Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

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to essentially common socio-political organization forms; not only to state
(see, e.g., Kubbel 1988; Kradin and Lynsha 1995; Claessen and Oosten 1996b;
Claessen 2000c; Trigger 1993; 2003) but also to chiefdom (vide stricto Earle
1997). This understanding of evolution – as a diversity of pathways to
common goal is generally dominant up to now, or at least was dominant until
very recently.
However, possibly unexpectedly enough, the unilinear concept of
many societies’ sticking on stairs preceding that of statehood has been turned a
specifically multilinear way round. The idea that these societies were not
situated on one staircase with the state on its upper stair but from the very start
moved along basically different evolutionary pathways has become popular
(see the review: Guidi 2002). If such a vision is employed, no one of, for
example, the band, tribe, chiefdom, and state is inferior or superior to another:
they are just initially and essentially different (Yoffee 1993). This standpoint
seems to me useful as an important step toward non-linear evolutionism but too
radical as such, especially with respect to the problem of alternatives to the
state. This view does presuppose non-inevitability of the state but treats the
issue of alternatives to it in an excessively wide way. If we employ the idea
(reasonable, as to my mind) that socio-political complexity can be measured
not only formally-structurally (by the number of political jurisdiction levels
above the local community) but also by complexity of problems a given culture
turns out able or unable to solve effectively (e.g., Claessen 1984), we will see
that, for instance, foragers’ bands are generally incomparable to preindustrial
states and other agricultural, especially complex, societies (recollect, for
example, the history of the Pygmies’ and San’s displacing to unfavorable
ecological milieu by the Bantu [see, e.g., Clark, J. D. 1977/1970: 202–205;
Sutton 1982/1971: 111–114; Lvova 1984: 40–42; Noten 1988/1982: 95–98]).
Indeed, it sounds very plausible that contemporary simple foragers
represent a specific branch of human social evolution, and that from the
historical perspective standpoint, the transition to social complexity is a chance,
not a necessity (Tainter 1990: 38; Lozny 2000; Artemova 2004). Actually, this
conclusion was anticipated, though not arrived at due to unilinear conceptual
backgrond, in Stone Age Economics – the book in which Marshall Sahlins
(1972) demonstrated convincingly that under favorable ecological conditions
foragers could well get the surplus product sufficient enough for launching the
processes of deep social differentiation, rigid political centralization and all the
rest what in long-run could eventually result in state formation but this
economic possibility was suppressed effectively by cultural mechanisms (see
also Hawkes et al. 1985; Gowdy 1998). However, alternatives to the state as
not an “evolutionary trajectory” but a form of socio-political organization may
be sought only among complex societies. Under some specific circumstances,
for example, ecological, an alternative to early state, though a limited in its
potential, could be represented by constellations of chiefdoms or tribal