Paper short abstract:

This paper revisits concepts that used to be at the heart of political anthropology but that have since been discarded (such as 'stateless societies' and 'segmentation'), in the light of recent ethnographic material from Algeria, Mali and Chad.

Paper long abstract:

At its inception, 'state-less societies' represented one of the 'problems' that anthropology was supposed to be good at. Indeed it has been argued that other key interests of the discipline - most notably kinship - derived from attempts to understand political structures in non-state societies. More recently, much of this interest has been decried as imperialist and overly functionalist, and the notion of state-less societies has fallen out of use - rightly so, as a definition by lack rarely has much purchase. Less justifiably perhaps, associated concepts, most notably that of 'segmentation', have equally been left by the wayside, although not much else seems to have been developed to replace it. Meanwhile, the anthropology of politics, where it has not been absorbed into reflections on 'power', has largely become the anthropology of the state, or, at best, of the margins or the breakdown of states. Although many of these studies are inherently critical, they leave little room for alternative concepts of politics. Drawing on recent works on non-state political systems and thought, this paper attempts to develop a way of thinking about politics without reducing it to question of power, drawing on examples from Berber-speaking Algeria, the border between Algeria and Mali, and northern Chad.