I'm not so sure. Much of the world is much less obsessed by territory. Even in Scotland I'm not sure that the fealty model was so top-down. Clans that happen to inhabit a certain area might be part of an association or owe fealty to a laird, but that does not mean that the laird rules over the territory and could hand it to someone else, does it?
Tribal associations may be a natural, emergent human structure, but binding them to lines on a map and then letting those lines supercede the human relations seems quite European to me.
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Date: 2006-11-29 07:05 pm (UTC)Tribal associations may be a natural, emergent human structure, but binding them to lines on a map and then letting those lines supercede the human relations seems quite European to me.