Tribes and states, [ethnographers and historians of the Middle East] agree, are mutually constituting entities. There is no evolutionary sequence; tribes are not prior to states. Tribes are, rather, a social formation defined by its relation to the state. “If rulers of the Middle East have been preoccupied by a ‘tribal problem,’… tribes could be said to have had a perennial ‘state-problem.’

James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. And his quote is Ira Lapidus, “Tribes and State Formation in Islamic History” from Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East.

The viewpoint Scott is arguing for is to see tribal cultures as being constituted as such specifically to avoid forming or being incorporated into a state. The introduction of agriculture involved, in many ways, a decrease in the quality of life, and not everyone decided to go in that direction. Tribal forms of organization arose alongside state-based forms of organization as some people turned towards agriculture and others turned away.

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