Preface by Alex Comfort

Anarchism is that political philosophy which advocates the maximization of individual responsibility and the reduction of concentrated power — regal, dictatorial, parliamentary: the institutions which go loosely by the name of “government” — to a vanishing minimum. It has no connection with bomb-throwing radicals: it has, in fact, been a point of view which has attracted biologists, such as Kropotkin, the founder of ecology, and anthropologists. To advocate it one must practise considerable self-abnegation, because the type of community it envisages cannot, for obvious reasons, be prescribed. One cannot say with Colonel Blimp “Dammit, if the blighters won’t be democratic we must make ‘em” . It is the blighters themselves who have to choose.

In this book Harold Barclay gives a scholarly account of a number of societies which do not accept the idea of Authority as natural — in fact, it does not occur to them. The documentation is fascinating, and it has its uses as an answer to the mythologies of “primitive man” which have propped up conventional political theories from the XVII century on.

The question which must occur to most readers, however, is one of relevance — rightly, in view of the contemporary excesses of “sociobiology” and the currency of theories based on white rats and Trobriand Islanders. Pygmies and Eskimos neither organise railroads nor operate social services: modern emulators like Makhno and Durruti, or the kids who organise free communes, look quixotic. The serious man’s problem with the anarchist wish to be rid of government is not, I think, that he quarrels with the idea that governments today represent little beside psychopathology, or that politics as we practise it is the art of preventing the possible. His doubts arise from the complexity of society, which looks irreversible, and the need for forward planning: in fact, the charge-sheet of many modern governments is concerned not only with the abuses they commit, but with their culpable failure to plan. In the past, the excesses of power were offset by its ability to provide coordination one put up with the psychopathology of King Henry VIII because a strong king was manifestly preferable to multiple local war lords. But with the growth of a technologically sophisticated public it has become plainer and plainer that today teleonomic, or purposive, planning has become almost wholly divorced from government. It is conducted by experts, while authority devotes itself to play-therapy. Some scientists, who find warnings ignored and resources squandered on pyramids, Maginot Lines and Five Year Plans unrelated to reality, talk about the day when computers will do the planning. Unfortunately, if they did, the playtherapy group would programme them.

Faced with this, the “serious man” withdraws into anti-politicism, or, in America, populism (which substitutes free enterprise and the Devil take the hindmost for the anarchist recipes of mutual aid and direct action) . He would be quite willing to learn from the Inuit and Pygmies if one could convince him that their forms of organisation had any lessons one could apply to a modern, complex community.

I think they have. The challenge “go run a modern state like a pygmy village and see what happens” misses the rather unusual cast of mind which anarchists seek to impart. Unlike Marxism or democratic capitalism, which are institutionalised theories, the rejection of authority as a social tool is an attitude, not a programme. Once adopted it patterns the kind of solutions which we are disposed to accept. Nor in order to be an anarchist ·does one need to wait until society shares the same attitude. Anarchists do not plan revolutions but when they become numerous, and the type of thinking which underlies the social organisation of the small groups Harold Barclay describes becomes common, the thinkers constitute active, unbiddable and exemplary lumps in the general porridge of society. If numerous enough, they begin to affect the types of choices which societies make. Mutual aid begins to constitute a serious alternative to administrative services, general dissatisfaction begins to turn to civil disobedience. If “revolution” occurs in consequence it is in the form of an assault by alarmed authority, loath to see its kingdom fail , on the increasingly ungovernable public, in other words counterrevolution . The growing awareness is threatened by inertia, by cooption, and by the set non-Pygmy habit of mind which comes from centuries in which our political muscles have atrophied.

Nor, in order to influence the course of society, do anarchistminded thinkers have to be wholly successful any more than the Chartists were successful. The Chartists did not secure a single demand of the Charter, but they reformed the parliamentary process. The surviving government of a state whose citizens thought and acted anarchistically would be an Irish democracy — one where the head of authority is held under water whenever it steps out of line. Poland, at the time of writing, may be headed in that direction. And indeed not only anarchist thinking, but even anarchist techniques, such as unanimity instead of a majority vote, are getting incorporated into such places as unions and protest movements which a few years ago would have used parliamentary procedure as a matter of course.

My own view is that anarchism is an attitude, not a programme: that attitude has enzymatic effects on the society in which it is widespread leading quite possibly to an adhocracy, an illogical compromise between Simon Pure anarchism and some of the old apparatus, rather as republican sentiment has been transmuted into a constitutionalism which illogically retains a monarch as a kind of blocking piece, to restrict the excesses of elected representatives. There are probably instances where decision-making has to be concentrated, provided the hot breath of the public is on the neck of the decision-maker. One would not now agree with the protoanarchist Godwin that it is a betrayal of liberty to play in an orchestra if it has a conductor. Where Barclay’s anthropological accounts are important is not as blueprints for complex societies, but as expositions of the attitudes of humans who have found no need of Authority. Faced with other environments, these attitudes will lead to new social structures, since man is an adaptive thinker, but as attitudes they are not time or place-determined. We are likely in our time to see many local and neighbourhood exercises whose form is classically anarchist, plus a growing tide of protest, some principled, some merely exasperated, in which anarchist modes of action and thought may be embodied. A society in which protest is fully effective has no need of a set revolution, and such a society, whether triggered by Marxist stupidity and dogmatism or Fri world military psychopathology, is an attainable goal. Studies such as these have accordingly more than academic importance.

Introduction

Anarchy is most often equated with chaos or seen as some crackpot scheme advanced only by bomb-throwing, wild-eyed maniacs. Certainly it is an idea which has not been taken seriously by most. Although in recent years there has been a slight increase in appreciation of anarchist theory, to the extent that a greater number now consider it worthy of mention in serious discussion, it remains largely ignored. The anthropologically demonstrated fact that anarchy is possible is frequently overlooked.

Over the past several generations, anthropologists, through their ethnographic research, have documented innumerable stateless and governmentless societies throughout the world and throughout time. And even the devotees of Marx point to these as indicators of some earlier stateless stage of human cultural evolution. Nevertheless there is some considerable reluctance to define these societies as anarchies. Even amongst anthropologists there are those so imbued with their own cultural traditions that they will go to any lengths to avoid recognising these systems for what they are. Because they believe social order can exist only where there is government and law, they stretch the meanings of these terms to cover what is clearly not government at all. In an anthropology textbook, Hammond has written : “Even when the population is large, relatively dense, and somewhat diversified, the absence of government does not necessarily imply the presence of anarchy” (239). Hoebel, who later changed his mind, has so defined law and the state, and so interpreted the data of numerous cultures, asto make every society a state with law (1958, 467ff) . And earlier, both Clark Wissler and George Murdock included a ‘government’ as a ‘universal’ of culture (Wissler, 1923; Murdock, 1945).

Other anthropologists readily recognise the widespread existence of staeless societies, some even call them ‘functioning anarchies’. They see the need to demonstrate the existence of such societies as a task long since accomplished and believe we should move on to more important problems. However, it has been my experience in more than 30 years of teaching anthropology that, among students, about the most firmly held myth is the one that no society can exist without government — and its corollary that every society must have a head. If modern day students have given up the religion of the church, they have not budged from the religion of nationalism and statism. It is the latter which affords the source of unity — the cementing element — in contempoary ‘pluralistic’ society. Thus, the myth of the necessity of the state and of government is decisive for that unity, as decisive as belief in God was for the unity of Medieval society. In the universities, political ‘science’ departments are the chief centres for the promulgation of this myth.

One task of this book, then, is to present examples of anarchy. Thereby we will demonstrate that there are human societies which fit the criteria of anarchy and should be recognised for what they are.

There are also other reasons for this book. I will be suggesting that anarchy is by no means unusual; that it is a perfectly common form of polity or political organisation. Not only is it common, but it is probably the oldest type of polity and one which has characterised most of human history.

In the course of this presentation, attention will be given to the kinds of social, economic, technological and ecological contexts which appear to be conducive to anarchic systems. We must consider the oft-made proposition that if anarchies or governmentless, stateless societies exist, they could do so only in the most simple form of human culture and in the smallest type of grouping.

An important aim of this book is to give some idea of what anarchy in practice is like. In this we must consider the various ways in which order is maintained within anarchy. This in turn is related to the more general problem of the dynamic interplay between freedom and authority which characterises human society. In connection with this we must observe how anarchy can, and does on occasion, appear to degenerate into despotism, a process which also entails a consideration of the origins of the state. In general,then, we will try to address the question: is there anything to be learned from these anarchic polities?

Perhaps, finally, this essay will provide a critique of anarchist theory and contribute, therefore, to an improved understanding of the problems of freedom in society.

There are similarities between what is proposed for this investigation and some of the works of Kropotkin, namely, his The State: Its Historic Role and Mutual A id. These works were a factor in my decision to enter the field of anthropology and also stimulated my writing of this book. I would like to think that this book adds to, and improves upon, Kropotkin’s pioneering investigations in this subject.

