Law and Institutions
in the Shire
 

We are approaching one of the most difficult questions in anthropology: the origin and functions of the state. Whether the state is a functional entity that becomes useful at a certain stage of economic development, or a predator or parasite that becomes able to support itself when the people it controls take up a certain way of life, has been debated since anthropologists a century and more ago clearly recognized that many peoples through the world lived well enough without states. (For a lucid discussion of the question, see Carniero, 1970.) We shall not resolve it here. But in any case, it seems clear that the Shire did not have internal conditions favorable to the formation of a state, either endogenously or in imitation of the external states with which it had contact. And, to its good fortune, it was never placed under such harsh and sustained military pressure as to force it to organize a state in self-defense.

We have ethnographic accounts of many real-world stateless societies, which at first present a bewildering diversity. Anthropologists have discerned certain recurring types and patterns within these accounts. Of these, the customs of the Shire suggest the most complex and largest scale form, the chiefdom. Indeed, we may view the array of folklands we are imagining as a group of chiefdoms.

A chiefdom is a group of settlements unified by personal allegiance to a single leader who has few coercive powers but gains influence from wealth and prestige, Typical chiefdoms have a few thousand inhabitants, perhaps from one to ten thousand, though in exceptional circumstances they may attain to one hundred thousand or more. The chief is probably a center of ritual and a war leader, but in everyday life neither of these functions is primary.

Rather, chiefs are important because they redistribute goods. We are not speaking here of anything like a welfare state funded by taxes and typically the activities of chiefs bring more goods to the already well-off than to the poor. But throughout the world chiefs customarily spend considerable effort on accumulating goods, not only by their own work, but by their ability to influence followers to work for them, and then hold large celebrations at which they give these goods away. The potlatches of the Pacific Northwest Coast tribes are perhaps the most famous anthropological example, but the custom is widespread — it can be seen, for example, in the feasts of medieval Europe.