My paper, and the book to which it refers, was a somewhat clumsy attempt to stimulate the sort of expert discussion presented in this issue. The comments presented here have already moved the debate well beyond my original argument, and I am grateful to all the reviewers for engaging with the argument so seriously.
It was bound to be a difficult and somewhat hubristic task, to try to present in a paper an argument that requires at least one book to substantiate. Some of the patchiness and errors of omission that Sergei Abashin and other commentators point to are the products of this compression.^[1] But in part they are the result of my trying to engage with a style of (originally anthropological) social theory that has been enormously influential in a wide range of literatures, many of which I cannot fully command. I accept that the safer path would have been to concentrate on a single case study and demonstrate the failings of the older kinship model properly (in the book I have tried to do this for the Mongol case). But this would have made it difficult to critique the wider model as a whole, since using this method one can really demonstrate only that it does not fit properly here, and this means it is entirely possible that the conventional approach is still good somewhere else. So I tried a bolder and more problematic approach – to sketch out, as well as I could, the sort of picture I saw emerging from the difficulties with the old model in different cases, in the light of the theoretical rejection of Morganian kinship theory in western anthropology. The result was always bound to be a rather imperfect one, and I felt from the outset that this was a polemical exercise, only worthwhile if it were able to stimulate the reflections of more expert scholars, such as we have in this issue.
I must stress that I do not wish to suggest that kinship is unimportant in any of the societies concerned. So I do not doubt the point that Sergei Abashin makes, that descent and kinship relations were important for the organization of daily life among common Kazakhs. Descent and kinship are of central importance in societies described as “state” and “tribal” alike. The question is whether this indicates a distinctive type of society that is more fundamentally organized by the principles of kinship than other types, so that we should categorize them as clan or tribal societies. Of course, aristocracy organizes society by principles of kinship – but it is the kinship of the elite that counts here and this is generally considered to be a political formation, at least in descriptions of European society. We have plenty of data on the importance of genealogy for steppe aristocracies, and that is to be expected. But the Morganian model assumed a general mode of bottom-up self-organization as a pre-state stage of social evolution, and it is this that we can now question. In the case of thirteenth-century Mongolia we do not have much information on how commoners constituted descent-groups, but what there is does not suggest they formed the “social building blocks” of the type suggested by the tribal model.
I fully accept the point Abashin makes that one can only very provisionally talk of “Soviet ethnography,” since a multitude of varied schools and streams existed throughout the Soviet era. In the book I do discuss some of the Soviet-era anthropology of nomads (for example, pp. 124–131), guided, I will readily confess, by my old teacher Ernest Gellner’s work State and Society in Soviet Thought, and I am sure that this is a very imperfect and sketchy treatment. However, my project is a critical engagement with “western representations of Inner Asia” as I indicate in the first line of the paper. I have tried to note some points where these narratives relate to Russian and other scholarly traditions – where, for example, western scholarship drew upon Soviet-era ethnography of Central Asia in constructing its own narratives. But it is for experts in these scholarly traditions to consider whether any analogous critique might be developed for their own fields or not.
Sergei Abashin reminds me of the dangers of conflating the tribe as a descriptive analytical term on the one hand, and as an ideological term of colonial administration on the other. He suggests clearly labeling these as separate problems and I can see the weight of this argument. All I would add is that in practice the meaning of the term “tribe” is continually jumping between these two registers, and here I was trying to examine some relationships between ideas. His other suggestion, to survey the various academic uses of the term “tribe” is also an excellent one. It was a project first undertaken in the western literature by Morton Fried in his 1975 monograph The Notion of Tribe.^[2] I see now that I should have summarized his work, and related contributions by scholars such as Kuper, Godelier, and Vail more fully in this paper.^[3] Abashin also wonders how structural-functionalist anthropology, which was noted for its anti-evolutionist stance, could now be said to have rationalized categories handed to it by nineteenth-century evolutionist thought. This is an interesting question, worthy of further investigation, although scholars such as Stocking and Kuper have already done a good deal of work on this, and I think this conclusion is no longer in doubt. As Stocking writes, by 1951 the structural-functionalism presented in authoritative works such as Notes and Queries on Anthropology had “in a peculiar way… re-evolutionized” descriptions of political authority, so that they became ranged “in implicit evolutionary fashion.”^[4] Structural-functionalist descent theory was very Morganian, and much of it was written in the colonial era when the idea of more and less primitive societies was still current, and tribes were simultaneously colonial administrative units and academic categories of analysis. There was, I guess, inevitable seepage between the “technical” vocabulary of political anthropology and the administrative language of practical organization.
