Graeber / Wengrow 382: "For the last 5,000 years of human history [...] our conventional vision of world history is a chequerboard of cities, empires, and kingdoms; but in fact, for most of this period these were exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants, if visible at all to historians' eyes, are variously described as 'tribal confederacies,' 'amphictyonies' or (if you're an anthropologist) 'segmentary socities'--that is, people who systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority"
"these were by far the world's most common form of goverrnment"