State Maine's formula and its sociological meaning.5.

The way of life: small bands (30–50, splitting as they grow — the fission of quarrels); gathering, hunting, fishing; immediate return (little storage: eat, move; the original affluent society, Sahlins's provocation — wants few, means sufficient); mobility: light possessions, fluid membership. Social organisation: the most egalitarian order known — leadership situational and unenforced (the good hunter leads the hunt, and is mocked for pride — reverse dominance: arrogance cut down to size); sharing as the economy's first law (the kill distributed by rule — meat's meticulous shares); bilaterality and flexibility in kinship; little property, no classes, no state. Order without law's apparatus: disputes handled by talk, withdrawal, mockery, and the rare feud; the wrongdoer's sanction — ostracism (a hard sentence in a survival group); third-party mediation by elders, without coercion. Classic ethnographic cases: the !Kung of the Kalahari, the Hadza. Nepal's living case: the Raute — Nepal's last nomadic hunter-gatherers (forest hunting of monkeys, wooden-bowl trade with villagers; a few hundred people maintaining refusal of settlement against all state projects — the ethics of which is anthropology's live Nepal debate); the Raji and Bote as part-sedentary kin cases.