The problem of the state runs through the history of anthropology. This is as much due to the nature of the object – the state as a mode of grouping and control of people — as to the history and presuppositions of anthropology itself. The question has a long philosophical heritage culminating in the Enlightenment: thinkers as different as Locke, Diderot and Rousseau all thought that structured and centralized political organization begins from a state of nature, from an aggregate of individuals left to their own devices, good or bad, innocent or industrious, according to the particular view of each author. From these speculative reconstructions emerged the idea of a primitive contract marking the beginning, in some way, of modern political society. We can see how central the juridical paradigm was to these conceptions of the state, quite apart from the spectral notions of contract and sovereignty. It is precisely this paradigm that was questioned by the late nineteenth-century historical research — on ancient society and ancient law respectively — of L.H. Morgan and H.S. Maine.
It is notable that these precursors of modern anthropology, whose work has made a lasting impression on later approaches to politics, were both concerned to identify the point of transition between two great modes of organization in the evolution of humanity: the first founded on "gens, "phratry and " tribe; the second on territory and property (Morgan 1877). There is a move away from the idea of a state of nature being replaced by the notion of the political state, consisting of people wilfully bound together by contract. Yet an opposition remains, this time between two ‘states of society’, one primitive and based on bonds of kinship, the other with a state: the appearance of property and the significance of territoriality mark the passage from one mode of organization to the other.
Substituting an explanation which aims to expose the objective material conditions for the appearance of the state, in place of the hypothesis of a collective subjective act, nevertheless retains the philosophical presupposition of a dichotomy between two worlds. This leaves open the question deriving from this presupposition, the problem of the origin of the state. Thus a vast anthropological project takes form: as there is an essential difference between the state and all earlier forms of political organization, it is necessary to identify the nature of this difference in order to understand the source of this new type of political system.
Working from Morgan’s data, "Engels (1972 [1884]) saw the emergence of the state as a consequence of the division of society into antagonistic classes. The state is then defined as the instrument of the dominant class whose members ensure that it maintains order and peace and that all within the society feel secure, while at the same time perpetuating their ascendancy over the subordinate classes. This vision of a coercive apparatus that operates ‘above society’ in the mystified consciousness of the oppressed, and which ensures the reproduction of the phenomena of exploitation and oppression to the benefit of the dominant group, finds empirical support in the correspondence between the development of private property and the existence of state forms. Engels draws upon Greek, German and Roman examples to back up the idea of a causal sequence which links in succession private appropriation, inequality, economic oppression and political "hegemony. Underneath this version of the genesis of the state we find the primacy of the economic infrastructure so dear to historical materialism. Morgan and Engels have been subjected to two types of criticism: the first questioned the universality of the causal hypothesis, the second challenged the evolutionist presuppositions of their research. These criticisms correspond to two distinctive approaches to the state in anthropology.
State formation
The neo-evolutionist approach is well illustrated by "J.H. Steward (1955), who attempted to reconstitute the different stages from hunter-gatherer "bands to the formation of the state. The emphasis here is on the role of irrigation which allows a large concentration of population and therefore leads to more elaborate territorial organization, requiring a new division of labour and a more developed power structure. For Steward, as for the historian K. Wittfogel (1957), the expansion of the hydraulic economy would have been a determining factor in the invention of the state. Starting from Marx’s arguments on the ‘Asiatic mode of production’, Wittfogel showed that the absence of private property in peasant societies is entirely compatible with the development of a substantial political and administrative apparatus. Morton Fried (1967) distinguished four successive stages — egalitarian societies, class societies, stratified societies and state societies. For Fried the decisive factor in the transition to stratified societies and the emergence of the state is the fact of unequal access to resources due to demographic pressure within the limits of a given territory.
However, the more we have learnt about traditional states, the more limited these different explanations appear. We cannot reduce to a single cause this process of the formation of a hierarchical and centralized apparatus, whose ascendancy spreads over a complete territory. In addition to ecological, economic, technological and sociological factors, it is necessary to account for the part played by "superstructural, religious and ideological determinants in establishing a domination which everyone regards as legitimate. "Maurice Godelier (1984) has shown how the formation of the state implies the prior consent of the dominated, who accept their subservience in exchange for the protection of those who control the supernatural. The emergence of the state is thus not treated as the simple product of a situation of inequality or of relations of exploitation, but as the unique and coherent consequence of several distinct processes. While the "unilinear evolutionary hypothesis is challenged, the idea of a primitive exchange between the dominated and those who dominate is rein-troduced: the asymmetry of the partners does not forbid all reciprocity. This curious oscillation between a mechanistic theory of the emergence of the state and an approach which, in aiming to recapture the complexity of the phenomenon, reintroduces the philosophical idea of the social contract, is revealing. It also marks the limits of an anthropological analysis which privileges the question of origins.
