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When historians, philosophers or political scientists argue about the origin of the state in ancient Peru or China, what they are really doing is projecting that rather unusual constellation of elements backwards: typically, by trying to find a moment when something like sovereign power came together with something like an administrative system
Theirs seems to have been a ‘capturing society’ not unlike some of the other, more recent Amerindian societies
Kroeber, a pre-eminent anthropologist of his day, spent decades on a research project aimed at determining if identifiable laws lie behind the rhythms and patterns of cultural growth and decay: whether systematic relations could be established between artistic fashions, economic booms and busts, periods of intellectual creativity and conservatism, and the expansion and collapse of empires.
was an intriguing question but, after many years, his ultimate conclusion was: no, there were no such laws.
different kinds of power crystallize, each with its own peculiar mix of violence, knowledge and charisma: our three elementary forms of domination.
important criteria for ‘statehood’ – at least not on most standard sociological definitions (monopoly of violence, levels of administrative hierarchy, and so forth).
three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships.
Where we once assumed ‘civilization’ and ‘state’ to be conjoined entities that came down to us as a historical package (take it or leave
what history now demonstrates is that these terms actually refer to complex amalgams of elements which have entirely different origins and which are currently in the process of drifting apart.
variety of ways in which power can expand its scope; these limits are the basis of our ‘three principles’ of sovereignty, administration and competitive politics.
resulted in a backlash among European thinkers which produced an evolutionary framework for human history that remains broadly intact today. Portraying history as a story of material progress, that framework recast indigenous critics as innocent children of nature, whose views on freedom were a mere side effect of their uncultivated way of life and could not possibly offer a serious challenge to contemporary social thought
the 1980s it has been commonplace for social theorists to claim we are living in a new ‘post-modern’ age, marked by a suspicion towards metanarratives.
may object: perhaps much of human history was more complicated than we usually admit, but surely what matters is how things ended up. For at least 2,000 years, most of the world’s population have been living under kings or emperors of one sort or another. Even in places where monarchy did not exist – much of Africa or Oceania, for example – we find that (at the very least) patriarchy, and often violent domination of other sorts, have been widespread. Once established, such institutions are very hard to get rid of. So your objection might run: all you’re saying is that the inevitable took a
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original sequence as developed by Turgot and others – hunting, pastoralism, agriculture, then finally industrial civilization
the indigenous peoples of North America aren’t being imagined as living in a separate time, or as vestiges of some earlier stage of human history, then they’re imagined as living in an entirely separate reality (‘ontology’ is the currently fashionable term), a mythic consciousness fundamentally different from our own.
Nations known in the colonial period as the ‘five civilized tribes’ of the American Southeast: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole. All of them exemplify this pattern, being governed by communal councils in which all had equal say and operating by a process of consensus-finding.
While every Osage was expected to spend an hour after sunrise in prayerful reflection, the Little-Old-Men carried out daily deliberations on questions of natural philosophy and their specific relevance to political issues of the day.
What we are suggesting is that indigenous doctrines of individual liberty, mutual aid and political equality, which made such an impression on French Enlightenment thinkers, were neither (as many of them supposed) the way all humans can be expected to behave in a State of Nature. Nor were they (as many
Perhaps the most stubborn misconception we’ve been tackling has to do with scale. It does seem to be received wisdom in many quarters, academic and otherwise, that structures of domination are the inevitable result of populations scaling up by orders of magnitude; that is, that a necessary correspondence exists between social and spatial hierarchies. Time and again we found ourselves confronted with writing which simply assumes that the larger and more densely populated the social group, the more ‘complex’ the system needed to keep it organized.
Complexity, in turn, is still often used as a synonym for hierarchy.
complex systems don’t have to be organized top-down, either in the natural or in the social world.
Not only do such views lack a sound basis in human psychology. They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule.
If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the ‘origins of social inequality’), is it precisely this: how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality, and how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalized within it?
how the new archaeological evidence that had been building up for the last thirty years might change our notions of early human history,
especially the parts bound up with debates on the origins of social inequality.
it’s hard to resist the temptation to write and think as if the current state of the world, in the early twenty-first century, is the inevitable outcome of the last 10,000 years of history,
Greek notion of kairos as one of those occasional moments in a society’s history
when its frames of reference undergo a shift – a metamorphosis of the fundamental principles and symbols,