I fear that Kradin and Skrynnikova have misrecognized my argument. I am not dismissing all forms of evolutionism and am not engaged in advancing post-processual archaeological theory in the way that Pauketat is. My aims are far more modest: to critically examine the application of some particular nineteenth-century theories of social evolution and their influence on a field of western scholarship.^[5] This is not to accuse previous scholars of any sort of “colonial conspiracy.” Scholarship is always a child of its time and this is often seen more clearly in retrospect. For much of the twentieth century the clan-tribe model used by western scholars was a sensible enough choice at a time when contemporary ethnographers described the tribal structure of pastoral societies as distinctive and characteristic.^[6] But this is no longer the case. Within western anthropology the tribe as an analytic term has been dropped,^[7] its supposed internal structure critiqued,^[8] and the idea of pastoral nomadic society as a distinctive social type all but abandoned.^[9] Maurice Godelier, a leading figure in western Marxist anthropology in the 1970s, for example, has come to the conclusion that there could never be such a thing as a kin-based society.^[10]
Whether or not we can ever know if Godelier is right, Morganian kinship theory is now largely seen as discredited in western anthropology. Those working in this field of scholarship are more or less bound to consider the task of attempting some sort of reevaluation of the older applications of the clan-tribe model to Inner Asian societies. Since I share Kradin and Skrynnikova’s dislike of critical discourses that make no positive contribution, I have tried to identify, very tentatively, analytical terms and directions in response to the collapse of nineteenth-century evolutionary kinship theory. These are to suggest that the structures of kinship and descent that we can most clearly discern are those of aristocracy; that power relations can no longer be assumed to flow from the bottom up as an aspect of the pre-state segmentary kinship system supposed by older models; that we might try to avoid the older connotations of words such as “clan” by finding another term for aristocratic descent groups – such as “house”; that instead of approaching pastoral nomadism as an ideal type associated with a particular stage of general sociocultural evolution and limiting its social complexity, we view it as a political economy that in any given case might not be necessarily simpler than a given agricultural system, or necessarily separated from it. In view of the scholarship that now stresses the frequent historical entanglements and connections between steppe and sedentary societies,^[11] I suggested that we might investigate comparable aristocratic orders found in both, and examine the state-like processes entailed by aristocratic rule. For some, such as Kradin and Skrynnikova, this is far too radical a break with the older models. For others, such as Munkh-Erdene, these suggested revisions are a good start but do not go far enough. Munkh-Erdene’s fascinating proposal is that polities such as the Xiongnu not only reproduced the power relations of the state in such a way that they were internalized by their subjects, but also could be said to have generated their own form of governmentality. Such a process would help to explain how Chinggisid legitimacy was so thoroughly accepted in the societies subject to their rule. I have not felt able to go this far, given the evidence available to me. But Munkh-Erdene, whose work I found to be inspirational, has an unrivaled command of relevant material. I have a feeling that exploration of this question will accumulate evidence to support Munkh-Erdene’s proposal. I also appreciate the danger he points to of reproducing the image of a “timeless and unchanging” steppe society (now labeled “aristocratic” rather than “tribal”). I can only say that I hope this can be avoided. Various sorts of aristocratic order have existed in most of Europe for much of its history, and pointing this out does not imply that it is unchanging or timeless. We can at least make a start by avoiding the tribal model, which has a closer association with notions of static traditional society.
