State Legibility and Mind Legibility in the Original Political Society

Abstract

In one of his last great provocations, Marshall Sahlins describes the ‘original political society’ as a society where supposedly ‘egalitarian’ relations between humans are subordinated to the government of metahuman beings. He argues that this government is ‘a state’, but what kind of state does he mean? Even if metahumans are hierarchically organized and have power over human beings, they lack two capacities commonly attributed to political states: systematic means to make populations legible and coercive means to identity the intentions of others. The nascent forms of state legibility and public mind reading that are present in Sahlins’s original political society are not unified and tied to particular agents. A discussion of the limitations of state and mind legibility points to the fundamental correlations between those two forms of legibility and their co-implication in whatever might be called ‘the state’.

Normative Conflict and Normative Change

“…In chimpanzee dominance hierarchies, a single male or smallcoalition of males seeks their private reproductive interests by imposing behaviors on group-members whereas human foragers are generally characterized by norms and practices that limit such competition, hierarchy, and exploitation, often responding violently to self-aggrandizing and bullying individuals who seek to elevate themselves and their interests above others (Boehm et al, 1993;Boehm, 1999). Long-standing ethnographic and anthropological work refutes a simplistic notion of an egalitarian human past (Buitron and Steinmüller, 2021;Lévi-Strauss, 1945;Lowie, 1948;Mauss, 2004;Sahlins, 2017;Wengrow and Graeber, 2015), necessitating an understanding of normative conflict resolution:…”