Over time an increasingly large proportion of nonstate peoples were not “pristine primitives” who stubbornly refused the domus, but ex–state subjects who had chosen, albeit often in desperate circumstances, to keep the state at arm’s length. This process, detailed by many anthropologists, among whom Pierre Clastres is perhaps the most famous, has been called “secondary primitivism.”14 The longer states existed, the more refugees they disgorged to the periphery. Places of refuge where they accumulated over time became “shatter zones,” as their linguistic and cultural complexity reflected that
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