I fear, however, that any elaboration or further substantiation of this line of argument will never satisfy Kradin and Skrynnikova. They have chosen a strategy of intelligent adaptation of the older model, with notions such as “supercomplex chiefdom,” whereas I have chosen to break with it and search, rather painfully, for some new tools.^[12] In my view, if we are to use terms for comparative analysis of different societies they should be as genuinely comparative as possible. If the term “chiefdom” could be renewed and applied to all polities that matched its technical criteria^[13] it might serve in this way, but this is not a likely prospect. Each one of the hundred or so petty rulers of seventh-century Ireland is commonly termed a “king,” for example, despite the fact that these rulers governed a few thousand people at best and could easily fit Earle’s criteria of a chiefdom. The hereditary ruler of the Bemba, however, governing some 140,000 aristocrats and commoners, was termed a “paramount chief” in both British colonial administration and anthropology. Numerous European dukedoms, principalities, and kingdoms might be termed “chiefdoms” with just as much reason as the Bemba, but our chances of convincing historians of Europe to change their terminology are poor, and, unless they did, our scholarship would tend to reproduce colonial-era descriptions in which, broadly speaking, certain parts of the world had chiefdoms and others had grand duchies, kingdoms, and so on. If, in the end, by these terms we mean the subjects and territories of one or more hereditary rulers, my own inclination is to begin with the language of aristocracy, not nineteenth-century evolutionary theory.
Richard Lim’s expert introduction to the classical debates adds a depth of understanding that was lacking from my work. Again, as with other areas of specialist knowledge, I am content if my understanding is more right than wrong. He raises some excellent points, including the difficulty of dealing with Durkheim’s subtle and voluminous works in a compressed way. It is too easy to seem dismissive of this important sociological figure and his views on archaic Greek and Roman society. But I think that the argument Durkheim used to try to counter that of Szanto and Hopzapfel looks weaker now than when he first made it. The objection that their scheme provided no explanation for the universality of tribes seems somewhat circular, since the perceived universality depended upon scholarly agreement on the applicability of the term “tribe.” But by the late twentieth century the notion of the tribe was so problematic in western anthropology that most scholars avoided it as an analytic term,^[14] and even those scholars who retained it had to concede that a definition of the tribe was “virtually impossible to produce.”^[15] No agreement, then, on even what the word should mean, let alone its universal existence. Durkheim had relatively little by way of ethnographic material with which to work. Godelier might be quite wrong to conclude there never was such a thing as a kin-based society, but he can at least draw on a century of anthropological enquiry that was unavailable to Durkheim.
Lim is quite right to be cautious about my claim that “[c]omprehensive kinship organization, where it appeared, seems to have been a product of the state, not a precursor to it,” and points out that since we know next to nothing about what pre-state social forms were like, we should not assume they did not resemble the kinship structures proposed by Morgan. Strictly speaking, I should have put this point more cautiously – that there is no evidence to suggest that comprehensive kinship organization, where it appeared, was a precursor to the state, and not a product of it. But, for the sake of argument, I wanted to go a little further than that. Although we are faced with a lack of good evidence, we do have a series of studies that all point toward a similar conclusion. In his study of Arab kinship, for example, Paul Dresch notes “The first segmentary, total genealogy, whose form was later taken as typical of certain “stateless” societies, was thus the product of a growing state.”^[16] Comparable processes are described in the Korean,^[17] Manchu,^[18] and Chinese cases.^[19] In each case, kinship structures once taken as original “traditional” political forms appeared as products of particular historical circumstances and are linked to the expanding state. So I used the phrase “seems to have been” here rather than “was” because although we cannot be absolutely sure, this is what the balance of evidence suggested to me.
