<i>The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia Scott C. Levi The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia. By David Sneath. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Anthropologist David Sneath is director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at Cambridge University and an established specialist in the study of Inner Asian nomadic societies. Sneath's previous publications include Changing Inner Mongolia: Pastoral Mongolian Society and the Chinese State (Oxford University Press, 2000), and the co-authored (with Caroline Humphrey) volume, The End of Nomadism? Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia (Duke University Press, 1999). With this volume, Sneath seeks to advance a revisionist interpretation of Inner Asian history from antiquity to the modern day by establishing two complementary points. First, he aims to discredit the notion, articulated by colonial administrators in the nineteenth century and embraced by many scholars since, that the principle political institutions of nomadic societies in historical Inner Asia were fiercely egalitarian kinship-based clans and tribes. This leads to his second objective, which is to advance an understanding of state and society in nomadic Inner Asia that places social stratification and aristocratic power, not kinship, at the heart of political authority. Sneath's discussion unfolds in seven chapters. In a substantial introduction, he provides a rich analysis of literature on the relationship of kinship and the state. Drawing heavily from recent work on nomadic communities in Africa, he lays out his general argument: Inner Asian nomadic societies functioned as a "headless state," which he describes as a "political environment, in which almost all of the operations of state power exist at the local level virtually independent of central bureaucratic authority" (5). The second chapter, "The Myth of the Kinship Society," elaborates upon this point and explores multiple ways that scholars have cast nomadic societies as primitive, static, tribal (or kinship-based) and stateless. The more analytical portion of the volume begins with chapter three, where Sneath takes aim at the means by which peripheral colonial powers, both European and Asian, have historically monopolized the production of knowledge that pertains to their nomadic neighbors. He locates only a small number of astute scholarly observers (e.g. Owen Lattimore) who have recognized that the tribal political order tribes referenced in the sources bears little similarity to reality as it was on the ground. In the next chapter, Sneath seeks to demonstrate that the notion of "clan" is also an external construct, a byproduct of states. efforts to organize their populace based on idealized patrilineal family structures, the goal of which was to "structure society and guarantee the uninterrupted continuation of the political process" (101). Sneath's fifth chapter lays out the ways in which certain "neocolonial" and Soviet scholars have essentialized nomadic peoples as "barbarians" stranded at an earlier evolutionary stage than their sedentary neighbors. He adeptly summarizes: "The perfect example of the ideal-type pastoral nomadic society, composed of egalitarian clans of fierce and free tribesmen, organized by the principles of segmentary opposition, was like any good mythical beast: no one had actually seen it themselves, but everyone seemed to have it on excellent authority that someone else had" (156). This is followed by chapter six, a somewhat awkward digression into the subject of nationalism that focuses as much on Europe as it does on Inner Asia. One may be sympathetic with Sneath's effort to argue against "the notion that nations are rooted in ?ethnic. units of common descent" (176) and to recognize in Inner Asian history "a rich diversity of political forms, all of which drew to some extent on techniques and institutions of governance that were parts of a distinctive steppe tradition" (178-79). Unfortunately what he means by "rich diversity" goes largely unexplained, and the discussion ventures little beyond the Mongols. Here, and elsewhere in the volume, his evidence is thin and the extent to which he can substantiate his broader assertions remains questionable. In the final, concluding chapter, Sneath returns to his central argument: nomadic societies, even those without a centralized authority figure, are not stateless. In fact, they exhibit all of the key features...