What do you think of Robert Carniero's theory of environmental circumscription? This seems to be the most widely accepted theory on why tribal societies become state societies. He does, of course, speak from a background influenced by Mother Culture, and seems to think that population automatically expands and food production must be expanded to accommodate it, but would you say that his theory holds true if the societies he studied were already in the food race? He studied South American societies but applied his theory to the Western one as well. He begins with agricultural tribes and doesn't address hunter-gatherers or semi-agricultural peoples. Would you agree that circumscription was a catalyst for abandoning tribalism in the cases Carniero studied, but that he simply hasn't gone back far enough in their history to pinpoint the adoption of totalitarian agriculture as the real reason? What do you believe IS the reason that people abandoned tribalism? It begins with complete dependence agriculture, doesn't it? • Ishmael.org, the work & philosophy of Daniel Quinn