Here I should stress that by “comprehensive kinship organization” I do not mean just the tracing of descent or the existence of genealogy. I mean the systematic ordering of social life by an inclusive kinship structure such as Morgan proposed. This is where I would agree with Adrienne Edgar that genealogy is of enormous importance in the study of the Middle East and Central Asia, and the exploration of various forms of genealogical imagination is a fascinating topic for investigation. But genealogy and descent are important in virtually every society and, in my view, this can no longer be taken as distinctive of some special “tribal” type. I cannot respond to all the points Edgar raises here, but many of them are addressed in my book. The Irons’ Turkmen ethnography, for example, is examined in chapter five.^[20] But I must clarify my position once again: I do not wish to argue that “kinship structures have no indigenous... significance.” Quite the reverse. Kinship is of crucial importance in aristocratic social orders and it is linked to power, which one could term structural. And this is my point – that the notion of tribal society, and the various models devised to try to characterize it, have tended to draw our attention away from aristocracy. Of course “tribal aristocracy” has been a well-recognized descriptive term for some time, why not simply stick to that? My answer is that the first part of the term has become a largely empty one for anthropologists who have found no way to define it or agree upon its distinctiveness, and it remains so entangled with colonial-era descriptions of “less civilized” societies that we simply do not need the headache of trying to “purify” the term by explaining why in one way or another the society concerned does not fit the older uses of the term.^[21]
I agree with Sergei Glebov that the interesting task for scholars of the Russian empire is to investigate the particular historical conditions in which the naming and classifying of populations have occurred, and this would require a very different sort of study. Similarly, the early meanings of the term rod and their application in administration is a specialist topic that I am not qualified to write about, except perhaps to remark on some of the most obvious features. However, I would not myself assume that European notions of social evolution or kin-organized society date from Hegel. This is an older and a deeper theme that I cannot begin to do justice to here, but Montesquieu in the Spirit of the Laws presents an early version of the sort of savagery – barbarism – civilization scheme that became important in nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, remarking that the difference between savage and barbarous nations was that “the former are dispersed clans, which for some particular reason, cannot be joined in a body; and the latter are commonly small nations, capable of being united. The savages are generally hunters; the barbarians are herdsmen and shepherds.”^[22] I should add that although I do use the word “colonial,” I do not actually employ the term “colonialist” to describe the language of tribe and clan in nineteenth-century Russian empire, and would certainly not wish to “dismiss it” as such. And I do not pretend to have any sort of improved historical understanding of the reality of life under tsarist administration – these are matters for specialists. I only indicate a connection between the European mechanism of colonial power and modernist social science in passing, since this is – as Glebov remarks – very obvious. I am just trying to point out discrepancies and difficulties with the application of the old Morganian model of kinship organization, and to see where this line of reasoning might lead when approaching ethnonationalist thought.
I also agree with Glebov that it would be ironic, to say the least, if a highly social constructivist approach such as the one used here were to end up being used to support essentialist constructions of ancient ethnic “peoples” in the national-populist mode – a point that Abashin also makes. I trust we are safe from this danger, since I cannot imagine any self-respecting elite finding anything of interest in my work that is not expressed far better somewhere else. In any case, I am not sure one should avoid trying to make an argument one finds convincing, just because others might misinterpret it.
This brings me to Valerie Kivelson’s perceptive comments on the importance of academic micro-environments. She quite rightly points out that my position is a reaction to the previously dominant trends in my field, and can only be read against this backdrop. Her fascinating account of changing approaches to the history of early modern Russia reveals a sort of mirror-image line of argument, where a statist mode of historical imagination generated a reaction that was articulated in the language of kinship, clan, and lineage. Like the old question as to whether the glass is half-empty or half-full, we can see this as a difference in emphasis rather than contradiction. In aristocracy, kinship and genealogical descent are central to the project of rulership. The relationship between kinship and politics, be they Chinggisid or Muscovite, seem bound to be a subject of comparative analysis. The impulse of those within a (historical) tradition dominated by the statist mode to push toward an (anthropological) one dominated by models of kinship seems complimentary to the movement of anthropologists in the opposite direction. Among the anthropologists who have also attempted to “bring the state back in,” as Kivelson puts it, is Michael Meeker in his 2002 work A Nation of Empire on the Ottoman legacy in Turkey. Meeker not only reveals how the rule of hereditary elites constituted the substrata of state power, but provides another example of how easily representations of an unfamiliar society were distorted by anthropological notions of kinship structure. Rather than clan society, standing in contrast to the state, as he first thought, Meeker found he was looking at something very different, a society that was thoroughly shaped by state power. This posed a problem for standard theories of the state. The features of local order that Meeker had encountered, local hereditary elites wielding forms of sovereign power, were thought to be characteristic of a lack of state power, and yet Meeker shows that it was precisely these forms that constituted state power in the region. He notes that this requires “a theory of a society within, rather than against, the state.”^[23]
I accept that my argument is sweeping, as Edgar points out. But I think there is sometimes a place for this when attempting a wider reexamination of our analytical vocabulary. In debating social science terminology one can never do much more than scratch the surface of the many applications of a widely used term such as tribe or clan, and although I can go a little further in my book, it is still a highly selective and patchy engagement with the literature. I can only hope to indicate a possible “direction of travel,” and see whether any of the points I make match the interests of others working in related fields.