[D66] !Kung

[R.O.]

"What Hobbes did not realize is that it was in everybody’s best
interest in small, prestate societies to maintain each other’s freedom
of access to the natural habitat. Suppose a !Kung with a Hobbesian
lust for power were to get up and tell his campmates, “From now
on, all this land and everything on it belongs to me. I’ll let you use
it but only with my permission and on the condition that I get first
choice of anything you capture, collect, or grow.” His campmates,
thinking that he had certainly gone crazy, would pack up their few
belongings, take a 20- or 30-mile walk, make a new camp, and
resume their usual life of egalitarian reciprocity, leaving the man
who would be king alone to exercise a useless sovereignty.
To the extent that political leadership exists at all among band-
and-village societies, it is exercised by individuals called headmen,
who lack the power to compel others to obey their orders. But can
a leader be powerless and still lead?"
-- OUR KIND (1989) MARVIN HARRIS