I. On the Nature of Anarchy

On anarchy and anarchism

Our first task must be to clarify the meaning of anarchy in relation to a variety of different terms. Let us begin by considering anarchy and anarchism. These must be distinguished from one another, just as one distinguishes ‘primitive communism’ from Marxian communism. The latter is an elaborate sociological system, a philosophy of history and an idea for a future condition of society in which property is held in common. ‘Primitive communism’ refers to a type of economy, presumably found among ‘archaic’ or ‘primitive’ peoples, in which property is held in common. By property is to be understood the crucial resources and means of production of wealth. In fact, what is communally held in such societies is invariably land; tools, livestock, and many other kinds of resources ( eg, fishing sites) are individually owned. In any case, Marxist theory does not identify primitive communism with the intended Marxist communism. One might say that implicitly it is held that the historical process involves a grand cycle where humans commence with primitive communism and ultimately return to communism at a higher level — which is somewhat reminiscent of the progressive-cyclic theory of Giambattista Vico. As we distinguish between the two communisms, so we must also distinguish between anarchy and anarchism. Anarchy is the condition of society in which there is no ruler; government is absent. It is also most clearly associated with those societies which have been called ‘archaic’ and ‘primitive’, among other pejorative adjectives. Anarchism is the social political theory; developed in 19th century Europe, which incorporates the idea of anarchy, but does so as part of, and as a result of, a broader, self-conscious theory of values which makes human freedom and individuality paramount. Thus, in anarchist theory, the first premise is something which Josiah Warren called the sovereignty of the individual and from this it follows that government and state are oppressive of individual freedom and should be abolished. But, at the same time, the anarchist looks to the abolition of other institutions similarly interpreted as oppressive: the Church, the patriarchal family and any system which appears to enshrine ‘irrational’ authority. Anarchist theory is egalitarian and antihierarchical, as well as being decentralist. Discrimination based on ‘race, colour, or creed’ or sex are always anathema. Anarchists were probably the first advocates of women’s liberation. In place of the old system, anarchist theory advocates self regulation and voluntary co-operation. Social relations are to be carried out through free contractual agreements of mutual or equal benefit to all parties involved. For Proudhon ‘mutualism’ was a basic cornerstone of anarchy. His mutualist conception has an interesting similarity and concordance with the contemporary anthropological theory of Mauss and Levi-Strauss, since mutualism may be readily seen as reciprocity. To Levi-Strauss, reciprocity as a mutual exchange is the fundamental structural principle of . society; it is a kind of ‘category of thought’, so fundamental as to be imbedded in the human mind. Pierre Clastres, following in the tradition of Levi-Strauss, argues that ‘coercive power’, that is, both state and government, are unreciprocal since a ruler receives more than a subject, so upsetting the balance of equity. Therefore, state and government are in opposition to the basic principles of social life: society is against the state. In the final chapter I shall return to Clastres’ thesis and the general subject of reciprocity and the emergence of coercive power. Here I only wish to indicate that anarchist theory and anthropological theory do impinge upon one another.

In addition to mutualism, Proudhon and Bakunin, among others, also stressed the idea of federalism, designed to facilitate relations between increasingly larger and more widespread groups of people. The initial building blocks of the federalist plan are the local, ‘face to face’ groups, either of neighbours or persons with common occupational interests — in any case they have a common mutual interest in working with each other for one or more ends. Such groups form and concern themselves with achieving their specified goals. In order to facilitate these ends they ‘federate’ with other similar groups to form a regional federation and in turn regional federations join with others to form yet a broader I federation. In each case the power invested in the organised group decreases as one ascends the different levels of integration. As Bakunin and others said, the system was to be ‘built from the bottom up and not from the top down’. Each member of a federation has a right to withdraw if in disagreement with the majority’s proposed action. It is interesting to note here the similarity between anarchist federalism and the segmentary lineage system characteristic of many anarchic polities, especially in Africa. In both cases the sum is composed of segments and each segment of sub segments and so on. In both cases the most effective authority is in the smallest unit, decreasing directly as one ascends to broader levels of integration, so that at the ‘top’, the ultimate federation has little influence whatsoever. In both cases, as well, we have a technique for establishing a broad network which draws innumerable small groups into 1’! large integrated whole. One major contrast between the two systems, however, is that federalism is based upon the co-operation between groups — the principle of mutualism or reciprocity — while for segmentary lineages the operative principle is opposition or conflict between groups of the same level. Anarchist federalism should not be confused with the kind of ‘confederacy’ advocated by such men as John Calhoun and other early 19th century American political thinkers. Anarchists would be sympathetic to such a view only in that it proposes to strip central government of most of its authority, permitting member states to withdraw from the system if they see fit. However, from an anarchist point of view, Calhoun and his sympathisers were inconsistent, in that they· were primarily concerned about maximizing the power of the several states within the Union. Had they been interested in the freedom of the individual unit members, they would also have recognised the legitimate right of the counties to withdraw from states, of towns to withdraw from counties and of individuals to withdraw .from towns.

Anarchism is in sum a complex theoretical orientation. It should not, however, be seen in any sense as a single monolithic conception, or a grand theoretical system to be compared, say, with Marxism. Anarchism, on the contrary, entails several related, but often distinct, points of view. And no anarchist theoretician has ever presented an integrated theoretical system. Yet all anarchist theory shares a common concern for the individual and freedom, opposition to the state and a desire to establish a system of voluntary co-operation. It is obvious that the sort of society envisioned by anarchists does not exist and, except for a few isolated and short lived attempts, has never existed. Nevertheless, we do have numerous examples of anarchy — societies without government and without the state.

Just as Marxist communists might not be thoroughly pleased with a functioning ‘primitive communism’ , so we cannot expect anarchists to approve extant anarchic polities. It is obvious that many would be horrified by some of their characteristics. While these societies lack government, as we shall see, patriarchy often prevails; a kind of gerontocracy or domination by the old men is not uncommon; religious sanctions are rampant; children are invariably in a ‘second class’ position; women are rarely treated in any way equal to men. Indeed, there are invariably strong pressures to conform to group traditions. But since they are highly decentralised, lacking government and the state, they do exemplify anarchy. And thus we must look at such systems as examples of the application of anarchy.

It may be argued that to employ the term ‘anarchy’ for a major group of human societies is ethnocentric and confuses ideology with social classification. It is to take a highly emotionally charged word, one with a very clear ideological connotation, identified with Euro-American cultural traditions, and to apply it cross-culturally when those in the other cultures would clearly lack the ideology and values of the anarchist. Thus, not only is the word distorted, but so also is the meaning of those cultures.

But if this is true of the word ‘anarchy’, it applies equally to the use of such words as ‘democratic’, ‘government’ , ‘law’ , ‘capitalist’ , ‘communist’ and a host of others employed daily by social scientists, yet derived from ordinary speech. Social science is full of terms in common usage which are applied to social contexts in other cultures. There are certainly dangers to such a procedure. It is easy to carry extraneous ideological baggage along with the term. On the other hand, if we cannot at all make such crosscultural transfers, we are left with a proliferation of neologisms which become pure jargonese, enhancing obfuscation rather than clarification. There are, after all, types of social phenomena which occur throughout the world. Scientific understanding is not furthered by a kind of radical phenomenology which makes every cultural item, every individual perception, unique. I believe many anthropologists, in their own projection of personal and cultural values, have obstinately refused to apply the one truly clarifying term to those numerous societies which are without government and are, therefore, anarchies.

Social order and authority

One of the universal characteristics of mankind, or of any species for that matter, is that it survives and thrives in the context of some kind of order. That is, humans have peace of mind where behaviour and events are on the whole predictable. We are animals of habit or animals of custom — traditionalists. Behaviour in human societies is, therefore, stanardised and deviations are punished. A society by definition has order and structure and operates with regularised, relatively fixed modes of behaviour. The term ‘society’ implies that the component members are operating according to some ‘rules of the game’. Such rules can be extremely vague and open to conflicting interpretations, or they may be very specific and explicit. In any case, there are guidelines without which we would be lost in a sea of anomie. Part of the problem of the modem world is that many of these guildelines have become so ambiguous that the level of general anxiety of the population increases. It is clear that where there is no structure, there is no order and there is no society. And, as the first lesson in any anthropology or sociology course points out, humans without society are not human. But another part of that first lesson is that there is an immense amount of variation within human society, including the amount and kind of structure and order.

Having said this, let me add ·that humankind often seeks a holiday from routine and structure. Max Gluckman pointed to what he called ‘rituals of rebellion’, which are periods in which the populace is expected to behave — within limits — in a manner counter to normal expectation. Thus there is the ‘Mardi Gras’, which is a traditional relaxing of behaviour before the commencement of the exacting observations of the Lenten season. We have Hallowe’en as a traditional time when children are .permitted a short expression of rebellion against the adult community.

Victor Turner has suggested that there are two countercurrents in a society: one of structure and the other of communitas or antistructure. The latter expresses the spontaneous, the unplanned and the ecstatic, as a kind of reaction to the usual, predictable and structured. This in a way parallels Proudhon’s view that authority and liberty operate as antinornies within any society, each acting so as to delimit the other, In terms of these polarities, anarchism as a social theory is allied with communitas and liberty. Like Thoreau, anarchists are critical of those elements within a culture which become so engrained as to be stultifying and superficial or empty rituals. They look with favour on the new and the untried. Perhaps Nietzsche’s call to live dangerously has some relevance here.

