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 Skalník (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 king-ship 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 (Abélès 1990, Kertzer 1988). Such developments indicate the broad relevance of anthropological research on the state, once freed from its obsessive quest for origins.
