Archaic Societies Research Articles

The Formation of Greek City-States: Status, Class, and Land Tenure Systems

Recent scholarship has often remarked on the opposition between two conceptions of Archaic Greek societies, relating either to a legal and static definition of status or to a notion of status as personal and fluid, linked to diversified strategies for obtaining social distinction. This article seeks to move beyond this opposition by examining the history of status groups in the Archaic period. After analyzing the key stages within the complex historiography devoted to this subject, it goes on to provide a history of status groups during the formative period of the city-states. The creation of new status groups was an essential feature of the city-states’ history and was primarily linked to indebtedness and war. Although statuses were collective and often imposed from the outside, they nevertheless display a historical development that is central to the formation of city-states. In the seventh century BCE, new groups were created in response to the aristocracy’s need for a workforce. The resulting conflict led to an evolution of the systems regulating access to land and food. This reorganization of entitlement, which was how communities responded to the social and economic crisis they faced, was in turn based on the creation of new status groups. Social conflict led to the definition of a new system of status groups.

Detours and Contours of Inherited Wealth: The Perennial Structures of Transmission Between Generations

André Masson proposes replacing Gary Becker’s “theory” of generational altruism with a structural explanation inspired by Marcel Mauss’s famous essay The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1923), which was rooted in indirect reciprocities between three generations. Masson thereby elaborates a gentle critique of the moral principles often lying beneath the analyses of liberal economists (such as the “demonstration effect,” disen-franchisement, or the theory of homo reciprocans). Accepting the ambitions of economic science, Masson nonetheless maintains a conception of the social sciences that is more competitive than cooperative and provides convincing analysis of the economic and social foundations of current intergenerational transfers. The argument developed in this critical note proposes both a historical reading of the ideology of intergenerational equity, which is only conceivable in the transition from the Trente Glorieuses to the Trente Piteuses, and a structural reading arguing that, for the wealthy classes during the European Old Regime, successful transfers of wealth between generations followed the same formal requirements as those in the twenty-first century.

The Unbearable Ambiguity of the Gift

In his book, Pour une histoire naturelle du don, François Athané questions the various anthropological, sociological, and philosophical discourses surrounding the fundamental social role of the gift. Taking as his point of departure the notion of the transfer of goods or services as a basic factor both in the exchange of gifts and of the gift itself, the author proceeds to deconstruct certain theories, beginning with Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (first published in French in 1923, and later published in English in 1954). Since such an approach does not permit considering the “gift—receipt—counter-gift” triad as a whole, it does not take into account the obligation to reciprocate highlighted by Mauss and thus deprives the gift of its constitutive role as a social link. Athané thus proposes a new interpretation of the place the gift occupies in human perception and social behavior. He refers to the universalizing nature of the gift as an expression of parental altruism. However, while this establishes a connection between nature and culture (the gift being the cultural form of this natural parental altruism), Athané makes no reference to the social and biological studies that were previously challenged by the authors he cites. This reconsideration of nature, in which society and its rules are said to originate, should give rise to new debates.

Biopolitics: From Tribes to Commodity Fetishism

This essay advances a new theory of biopolitics by first showing that the shortcomings of both Michel Foucault's and Giorgio Agamben's theories are due to the fact that they do not approach biopolitics as both a historically specific and a transhistorical phenomenon. Based on a synthetic reading of Karl Marx's analysis of capital, labor-power, and commodity fetishism; Spinozian monism; Lacanian psychoanalysis; Claude Lévi-Strauss's analysis of the incest prohibition and the relation between nature and culture; Georges Bataille's theory of religion; and Étienne Balibar's differentiation of state capitalism as the era of ideology and market capitalism as the era of commodity fetishism, this new theory argues that biopolitical mechanisms are organized around the transhistorical prohibition of self-referentiality—a prohibition that constitutes the very precondition for any society to function. It then traces the concrete historical manifestations of this prohibition from archaic societies through the state and sovereignty to capitalism and its distinct phases. After showing that the primary referent of the prohibition of self-referentiality is blood—as in the incest prohibition of archaic societies, that is, the interdiction of same-blood marriage—the essay follows the subsequent historical “transubstantiations” of blood through theocracy and sovereignty to state and market capitalism. It concludes by addressing the contemporary biopolitical need for a racism—defined, following Foucault, as the break between those worth living and those who must die—that is based on a radical reconceptualization of humans as immortal beings.