On occasion, the anarchist sympathy for communitas has appeared to go to extremes. Thus Hippies, in their rejection of modern structures, sometimes reject every form of structure so as to enshrine dirt — the ultimate of disorder. But while, of all social theories, anarchism has more sympathy for communitas, it is still not opposed to structure, to order or to society. Indeed, Proudhon once wrote that liberty is the mother of order not the daughter. The issue for anarchists is not whether there should be structure or order, but what kind there should be and what its sources ought to be. The individual or group which has sufficient liberty to be self-regulating will have the highest degree of order; the imposition of order from above and outside induces resentment and rebellion where it does not encourage childlike dependence and impotence, and so becomes a force for disorder.

The relation of anarchy to power, authority, politics and political organisation is another misunderstood area. In human groups some manoeuvring for power characterises the relationship between individual members. The intensity and emphasis on the contest varies from one culture to another and from one individual to another. The cultural values of the Pygmies to be discussed and also of such Pueblo Indian groups as the Zuni and Hopi, play down attempts by individuals to stand in the forefront, although one cannot say that the desire to influence others is absent. And within every culture there is variation. Some people strive more than others; a few even opt out. Nevertheless, the contest for power manifests itself in some fashion within each human group. Power means the ability to get others to do what you want them to do. Thus, someone who convinces ten others to follow orders has more power than someone who is able to get only one to obey. But this depends on all other things being equal, since, for example, someone who controls the one individual who knows how to use a nuclear detonating device can have more power than someone who controls the behaviour of a million ordinary men and women. Power means influence — convincing others by logical argument, by the prestige of one’s status or rank, by money or bribe. Or it means implied or overt threat of injury — either by physical or psychological means — and the ability to carry it out.

The contest for power is an important dynamic force in the social group — a major mechanism by which the group undergoes change over time. The ‘push and pull’ of members not only causes ‘palace revolutions’, that is, shifts in the personnel of the less powerful and the more powerful, but leads as well to changes in rules and values.

Ralf Dahrendorf, a German sociologist who is certainly no anarchist, presents a thesis in a way amenable to anarchist thought, particularly as an answer to Marx. Dahrendorf suggests that the conflict for power is central in a society; Marx was primarily concerned with one feature of the power complex, namely, economic power. This emphasis has meant that those who follow Marx devalue the non-economic dimensions of power. Consequently, we find the world full of peoples’ democracies in which the oppression of ordinary people is no less than it was before the ‘revolution’. Marxism in practice has tended to transfer the forces of power from the capitalist to the professional bureaucrat and military officer, primarily because it does not see that the central problem is the problem of power itself. The anarchist insists upon addressing this larger issue.

Neither anarchy nor anarchist theory deny power; on the contrary, in anarchist theory this is a central issue for all human societies and the limiting of power is a constant concern. Bakunin recognised the great human drive for power ( Maximoff, 248ff ) . Anarchy is, after all, the condition in which there is the maximum diffusion of power, so that ideally it is equally distributed — in contrast to other political theories, such as Marxism, in which power is transferred from one social group ( class ) to another. It is, of course, true that much anarchist thinking regarding power has been muddled by ‘utopian’ dreaming of the ideal society where no-one infringes on anyone else. Godwin and Kropotkin, for example, believed that in the course of time the human race would evolve towards a condition where all were good to their fellows and did not try to take advantage. But other anarchists are not such optimists about human nature; if they were they would not be so worried about the uses and abuses of power.

Max Weber stressed the difference between power and authority. In any society, individual members recognise certain others as having authority within specified realms. Thus, in modern society, members accept as legitimate the right of certain individuals to carry and, where ‘necessary’, to employ firearms, in order to apprehend suspected law breakers. These policemen invariably wear special dress. Members of this society do not recognise as legitimate the use of force by others, such as gangsters. In both cases coercive force is· employed. In the first the power is authority since it is seen as legitimate and right; but the second is not authority; it is the illegitimate use of power. Something of this kind of distinction can be identified in all societies. Yet a significant modification of Weber’s terminology is in order. Most Canadians would eagerly subscribe to the notion that the power of the Ottawa government is legitimate, but some would only acquiesce to that power. The several generations of colonial rule of the Dutch in Indonesia, for example, commenced as a pure case of the imposition of brute and raw force. But with the passage of time it acquired a certain ‘legitimation’ , so that the power became authority in Weber’s terms. But it becomes legitimate power because the Indonesians learned to acquiesce: they grew accustomed to the situation and tacitly accepted it. Raymond Firth has noted that power acquires some kind of support from the governed either because of “routine apathy, inability to conceive of an alternative or acceptance of certain values regarded as unconditional” (123). Most authority commences as the raw power of the gangster and evolves into the ‘legitimate’ authority of tacit acquiescence. This is certainly the history of the nation state. Fried observes that legitimacy is the means by which ideology is blended with power. The function of legitimacy is “to explain and justify the existence of concentrated social power wielded by a portion of the community and to offer similar support to specific social orders, that is, specific ways of apportioning and directing the flow of social power” (Fried, 26).

No philosopher or social theorist accepts the legitimacy of ‘raw’ use of power and none rejects totally and completely any and all kinds of authority. Even the anarchist recognises that there is a place for legitimate authority. An anarchist conception of legitimate authority was long ago intimated by Proudhon: “ ... if man is born a sociable being, the authority of his father over him ceases on the day when his mind being formed and his education finished, he becomes the associate of his father... “ (n.d. ,264) . Later Bakunin wrote: “We recognise then, the absolute authority of science ... Outside of this only legitimate authority, legitimate because it is rational and is in harmony with human liberty, we declare all other authorities false, arbitrary and fatal “ (Maximoff, 254).

Paul Goodman in Drawing the Line writes of natural coercion in which the infant is dependent upon his mother or the student upon the teacher — cases in which teaching is involved with the intent of increasing the independence of the one to attain the level of the other (1946) . I don’t know whether Fromm ever read Proudhon, Bakunin or the early Goodman, but certainly his view of the nature of authority closely parallels and further explicates that of his anarchist predecessors. Fromm distinguishes, as does Bakunin, between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ authority. Rational authority has its source in competence; it requires constant scrutiny and criticism and is always temporary. It is based upon the equality of the authority and the subject “which differ only with respect to the degree of knowledge or skill in a particular field” . “The source of irrational authority, on the other hand, is always power over \ people” — either physical or mental power (9). Stanley Milgram has said that people appear to believe that those in positions of authority, including politicians, are the most knowledgeable. But perhaps this is only wishful thinking in an attempt to justify their authorities. People delude themselves into thinking that through the electoral process they put those in office who are intellectually superior.

Modern society has many in authority who have earned rationally the right to authority, but it has many whose claim to authority is irrational and they are our politicians, judges and policemen. These the anarchist rejects, accepting only rational authority. Anarchists· recognise that there are specialists, that is, authorities in various realms, who are accepted as such because of their expertise. Yet one can readily see the potential danger inherent even here, that those holding one form of authority may seek to extend their power· so that rational authority is transformed into irrational authority. Closely related to the concept of authority is that of leadership. Again, no one can deny that there are individuals who appear in every human group who stand out as influential persons for one reason or another. The anarchist movement has long accepted leaders within its own folds, even though it has remained suspicious of the general idea. Although group leadership is a universal of human social organisation, it is, at the same time, necessary to stress that leadership is conceived differently amongst different peoples. The Pygmies and Hopi of Arizona express an anarchist distrust of leaders, such that that each individual seeks to avoid the leadership role, blending into the group as much as possible.

Since societies have order and structure and must deal with the problem of power, they are therefore involved in politics. When we use the word politics, we are concerned with power and its uses in a human group. Not only do all societies have politics, but they have political organisation or political systems — that is, standardized ways of dealing with power problems. Political organisation is not a synonym for government. Government is one form of political organisation. Politics may be handled in a variety of ways; government is just one of those ways. Thus it is clear that even anarchism as a theory does not deny or oppose politics or political organisation. It is, on the contrary, very political.

In the broadest sense politics can be applied to any kind of social group-. That is, there may even be politics within the family — where clearly the distribution of power between father, mother, son and daughter is a major issue. A local club also has politics in a similar small-scale fashion. Ordinarily, however, when one speaks of politics or political organisation, one does not think of the internal affairs of the family. Political organisation applies more to ‘public’ affairs — relations which are territorial and cut across kinship groupings. Politics involves a substantial geographical area — a community, or at least an extensive neighbourhood. Yet even this kind of conceptualisation leads to ambiguity as to whether one is dealing with political or family affairs. We may have a confrontation between two groups related by kinship, but beyond the level of extended family (for example, two patrilineages), which would be considered at least as a quasi-public affair. Nevertheless, the terms of address employed and the atmosphere of the exchange will unmistakably be those of kinship.

Social sanctions

Neither anarchy , nor anarchist theory in sum, is opposed to organisation, authority, politics, or political organisation. It is opposed to some forms of these things, especially to law, government and the state, to which terms we must now proceed. Radcliffe-Brown proposed the term ‘sanctions’ to apply to the manner in which a social group reacts to the behaviour of any one of its members. Thus, a positive sanction is some form of expression of general approval. A soldier is given a medal; a scholar an honorary degree, or a student an award; mother kisses little junior for his good behaviour, or daddy gives him a piece of candy. A negative sanction is the reaction of the community against the behaviour of a member or members; it expresses disapproval. Thus, a soldier may be court martialled; a scholar fired or put in jail; a student failed in course work or ostracised by fellow students and the child slapped b y his parent. It seems obvious that it is the negative sanctions which become most important in any society.

