In growing number, anthropologists are attempting to explore various aspects of the appearance and evolution of states – considerations of their origin, spread, growth and decline, essential similarity, and irreversible dynamic at the macrolevel of history. In this framework, the question becomes “why is there something rather than nothing?” The question is especially poignant when one considers that state polities require a sector of the populace particularly vulnerable to the demands of the state that, paradoxically, its citizenry be obliged to expand their networks of interdependency while simultaneously weakening their capacity to maintain relatively self-sufficient familial and neighborly interdependencies bonded by voluntary rules of sharing the basic necessities of life. Indeed, members of that sector have requested, on not a few occasions, a few governing elite to take from them what some have labeled these prime directive in the quest for survival. It seems reasonable to assume that this shift, however, took a long time and gradually grew up as the population did. This paper will focus on one of the processes by which increasing numbers of the members of given societies became enmeshed in the system of a polity formation that increasingly deprived individuals and households of their control over the everyday stuff of existence.
