The Headless State

Since the colonial era, representations of Inner Asia's traditions and history have been dominated by images of fierce and free nomads, organized into clans and tribes. After years of extensive anthropological fieldwork, however, David Sneath has found that these representations have no basis in historical fact. Rather, they have their roots in nineteenth-century evolutionist social theory, which saw kinship as the organizing principle in a nonstate society.In his revolutionary new book, Sneath aggressively dispels the myths surrounding the history of steppe societies and proposes a new understanding of the nature and formation of the state. He 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. Consequently, the distinction between state-organized and stateless societies becomes meaningless, and a more accurate picture of steppe life emerges. Aristocrats determined the size, scale, and degree of centralization of political power, and the history of the region shows no clear distinction between a highly centralized, stratified "state" society and an egalitarian, kin-based "tribal" society. With this book, Sneath challenges the legitimacy of the tribal model, which continues to distortscholarship on the history of Inner Asia.