unproven warrior and an elder of an aristocratic family; between an unimportant village priest and a priest who advises the king; between a landless peasant and an honored craftsperson; between pure Dasas and people with one Aryan parent).

Gradually, the Vashiyas became traders and landowners and the Shudras moved up to become cultivators. This allowed new conquered ethnic groups to assume a place at the bottom of the caste system.

With sedentary agriculture and political expansion (tribes growing, uniting, or taking slaves) the king, helped by the priests, became divine and then hereditary. The important role of the priests in legitimating the authority of the chief aristocrat/warrior would play a key role in altering the caste hierarchy and also separating the monarch from the Kshatriya caste he had come from, creating a royal family separate from the general nobility. This shows a curious evolution in which the military power of the warrior caste declines in relative importance, and a priest class bestows divinity on a king, without the king having to be a priest himself. Ancestor worship was important among the Aryans, as were genealogies, but lineages did not evolve into castes, or ancestors into gods, as in the holy father state. Rather, in an effective campaign of class war, the Brahmans developed the tools to augment their power in a changing environment, to make themselves indispensable to the project of social control, and to divide the caste that had stood above them through strategic alliances. In proto-state Roman society, by contrast, which bears fundamental organizational and cultural similarities to Aryan society, the priests were never so dynamic, and it was the warriors who became the architects of the new state. Among the Aryans, the Brahmans also played the decisive role in increasing patriarchy in Aryan society, a vital accompaniment to state formation.

At this point, the structure of the Aryan polity was as follows:

The tribal kingdom (rashtra) contained tribes (jana), tribal units (vish), and villages (grama). The nucleus was the family (kula) with the eldest male member as its head (kulapa). The king was assisted by a court of the elders of the tribe and by the village headmen. Even closer to him were two officers: the purohita or chief priest, who combined the function of priest, astrologer, and adviser; and the senani or military commander. [159]

The royal court also contained spies, messengers, and later the royal charioteer, treasurer, steward, and superintendent of dicing—gambling being very important to the Aryans. As noted above, once the chief became a divine royal figure, he no longer served as the military commander, that role having been specialized and subordinated to him.

Aryan society at the local level had still not undergone such dramatic changes. The grama was originally a grouping of three generations of related families, in which brothers lived together accompanied by their wives and children. With sedentary living and agriculture, the grama grew to encompass more families. Land was the communal property of the entire village, though over time a part of the land came to be the property of the chief, who hired out laborers to work his share. “The house was a large all-inclusive structure with family and animals living under the same roof.” [160] The hearth, which was always kept burning, was important economically and symbolically.

Before the emergence of the state, marriages were freely chosen, and women enjoyed a decent status. Female deities tended to lack importance, though some of the most important deities were hermaphroditic.

Initially, the Aryan religious pantheon was similar to the general Indo-European archetype. The Indus Valley civilization probably left an important mark, as seen in the popular worship of the Mother Goddess, the Bull, the Horned Deity, and sacred trees, elements that later worked their way into Hindu worship. On the other hand, “the more abstract brahman system of belief, founded on the Vedas, appealed to a limited few.” [161] In other words, there was an elite religion and a popular religion. It was the former that would become the state religion, Hinduism.

Animal sacrifice, encouraged by the Brahmans, came to play a vital role in religious life, winning the support of the economic elite, given that those who had the most cattle were the ones who could acquire the most spiritual capital. It is no surprise, then, that the heterodox Buddhists later did away with sacrifices.

Before the caste system opened the door to state formation, Aryan law was purely customary, with disputes mediated by elders or leaders, and reconciled with reparations (i.e. the payment of cows), even in cases of murder. The death penalty came later, as did codified laws in which people were punished differently according to their caste. Subsequently, “Judicial procedure was extremely elaborate.” [162]