Beyond the search for origins
Anthropological studies, which have now been going on for more than fifty years, in Africa, the Pacific, Southeast and South Asia, and in Amerindian societies have considerably modified the terms of the debate. Researchers are now more interested in the form and workings of the state in apparently very different societies, than in the question of state formation. Is it appropriate to apply the modern concept of the state in sociocultural contexts which contrast very strongly with those more familiar settings in which the concept has usually been employed? Following S.F. Nadel the state can be defined as a form of political system which is the product of a conjunction of three factors: a unitary polity based on territorial sovereignty; a specialized governmental body with a monopoly on legitimate force; and a ruling group, distinguished from the rest of the population by training, recruitment and status, with a monopoly on the apparatus of political control. It is in this sense that it is possible to consider as states forms of government that are far removed from the complex and highly developed hierarchical structures of modern society, and to oppose them, as did E.E. Evans-Pritchard and M. Fortes (1940), to other political systems that have no centralized authority, no specialized judicial institutions, no differences of rank and status, and where kinship groups provide the basis for political roles.
This definition of the state nevertheless remains somewhat abstract. As Claessen and Skalnik (1978) point out, the traditional state (or ‘early state’ in their terms), as studied by anthropologists, shares certain characteristics with stateless societies. Politics and kinship often overlap and ties of reciprocity and redistribution still predominate. Aidan Southall has even proposed the idea of the ‘segmentary state’ in order to cover states based on relatively discrete local units or segments (based on territory or descent) but with a centre which is stronger in ritual than in administrative terms. Is the classic opposition between territory and kinship valid in the traditional state? As the work of Claude Tardits on the Bamoum of Cameroon (1980) has shown, territorial organization may be a geographical working out of relations between kin groups within a single genealogy. Kinship also plays a part in the accession to office: power is a matter of competition within royal lineages, and relationships between the designated monarch and the other princes are never without tension. The king generally aims to limit the princes’ influence by removing them from. the administrative apparatus, while filling positions with nobles from outside his lineage, or men recruited from lower strata such as servants and even slaves.
Apart from the mode of recruitment of the ruling elite, traditional states are marked by complex rituals and the role given to the symbolic and ideological element. Divine kingship has been found in many very different contexts (the Inka in Highland South America; African kingship among the Swazi, Jukun, Shilluk, Rukuba, and Moundangi, Hindu and Buddhist kingship in South and Southeast Asia), and has become the subject of debate on its origins and extensions: rites of enthronement, prohibitions connected to the royal person, representations of ‘royal incest’, the tradition of ritual regicide in certain societies, which evokes the close association between political power and the practices which reveal the sovereign’s special relationship with the cosmic order and the supernatural powers that participate in his reproduction. This whole set of beliefs and rituals must be treated as an integral part of the power apparatus which we call the state, rather than as a state religion employed to legitimate some pre-existing balance of political power.
The wealth of ethnographic and historical research on political organization, lineage segmentation and the representation of kingship demonstrates the specificity of a kind of state, which the labels ‘lineage state’, ‘tributary state’, or ‘archaic state’ merely simplify. Similarly we now have very precise data not only on institutions but on processes of decision-making, by the king and his counsellors, within the body of the state. The fruitfulness of anthropological methods in this context raises the possibility that a similar application to Western society might rejuvenate studies of the modern state. So investigations have rapidly developed concerning the centralization and territorial configuration of Western states, the networks of relationships which run through their institutions and apparatuses, and the rituals and symbols of power (Kertzer 1988; Abeles 1990). Such developments indicate the broad relevance of anthropological research on the state, once freed from its obsessive quest for origins.
From the mid 1990s on there has been a rapid growth in ethnographic studies of the ‘modern’ state. Theoretically, much of this new work has been informed by a melange of Marxist and Foucauldian influences (ably assembled in Sharma and Gupta’s reader [2006]). Empirically it has focused on bureaucracy, development, education, political ritual and political symbolism, all the while torn uneasily between a post-structural desire to wish away the state as a social construct, and the need to recognize the importance of state institutions as a material presence in people’s lives. Navaro-Yashin’s (2002) study of the Turkish state is a good example of the best of this new work.
