Law as Refuge of Anarchy: Societies without Hegemony or State (Untimely Meditations) - Softcover

Amborn, Hermann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262536587 ISBN 13: 9780262536585

Publisher: MIT Press, 2019

Synopsis

A study of communities in the Horn of Africa where reciprocity is a dominant social principle, offering a concrete countermodel to the hierarchical state.

Over the course of history, people have developed many varieties of communal life; the state, with its hierarchical structure, is only one of the possibilities for society. In this book, leading anthropologist Hermann Amborn identifies a countermodel to the state, describing communities where reciprocity is a dominant social principle and where egalitarianism is a matter of course. He pays particular attention to such communities in the Horn of Africa, where nonhierarchical, nonstate societies exist within the borders of a hierarchical structured state. This form of community, Amborn shows, is not a historical forerunner to monarchy or the primitive state, nor is it obsolete as a social model. These communities offer a concrete counterexample to societies with strict hierarchical structures.

Amborn investigates social forms of expression, ideas, practices, and institutions that oppose the hegemony of one group over another, exploring how conceptions of values and laws counteract tendencies toward the accumulation of power. He examines not only how the nonhegemonic ethos is reflected in law but also how anarchic social formations can exist. In the Horn of Africa, the autonomous jurisdiction of these societies protects against destructive outside influences, offers a counterweight to hegemonic violence, and contributes to the stabilization of communal life. In an era of widespread dissatisfaction with Western political systems, Amborn's study offers an opportunity to shift from traditional theories of anarchism and nonhegemony that project a stateless society to consider instead stateless societies already in operation.

About this title

About the Author

Hermann Amborn is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

Review

By challenging the inevitability of the state as the “natural” outcome of societal evolution, Amborn's study provides an essential challenge to one of the most pervasive and misleading narratives of human history. Law as Refuge of Anarchy forces us to reevaluate how we got here and reimagine possibilities for where we go next.

―Mark Bray, historian at Dartmouth College; author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook and Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street; coeditor of Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0262536587
• ISBN 13: 9780262536585
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 232