Codified and differentiated (unequal) laws were also the fundamental features of Hammurabi’s law code (1754 BCE). In reflecting on the formation of the modern state—a more relevant problem for today’s readers—it is worth noting that the liberal ideology demands “equality before the law” but keeps a complicit silence regarding the codification of law, even though written law (as opposed to community mediation) signifies the professionalization of justice and an authoritarian transformation of power relations at least as extreme as the results of differentiated law. There may no longer be one law for slaves, another law for masters, but the liberal principal of equal yet codified law is still a farce. Democratic formalism, combined with a capitalist economy, allows extreme judicial differentiation to exist side by side with an ideology of equality. As Anatole France wrote, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.” Private property and states inevitably produce social inequality, whereas the codification of law professionalizes the reproduction of morality and excludes communities from conflict resolution, ensuring the reproduction of hierarchy through authoritarian punishment regimes. However, philosophers, historians, researchers, and educators continuously subject us to the insincerely naïve belief that writing is an unqualified good.

In the emerging monarchies on the Ganges plain, the Brahmans became the top caste, overtaking the Kshatriyas and authoring the new ideological system in alliance with the king. The key role of the priests becomes evident if we compare the monarchies that constituted early states with the largely stateless “republics” of the highlands. In the latter, the Kshatriyas remained the dominant caste.

The republics and monarchies that arose in north India before 600 BCE comprised single tribes or tribal confederations. The republics retained the idea of organization by assembly, and preserved more tribal customs in general. These republics were frequently founded by illegitimate or displaced members of royal lineages from neighboring states. At least, that is the version preserved in their mythical histories, demonstrating a curious relationship with the symbolic value of the monarchies. On the one hand they ascribed to the same status symbols, like royalty, and on the other hand they seemed to broadcast a perverse adulteration or a defiance of the monarchical values: their semi-mythical founders were not eldest sons but bastards and black sheep.

The republics tended to have a capital where the representatives of the tribes and heads of family would meet in assembly, presided over by the rajah, who was chosen from among the representatives. In the case of the Vriji confederacy the tribes retained independent and equal status. They had an administration by officials such as a treasurer, assistants to the chief or rajah, and a military commander. Emerging towns specialized in specific crafts, like pottery, or they became trading centers. Kshatriyas lived in the towns and “probably encouraged the activities of the artisans.” [163]

The Aryan republics tolerated unorthodox views, as seen in the subsequent appearance of Buddhism and Jainism; the founders of both those cults came from republican tribes, and they spread most quickly in the republican areas. Buddhists in particular supported the republics by replacing the Hindu myth of the divine origin of states with the myth of the social contract.

Power-holders within the tribes also defended the republican form of organization with its weaker hierarchies, whereas the monarchies had to subvert tribal loyalty and replace it with caste loyalty and loyalty to the monarch. The tribal republics lasted until the fourth century CE. Demonstrating the multi-lineal nature of social evolution, some monarchies like Kamboja morphed into republics, though in the Ganges plain the monarchies remained predominant. [164]

Before 500 BCE, four polities (three monarchies and the stateless Vriji confederacy) competed for control of the Ganges plain, controlling river traffic, fighting for access to trade with east India and Burma. By then, kingship was hereditary among the monarchies, royal families of different states intermarried, and the states that would prove victorious emphasized efficient administration with handpicked ministers (as opposed to hereditary ministers). Village headmen collected and delivered taxes. Most land was communal, worked by Shudras. Villages were stockaded, surrounded by fields and pastures. Beyond was forest and wasteland, and only the king could sanction the clearing of new lands. His prerogative was to receive one-sixth of their produce. The “untouchables” came into existence in this period; they were probably former hunter-gatherers who were partially assimilated and forced to live by rush-weaving or hunting, both of which were disparaged activities within the dominant culture.

Between 493 and 461 BCE, Magadha became preeminent on the Ganges plain, dominating neighboring states through warfare. The stateless Vriji confederacy was able to resist the longest: sixteen years. Once that fell, Magadha monopolized regional trade. A later ruling dynasty of Magadha, the Nandas, in power until 321 BCE, were the ones to amass an army so huge that they dissuaded Alexander of Macedonia from continuing his conquests past Punjab. Interestingly, the first Nanda was of Shudra origin, though his ascension to power only solidified—rather than upset—the caste system. In this history we can see another similarity between the caste state and the democratic modern state, suggesting (and not for the first time in our study) the contours of a logic of power capable of transcending the structural and ideological limitations it develops to express itself.