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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, & Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia

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

Sneath, David

Hardcover

AnthropologyCentral Asian HistoryHistoriography

ISBN10: 0231140541
ISBN13: 9780231140546
Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr
Published: Dec 21 2007
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.14
Height: 0.98 Width: 6.40 Depth: 9.01
Language: English

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.

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