Why do We Need a Typology (Classification) and a Political Anthropological Meta-Language for Describing Post-Neolithic Pre-Modern Polities?
Journal: Social Evolution & History. Volume 24, Number 2 / September 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.30884/seh/2025.02.07
Aleksei S. Shchavelev
Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences; International Center of Anthropology, HSE University (National Research University ‘Higher School of Econom-ics’), Moscow, Russia
In the twenty-first century, historical science witnessed a rapid obsolescence of most conceptual models of history and meta-languages for describing societies of the past, especially the history of archaic, post-Neolithic pre-Modern, societies, i. e. the period of Ancient Times and the Middle Ages. Now historians-theorists in their majority steal bits of empirical data from practitioners (Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard [1961] wrote about this), not really understanding how they were obtained, while historians-practitioners often appropriate fragments of social theories from theorists without caring to understand the procedures of their elaboration and the axioms underlying them. Of course, the time of philosophers of history, who ignore descriptions of the reality of the past and present, has almost passed, but they have been replaced by compilers of various specialties who parasitize on the idiosyncrasy of researchers working with sources for broad generalizations. In contrast to the ‘narrow-minded’ empiricists who solemnly reject ‘new-fashioned theories’ and terminological systems developed within their frameworks, they continue to flourish, believing that in this way, they preserve their corporate identity. In fact, such a declarative rejection of any theory means that these ‘craftsmen’ simply use old theoretical schemes and zombie concepts developed in the century before last and outdated in the last century due to inertia. These guardians of empirical purity remain hostage to alien axiomatic assumptions and destructive memes, which emerged under conditions of strong ideologization of social sciences and humanities, with an obviously less factual basis.
The methodological relevance of the rhetorical question posed in my essay title is due to the fact that a number of types and directions of historical research do not require any special terminology to achieve their goals. Scholars in these fields usually use a combination of ‘cultural vocabulary’ from original sources and ‘natural language’ of researchers themselves, often including obsolete terms that have survived due to historiographic inertia and the conservatism of academic discourse. For example, the oxymoronic ‘retinue state’ and the zombie concept ‘feudalism’, as well as their various derivatives, still appear in Medieval studies. This does not prevent studying genealogies of ‘feudals’, determining dates of military campaigns of ‘retinues’ and reconstructing events in ‘states’, which do not have any features of statehood. Again, when describing the actions of rulers at any time or scale, one can still call them ‘tsars’, ‘kings’, ‘princes’ and so on, but the essence of the matter remains unchanged. Meanwhile, modern social disciplines, sociology, economics, political science, criminology, psychology, and sexology provide an optimal set of terms for describing any society. Thus, the definition of ‘racketeering’ (Tilly 1985) is much better and more accurate than the academically exalted ‘tribute,’ and ‘field commander,’ ‘power partner,’ or ‘warlord’ is much more accurate than ‘barbarian king’. I see the urgent need to reject the artificial archaization and outright sanctimony of the vocabulary of historical research.
As for the terminology used to describe political systems, political science, historical macro-sociology and political anthropology are optimal. However, even now modern Russian historians still use the primitive dichotomy ‘tribe vs state’, which is based on the immanent statism, i. e. a priori overestimation of the ‘state’, and a hidden colonial-racist underestimation of any people who ‘failed’ or ‘did not have time’ to create a ‘state’. As Petr Skalník (2004: 82) correctly points out, if we write ‘state’, it does not matter what adjective comes before it, ‘early’, ‘barbaric’, ‘archaic’, ‘patrimonial’, or even ‘headless’ (cf. Kra-din 2012), because the polity called ‘state’ will, one way or another, be perceived as approximately the same as a modern state and evaluated depending on the expressiveness of the signs of statehood. And it is even more methodologically stupid to summarize all the variety of types of archaic political systems under the meaningless definition of ‘tribe’.
If the researcher has an anthropological task to understand how this or that socio-political system is organized, or even more so if several societies are compared (Trigger 2003), it becomes necessary not only to analyze the original emic vocabulary, but also to have or develop an adequate ethical terminological system (Pike 1967; Headland, Pike, and Harris 1990).
This essay is my personal application of conceptualization of socio-cultural anthropological and macro-sociological theories to describe and analyze the Western Eurasian societies from the first to eleventh centuries, I am researching. I rely on the scale of levels of complexity of political organization by Allen W. Johnson and Timothy Earle (2000) and the classification proposed by Ted C. Lewellen (2003: 16–41). Now the world historiography of the Early Middle Ages has already produced a number of successful examples of this approach (Curta 2001: 311–334; Macháček 2009; Gibson 2012; Hodges 2012), while Russian scholars studying the Middle Ages and early Rus’ are still living in the ‘long nineteenth century’.
