INTRODUCTION TO ANARCHIC SOLIDARITY: AUTONOMY, EQUALITY, AND FELLOWSHIP IN SOUTHEAST ASIA ∗ Thomas Gibson and Kenneth Sillander This volume analyzes a group of Southeast Asian societies whose members have achieved a remarkably rigorous balance among the moral values of autonomy, equality, and fellowship. It also suggests some moral and political lessons that readers who share these values might apply to their own societies, in line with recent suggestions concerning the relevance of the anthropology of egalitarian societies to the theory and practice of anarchism (e.g., Clastres [1974] 1977; Graeber 2007). The volume brings together a number of societies that are normally placed in distinct analytical frameworks according to their traditional modes of subsistence: nomadic hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators, sea nomads, and peasants embedded in a market economy. The authors came together to produce it because they have concluded that these societies have something more fundamental in common: a mode of sociality that maximizes personal autonomy, political egalitarianism, and inclusive forms of social solidarity. Personal autonomy is maintained through the principle of “open aggregation,” in which all groups beyond the domestic family are loosely defined, ephemeral, and weakly corporate, and in which membership is fluid, elective, and overlapping. Political autonomy is maintained by occupying areas that are difficult for states to administer, such ∗ Thomas Gibson and Kenneth Sillander, eds, Anarchic Solidarity: Autonomy, Equality and Fellowship in Island Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies Monographs No. 60, 2011).