Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

To treat those engaged in these different activities as essentially different peoples inhabiting different life worlds is again to read back the much later stigmatization of pastoralists by agrarian states to an era where it makes no sense. A striking illustration of the shift may be found in Anne Porter’s perceptive reading of the many variants of the Epic of Gilgamesh.25 In the earliest versions, Gilgamesh’s soul companion Enkidu is merely a pastoralist, emblematic of a fused society of planters and herders. In versions a millennium later, he is depicted as subhuman, raised among beasts, and requiring sex with a woman to humanize him. Enkidu becomes, in other words, a dangerous barbarian who knows not grain, houses, or cities, or how to “bend the knee.” The “late” Enkidu is, as we shall see, the product of the ideology of a mature agrarian state.