Beyond nature and culture

Modes  of identification broadly schematize our experience of things, distinguishing between parcels of ontological properties distributed in accordance with the arrangements of existing beings, arrangements whose structural characteristics we have examined above, each in turn. It is a distribution of beings according to their attributes, the principles according to which socio-cosmological collectives are organized, the dominant regimes of knowledge and action, and the boundaries of identity and otherness. Each of these forms of identification defines a specific style of relations with the world. Long-established expressions of these relations are to be found in geographical regions, many of which are immense, and over very long periods. Yet we cannot use those styles as criteria for distinguishing between singular collectives with contours limited both in time and in space—the kind that historians, ethnologists and sociologists usually choose to investigate. Rather, we should regard those stylizations of experience as what are usually called ―world views,‖ ―cosmologies‖ or ―symbolic forms,‖ all of these being terms of vague epistemological status yet that constitute a handy intuitive way of synthesizing under a simple label (such as ―the modern West,‖ or ―shamanistic societies‖), ―families‖ of practices and mind-sets that seem to display affinities despite the diversity of their concrete manifestations. However, within those great archipelagos marked out by a shared mode of identification one comes across numerous kinds of collectives that consider themselves to be very different from one another (and that are, indeed, perceived as different by those who study them). This is not only on account of their different languages, institutions and, more often than not, the

Affect and the Political

(Yubraj Aryal interviewed Lauren Berlant on Affect and the Political. Mr. Aryal focused his questions on the affective aspects of the political.) Y. A.: Your book Cruel Optimism maps out an affective history of the present. What is the model of the present, which you think, with which people are relating to themselves with the present in the contemporary [American] society today? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] L. B: In Cruel Optimism I claim that the historical present makes itself available to its occupants first as a serious affective disturbance in the reproduction of life. By "the reproduction of life" point to many scenes of engagement: from familial and intimate, to labor and economic, to participation in media and pleasure consumption. Since job and credit availability have become so very unstable in the last four years, there has been a tightening up in the diversity of the material experience of the present-more people are in sync observing and living the historical present as an economic crisis time. Economic crisis threatens the robustness of intimate consumer pleasure domains too, although the instability of intimacy and other modes of mediated cultural belonging doesn't only come from the economic root. The global financial crisis also threatens the faith in and the primacy of the nation form, in its symbolic and political infrastructure. The historical present became modern in the US and Europe with the coming to hegemony of the national frame: so a disturbance in what kind of resource for belonging the nation is is a disturbance in what constitutes the historical present in a serious way. So I guess what I am saying to you is that the model of the historical present at present is a disturbance in the historical present's traditional forms. Y. A.: In the last part of your conversation, you are sketching the economic crisis. So, certainly you are trying to suggest reproduction of capital has shaped the "reproduction of life." I agree! It just reminds me what Deleuze says in the Anti-Oedipus that the formation of political reproduction at present is taking place through the reproduction of capital (all it matters is reproduction of money) whereas it would take place through biological reproduction (kinship, bigotry etc. Rulers or kings would decide whom their sons or daughters could marry and whom not in order to influence a specific political reproduction. The same regulation was also maintained in the familial relations among population) in the archaic societies, so that familial/intimate relations are increasingly viewed as "private matters." This is what another but similar way of understanding " a disturbance in the historical present's traditional forms" in terms of political reproduction. In what ways do these "private matters [familial relations .i.e. biological as well intimate relations i.e. biosociality] " participate in the reproduction of the political at the historical present? And how is it connected to the reproduction of capital? L. B: It would be difficult to answer this question in general, I can't do it. Political reproduction (in administrative, policy, juridical, and symbolic ways) saturates (but never homogenizes) the reproduction of life, in the everyday, in people's relation to work and pleasure, in people's practices and imaginaries for belonging, and in debates and concepts of what a life is--and of course the question of the flourishing of people in families is always an extremely invested site for multiple performances of political antagonism, usually allegorical but not always. At the same time, everyday life theory has long argued that people's relation to the materiality of work-to that part of capitalism that constructs sleep and eating patterns, leisure and speed--constructs relationality in desperate and subtle ways, along with affecting what the shape of a life is in its daily and longer temporal arcs, not to mention people's senses of causality and efficacy. …

O CICLO DAS ÁGUAS DE MOACYR SCLIAR À LUZ DA HERMENÊUTICA SIMBÓLICA

This article aims at studying the cyclical images of water in the novel O ciclo das Aguas, by Moacyr Scliar. We intend to prove that, even though the work belongs to a realistic context, it presents mythical components similar to primitive and archaic societies, which allows us to approach the novel to poems and ancient reports. However, as the novel by Scliar belongs to a world without religious meaning, it is frequent to observe the deconstruction of myths, which is responsible for the parody intrinsic to the text.

