The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia

by David Sneath

In this groundbreaking work, social anthropologist David Sneath aggressively dispels the myths surrounding the history of steppe societies and proposes a new understanding of the nature and formation of the state. Since the colonial era, representations of Inner Asia have been dominated by images of fierce nomads organized into clans and tribes―but as Sneath reveals, these representations have no sound basis in historical fact. Rather, they are the product of nineteenth-century evolutionist social theory, which saw kinship as the organizing principle in a nonstate society.

Sneath argues that aristocratic power and statelike processes of administration were the true organizers of life on the steppe. Rethinking the traditional dichotomy between state and nonstate societies, Sneath conceives of a "headless state" in which a configuration of statelike power was formed by the horizontal relations among power holders and was reproduced with or without an overarching ruler or central "head." In other words, almost all of the operations of state power existed at the local level, virtually independent of central bureaucratic authority.

Sneath's research gives rise to an alternative picture of steppe life in which aristocrats determined the size, scale, and degree of centralization of political power. His history of the region shows no clear distinction between a highly centralized, stratified "state" society and an egalitarian, kin-based "tribal" society. Drawing on his extensive anthropological fieldwork in the region, Sneath persuasively challenges the legitimacy of the tribal model, which continues to distort scholarship on the history of Inner Asia.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published November 28, 2007

Reviews

[Kenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book that brushes away the century old misconceptions about nomads and proposes a new system of analysis based on actual history, rather than 19th century notions of societal evolution. A true game changer, anyone interested in Central Eurasian or Inner Asian history and states should read it. Or those that are just interested in history in general.

As a Mongolist, I can not recommend this book highly enough.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book that should be required reading for all history students along with Christopher Beck's Empires of the Silk Roads and Andre Gunder Frank's The Centrality of Central Asia. It almost seems like most of Sneath's conclusions should be obvious, but those definitions of "Other" blind us to so much--as does our fascination with "bigger is always better." Why does an empire have to "disintegrate?" Why can't it evolve or shift or transform? The steppes and the steppe empires break so many of our paradigms and evolutionary tables, so we brand them as "inferior" and "Tribal" and "barbarian." Highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in history; Sneath's conclusions are not limited to the steppe empires, but are useful when looking at many past and present cultures.

[Céleste · Rating 2 out of 5]

The argument is interesting and worthwhile, but the book was an absolute snooze.

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thoughts under revision until I finish a second read. At the moment I'm asking, doesn't he make one type of steppe politics blanket? There were headless states and aristocratic orders. There were also other social structures and ideas, in different times and places. As per Isenbike Togan's Flexibility and Limitation in Steppe Formations: The Kerait Khanate and Chinggis Khan, which seeks to recover political & ideological conflicts or alternatives (her aim is to restore complexity to what we have seen as a primitive, undifferentiated tribal world).

I have to note its curmudgeonly, agenda-driven tone, that does not disagree graciously with other scholars. Several of whom I'm not ready to ditch for the new dogma in this book. I find comfort in a review by David Durand-Guédy who characterizes it as a 'polemical pamphlet': https://www.academia.edu/1788230/Davi...

I like much of his deconstruction work on tribes & clans & lineages: that genealogies are not an original feature but part of regulation by a state. But the steppe was not aristocratic orders across time, through history, no more than it was a kinship society of either European or Chinese dodgy ethnography. This is a narrow book that sees other work in the field narrowly: if you read only this, you'd have a caricatured view of the ideas that are out there.

Nevertheless, to balance the review I link above, here's a positive one from Johan Elverskog (whose book on the Mongols and the Qing I found fantastic): http://cces.snu.ac.kr/article/jces1_7...

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The essence of Sneath's compelling argument is that Inner Asian nomads were never organized into segmentary kinship lineages, instead, they were "headless states:" shifting alliances of aristocratic households.

He gets to this point by drawing from the anthropological and historic record of many such groups: Mongols, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turks, etc. In an approach widely panned by his many reviewers, Sneath deconstructs the terms for "clan," "tribe," "people," and other such political/social keywords and shows that they could also be read to reflect terms that we associate much more strongly with landed aristocratic societies. Sneath has to be careful as he does this because he does not want to dredge up earlier essentializations of nomadic pastoralists as part of teleological structure that locks them in as any sort of alternative feudalism. Instead, he reduces the definition of a "state" entirely to a social relation that entails powers disparity. Rather than egalitarian nomads or an almost-feudal society, we get society-states divided into commoners and rulers; the common people having little sense of kinship or connection beyond their immediate family. Sneath also reverses the long-standing narrative of gradual colonial fixation of these groups onto territories. For him, the commoners (who he often implies were either slaves or the equivalent of slaves) were always bound to place while the aristocrats moved. Colonial states' contribution here was only in cartographically fixing names to these pasturage places. These names were derived from the local nobility.

I suppose how convincing you will find Sneath's argument is equal to how convincing you find his methodology. Does his deconstruction hold up? If so many people (Barfield, Khazanov, Golden, among others) say it doesn't, then why should we value Sneath's opinion over theirs? I found that the alternative arguments analyses from the cases he was challenging (which are often in the footnotes) were equally plausible as those offered by Sneath. Everyone is doing a degree of interpretation. If this book wasn't so polemical I think I would find it more convincing.

[Mohamad Ballan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enlightening and refreshing. Highly recommended.