65 THE STATE OF THE STATE IN ANTHROPOLOGY Christine Ward Gailey Social theory is embedded in practice and is imbued with political engagement in one's own society. Theories of the state and state formation in anthropology are no exception, although they rarely are analyzed as such. The latest period of crisis and concentration in capitalism has affected anthropological dis- course on the state in a number of ways. In Western Europe and in the United States, the abandonment of the welfare state model and the forging of ever closer cooperation be- tween government and multinational corpo- rate capital in the global accumulation process has been echoed in the literature on state origins. Prior to the United States' defeat in Viet- nam and the acceleration of corporate control of oil and other energy resources in the early 1970s, prevailing theories of state origins were unicausal as a rule, and linear in their progres- sive evolutionism. In the wake of the war and the onset of the new period of economic recession and conglomerate consolidation, models of the state as stimulus of develop- ment were shattered. Typically, the crisis in the contemporary state permeated research into precapitalist states. The mainstream fashioned cybernetic or systems models, while the increasing economic stratification through- out the capitalist world sparked a renaissance of Marxist research into the origins of ex- ploitation. In the age of Reagan and Thatcher, and the repressive neo-colonial regimes bol- Christine Ward Gailey is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Northeastern University, Boston. 0304-4092/85/$03.30 9 1985 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. stered by the United States, maintenance models such as systems theory are being sup- planted by symbolic and structuralist presen- tations of the state. As the militarism and scale of state-sponsored repression increase throughout the capitalist-dominated Third World, at least one theory has emerged that presents the state as the embodiment of the social order, even of culture, reflecting, of course, the more general historical incorpora- tion of all essential human activity by the representatives of the state apparatus from the earliest periods of state formation. The Marxist scholarship is attacked as ethnocen- tric, while the symbolic alternative claims to uphold the integrity of other cultures, of the folk. The current situation in state formation theory parallels the tension between the cap- italist state seemingly on a global, totalitarian trajectory, and the resistance to such a poten- tial. I will examine some of the key issues emerg- ing in the myriad of state origins theories from the 1950s to the present, with particular attention to the post Vietnam war period. Integral to the evaluation of such theories will be their analysis, or lack of analysis, of the significance of one of the pivotal dimen- sions of kin-defined divisions of labor that precede class relations and persist within them, namely, gender. Obviously, in the academy, the concern with problems of state formation, class origins and divisions, and gender social bifurcation is contained within abstract boundaries. In 1984, the centennial 'year of Engel's Origin of the Family, Private