ABSTRACT
P. B. Roscoe's exposition on practice theory in political evolution is the most recent to try to account for the origin of the state. Two major synthetic theories account for the origin of the state. One builds on the ideas of environmental circumscription and is ecological in nature. The other is Marxist and political economic in nature. In anthropology, typologies are usually a product of evolutionary theory, and this is true for political anthropology. The chapter explores the anthropological contribution to the study of the state, the dynamics of state organization. In state formations, the relationship between government and nation is recursive and dominated by the dialectic of local autonomy and centralized control. The vertical entrenchment ot the governments ot incorporative states is largely a natural history of the increasing influence of the praxes of state governments over the personal practices of their citizens and the nation's institutions.