Degenerative Joint Disease and Social Status in the Terminal Late Archaic Period (1000–500 b.c.) of Ohio

ABSTRACTThis research presents an analysis of the inferred Late Archaic social structure in Ohio based on degenerative joint disease (DJD, also known as osteoarthritis) and mortuary practices. We tested the hypothesis that mechanical loading involving physical activities is differentially distributed in a population along levels or types of social stratification. This hypothesis was investigated via statistical treatment of DJD as a skeletal stress marker of activity, its occurrence by age and sex, an association with grave goods, and spatial distribution in terminal Late Archaic cemeteries. The skeletal samples used in this study came from three cemeteries, the Boose, Kirian‐Treglia (KT), and Duff sites, dating to the Ohio terminal Late Archaic period.In general, the high overall prevalence of DJD in these people indicates that this population led a rigorous life. This study hypothesized that the burials in the Late Archaic period in Ohio might be socially patterned as evidenced from the unequal distribution of grave goods and skeletal variability in DJD. Nevertheless, the analyses suggest that there is no statistical association between DJD and mortuary practices including grave goods and burial location in a cemetery. As observed in numerous hunter–gatherer populations, the societies in our sample were also characterized by the absence of a marked social stratification. The results suggest that there were only ‘natural inequalities’ in Late Archaic societies due to biological factors, such as age and sex. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam by Akbar Ahmed

Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam by <i>Akbar Ahmed</i>

Redistribution in Aegean Palatial Societies. Redistribution and the Political Economy: The Evolution of an Idea

Whether the Bronze Age Aegean economies can be described as “redistributive” depends on how one defines the term. The concept of redistribution itself has undergone several decades of critical archaeological analysis, much of it stemming from my early work in Polynesia. I consider here how Polanyi’s ideas about redistributive economies have been expanded since the 1970s. My review complements the article in this Forum by Nakassis et al. and the contribution by Halstead, who discusses why and how the concept of redistribution still matters in studies of the Minoans and Mycenaeans. To some degree, we all agree: chiefs, and later kings, who sought power in archaic societies did so through many highly variable, contingent, and changing means, all designed to support political-economic strategies based on multiple systems of finance. The Bronze Age Aegean societies provide excellent examples of this process, as demonstrated by the contributors to this Forum.

Archaic Societies: Diversity and Complexity across the Midcontinent edited by Thomas E. Emerson, Dale L. McElrath, and Andrew C. Fortier

Archaic Societies: Diversity and Complexity across the Midcontinent edited by Thomas E. Emerson, Dale L. McElrath, and Andrew C. Fortier

The Ghost in the Financial Machine

This essay lays out an argument that leads back from some debates in contemporary social studies of finance to arguments that have not been fully developed in some classic writings of Marcel Mauss (1990 [1954]) and Max Weber (2009 [1920]). My starting point is Jacques Derrida’s (1994) famous argument about the “impossibility” of the gift, which annuls itself by its implicit expectation (a negative performative) of a return. I focus here on the idea of the “return” as one entry into a new approach to contemporary financial devices. Derrida’s argument about the logical impossibility of the pure gift is in fact anticipated in the very first pages of Mauss’s classic essay “The Gift,” in the perception by Mauss of the inner contradiction between the voluntary and the compulsory as well as the disinterested and the self- serving elements of the gift. Two facts about Mauss’s study have been lost from view. One is that his entire and fundamental interest throughout his essay is in the question of the force behind the obligation to return. The second point is that Mauss’s thorough archaeology of the gift (in both primitive and archaic societies) was wholly motivated by his interest in the moral force behind the modern contract (legal, impersonal, obligatory, etc.). Bearing these two points in mind allows us to understand better what may have been Mauss’s rich and only partial answer to his question, that is, that the obligation to return lay in the spirit of the thing given (the famous hau of Polynesia), which in turn provided a dynamic and forceful connection between giver and receiver, and the first giver and the second giver/returner, and so forth.

Streitbeendigung durch Eid. Überlegungen zu Ilias Ψ 579–595

Abstract In archaic societies the oath is not an explanation given in particular form by an official order, but, at the very most, a selfcondemnation and therefore, together with trial by ordeal and duel, a means to ending serious conflicts. In the early Greek epos there is only one single paragraph that still testifies to such a regulation (by πρόκλησις ‘challenge’, as the later term says); and less than 200 years later Xenophanes describes what happens when in the legal reality of more secular/enlightened societies the old piece of evidence remains preserved.

Two Birds of Paradise in North Holland, 1592: The Gift in the Exotic

Two Birds of Paradise in North Holland, 1592: The Gift in the Exotic

Archaic societies: diversity and complexity across the midcontinent

Archaic societies: diversity and complexity across the midcontinent

Alienation, the Cosmos and the Self

This paper is concerned with the alienation between the self and the cosmos. On the one hand, the binaries involved in this process (including the division between society and nature and between mental and manual labour) have been widely described and commented on. Social scientists and activists alike have shown that dichotomies of this kind are used by social elites to legitimate control over nature and over ‘inferior’ human beings. These insights are all vital but this paper attempts to combine them with elements of psychoanalysis. Binary ways of thought also appeal to elements (especially infantile elements) of the human psyche that divide parts of society and nature into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. These binaries are the product of psychic defence mechanisms operating under uncertain, challenging or difficult- to-understand circumstances. They result in a narcissistic rather than an anaclytic relation to the cosmos, one in which a divided cosmos is mirroring a divided self rather than (as in archaic societies) a self which develops in close relation to ‘others’ on which it depends. The paper concludes by arguing that a highly general, ‘universal’, knowledge of the cosmos and external nature is unstable and eminently challengeable.

