Reading: The Fremen Mirage, Part 1: War at the Dawn of Civilization
Linked Article By: Bret Devereaux (2020) related tags: #WarHistory #FremenMirage #StateConstruction
But before we get into that, we need to talk about what we mean by the state. The state is a system of social organization that is so prevalent in today’s world that all too often we take it for granted that it is the only form of social organization, or the chief one, when in fact it has been around for only a tiny minority of our species’ tenure on this planet. Now the modern, political-science definition of a state today tends to run something like this (this is, for the curious, Max Weber’s definition): a state is a political entity (a polity) which exercises a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a given territory. Another way of defining the phenomenon – and one more useful in the very early stages of state-formation – is to define a state as (to use Wayne Lee’s formulation of the common definition from Waging War, 36), “a society with marked social stratification, with a centralized and internally specialized government capable of extending bureaucratic control out into a settlement hierarchy” consisting of multiple (at least usually three; center, regional centers and subordinate communities below them) tiers.
Going to be reading a few of Bret's works (which are lengthy), but I want to gather some of the quotes I find. This is something that I wish more people working on history and anthropology would actually engage with because... well, it's true that most people assume that the state is a natural and obvious structure of organisation (it's also occasionally tacked on to the hierarchy of progression: band, tribe, chiefdom, and state (thanks to Elman Service for this absurdist typology that he outlined in the fucking 1960s that won't go away).
There’s a lot more to this process – one day we’ll talk more about state formation on its own – but I wanted to lay out the basic outlines because I want to show how central military power is to this process. While the state produces all of these very un-Fremen things: social complexity, increased specialization, bureaucracy (which in turn leads to literacy and from there to very un-Fremen literature) and the accumulation of large amounts of wealth, it does so in the pursuit of military power. And it worked: the state was and remains the single best organizational principle for the creation and direction of violence ever derived. With only a handful of exceptions (which we’ll discuss in the final part of this series), the potential violence the state can bring to bear wildly outstrips the capacity of other forms of social organization.
Also going to tuck away this quote here.
I don’t want to get into all of the possible permutations of pastoralism, from mostly stationary ranching to transhumance to true nomadism – that’s for another time. But I do want to note the existence of these unfarmable places, because they are places that the state struggles to go, and in some cases can never truly go into. The state, as an organizational system, is fundamentally based on farming communities: densely populated, sedentary and highly specialized. But pastoralist societies are often thinly populated, transitory and largely unspecialized. Whereas an expanding state could simply convert tribal farmers into new state subjects, relying on the (borrowing the idea from Landers, The Field and the Forge (2005) demographic space created by those farmers (the available agricultural surplus, community centers like towns and villages to serve as administrative centers, transportation infrastructure, and sedentary farmers) to do so, pastoralists are a difficult fit with the state. They often don’t stay neatly in one place for the purpose of taxation or extraction, there is no easy administrative center to organize them, and – knowing that their rough terrain gives them a degree of insulation from state control – they tend to be truculent.
This also might highlight a part of why borders are so strictly enforced and become more strictly enforced as time goes on. The same applies to places where you must consistently report your home address (especially, but not limited to, having to do so immediately and directly to an institution, be it an immigration service or the police). I don't know if it's a correct assumption, but if we could easily go to different places whenever we wanted or needed... Similar issues would apply.