First, we can speak of a natural anthropology of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). The nuclear family is the base unit of consensus society, but not of the TAZ. ("Families ! - how I hate them ! The misers of love !" - Gide). The nuclear family, with its attendant "oedipal miseries", appears to have been a Neolithic invention, a response to the "agricultural revolution" with its imposed scarcity and its imposed hierarchy. The Paleolithic model is at once more primal and more radical : the band. Within larger trival societies the band-structure is fulfilled by clans within the tribe, or by sodalities such as initiatic or secret societies, hunt or war societies, gender societies, "children's republics", and so on. If the nuclear family is produced by scarcity (and results in miserliness), the band is produced by abundance - and results in prodigality. The band is open to the affinity group, the initiates sworn to a bond of love, a horizontal pattern of custom, extended kinship, contract and alliance, spiritual affinities, etc... The family is closed, by genetics, by the male's possession of women and children, by the hierarchic totality of agricultural / industrial society. The nuclear family becomes more and more obviously a trap, a cultural sinkhole, a neurotic secret implosion of split atoms. The TAZ then as festival. Stephen Pearl Andrews once offered, as an image of anarchist society, the dinner party, in which all structure of authority dissolves in conviviality and celebration. The media invite us to "come celebrate the moments of your life" with the spurious unification of commodity and spectacle, the famous non-event of pure representation. In response to this obscenity we have the spectrum of refusal (chronicled by the Situationists, et al.) - on the other hand, the emergence of a festal culture removed and even hidden from the would-be managers of our leisure. Appropriate to an age which offers TVs and telephones as ways to "reach out and touch" other human beings, ways to "Be There!". The essence of the party : face-to-face, a group of humans synergize their efforts to realize mutual desires, to attain the very transport of bliss-a "union of egoists" or, a basic biological drive to "mutual aid". (Here we should also mention Bataille's "economy of excess" and his theory of potlach culture.)