Farewell Ritual and Transmigrating Souls: Secondary Funeral of the Attappadi Kurumbas

This article examines the ritual importance of the secondary funeral of the Kurumbas and places it in the context of tribal religion and social relations. Among a chain of ceremonies that mark a tribal funeral, secondary funeral is the most elaborate and ritually the most complex. Tribal people all over the world practice secondary funerals but in Kerala only two tribes, namely, Kurumbas and the Mudugas of Attappadi, practice it. As the most primitive tribal groups now living in Kerala, the cultural practices of these tribes are exceptionally relevant to the study of archaic societies. The ritual is an elaborate process and is the formal ceremony by which the souls of the dead of a fixed period are cheerfully sent to the world of the spirits with the accompaniment of song, music and blood sacrifice. It also involves the retrieval and reburial of the relics of the dead. Spirit worship and ancestor worship are the basic elements of the religion of the Attappadi tribes. Rituals like secondary funeral have diametrically opposite roles in a tribal society - while helping to maintain tribal unity and solidarity, it exhaust the surplus necessary for an economic growth. However, the advancing process of acculturation is bringing about a crisis in religious practices based on ancestor-cult and is a pointer to the slow but steady transformation.

PARA UM RETORNO GENEALÓGICO AO DIREITO: SOBRE A PASSAGEM DAS SOCIEDADES ARCAICAS PARA UMA SOCIEDADE RELIGIOSAMENTE CAPITALISTA

O Direito enquanto criacao humana, produto da linguagem, imprescindivelmente precisa de uma reflexao genealogica, que se volte as origens dos seus obscuros sentidos. Esse regresso possibilita um resgate para uma construcao do proprio Direito. A analise das sociedades arcaicas em suas relacoes de trocas identifica ja um sentido juridico e um paradigma social que existiu e de outras maneiras ainda e existente, no entanto, diferente da atual sociedade em que vivemos, uma sociedade re(produzida) de maneira religiosamente capitalista. Essa compreensao enseja um posicionamento tambem diferente em relacao ao Direito e a Justica.

Donjuán i Pan Niedziela

The essay provides an interpretation of a scene (dialogue Don luan - Monsieur Dimanche; IV, 2) from Molière's Dom luan ou le Festin de pierre in several complementing discursive orders. The first relates to the formal theory of cooperation (R. Axelrod, W. Hamilton), the second - to Marcel Mauss's essay, The Cift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, and the subsequent - to the typology of speech acts and subject's attitudes towards the order of signs. Models, created on this basis, serve as tools for the analysis of the relations between Don Juan, other people, God, and of his attitude to love, gift, obligations and death. The protagonist violates communication rules ordering society and its institutions. The destruction of the most important rule, the rule of reciprocity, shows simultaneously the cognitive mechanisms conditioning exchange, use of performatives, understanding of the sign as a tripartite structure of signifiersignified-designation.

Rasjonell solidaritet

Rational Solidarity The notion of rational solidarity may ap¬pear as a contradiction of terms at first glance to a sociologist, in that actors are either rational or solidary. This dichoto¬my, however, leads to problems, for in¬stance in explaining public allocations in the welfare state. This is because much sociological theory is based on the di¬stinction between homo economicus and homo sociologicus and therefore cannot have a concept of collective rationality. This is a self-imposed limitation created at the level of general theory in the so-called problem of order or collective action. This limitation is illustrated in an analysis of the works of Talcott Parsons, Jon Elster and Jürgen Habermas. In order to develop a concept of collec¬tive rationa¬lity, sociology must change some of its basic assumptions. Following the thoughts of Niklas Luhmann it must re¬place action and individuals with com¬munication as the basic unit of society. By doing so, it will be possible to appreci¬ate the fact that solidarity is not some¬thing typical of archaic societies or small groups, but rather a medium for the allocation of collective goods by the welfare state. The idea of rational solidarity sym¬bolizes the difference between individual and collective rationality as a unity: one should sacrifice individual opportuni¬ties to achieve collective goods and solve social problems. Taken as a medium for the allocation of collective goods, there is more to solidarity than Luhmann will admit: solidarity is the nexus of functio¬nal differentiation.