State System:

Elman Service (1971: 163), the distinguishing quality of the state, that which separates it from the chiefdom, “is the presence of that special form of control, the consistent threat of force by a body of persons legitimately constituted to use it.”

Morton Fried (1967), on the other hand, emphasizes stratification: the state has special institutions, both formal and informal, to maintain a hierarchy with differential access to resources. This stratification goes beyond the individual and lineage ranking found in less complex societies; it involves the establishment of true classes.

Ronald Cohen (1978a, 1978b), the key diagnostic feature of the state is its permanence. Unlike lower order forms of political organization, the state does not regularly fission (i.e., break up into a number of smaller groups) as part of its normal process of political activity.

States organize an extensive population in the hundreds of thousands or millions (Johnson & Earle 1987), often representing many ethnic groups with separate historical traditions, economies, religions, and cultures. To integrate such a diverse populace requires elaborate and specialized institutions of governance and domination. General categories of state institution include administrative bureaucracies, legal systems, and military and religious organizations. Such institutions represent different sources of power economic, political, military, and ideological. The degree of elaboration and the interrelationships between the various institutions differ considerably from state to state.

The “state,” as a category of social evolution, is internally highly variable in terms of scale of integration (from the city state to the empire), type of integration (“administrative” vs. “theater” state [C. Geertz 1980]), the nature of control (“territorial” vs. “hegemonic” [Hassig 1985]), and the basis of finance (“staple” vs. “wealth” [D’Altroy & Earle 1985]), among other characteristics. Social stratification characterizes state societies. A ruling segment or CLASS retains differential access to “the basic resources that sustain life” (Fried 1967: 186). State societies are divided into classes with different economic and political interests (Marx & Engels 1888), and state institutions are developed to reproduce the social system of domination. Although this may be the dream of the ruling segment, life in complex society is more precarious. Brumfiel and Fox (1994) described the intense competition among elites for control over ruling institutions.          

A focus of anthropological research has been to explain the “origin” of state society to “civilization” (Flannery 1972; H. Wright 1978). Theories have emphasized either the central management or the coercive power of states (Service 1975).

Managerial theories outline how problems of survival require central management that supposedly only the state can provide, such as irrigation systems in the desert. Sanders (1956) argued that community specialization within ecologically diverse regions must have resulted in an integrated economy and market system; the peace of the market, then necessary for the regional economy, was thereafter guaranteed by the state.

Carneiro (1970) described how competitive warfare required central organization for success; states, with more effective militaries, expanded at the expense of more simply organized societies. Underlying these adapationalist theories is either the advance of a new organizational form, like irrigation, or the creation of new problems with a growing population.  

Characteristics of States

There are many different kinds of states, both past and present, whose political forms are influenced by local historical events, a local environment and the degree of exposure of people living in a state to new cultural and  social ideas.