Today, I was arguing against an anarcho-socialist friend of mine, who has this "very romantic" view of stateless human tribes as being pervasively peaceful and respectful of individual liberties. He argues that all cruelties and barbarianism are product of a state apparatus with centralized government. My response was that barbaric cultral practices and violation of individual liberties had long existed in human communities and preceded a state, sovereign or any form of central government with a formalistic procedure that inscribe the barbaric cultral practices into letters of law. I used the example of practice of female genital mutilation in African Tribes where women are forced into the cultural practice by the community. He said that it only existed after there was governmental structure and that power structure and systemic violence that oppressed minority and individual rights did not exist in ancient human tribes with no formal law because it lacked the enforcement mechanism. (Note that we both accept that FGM as a recognized form of barbarism.) So the definition of barbarism is not at issue here. I don't know much about history but his argument just sounds crazy af.
Can anyone back up my claims with actual historic evidence? Or am I the crazy one?
Political Scientist (who reads a lot of history for my work) here. I’ll try to address some of the issues you raised and I hope its a helpful response. But I can’t attest to the specific cases you mentioned but I hope previous (and future) responses get to them.
First I think we need to be careful with how we are defining state and stateless. In PS we often go with Max Weber’s definition as a “compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory.” I think this might be a helpful way to think about it in this case (Charles Tilly also has a popular definition, but I don’t find it contradictory to this one just slightly different… in this particular case it boils down to the same thing). In contrast a stateless society is one that does not match all of those characteristics. In this sense we can think of Feudal Europe (Some historian specializing in this time (600-1500s ish) can correct me if I am miss characterizing anything, and I also understand there was lots of variation in time and place here) as a stateless society as often multiple political organizations had legitimate use of force in a territory (eg: Church, local lord, higher lord, and king another king who also has some right such as French kings in English ruled France). The point I am trying to make here is that there many different types of stateless societies not just tribal societies as it seems the focus of the discussion was on.
Also as a side note I want to be clear that the examples of tribal societies given by OP are in no way really anarchical in the technical sense, all these societies had institutions that governed societal life. I’ll get to what I mean by institutions a little further down, but anarchy implies a lack of any governing institutions. Some anarchist ideologies define it more loosely as lack involuntary institutions but even those societies often had many involuntary practices.
Next I think it’s important to address the statement about the lack of enforcement mechanisms in starless societies. Every type of society (stateless and states) has enforcement mechanisms to enforce their institutions (here I use institution as it’s often used in PS to mean any law, organization, or customary practice) some mechanisms use force (or the threat of force) and others do not, some societies have more capacity to enforce those mechanisms while others have less. It is extremely hard to have a causal link between statelessness and capacity of enforcement. In one hand we can point to modern states like the US and European states as examples of state societies that have very high capacity to enforce their laws in many cases. However that is not always the case across countries, look at weaker states in modern Africa or even early European states in the 16-18th century where the state was weak. Further there is high variance in capacity to enforce different institutions. For example the US has high capacity to enforce tax laws, but in many ways low capacity to enforce domestic abuse laws as the state often does not have information to know those laws are being broken or to prove that they were. (Just to be clear I also recognize that the judiciary sometimes is also just unwilling to enforce these things because of ideological reasons). The point here is that the link between capacity and state (or lack of) is not clear.
Now to the main point. Do stateless societies also have institutions that are seen as morally incorrect to modern (usually western) observers? The clear answer is yes. Look at Feudal Europe as mentioned above for plenty of examples. More specifically are primitive or tribal societies (which is what the argument was really about it seems) free of such morally bad institutions? I find that hard to believe… and I can point to some examples such as cannibalism (and I know there’s lots of historical disagreement here but my understanding is that I did exist in one way or another in a few societies). And are such societies less likely to have these institutions? I think this is a better question without an answer that I could give… I think it’s possible but also that there is no link… I am not aware of any studies on this particular question that are convincing in one direction or the other.
Regarding your second question - though there's always more to be said, I've answered it before, in Was rape really non-existent in the Pre-Columbian Americas? The short version is that the claim has its own history.