Sanctions may also be categorised as being ‘diffuse’, ‘religious’ or ‘legal’. Here my interpretation deviates slightly from that -of Radcliffe-Brown. Diffuse sanctions are those which are spontaneously applied by , any one or more members of the community. Crucial to the conception of diffuse sanctions is the notion that their application is not confined to the holder of a specific social role. They may be imposed by anyone within a given age/sex grade or, occasionally, there may be no limit to who may initiate them. This is the meaning of diffuse: responsibility for and the right to impose the sanction is spread out over the community. Society as a whole has the power. There is no special elite which even claims a monopoly on the use of violence as a sanctioning device. Further, when and if sanctions are applied is variable, as is the intensity of the sanctions imposed.

Diffuse sanctions include gossip, name calling, arguing, fist fighting, killing and ostracism. Duelling and formal wrestling matches are less widespread forms. Inuit have ritualised song competitions in which two opponents try to outdo one another in insults before an audience which acts as judge. Diffuse sanctions may be resorted to by an individual or a group. And their effectiveness is enhanced as the entire community joins in participation in the sanctions. Vigilante style action and feuds are common forms of diffuse sanction which depend upon collective action.

In many societies, fines and other punishments are meted out by an assembly. Radcliffe-Brown calls these ‘organised’ sanctions. Yet they are still not ‘legal’ but have the character of diffuse sanctions, of a more formalised type, if the assembly has no authority to use force in executing its decisions. In such instances the assembly members act as mediators rather than judges and are successful to the extent that they can convince two disputing parties to come to some compromise. Diffuse sanctions are a universal form of social regulation; if a social group has nothing else it will have various techniques which can readily be classified as diffuse sanctions.

Religious sanctions involve the supernatural. ‘Black magic’ may be performed against a person; one may be threatened with the eternal torment of hell, or encouraged with a positive religious sanction promising everlasting ecstasy in heaven. The Nuer leopard skin chief may get his will done by threatening to curse another. The Ojibwa Indians believed infractions of the rules led to the acquisition by supernatural means of specific kinds of diseases. Thus, religious sanctions may either have a human executor, as in the case of a curse which must be invoked, or be seen as automatic, as with the Ojibwa belief, or the idea that breaking out of the ten commandments commits one to hell fire. In another respect religious sanctions are either those which are intended to bring forth punishment in this life, or those which are for an after-life: physical versus ultimate spiritual punishment.

Legal sanctions involve all expressions of disapproval or approval of the behaviour of an individual wherein: a) such expressions are specifically delegated to persons holding defined roles, one of the duties of which is the execution of these sanctions; b) these individuals alone have the ‘authority’ to threaten use of violence and use it in order to carry out their job and; c) punishments meted out in relation to the infraction are defined within certain limits and in relation to the ‘crime’.

Policemen, justices of a court, jailers, executioners and lawmakers are examples of those who may enforce legal sanctions. In our society they collectively constitute a government. The state, through its agent the government, declares it has the monopoly on the use of violence against others within society, meaning that only certain agents of the state, for example, policemen, can take a person off the street and put him or her in jail. Only certain collectivities, that is, the courts, can determine guilt and assess a punishment in accord with what others, the lawmakers, have established as law. Finally the punishment connected with a legal sanction is fairly standardised and precise. A person found guilty of robbing a store will receive, say, a year to ten years in prison.

Legal sanctions are laws. Laws exist where one has specific social roles designed, or delegated, to enforce regulations by force of violence, if necessary and where punishment has certain defined limits and is not capricious. Law exists where you have government and the state; conversely, if you have a government you have law. Legal sanctions, and thus law and government, are not universal, but are characteristic of only some human societies — albeit the most complex ones. Such societies also, it should be borne in mind, retain a peripheral position for both diffuse and religious sanctions.

Malinowski suggested that the term ‘law’ should be applied loosely to cover all social rules which have the support of society (Malinowski, 9–59). Such usage, however, obscures the fundamental and important difference in the means by which different rules are enforced. Law and government are invariably associated with rule by an elite class, while governmentless societies are invariably egalitarian and classless. Hence, Malinowski’s loose usage obfuscates the important difference concerning who, or what, enforces regulations.

It should be clear that any society characterised by the prevalence of legal sanctions can hardly be called anarchic. As we shall note in considering some of the case studies below, there are marginal examples. There is no clean-cut line between anarchy and government. The relation of anarchy to diffuse and religious sanctions, however, requires some futher clarification. In the social theory of anarchism the idea of voluntary co-operation has been made the positive side of the coin of which abolition of government is the negative. Where the idea of voluntary co-operation is so critical to anarchist thought, it is important to consider it in relation to the nature of functioning anarchic polities, giving special attention to the employment of diffuse and religious sanctions. Voluntary co-operation, like its antonym, coercion, is a highly ambiguous term. From one point of view nothing may be seen as purely voluntary and all acts as being in some way coerced. For one thing, it might be said that conscience, ego, id, ‘the inner spirit’ or what have you, are fully as coercive forces as the policeman, or as public ostracism. However, coercion may be best conceived as a relationship of command and obedience, wherein the commanding force is· either human or supernatural, but is always external to the individual person. Ideally, for true voluntary co-operation t9 prevail, there must be no such forms of external coercion. Yet, in fact, even anarchists themselves accept the use of such coercive force and limit voluntary co-operation. In their everyday activity’ in their writings and in their own creation of anarchist communes and societies, anarchists use a variety of diffuse sanctions. Some have advocated and applied what are clearly legal sanctions.

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the type of society envisioned by a Bakunin or Proudhon from a decentralised federal democracy. Towards the end of his life, Proudhon seems to have moved away from his advocacy of voluntary association, towards a sort of minimal state. “ ... (I)t is scarcely likely”, he writes in Du Principe Federatif, “however far the human race may progress in civilisation, morality, and wisdom, that all traces of government and authority will vanish” (20). For him anarchy has become an ideal type, an abstraction, which like the similar ideal types, democracy and monarchy, never exist in a pure form, but are mixtures of political systems. “In a free society, the role of the state or government is essentially that of legislating, instituting, creating, beginning, establishing; as little as possible should it be executing .... Once a beginning has been made (for some project) the machinery established, the state withdraws leaving the execution of the new task to local authorities and citizens” (45). Proudhon has become an advocate of a federal or confederal system, in which the role of the centre is reduced “to that of general initiation, or providing guarantees and supervising ... (T)he execution of its orders (are) subject to the approval of the federated governments and their responsible agents” ( 49). He cites the Swiss confederation with approval. “If I may express myself so” , Proudhon had written in a letter of 1864, “anarchy is a form of government or constitution in which the principle of authority, police institutions, restrictive and repressive measures, bureaucracy, taxation, etc, are reduced to their simplest terms” (quoted in Buber, 43). We are left wondering if the elder Proudhon would now not feel more at home with such early American opponents of centralised government as John Taylor of Caroline or John Randolph of Roanoke, even John Calhoun.

Bakunin, who absorbed most of Proudhon’s federalist ideas, presents a similar problem. In describing his idea of a federal system in the Organisation of the International Brotherhood, Bakunin makes some disconcerting statements: “The communal legislatures, however, will retain the right to deviate from provincial legislation on secondary but never on essential issues ... “ while the provincial parliament “will never interfere with the domestic administration of the communes, it will decide each commune’s quota of the provincial and national taxation”. There are to be· courts and a national parliament as well. This national parliament “will have the task of establishing the fundamental principles that are to constitute the national charter and will be binding upon all provinces wishing to participate in the national pact”. The national parliament “will negotiate alliances, make peace or war, and have the exclusive right to order (always for a predetermined period) the formation of a national army” (Lehning, 72–73). Bakunin’s anarchy sounds like a decentralised federalist democracy. Yet a year after writing this document he seems to redeem himself for anarchy in an essay on Federalisme, Socialisme et Antitheologisme: “Just because a region has formed part of a State, even by voluntary accession, it by no means follows that it incurs any obligation to remain tied to it forever.” “The right of free union and equally free secession comes first and foremost among all political rights” (Lehning, 96).

Kropotkin favourably described the early Medieval city . commune as an anarchistic system, when, as we shall note below, it surely had a governmental structure. The same may be said concerning the ‘anarchist collectives’ established in the Ukraine in 1917 and later in some of those in Spain. Even such an individualist anarchist as Josiah Warren saw the need for organised militias. And most anarchists have legitimised military force to achieve their ends, or have considered it an unfortunate necessity. In a word, anarchists have sometimes been equivocal about legal sanctions, to say the least.

In focusing on highly centralised realms of coercion in modem society such as the state and the church, they have also tended to neglect the sometimes more oppressive force of such diffuse sanctions as gossip and ostracism. Nevertheless, there is an important difference between the coercion of the state and. the coercion of diffuse sanctions, which may in part justify anarchist reliance on the latter while rejecting the former. In the state or government there is always a hierarchical and status difference between those who rule and those who are ruled. Even if it is a democracy, where we suppose that those who rule today are not rulers tomorrow, there are nevertheless differences in status. In a democratic system only a tiny minority will ever have the opportunity to rule and these are invariably drawn from an elite group. Differential status is not inherent in diffuse sanctions. Where a group or individual employs gossip or ostracism against another person, that person may freely use these same techniques. Where differential status is associated with diffuse sanctions, such as in the command position of the father over his son, we do have a form of coercion which begins to approach that of government. Yet still the father role has the quality of a rational authority and a young man may expect eventually to ‘graduate’ to a position of greater equality with his father, eventually achieving fatherhood himself. In no diffuse sanctions is there a vesting of the power to employ violence into the hands of a restricted group of commanders.

