[nullstyle]

Been awhile since I've listened to the book (all cards on the table), so I can't be specific. Nor am I an expert in anyway. My takeaway is that the pre-historical Americas had many diverse ways of organizing people that doesn't quite match up to the implied-risk-game of territory that I was responding too.

In starting to read through some of the criticism's of the book just now, I was reminded of the seasonal hunting parties where many smaller groups would band together for better kills. That's what I mean with "tribal fluidity".

And by freedom of movement, the impression that I had coming away from the listen was that there were many ways in which someone could find themselves in a role where the could migrate through several communities and still live. looking at things again presently, I stumbled across https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopewell_tradition, which I think illustrates what I was trying to convey. "Border sovereignty" doesn't make much sense to me as a concept in that world... i think things were much more fluid. There weren't border checkpoints throughout prehistory.

[tomrod]

All academic work is critiqued. It doesn't make it wrong though. Your notion of fluidity is specifically what original poster missed entirely.

[crazygringo]

I honestly have no idea what on earth the "fluidity" of groups banding together on hunting expeditions has to do with the notion of tribes occupying recognized geographic areas that they don't allow strangers to invade? I don't see any connection at all between the two.

[crazygringo]

There are definitely a lot of diverse ways of organizing people within a tribe.

And you're absolutely right that tribes could join forces to accomplish objectives. And the Hopewell tradition is mainly about trade and cultural dissemination -- of course trade involves traveling with goods to other tribes.

But none of that changes my point. Even if tribes allied for a purposes, they still had their distinct geographic areas. If if people traveled to other tribes to exchange goods, they were just visitors traveling through.

"Border sovereignty" was absolutely real, just as it is in primates. There weren't literal manned border "checkpoints", but you can be sure that as soon as a tribe got wind of a stranger approaching, they'd immediately investigate and either allow them in (if e.g. someone friendly temporarily traveling through) or send them back in the opposite direction with force if necessary. The idea that the norm was that some stranger could just waltz in with their family and they'd be welcomed to stay and share the land is not supported by evidence.

(Even though that's definitely the anarchist ideology that Graeber was trying to push in his book, because that's exactly where he gets criticized for ignoring most of the evidence and cherry-picking examples.)

[nullstyle]

I don't think we will agree here. The statement that "The whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty has been with us for essentially all of human history" is not something I can get down with unless its better supported. The territory you are describing is not all the same thing as national territory to my mind, and your arguments are not convincing.

> they'd immediately investigate and either allow them in (if e.g. someone friendly temporarily traveling through) or send them back in the opposite direction with force if necessary.

Was there never the case that they investigated, saw that the strangers were floating down a river on the border of "their territory" and simply let them pass through unmolested? That doesn't happen today, and my intuition is that was simply so much space in the americas before recorded history that it happened often then.