On cultural homogeneity and pre-State war

In a recent FB status update, Justin E. H. Smith cites James Scott approvingly:

As the anthropologist James C. Scott has compellingly argued, it is a fool's game to attempt to learn about human nature from 'isolated' or 'primitive' tribes, since every human group about which we have any knowledge has existed in some relation to a broader network of other human groups, and usually of states and empires. In this respect the idea of homogeneous national cultures attaching stably to territories is not only an illusion, to the extent that the homogeneity was initially imposed by a concerted campaign, but also to the extent that influence and goods are always flowing in from outside, even if in certain places and times foreign faces and foreign tongues are an unfamiliar occurrence. James C. Scott, "Crops, Towns, Government," London Review of Books, Vol. 35, No. 22, 21 November, 2013, pgs. 13-15. 

While I agree grosso modo with Scott's point about skepticism about direct and naive conclusions from existing foragers back to pre-State times, I think we can make some reasonable, modest, and always open to re-interpretation, guesses (or if you want, hypotheses) for pre-State forager bands. When we do that we have to remember that claims that inter-group war was the dominant form of inter-group relation are themselves prone to illegitimate analogies with nation-state behavior (that is, society as boot camp: impose a homogeneous culture to better ensure success in war through loyalty to the group, etc).

There's a school of anthropological thought about pre-State foragers* such that war was not the only or even major form of inter-group relation, but they were always in periodic contact with outsiders, often in the form of festivals, with their attendant gift exchanges, games, contests, child adoptions, and hook-ups (okay, "negotiations for marriage and other kinship relations"). 

So while no one would say pre-State forager bands were hotbeds of cultural experimentation, the idea that they were locked into some rigid, perfectly reproduced, cultural pattern guarded against "contamination" along both "horizontal" (synchronous / contact with "others") lines and "vertical" (diachronous / respect to the "elders") lines is, again, probably a projection of a fever dream of an ideally homogenous nation-state, and / or a projection of a nightmare anti-liberal society that would put over there all the things we don't want to think about that is happening here in our supposedly liberal "open society."**

* This piece by Raymond C Kelly on pre-state social relations is worth reading. See also Fry 2013 for a comprehensive recent summary of the anti-universal war position. I cite Kelly approvingly in this presentation I'll be giving a few times this spring. See here for a recent conference talk (APSA 2013).

** Here I'm adapting some themes from Discipline and Punish.