According to my observations in Western Eurasia during the first millennium AD, from the first to the eleventh centuries, the most common types were ‘bigmanship with bigmen-leaders’ and ‘bigmen associations’ (Sahlins 1963; Godelier and Strathern 1991; Whitley 1991), ‘simple and complex chiefdoms’ and their analogs (Skalník 2004; Earle 2021), and ‘early states’ (Claessen, Hagesteijn, and van de Velde 2008; Skalník 2009). To these classical types, we should add ‘koinoniacracy’ (‘archaic corporatocracy’), in which the functions of the chief and his lineage are performed by some socio-professional group (businessmen, warriors, or cultists) linked not by kinship-genealogical, but by mobilization-adoptive mechanisms. The bigman heads a decentralized polity that is an economic (production, exchange-trade, etc.) and communication network (negotiation, cult-ceremonial, military-mobilization, etc.). He acts as an organizer, coordinator and mediator in his society and represents it in external contacts. His power is personal and consensual, it cannot be inherited or multiplied, i. e. it can be transferred to relatives, descendants, and clients. Bigmen can create complex associations, often analogous to chiefdoms, and it is often a precursor of chiefdom. The chief is at the head of a centralized polity, his power is hereditary and performative, and his kin (blood and adopted) either constitute the elite, or are a privileged group within the elite. The main features of a chiefdom are, first of all, the presence of the figure of the chief and his lineage, whose members are political functionaries. The chiefdom has a functional analog of ‘koinoniacracy’ (from Ancient Greek ἡ κοινωνία, i. e. community, fellowship, or commonwealth for cooperation), in which the role of the chiefly lineage is played by some oligarchy, for example, an association of bigmen or a heterarchical community of warriors. The key feature of any ‘state’ of any level of complexity or scale, is the exercise of management and control by a socio-pro-fessional group of ‘general and specialized functionaries’, i. e. bureaucracy (Shchavelev 2021). The ‘state’ is a centralized polity in which the management of complex societies with pronounced social hierarchies and clear territorial boundaries is carried out by specialized bureaucrats using writing technology, special quantitative systems, and performative texts embodied in a multi-level and multi-component graphosphere (Goody 1996; Shchavelev 2021). Let me emphasize that we are talking about the most common types of political organization of different levels of complexity (Bondarenko, Grinin, and Korotayev 2011), whose diagnostic features are revealed through comparisons between cases from different regions of the world and different historical eras.
If we turn to specific historical cases, Florin Curta has exceptionally perceptibly shown that Slavic-speaking societies of the sixth–seventh centuries, well described in Byzantine and Latin sources, were headed by bigmen and chiefs (Curta 2001: 311–334). There is a classic example of a bigman named Samo, who in the seventh century led the community of ‘Sklavs-Vinids’. He coordinated trade operations on the borders of the Frankish kingdom and led the mobilization of Slavic border communities to fight against the Avars and the Franks (Wallace-Hadrill 1960: 39–40, 56–57, 63; Curta 2001: 59–61, 109, 115, 330–331, 343–344). Medieval Iceland appears in historiography as a unique political system, either as a unique form of state or as a complex society that was an alternative to the state. Scholars were fatally influenced by the mythologized national ideology of Iceland, supposedly a unique democracy with ‘the first parliament in Europe’ and the ‘oldest original legal system’ (even the most anthropologically minded Jesse Byock [2001] shares these misconceptions). In fact, Icelandic society was initially a large ‘dispersed village’, i. e., a network of family groups, then, it evolved into an association of bigmen (O. N. goði, pl. goðar). Finally, several proto-chiefdoms were formed on the island, with their leaders, the ‘stórgoðar’ and even the first local jarls, waging wars for the status of ‘paramount chief’ of the whole island (Andersson 1999; Sigurðsson 1999; Byock 2001; Jakobsson 2012). The trajectory of transformations of Icelandic society is quite similar to that of Hawaiian island communities (Kirch 2010). However, in Iceland, resources and historical time were insufficient even for the creation of a complex chiefdom and Hawaii has reached the level of an early state. Finally, the Rurikid polity in the Middle Dnieper area of the tenth century was an association of bigmen, a koinoniacracy of owners of homesteads and ships, then by the mid-tenth century, it ceased to be a chiefdom headed by the Rurikid lineage, and finally, only in the first half of the eleventh century it had an apparatus of special officials, which is a diagnostic sign of an early state (Shchavelev 2020). So, the presence of elaborated concepts of the main types of political systems allows us to see similar scenarios of evolution in societies with very different sociocultural characteristics, such as Iceland, Hawaii, Rus’ and the Slavs of the borders of the Byzantine and Frankish Empires.
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