Anarchism as a social theory cannot, and I believe in actuality does not, reject all forms of coercion. While its advocates may wield the slogan of voluntary co-operation, it is recognised that this too has limits. For anarchists there is a tacit and, for many, an overt recognition of the legitimate use of some kind of force in some circumstances and this force is what anthropologists refer to as diffuse sanctions. Indeed, as psychologists have informed us and as Allen Ritter has lately reiterated, these sanctions are imperative for the development of personality. The growth of the individual’s self image relies upon knowing what others think of his or her behaviour. At the same time, the operation of sanctions instills awareness of others and so builds community by building empathy (Ritter, 1980): Concerning religious sanctions, anarchist theoreticians have generally looked upon religion as another oppressive system aimed at curbing the free expression of the individual. Michael Bakunin, e.specially, saw God and the state as two great interrelated tyrannical ogres which must be destroyed. All well-known anarchists at least opposed the church — religion being seen as an organised and hierarchical social structure. Even Tolstoy agreed in this, although his anarchism derived from his interpretation of a Christianity which stressed the literal acceptance of the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount.

The Catholic Worker Movement is a rather unusual development within American anarchism. Led by a convert to Catholicism, Dorothy Day, it professes both an adherence to the principles of pacifist anarchism and to the Roman Catholic Church — a kind of Catholic Tolstoyan movement. Few outside this movement have understood how anarchism, or for that matter any moderately libertarian doctrine, could be reconciled with Roman Catholicism and its dedication to an absolutist monarchy — the papacy — and to a rigid hierarchical structure. Most anarchists see any religion as an authoritarian system, but are all religious sanctions necessarily incompatible with anarchy? I think not. We must appreciate the distinction made above between those religious sanctions which require human mediation and those which are ‘automatic’. A religious sanction which is least compatible with anarchy and takes on some of the character of . a legal sanction, is one which can only be invoked by a specific individual as part of a formal office and where there is consensus that such a person has a legitimate monopoly on the power — ie, the authority — to impose sanctions. The priest is the best example of this. On the other hand, where the power to invoke religious sanctions is available to the many and not legitimately monopolised, we have a situation which parallels diffuse sanctions. A punishment which is believed to come directly from God or some other supernatural force, does not require human intervention and is more on the order of subjugation to natural occurrences such as storm and earthquake. Indeed, it is quite clear that punishment by one’s conscience is a sanction of this order. Those religious sanctions which parallel diffuse sanctions, as well as those which require no human intermediary, do not seem incompatible with anarchy as we have here conceived it.

Government and the state

Conceptions of government and the state and the relationship between them are often confused. Marxists and some anarchists, including Bakunin, declare their opposition to the state and desire to replace what is called ‘political’ government with a government over ‘things’. But this seems like playing with words and sloganeering.’ Any ‘things’ are going to be manipulated by people and will therefore be seen as in need of governing because people are involved. So it is still a government over people. Further, one cannot abolish the state and still have a government, since the latter is the institutional apparatus by which the state is maintained.

Nadel (1942, 69–70) has given three specific characteristics of the state and in doing so has also indicated the role of government in the state. First, the state is a territorial association. It claims ‘sovereignty’ over a given place in space and all those residing within that area are subject to, and must submit to, the institution of authority ruling or governing that territory, that is, the government.

While the state is a territorial entity, it is often an inter-tribal and inter-racial structure. The criteria for membership are determined by residence and by birth. Membership is ordinarily ascribed, although one may voluntarily apply to join if one immigrates and settles within the territory of the state.

The state has an apparatus of government and this is to some degree centralised. The government functions to execute existing laws, legislate new ones, maintain ‘order and arbitrate conflicts to the exclusion of other groups or individuals. It comprises specific individuals holding defined social roles or offices. Crucial to the definition of such roles is the claim to a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within that territory. The part played by the different role holders in using violence may vary so that there can be a highly differentiated system or division of labour (cf the discussion of legal sanctions above). All are in any case part of a single integrated monopolistic institution. Such a situation differs, for example, from the role of the Inuit shaman who may threaten a victim with violence, since the shaman cannot claim a monopoly on its legitimate use.

The ruling group in any state tends to be a specialised and privileged body separated by its formation, status and organisation from the population as a whole. This group collectively monopolises political decision. In some polities it may constitute an entrenched and self-perpetuating class. In other more open systems such as a democracy, there is a greater circulation or regular turnover of membership of the ruling group, so that dynasties or other kinds of closed classes of rulers do not ordinarily occur. This, of course, contributes to the illusion of equality of power in a democracy and obscures the division between rulers and ruled.

Fundamental to both government and the state is the employment of violence to enforce the law. This may be variously viewed as either the imposition of the will of the ruling group, or as a device to maintain order, keep the peace and arbitrate internal conflicts. In fact states and governments fulfil all these functions by enforcing the law. It is theorists of the left and especially anarchists, however, who emphasise that the paramount and ultimate end of all law enforcement is to benefit the ruling interests, even though there may be positive side effects such as keeping the peace. They would further emphasise that the existence of the state is conducive of strife and conflict since as a system based upon the use of violence it thereby legitimises and incites it. The state is further predicated upon the assumption that some should be bosses giving orders while others should be subordinates — a situation which can only irk the subordinates and frustrate them and, thus, become yet another provocation of violence. Democratic systems may ameliorate this situation but they do not cure it. By their nature state and government discourage, if they do not outlaw, the natural voluntary co-operation amongst people, a point made by Benjamin Tucker and more recently in some detail by Taylor. Anarchist theory is therefore clearly opposed to Hobbes’ thesis that without government society is nasty and brutish. Indeed, anarchists set Hobbes on his head and argue that the world would be more peaceful and amenable to co-operation if the state were removed. And, clearly, the anthropological record does not support Hobbes in any way. Stateless societies seem less violent and brutish than those with the state.

Above all, the state and government are organisations for war. No more efficient organisation for war has been developed. It is interesting and perhaps ironic that right-wing and anarchist theoreticians have converged in recognising the significance of violence to the life of the state. Machiavelli’s practical guide to the operation of a state has disturbed many a naive believer in democracy, since the Italian politician recognises force and fraud as the obvious central mechanisms for the success of any state. Von Treitschke, the German historian whose greatest hero was Frederick the Great, observed that “without war no State could be. All those we know of arose through war and the protection of their members by armed force remains their primary and essential task. War, therefore, will endure to the end of history as long as there is a multiplicity of States ... the blind worshipper of an eternal peace falls into the error of isolating the state, or dreams of one which is universal, which we have already seen to be at variance with reason” since a state always means one among states and thus opposed to others (38). “(S)ubmission is what the State primarily requires ... its very essence is the accomplishment of its will” (14). “The State is no Academy of Arts, still less is it a Stock Exchange; it is Power.. “ (242).

The pioneer British anthropologist, Edward B Tylor, wrote in his Anthropology, “A constitutional government whether called republic or kingdom, is an arrangement by which the nation governs itself by means of the machinery of a military despotism” (156).

Nietzsche, who contrary to popular opinion was no friend of the state, noted its predatory nature: “The State (is) unmorality organised ... the will to war, to conquest and revenge. “ As a predator the state attempts to become larger and larger, ever ·expanding its sphere of influence and subjugation at the expense of other weaker states. It is true that in the course of time in this interstate struggle most states opt out of the conflict and resign themselves to becoming satellites of larger states, realising they cannot effectively compete. It is also true that the giant states may not always. seek to gobble up weaker states, because they find it better for their own interests to keep such states as ostensibly independent entities. Thus, in the modem world, we have super powers which are in the midst of the struggle for expansion, carrying on the traditional predatory role of the state — the United States, Russia, China, France, and. the United Kingdom ( now marginally ) . There are innumerable satellite states of each of the big predators. There are those — usually known as ‘Third-world’ states — which may try small order predation against neighbouring states, but on the whole they keep their independent status and opt out of full conflict because they are buffers between, or pawns of, the big predators. Finally there are a few states such as Switzerland and until recently Lebanon which are perpetually neutral zones; the big predators do require such zones in which to operate, particularly for information gathering purposes.

Conclusion

The classification of sanctions discussed above may now be summarised in relation to political systems by means of the following diagram presented as a continuum with anarchy, where there is 00 government, at one end and archy, where the state and government clearly exist, at the other. Under anarchy only diffuse and certain supernatural sanctions are operative, while archy is characterised by the prevalence of legal sanctions. In the middle, between the two poles, there is a limbo which may be seen as a marginal form of anarchy or a rudimentary form of governmental or archic system. There are many anomalous cases of this kind and we shall consider some of these below. Such entities may possibly be considered as transitional examples from anarchy to statism. As Lowie has said, states do not appear full blown out of the stateless condition; they too must evolve or develop and this takes time.

