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The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia, by David Sneath
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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.
- Sales Rank: #2646502 in Books
- Published on: 2007-12-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.01" h x .98" w x 6.40" l, 1.14 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
Review
A study rich in both historical fact and linguistic analysis... Highly recommended.
(Choice)
The author presents intelligent, clearly writtenarguments, disagreement with which should callfor serious reflection.
(Daniel Prior Journal of the Royal Anthropological institute)
Review
David Sneath's The Headless State is a long-overdue challenge to the conventional picture of Inner Asian nomads divided up into kin-based 'tribes' and 'clans.' Classic histories and ethnographies are given a provocative new reading via an incisive history of social anthropological doctrines and dogmas. What emerges is both the centrality of the state in Inner Asia and the analytic dangers implicit in the state-society dichotomy. Boldly argued, The Headless State will place Inner Asia at the center of writing on state formation.
(Christopher P. Atwood, chair, Central Eurasian Studies Department, Indiana University)
In this provocative book, David Sneath provides a scrupulous and erudite critique of concepts such as pastoralism, kinship societies, tribalism, and the state as used in the analysis of Inner Asian polities. He argues instead for the presence of an aristocratic order; the existence of rulers and ruled as distinct social strata; and the presence of 'state relations' in societies that do not seem to match the older models of the centralized state. An important work that will be of interest to anthropologists and political theorists regardless of their regional specialization.
(Signe Howell, professor of social anthropology, University of Oslo)
About the Author
David Sneath is director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at Cambridge University and a lecturer in social anthropology. He conducted doctoral research in Inner Mongolia in the 1980s and since then has carried out research in Mongolia and other parts of Inner Asia.
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Informative but not historically conclusive
By Big A
I bought this book because as a historian I am interested in the cultural changes nomadic pastoralists effect when they conquer or move into sedentary areas. What do they bring with them that is and is not adaptable.
This book, to my mind, spends far too much time criticizing modern social anthropological theory, and it does not do it that well. For instance, the author points out that Khazanov and others question the existence of the conical clan because they have not come across them and that other academics such as Krader and Barfield offer no proof of its existence among nomadic pastoralists in Central and Inner Asia. This not only ignores Leach's work, recently applied to the formation of the state by Maisels, but also disregards, for example, the adopted geneaology of the tenth century Oguz, to mention but one nomadic pastoral polity in Central Asia.
In other words, by concentrating on anthropological theory and case studies instead of the historical record, the author does his argument a disservice. The only historical evidence he puts forward is for the Mongols of the seventeenth century. There is much more available concerning the tore (customary law) in Turkic history and it refers to earlier times.
To sum up, whether or not Turkic or Mongol clan structures ever were conical, there is plenty of historical evidence that nomadic pastoralists had a strong concept of statehood but did not need to apply it by establishing empires unless absolutlely necessary, something for instance both Khazanov and Barfield argue at least in part. In historiography nomadic pastoralists are denied anything more than tribalism by academics who think only things sedentary and Judea-Chritian are civilized and all else is inferior if not barbaric. This is far more corrosive than bad social anthropology, which historians in general disregard because so recent.
I think Sneath has missed a superb chance of setting the historical record straight by tilting at social anthropological windmills instead of taking Western historiography to task.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Essential
By J. H. Windsor
This is a superbly researched work of Central Asian historiography, and I think one could argue of World Historiography. The author attempts to reposition Asian nomadic-pastoral states vis a vis the sedentary, from their alleged place in the evolutionary continuum of political organization, which finds them in an early protean phase of institutional sophistication. The usual characterization of these states is as "tribal." This label is a culturally-specific (mostly 19th Century European Orientalist, I might suggest) identity often applied with astonishingly little evidence. The author succeeds in my estimation as he traces the origins of these slapdash labels. The book also can open the reader's mind to other instances of accepted "wisdom" in the field of history and historiography, which I like to think of as history history.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By SUN KOOK HWANG
Sneath pointed out the very important thing clearly.
As I know, the nomadic society is not egalitarian.
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