Shifts in Production and Organization: A Cluster-Interaction Model [and Comments and Reply

Abstract

Periods of intensification alternate with periods of shift of mode of production in pristine-state sequences; attendant upon these are regular shifts in sociopolitical organization. This paper develops an evolutionary model of these regularities and their relation to other traditional questions of state formation. Specifically it notes that rarely if ever do such transformations affect only a single precocious polity, at any level of sociocultural integration. Instead, a number of polities, comparable to each other in size, complexity, and thechnoeconomic structure, are involved. Essentially uniformitarian resemblances among them are enhanced by the fact that these are open systems, in at least sporadic contact (subsuming both exchange relations, however patterned, and competition/warfare). It is suggested that this entire cluster acts as some sort of evolutionary unit that certain processes of adaptation and selection operate at this supersystem level and cannot necessarily be treated at the level of the single member society or cluster component. Epistemologically, furthemore, it follows that the search for chronological priority or direction of influence within the cluster or cohort must be considered illegitimate. Evolutionary sequences leading to pristine-state formation seem to be characterized by this type of suprasystem organization from the beginnings of characterized by this type of suprasystem organization from the beginnings of an agricultural mode of production onward. The emergence of ranked society, of irrigation agriculture, of social stratification and the state, all follow this pattern. Analytical questions of productivity-force-risk-competition, of hydraulic agriculture and institutional transformation, of the relation of state institutions to urban processes, are considered within this framework. While mosts of the illustrative material in this discussion is Mexican, the model should be applicable to Peru, to Mesopotamia, and problably to China. It is not predicted that this model necessarily fit secondary state formation, a process involving distinctive, more overt relations of diferential economic and physical force among the polities involved.