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neighboring societies
Anarchy Works
nations, immigrants, ethnic minorities, poor people, workerseveryone
who has been colonized or exploited.
In the stateless, small-scale societies of the past, warfare was
common but it was not universal, and in many of its manifestations
it was not particularly bloody. Some stateless societies never
participated in warfare. Peace is a choice, and they chose it by
valuing cooperative reconciliation of conflicts and nurturing
behaviors. Other stateless societies that did engage in warfare
often practiced a harmless, ritualized variety thereof. In some
cases, the line between sporting event and warfare is unclear. As
described in some anthropological accounts, teams or war parties
from two different communities would meet at a prearranged
place to fight. The purpose was not to annihilate the other side, or
even necessarily to kill anyone. Someone on one side would throw
a spear or shoot an arrow, and they would all watch to see if it hit
anyone before throwing the next spear. They would often go home
after one person got hurt, or even earlier.l2° In warfare as practiced
by the Lakota and other plains Indians of North America, it was
more highly valued to touch an enemy with a stick-"counting
coup"-than to kill him. Other forms of war were simply raidingvandalizing
or stealing from neighboring communities and often
trying to get away before a fight broke out. If these sorts of chaotic
fighting were the warfare of an anarchist society, how preferable
that would be to the cold, mechanical bloodbaths of the state!
But societies that do not want to war with their neighbors
can structure themselves to prevent it. Not having borders is an
important first step. Often we can arrive at the truth by simply
reversing the rationalizations of the state, and the line about
borders keeping us safe can easily be decoded: borders endanger us.
If there is a social conflict, violence is much more likely to break out
if there is an "us" and a "them:' Clear social divisions and borders
120 See the citation of van der Dennen and Rappaport in Chapter 1.
prevent reconciliation and mutual understanding and encourage
competition and polarization.
Anarchist anthropologist Harold Barclay describes some
societies in which each individual is connected to others through
multiple, overlapping networks, arising from kinship, marriage, dan
affiliations, and so on:
We do have examples of anarchic polities among
peoples[. ..] numbering in the hundreds of thousands
and with fairly dense populations, often over 100
people to the square mile. Such social orders may be
achieved through a segmentary lineage system, which
as we have seen already has certain parallels to the
anarchist notion of federalism. Or, as among the Tonga
and some East African pastoralists, large populations
may be integrated by a more complex arrangement
which affiliates the individual with a number of cross
cutting and bisecting groups so as to extend his or her
social ties over a wide area. In other words, individuals
and groups constitute a multitude of interconnected
loci, which produces the integration of a large
social entity, but without any actual centralised coordination.12l
In addition to this self-balancing property of cooperative societies,
some stateless peoples have developed other mechanisms to
prevent feuds. The Mardu aborigines of western Australia traditionally
lived in small bands, but these periodically came together
to hold mass meetings, where disputes between individuals or
between different groups would be resolved under the eyes of the
121 Harold Barclay, People without Government: An Anthropology of
Anarchy, London: Kahn and Averill, 1982, p. 122.
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