Maine in his Ancient Law was the first to explicate an evolutionary typology of tribal or stateless society on the one hand and the state type society on the other. The first was based on kinship ties, in which every member believed he was related to all others in the group. Members obeyed a head man, not as a ruler of a state, but as a senior kinsman, as head of a family, a father. Early societies were all of this type and in the course of time some evolved into societies with a different basis of membership — that of territory . ‘Local contiguity’ rather than kinship became the basis for deciding the ultimate authority. Such a society entails a government and a state. Gluckman has noted that Maine meant to stress that the ‘revolution’ in social order comes about when dwelling in a certain territory was sufficient to grant citizenship without having to create some kinship tie either by marriage, adoption, or through inventing a genealogical connection. “The alteration comes when a kinship idiom to express political association is no longer demanded” (86).

My continuum should not be interpreted as an evolutionary scheme, in which culture history is a one-way street where tribal or anarchic societies only become state type societies, while the reverse does not occur. At any point in time, individual societies may be placed along the continuum. In addition, any given society may have different positions in the course of its history. The major thrust of history seems to be the transformation of stateless into state societies, but, as we shall note below, there are examples as well of the reverse and of societies which seem to oscillate back and forth between the two opposite poles. In addition, let us not forget that even if the trend of history and evolution favours the change from anarchy to archy, this does not thereby make that process right and good.

II. Some Observations on Procedure

In selecting the various societies discussed in the following chapters, I have attempted to obtain a wide ranging diversity in terms of geography and cultural type. At the same time an effort has been made to employ a sampling which offers distinct and different solutions to the problem of order in anarchy. In other words, emphasis has been placed on drawing examples of varying kinds of sanctions and styles of leadership. Some cases are included whose anarchic nature will clearly be controversial. They may represent cases of marginal anarchy or marginal ‘statism’.

We may distinguish among the several examples of anarchic polities between those which are ‘unintentional’ and those which are ‘intentional’. The latter are deliberate, planned attempts by individuals to initiate a social order according to some preconceived programme. To use another descriptive adjective, they are ‘Utopian’ experiments along anarchist lines. Most of the sample are ‘unintentional’, the kind of societies which, like nearly all those in the human adventure, have grown “like Topsy”, in the absence of any overall conscious plan.

Finally, concerning these unintentional societies, it should be borne in mind that for most of them the conditions described no longer obtain. With the advent of European imperialism these anarchic polities — which are clearly the least understood by European colonialists of all non-European political arrangements — were transformed to fit into the pattern of government and order as conceived by the masters. In the descriptions which follow, however, the present tense will be used so as to suggest an ‘ethnographic present’.

The discussion of the several anarchic polities is placed within the context of a typology of societies long in vogue in anthropological circles: that is, according to their primary mode of subsistence. Thus, some are hunters and gatherers of wild animals and plants; others are chiefly simple gardeners or horticulturalists primarily dependent upon cultivating domesticated plants with hand tools and human Jabour power alone. A third type are pastoralists who specialise in herding livestock and at the same time may give incidental attention to cultivation of plants. Finally, we may speak of agricultural peoples who are dependent upon a more extensive form of plant cultivation using animal traction or, more recently, tractor power. Here the chief technological symbol is the use of the plough. Such societies depend upon a mixture of plant cultivation and livestock husbandry.

Some anthropologists have made much more of such a classification of societies than may in fact be warranted. For them the significance of this classification is that one may predict from subsistence numerous other strategic characteristics of such societies. Therefore, the classification, it is held, bears out the theoretical orientation of a materialist conception of humans and their culture. This is the view that the subsistence base of a society determines the type of social system. This is not the place to enter into a detailed argument concerning this thesis. Yet usage of this classification here, as in many other anthropological works, should not be taken as support for this point of view. The classification is employed because it offers a convenient way of dividing, and so dealing with, a variety of human situations. And like any classification and its implicit theory it bears elements of truth. Thus, we know that practically all hunting-gathering people lack a complex division of labour, social classes-, the state and government, and at the other end of the spectrum that practically all agricultural societies have social classes, a complex division of labour, the state and government. It is clear that hunting gathering cannot provide the necessary material wherewithal to sustain such elaborate social systems as can an agricultural system. Thus, hunting-gathering societies are, with only a few exceptions, ‘egalitarian’ societies in Fried’s classification, or ‘band type’ societies in Service’s. And most examples of anarchic polities are likewise to be drawn from hunting-gathering peoples, whilst agricultural societies are almost entirely stratified (Fried) and state type systems where anarchy is at best a marginal occurrence.

As is so true of single factor determinist theories, this one as well, which rests upon material subsistence, has a ring of truth if we remain at the level of certain broad generalities and probabilities. However, such theories break down when we attempt to employ them in explaining the wide variations which occur, for example, within hunting-gathering systems, or the more precise dynamics pertaining to specific aspects of the social order. Nor are they able to explain variations in ideology. Like the geographical environment, mode of subsistence may be said to set limits to what a people by themselves can do and can develop, but within these limits there are, given the inventive genius of the human mind, all kinds of variations which are possible and are not purely epiphenomena of material conditions of life.

Any society at a given time is the product of the collective interaction of its several parts, not of one phenomenon alone. Food gathering of a specific kind is in part a determinant of population size and diversity, as well as of the extent to which sufficient wealth can be produced to allow for certain development in social organisation. Population size and density have much to do with the kinds of social organisation which can appear. For example, a small population can readily sustain a polity based solely upon kinship. At the same time hunting and gathering, like any other mqde of subsistence, is also heavily dependent upon the kinds of technology available. Yet the technology and, thus, the whole hunting-gathering base, depends upon the non-material factor of knowledge which is inside people’s heads. Knowledge in turn is focussed or oriented by the prevalent kinds of cultural values — what is held to be the important ends of life — and in turn by the existing kinds of technology. In a word the most satisfactory model of a social order may be as an interacting multi-factor system.

The sequence from hunting-gathering through horticulture, pastoralism to agriculture should not be seen as a fixed model of stages of cultural evolution through which every culture must pass, nor should it be viewed as a sequence of ever increasing complexity. It is true that all societies either are, or were once, dependent on hunting-gathering and that most present day agricultural societies started out as hunting-gatherers and evolved into horticulturalists .. But there are a variety of other ways or sequences in which societies may develop besides this process. The model of cultural evolution is multilineal, not unilineal.

Regarding degrees of complexity, some hunting-gathering societies are more complex than some horticultural ones, some even more than a few pastoral ones. And some of the horticultural societies are as complex as some of the agricultural ones. In the descriptions which follow the emphasis will be upon determining patterns and techniques of leadership and mechanisms of social control as indices of anarchic polity. The relations between the sexes and between age groups are two areas of concern to anarchists, and in any modern anarchist theory there is a demand for full sexual equality and at least an opposition to any irrational authority over the young. In what follows we will not have a great deal to say on this subject. The truth is that few societies grant anything approaching sexual equality and female equality is clearly not a feature for which most of the societies discussed below are to be noted. Similarly, the young are invariably subordinate to their elders and more often than not in an arbitrary manner. We stick to the strict meaning of anarchy as a polity without rulers, without government, but again freely admit that this may leave much to be desired by those who are ideologically anarchists and by others concerned about liberty as well. Anarchy does not necessarily mean freedom.

Finally, there is a problem with the names commonly applied to several of the groups discussed in that they have an ethnocentric origin. At the same time appropriate alternatives are difficult to locate. Thus, while Eskimo has its origin in a pejorative, the alternative, Inuit, which is the name they use for themselves, has an ethnocentric ring as well. It means people or human beings carrying with it the implication that outsiders are not human. Berber is no doubt the most pejorative appelation of all — it means barbarian. But these people lack a single blanket term for themselves. Most, however, use some form of Imazighen, that is, “free men”, and I would surmise that none of them would resent being so called. In this text I have tried to employ neutral terms for the various groups, but I have not been able to produce any exhaustive ethnocentric-free list of names. I still use Pygmy for lack of an alternative and for all I know the names of many groups may disguise insults of one kind or another. I will use Inuit instead of Eskimo; San instead of Bushman; Samek instead of Lapp and Imazighen instead of Berber.

III. Anarchy among Hunter-Gatherers

“Among the lessons to be learnt from the life of rude tribes is how society can go on without the policeman to keep order” (Tylor, II, 134) .

The hunting-gathering type is obviously the oldest kind of human society, characterising the human way of life from its cultural beginnings and for about 99% of the time thereafter. Beginning about 12,000 years ago, with the invention of plant cultivation and animal husbandry, hunting and gathering began to decline. Today, there is practically no group on earth which relies completely on this way of life. Even the Inuit and Arctic Indians have abandoned full dependence upon hunting and gathering in favour of a livelihood aimed in great part at obtaining furs and manufacturing itenis for an international luxury market. Elsewhere, the huntergatherers such as those to be found in India or in parts of East and Central Africa, are usually specialised castes of professional hunters dependent upon an adjacent agricultural or horticultural society.

Hunter-gatherers constitute simple societies and are primitive in the sense that primitive means that they are more similar to the oldest forms of human society than are other extant ones. But it is an error to conceive of these societies as being the same as those archaic societies. Contemporary hunter-gatherers are present-day people who, like everyone else, have a history; they are not petrified hangovers from a Paleolithic past. They have changed at a different rate than most other people and in different ways. Their histories represent various paths of evolutionary development, not necessarily some fixed stage within, or at the bottom of, an evolutionary sequence.

