Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

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would regard as such the societies which have at least reached the level of
“the typical early state” of Claessen and Skalník (Ibid.) – “… the kind of state
in which ties of kinship were [still only] counterbalanced by those of locality,
... [but] where non-kin officials and title-holders [already] played a leading role
in government administration…” 51 Indeed, the categories like “clear but not
overwhelming dominance” sound not well-definable enough and probably even
leaving too much room for a researcher’s voluntarism, not for example like in
case when the state is defined through the category of “the kinship ties
absence”, but such “milder” categorization does reflect and capture the
evolutionist, gradual nature of the state formation process.
Even highly developed prestate cultures, like complex chiefdoms, are
normally characterized as essentially kin-based societies (see Earle 1997: 5;
Milner 1998: 2), and it is symptomatic that in his recent critical reevaluation of
the Early State concept Peter Skalnнk, its author together with Henri Claessen,
recognizes explicitly that “the early state in a number of concrete cases but also
by its theory of inchoate (incipient) state, ‘swallowed’ chiefdom as an
independent category” (Skalnнk 2002: 6). Actually, long before that this fact
was noted by the reviewer of the Early State project first two volumes
(Claessen and Skalnнk 1978a; 1981a) Malcolm Webb (1984: 274–275). For
“the inchoate early state” which I cannot regard as state in any sense at all,
Claessen and Skalnнk postulated not only kinship ties domination but also “a
limited existence of full-time specialists…” (Claessen 1978: 589), thus “rare”
in such societies (Claessen and Skalnнk 1978c: 23), i.e., such administrators do
not form an objectively absolutely necessary and hence non-removable core of
the government. 52 At this point, it is also worth noting Aidan Southall’s (2000:
150) remark: “Claessen and Skalnнk (1978a) distinguished inchoate, typical
and transitional early states… The segmentary state conforms most nearly to
the inchoate state, but Claessen considered the segmentary state as I defined it
not a state at all.” Hence, in my turn, I would not label Southall’s “segmentary
states” (1956; 1988; 1991; 1999) as states even more so. The same I shall say
about Lawrence Krader’s “tribe-states” or “consanguinal states” (1968: 4) the
rulers of which exercise cohesive control but kinship still remains the basic
principle of social organization, and which Bruce Trigger (1985: 48) rightly
equated with Claessen and Skalnнk’s inchoate early state.
In the meantime, what I see as a true and reliably verifiable criterion of
territorial (i.e., the state in its broader – full sense) organization, is the right and
practical possibility for the government to carve up arbitrarily traditional,
determined by kin grouping, division of the country’s territory into parts.
Provided it is possible (for instance, if the central authority can unite them with
others or cut into parts), one can argue that even if those social entities
preserved their initial structure and the right to manage their purely internal
affairs, they were nothing more than administrative (and taxpaying) units in the
wider context of the whole state polity administered by functionaries either