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This chapter explores how Hobbesian ideas affected the development of anthropology and how “the Hobbesian hypotheses” (the claim that everyone is better off in a state society with a private property system than they could reasonably expect to be in any society without either of those institutions) has appeared in the history of anthropological thought and in popular anthropology. Although many of the issues discussed remain the subject of debate in anthropology, to some extent, this discussion reveals how anthropologists overcame Hobbesian influence as they gradually improved their understanding of small-scale societies.

This chapter empirically investigates two hypotheses often used to support the claim that virtually everyone is better off in state society than they could reasonably expect to be in any stateless environment. “The strong violence hypothesis” is the claim that violence in stateless societies is necessarily intolerable. “The weak violence hypothesis” is the claim that violence in stateless societies tends to be higher than in state society. Section 1 uses anthropological and historical evidence to examine violence in prehistoric stateless societies, early states, and contemporary states. Section 2 reviews evidence from modern stateless societies. Section 3 attempts to assemble anthropologists’ consensus view of violence in stateless societies. Section 4 evaluates the strong and weak hypotheses in light of this information, arguing that societies in which sovereignty is most absent maintain the ability to keep violence at tolerable levels. Although it is reasonable to suppose that stateless societies tend to have higher violence than contemporary state societies, some stateless societies have lower violence than some states. Because these findings reject 350 years of accumulated theory of sovereignty, Section 5 briefly discusses how bands are able to maintain peace without state-like institutions. Section 6 concludes.

This chapter empirically investigates “the Hobbesian hypothesis” (the claim that everyone is better off in a state society with a private property system than they could reasonably expect to be in any society without either of those institutions). It does so in two ways: first, it makes ad hoc qualitative comparisons of the lives of disadvantaged people in capitalist state societies with people in observed, small-scale stateless societies in terms of social and cultural satisfaction, material wellbeing, the availability of luxuries, leisure and work effort, basic needs, health and longevity, and freedom. Second, it assesses actions and expressed preferences of people with the opportunity to choose either lifestyle. Although evidence indicates that the average person tends to be better off in most contemporary state societies, the concludes the hypothesis is false. Contemporary states allow so much inequality—with a bottom so low in absolute terms—that significant numbers of their citizens are worse off than people in a small-scale stateless societies.

This chapter explores the concept embedded in historical ecology that humans are part of what we often define as nature and not apart from it. Four observations are considered: first, small-scale societies transform their world; second, these transformations have been ongoing since the dawn of humanity; third, micro-analyses are required to reconstruct histories of local events; and fourth, historical environmental changes are the product of both intentional and unintentional activities. The histories of the Late Archaic Jaketown and Poverty Point sites are used as examples. Finally, the policy implications of these conclusions are considered. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors may not have had the tools that allowed them to see the effects of their actions on the physical world, but modern society cannot claim such ignorance.

This chapter describes attempts to elucidate the internal site structure of the Suwannee-Bolen component at Harney Flats which was a major goal of the project. SYMAPS of the flake distributions and piece-plotted artifact distributions for each excavation area are illustrated and examined with respect to ethnoarchaeological models of hunter-gatherer site structure. Spatial patterning within each area is less clear than patterning between areas. That is, while the three areas are generally similar in the range of tool types they contain, they do differ in the relative frequencies of those tool types. The assemblages of Areas 2 and 3 are interpreted to represent activities primarily associated with tool manufacture and core reduction. The Area 1 assemblage differs from the other two areas and is interpreted as a living area. Moreover, Area 1 is situated on the highest and flattest portion of the site, with Areas 2 and 3 situated farther downslope.

This chapter explores the history of subsistence categories like “farmer”, “hunter-gatherer”, and “pastoralist” in Western intellectual thought. It argues that such subsistence categories have been mobilized as identity categories and, therefore, have much in common with (and often served to buttress) other identity categories like gender, race, and ethnicity. But Africans, too, invented categories of subsistence and imbued them with social and political meaning. As Western conceptual categories like “farmer” and “hunter-gatherer” were applied to the study of African societies and their pasts, they masked the kinds of vernacular categories of subsistence that form the subject of this book. This chapter lays out the stakes for treating these two coeval intellectual histories of subsistence categories as contingent and distinct. The chapter closes with a short survey of approaches to power, the politics of status, and affect in precolonial African historiography and a summary of the chapter contents.