Although hunting-gathering is a type or class of societies, such societies are not undifferentiated, like so many peas in a pod. Contrary to some popular views, there is a considerable variation among them. In delineating the highlights of the type then we should indicate some of the more significant variations. These societies are dependent upon the acquisition of wild, undomesticated foods: wild game, fish and plants. Nevertheless we find there is some tendency to specialise in exploiting selected resources. Thus, there are those who are largely hunters of sea mammals; others tend more to fishing. There are peoples who may be called big game hunters and those who specialise more . in collecting wild seeds. There are also many who are much more omnivorous in their habits.

Reliance upon wild sources of food places greater limits on potential cultural development than any other form of subsistence. There are more severe limits on what a people can do and can invent and utilise when they must rely upon the often precarious and insecure sources offered by nature alone. There is less guarantee as to where the next meal might come from than in an agricultural society. But it is not a life that demands unceasing labour or a kind of bare hand to mouth existence. This is a condition which more appropriately describes a peasantry or 19th century factory working class. Ordinarily hunters and gatherers produce a food supply sufficient for an adequate caloric intake for each member of the group, plus enough for the ritual and ceremonial requirements traditional for the society. Some, chiefly fishing specialists, have been able to build up ‘surpluses’ and enjoy a more secure food supply than many an agriculturalist. In any event, the parameters of no human society’s subsistence are ever so rigid as to preclude freedom in experimentation and innovation.

Hunting-gathering societies invariably have a band type organisation. This means that the basic stable territorial group is a relatively small one, usually under 100 persons. It contains at least a core of individuals who are kinsmen and in most cases all in the band are related to one another. The group is identified with some territory which it, as well as others, sees as belonging to it.

Nomadism is normally a characteristic of such societies. Yet this does not mean aimless wandering. Rather there is periodic movement according to some rational plan from one encampment site to another. Nomadism, and especially pedestrian nomadism, inhibits the accumulation of material goods. Nomadic hunters do not make good pack rats since one can hardly carry a mess of junk from one camp to another. A minority of hunting-gathering people have been sedentary, dwelling in villages.

Hunting-gathering societies share a technology based upon the use of stone, wood, bone and ivory tools. They do not of themselves know the art of metallurgy.

There is a minimal social differentiation and specialisation of tasks. The social roles are limited to those of kinship and to roles based on sex and on relative age. The society is characterised by what Radcliffe-Brown referred to as a high degree of .substitutability. That is, it is easy to substitute one person for another. One adult male can be fairly readily replaced by another. So each person of the same sex and approximate age is expected to be able to do what any other one in the same category can do. Thus, the adult male is a jack of all trades, or, more correctly, there are no trades. Nevertheless, there are in such societies inμividuals who do tend to specialise, so that one person may become more adept at fashioning arrow heads than any other in the group and another more knowledgeable in performing rituals or in making cures. Indeed, in some cases the shaman becomes at least a part-time specialist.

Such societies are also egalitarian to the extent that “there are as many positions of prestige in any given age-sex grade as there are persons capable of filling them ... “. At the same time “an egalitarian society does not have any means of fixing or limiting the number of persons capable of executing power” (Fried, 33). Egalitarian does not, however, mean that there is any equality between sexes and between different age groups. In a few hunting-gathering societies, such as the Inuit there is greater equality between the sexes. Nevertheless males are still considered superior.

There are also a few hunting-gathering societies which must be considered as rank societies “in which positions of valued status are somehow limited so that not all those of sufficient talent to occupy such statuses actually achieve them. Such a society may or may not be stratified. That is, a society may sharply limit its positions of prestige without affecting the access of its entire membership to the basic resources upon which life depends” (Fried, 1 10). In a classification based on different criteria, Elman Service describes ‘chiefdoms’ as a type of society with some close parallels to Fried’s rank societies. “Chiefdoms are redistributional societies with a permanent central agency of co-ordination.” The central agency acquires an economic, religious and political role (Service, 1962, 144). The ‘redistributor’ of communal wealth is a ‘chief or person in an established position of influence, responsibility and wealth. The political role of this redistributor or ‘chief’ varies considerably. At the anarchic ‘pole’ we have the examples of the Yurok and Northwest Coast Indians given below. At the other extreme there are Polynesian and African chiefs who are in effect petty kings. Among hunter-gatherers these ‘chiefly’ or ‘rank’ style societies tend to be the wealthiest and economically most secure. Anarchy is the order of the day among hunter-gatherers. Indeed, critics will ask why a small face-to-face group needs a government anyway. And certainly any which may be called fully egalitarian according to Fried’s definition are anarchic.

If this is so we can go further and say that since the egalitarian hunting-gathering society is the oldest type of human society and prevailed for the longest period of time — over thousands of decades — then anarchy must be the oldest and one of the most enduring kinds of polity. Ten thousand years ago everyone was an anarchist.

Inuit

Inuit, the indigenous residents of the North American Arctic, are a well-known people — both in terms of their adaptation to the hard life of the far north and as participants in an egalitarian social system. Even Hoebel recognises their “primitive anarchy” (1954, 67).

Social groupings among Inuit have been referred to as tribes by some observers, but the term designates a particular geographical group which shares a common culture and language. It has no political significance. Birket-Smith writes:

“Thus among the Inuit there is no state which makes use of their strength, no government to restrict their liberty of action. If anywhere there exists that community, built upon the basis of the free accord of free people, of which Kropotkin dreamt, it is to be found among these poor tribes neighboring upon the North Pole” (144).

Traditionally Inuit formed local communities or bands which in some cases consisted of a few dozen members and in others of ten times that number. In each band there is at least one outstanding individual and usually one person whom the others recognise as a first among equals’ (Birket-Smith, 145). Birket-Smith reports that among the Central Eskimos of the Northern Canadian mainland this person is called “isumataq , he who thinks, the implication being he who thinks for the others” (145). But one might also surmise that the title implies that the person is considered the most intelligent in the group.

In any case, an important basis for leadership is demonstrated ability in activities necessary for survival in this climate: hunting, provision of food and shelter, shrewdness and astuteness. Spencer, describing the North Alaskan Inuit, says that one of the recognised leaders of the community would be a man of wealth — that is, a big boat owner (65). Yet this man has also achieved his position by knowledge and skill in exploiting the local environment. Aside from such secular leadership, shamans are an important element in Inuit politics as well as religion. A shaman may be a respected hunter, but his power derives from his special relationship with the supernatural forces. The shaman is a curer, a diviner, a conjurer, a magician and a leader in religious ceremony. The Inuit shaman is believed to have the power to ascend into the heavens and descend into the underground, to control weather and other natural phenomena. He can invoke supernatural forces to benefit a person and he can also invoke them to cause injury. Among the Copper Inuit, shamans “held the threat of witchcraft over others and were, for the main part, not highly susceptible to vengeance because of their presumed supernatural immunities” (Damas, 33).

In Inuit society there is no-one who can be called a ruler — a person who can order others to obey him, having behind this order an exclusive right to employ physical force to compel obedience. Leadership is informal and the role of leadership only loosely defined. The commands of a leader can be ignored with impunity, but this could be dangerous, especially in connection with a malevolent shaman. In a community major issues are . openly discussed in informal gatherings. Consensus regarding a course of action may result, usually being an approval of the suggestions made by influential men. However, if unanimity of opinion is not forthcoming, the disagreeing parties may merely go their own way.

The Inuit case points to the potential pitfalls of a system in which there is no formal leadership and where anarchy prevails. As we have noted, a shaman can exert considerable power by inducing fear of his supernatural powers, so that he could enhance his position, although he would not thereby enhance his prestige. Damas says they were more feared than respected (33). A related problem which arises in Inuit society is the man who chooses to reject community morality and assert his personal strength in acquiring whatever he wanted. Often such men are able to run roughshod over others in a community, but inevitably must ultimately come to a violent demise themselves. They might be dispatched by a revenge killing. Or in vigilante fashion, a number of men, sometimes the offender’s relatives, would plan the execution. A less permanent solution is to drive the individual out of the group. In any case some form of diffuse sanction is the only means employed to overcome such threats.

All forms of leadership, including that of shaman, are achieved statuses in Inuit society. As one earns status, so one might also lose it. Loss of position could come with the appearance of what is recognised as a better leader, hunter or shaman or as a result of the failure of shamanic powers.

Alleged wrong-doers could be ostracised and in some cases driven out of the village, or, as we have already mentioned, in extreme cases they might be killed. Gossip and argument are effective techniques for lesser offences. Occasionally a severe crime might go entirely unpunished. Ordinarily the kinsman of a murdered man sought revenge and feuds of a limited sort have not been unknown. Inuit frequently settle disputes through competitive trials between opponents, with the audience deciding who is victorious and therefore winner in the dispute. Two disputants might therefore engage in a wrestling match, or they might compete with one another in composing songs which, among other things, attempt to outdo each other in insult. Shamans contest with each other by demonstrating their marvellous powers in grand spectacles which could be the highlight of an otherwise dreary and dark winter.

An Inuit woman could not be considered as fully equal to a man, yet she has a liberty and influence which exceeds that of women in most. other societies. It is sometimes argued that the high position of Inuit women results from their crucial role in the economy. An adult male Inuit requires assistance in maintaining a household; he cannot survive without an adult female fulfilling her role. So necessary are women to the household that if a man is unable to find a single woman to take as his wife, he may even indulge in polyandry and marry a woman who already has a husband. It is true that in a difficult land, such as the Arctic, one would expect the co-operative interdependence of a family group to have greater significance than it might under less severe conditions. Thus the economic importance of the woman’s role elevates her status in such a society. On the other hand, among hunters and gatherers elsewhere women are known to provide over 50% of the food supply in their gathering activities, in addition to filling other crucial economic roles in society. Yet these women do not have the freedom or equality of their Inuit counterparts. The Australian Aboriginals are a case in point. Inuit may well award women more equality and freedom in part because of their important economic role, but, in fact, the position of these women derives mostly from an emphasis upon self-reliance which is instilled in every Inuit. A self-reliant person must be given a greater degree of freedom. This emphasis also, I think, helps explain why children in Inuit society are treated as distinct persons with specific inalienable rights. In contrast, many other peoples see children at best as mere extensions of the person of their father. Again, in the environment of the Inuit, co-operative activity is crucial, but self-reliance, learning to get along on your own, is mandatory if one is to survive.

San

In the arid zones of southern Africa there are peoples collectively referred to as Bushmen or by their close relatives, the Hottentots, as San. Most of them have long since abandoned a hunting-gathering way of life to become employed as servants by neighboring Negroid groups or European farmers. A small handful, numbering in the hundreds, have at least up until a scant few years ago persisted in the old traditions in the refuge of to desert areas of Botswana and Namibia.

The San are organized into bands or camps which are loosely structured groups composed primarily of related individuals (often patrilineally related to a common male ancestor) and dwelling in a territory identified with the band.

San have no formal leaders, neither headmen nor chiefs, but bands do have leaders or persons of influence. These are invariably “owners” of the lands which surround a water hole and represent the band territory or the area which provides its general needs. “Owners” comprise the core of related persons, usually siblings or cousins, in the band who have lived around its water hole longer than anyone else and are therefore recognized as collective owners, as “hosts” of the territory to whom anyone from outside the group is expected to request permission on visiting the area. This kind of ownership passes from one generation to the next as long as any descendents remain within it.

One who is not an “owner” may seek to achieve leadership status by marrying a woman in another band who is an owner. Yet ownership alone is insufficient to place one in the forefront. Other attributes of leadership include being the older within a large family with many children and grandchildren. Moreover one should possess several personal qualities. Thus, one who is a powerful speaker is respected. It helps also to be recognized as a mood mediator. Under no circumstances should a leader be “arrogant, overbearing, boastful, or aloof.” (Lee, 345). Lee notes that these characteristics of the leader are also stressed among Australian aboriginals.

Camp leaders are preeminent in decision making, mediation and food distribution. Yet one !Kung San in response to a question as to whether his group had headmen replied: “Of course we have headmen! In fact we are all headmen ... each one of us is headman over himself” (Lee, 348).

Another more recent kind of leader has arisen among “Bushmen as a consequence of contact with neighboring Blacks, peoples who have a more hierarchical social system. Such leaders are brokers or liaison agents with the outside non-San peoples and have their position because of their ability to deal with foreigners and carry on entrepreneurial affairs. Such individuals are rarely camp or community leaders.

There are also medicine men whose sole role is the curing of illness, receiving no special privilege because of this position. The San lack sorcerers and witches. Throughout the society men are dominant, a factor Marshall attributes partly to their superior physical strength, but also to their prestige role as hunters and thus as those who provide the meat for the community (despite the fact that plants collected by women supply the bulk of the food). Lee, however, has noted that some women become recognized camp leaders.

San fear fighting and desire to avoid all hostility. At the same time fights do arise and sometimes lead to killing. Most conflicts are in the nature of verbal abuse and argument relating to food and gift distribution or accusations of laziness and stinginess. When actual physical combat is provoked those around the combatants, most often close kin or supporters of one of the protagonists, immediately seek to separate the participants and to pacify them. Extended discussion may ensue but the antagonists remain silent. “The trance dance that sometimes follows a fight may serve as a peace-making mechanism when trance performers give ritual healing to persons on both sides of the argument” (Lee, 377). It is considered particularly important to intervene in a fight involving men between ages 20 and 50 since they have a monopoly on the poisoned arrows. Thus were they to lose all self control and physical combat among these people is likened to a state of temporary insanity — someone would surely die.

Although San do not engage in ritual murder or sacrifice they sometimes “Carry out revenge killings. Yet even these may be avoided. for fear of escalating the violence. On some occasions killers have been “executed” through the mutual agreement of a group of men. According to Lee a goodly number of those who are killed in fights are non-combatants, being usually persons who seek to intervene to stop a fight or occasionally a by-stander. Any severe conflict is usually resolved by the group splitting up.

According to Lee a camp persists as long as food is shared amongst its members, but once this is discontinued the group ceases to exist. There are specific rules concerning the distribution of wild gaμie. The bulk of any kill must be distributed initially by its ‘owner’, the man who owns the arrow which first entered the animal. So a hunter who shoots an arrow loaned to him by another is merely shooting for that person. Meat is first distributed amongst a small group, including the hunters and the owner of the arrow. This group in turn distributes portions to a wider circle of individuals and they to still a larger group. Consequently, members of the sharing group are involved in a reciprocity system which obligates those who receive to return gifts of meat in future distributions.

Because groups are small, nearly all social relations are actually guided in terms of kinship concepts. There is no organisation or integration of San beyond the band level. One retains band membership throughout life, along with the associated rights to its resources. Yet members do leave their home band and join others. They may still return at a future date.

Children are treated permissively by parents. Marshall affirms the latter are especially fond of younger children and gentle in their treatment of them. “!Kung children are never harshly punished. One father said that if he had a boy who was quarrelsome or who disobeyed the rules — for instance, the absolute rule of the !Kung against stealing food or possessions — what he would do about it would be to keep the boy right with him until he learned sense. The children on their part do not often do things that call for punishment. They usually fall in with group life and do what is expected of them without apparent uncertainty, frustration, or fear; and expressions of resistance or hostility towards their parents, the group, or each other are very much the exception” (Marshall, 264).

Pygmies

The traditional Pygmy hunters dwell in the rain forests of the interior of Zaire living in small nomadic bands. There is neither formalised leadership nor are there formal group councils, although outstanding men and women are recognised in each band. No-one, however, wishes to take it upon himself to make judgments or impose punishments on others. Rather, the maintainance of order is a co-operative affair, or something left up to superntural forces. “ ... Pygmies dislike and avoid personal authority”, says Turnbull, “though they are by no means devoid of a sense of responsibility: It is rather that they think of responsibility as communal” (1962, 125). The Pygmies told Turnbull they had no leaders, lawmakers or government “because we are the people of the forest”; the forest “is the chief, the lawgiver, the leader, the final arbitrator” (1962, 126).

When a theft has occurred there is a detailed discussion of the case by an assembly of the whole encampment. When consensus has been reached as to the guilty party, all those who feel so inclined collectively administer a sound thrashing to the offender. The most outrageous offences, it is believed, are so terrible that they result in supernatural punishment. Minor disputes and alleged offences are often left to the litigants who either settle them through argument or a mild fight. Such encounters may, however, escalate and soon the whole band may be involved in arguing the case. Turnbull writes that if you lose patience with your wife’s nagging, you call on your friends to assist you in trying to put her in her place. Your wife will do the same, so that the entire camp is drawn into the argument. “At this point someone — very often an older person with too many relatives and friends to be accused of being partisan — steps in with the familiar remark that everyone is making too much noise, or else diverts the issue onto a totally different track so that people forget the origin of the argument and give it up” (1962, 124).

Other techniques of diffuse sanctions employed commonly by Pygmies include the use of ostracism and ridicule. In most bands there is a young bachelor with some repute as a hunter. He assumes the role of the clown and lampoons the disputants in a conflict. The process of decision-making in everyday community affairs is similar to the technique for dealing with disputes. Affairs are dealt with in a casual and informal way and without the appearance of individual leadership. In deciding on a hunt, each adult male is involved in discussion until agreement is reached. Women, too, participate by offering their opinions.

Pygmy society is strongly communal in its orientation and the emphasis on co-operative action is such that when compared to the Inuit these Arctic dwellers seem very individualistic indeed. Pygmies probably approach the anarchist ideal more closely than most other groups. While others have the form of anarchy, Pygmies appear to have captured some of the spirit as well.

There is an attempt to avoid leadership by one or a few, to arrive at decisions by full communal participation and consensus. Pygmies, like the Inuit, minimise discrimination based upon sex and age differences.

Australian hunters and foragers

Australian society, like that of other hunters, is organised on a band basis. Several families traditionally hunted and camped together and claimed a territory for economic exploitation and as a ritual and totemic centre. These families were related and for the most part through the male line, usually to a common paternal grandfather or great grandfather.

Australians have often been described as the most primitive people in the world — or as having the simplest culture. But such descriptions contribute more to confusion and misunderstanding of Australian cultures than they do to clarification. It is true that few people known to modern society have possessed a more rudimentary and limited technology. An Australian could readily .. carry all his earthly possessions under his arm. Spears and throwing sticks were his most elabor