David Sneath is a well-known anthropologist of contemporary Inner Asia. He co-edited two important collections on the topic and co-authored a well-received book devoted to pastoral economies and cultures of post-Socialist Inner Asia.^[1] The article published in Ab Imperio presents the ideas and conclusions of several of his early papers as summarized in his most recent monograph The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).^[2] This book has already been evaluated in professional periodicals.^[3] Sneath summarizes The Headless State for AI, but the book is naturally broader in its coverage. We therefore address some of the ideas that Sneath has omitted in the summary article.
Both the article and the book are profoundly anti-evolutionist, having been conceived under the obvious influence of Edward Said, Benedict Anderson, and Adam Kuper. This anti-evolutionist stance characterizes the current stage of development of Western anthropology and archaeology. Practically all major Western textbooks assert that evolutionism is an outdated concept. In order to join the clan of postmodernist anthropologists one need only repeat this “ritual incantation.” Sometimes this seems ridiculous and makes one wonder why any American textbook on archaeology or anthropology still features terms used by neo-evolutionists (such as local band, chiefdom, early state, national state, etc.). Can we not assume that the last 50,000 years of human life have witnessed tremendous changes? Or that until fairly recent times the majority of humanity was organized into small local groups and lived by hunting and gathering? Where did neo-evolutionists assert that all peoples should follow a single path through all stages of the evolutionary ladder? It seems that today we are seeking new explanatory models of the past, while old theories are indeed inadequate in many ways. In the absence of new theories, we have only critical discourses that fail to make a positive contribution. Sneath’s book illustrates this tendency. In this sense it reminds one of another revisionist work by T. Pauketat on the treatment of chiefdoms in American archaeology.^[4] Both authors use the same odd approach: first, they construct a grotesque model of evolutionism and then they engage enthusiastically deconstructing it. We personally do not know a single nomadologist who would use the evolutionary scheme that Sneath ascribes to our field: tribe – ethnos – nation. His criticism may appear convincing to those outside of the field but it is rather puzzling to those who are well acquainted with the works of the researchers he attacks in the book. Sneath oversimplifies their views. For example, he passionately rejects as colonial the theory of “egalitarian nomads,” which, in his opinion, was invented to emphasize the backwardness and primitive nature of pastoral peoples. This explains the usage by colonial anthropologists of terms such as clan and tribe to account for the political systems of nomads. Sneath finds the same negative connotations in the term chiefdom.
Indeed, many anthropologists admit that the social organization of nomads is less complex than the elaborated bureaucratic institutions of agrarian civilizations. But is this not obvious? However, it is not fair to claim that all anthropologists consider egalitarianism to be the single chief characteristic of nomads. Thomas Barfield, Peter Golden, and Anatoly Khazanov, with whose works Sneath engages, do not deny that nomads were capable of establishing the early state.^[5] Even those who reject such a possibility do not claim that mobile pastoral societies were primitive and egalitarian.^[6]
Many of Sneath’s statements are surprising. For example, he writes that the term “tribe” was coined by Lewis Morgan, whose intentions Sneath criticizes. But this is a questionable interpretation, as the term was present in English long before Morgan used it. It goes back to the Latin tribus. Its Russian equivalent – plemia – originates from the ancient Slavic word. Similar words exist in Czech, Polish, Croatian, and other Slavic languages. A. I. Levshin’s book on Central Asian nomads, which Sneath mentions as an example of Morgan’s influence on the semantics of “tribe,” was written several decades before Morgan’s work. In fact, Levshin was writing before evolutionism came into the picture and before social anthropology established itself as a science. Therefore, he could not participate in the “global conspiracy” of Western anthropologists against nomads.
Sneath also assumes that all ancient and medieval sources on nomads that feature terms such as “clan” and “tribe” were incorrectly translated into European languages. How should we account for this? Was it another “world conspiracy,” only this time by historians – from Herodotus and Sima Qian to Morgan and Vladimirtsov? Can we not assume that all of these intellectuals simply saw the difference between the social organization of nomads and the institutions of settled societies, and this encouraged them to use specific categories to describe the former?^[7]
Sneath overstretches the argument about biased translation to make his analysis even more intriguing. Take his criticism of scholars who translated from the Latin notes of European travelers of the thirteenth century (Pp. 89–90). Sneath found evidence that in the Latin originals Mongolian leaders were presented in terms that are also applicable to European medieval aristocracy. In the twentieth century, European translators substituted these terms for definitions of the tribal society. For Sneath, this fact confirms the total participation of European anthropologists and translators in a colonial conspiracy, on the one hand, and aristocratic (as opposed to tribal) organization of the Mongol society, on the other.
We disagree with such a view. Giovanni Plano Carpini and William Rubruck described Mongol society in terms of their own European feudal society (etic), and not in Mongolian terms (emic). We have no way of knowing for sure what modern-day translators were thinking when they made changes in the translated texts. In our opinion, they were guided by the fact that Mongolian khans differed from European dukes. We are skeptical about the “conspiracy theory.” If Sneath knew Russian, he would be able to read the translation by A. I. Malein, who retained original Latin terms and used them to designate the titles of both Mongols and Europeans. Following Sneath’s logic, such use of the same system of designations indicates that the Russian historian was anticolonial.
Another citation pertains to the main conclusion of Sneath’s book: Plano Carpini describes Mongolian society in a way that makes the metaphor of the “headless society” (and the title of Sneath’s book) simply irrelevant:

“The emperor of the Tartars has wonderful power over everyone. No one dares camp anywhere unless the emperor himself assigns the place. He himself assigns where the generals stay, the generals assign the millenarii their place, the millenarii assign the centenarii their place, and the centenarii the decani their place.”^[8]

Can such a society be called “headless?”^[9] We suggest that European travelogues call for a different interpretation. They project a typical etic view of Chinggis Khan’s empire characteristic of foreign diplomats. An emic vision can be distilled only from the Mongolian texts. Their original semantics is not always easy to translate into the language of contemporary anthropology, but the image of a nomadic society produced by these texts is very far from the hierarchical Leviathan.^[10] We therefore believe that nomadic empires cannot be equated with states. We understand the latter in Ernst Gellner’s sense,^[11] while for nomadic empires we prefer general yet precise terms such as the “supercomplex chiefdom.”^[12]
An analysis of the original Mongolian terms suggests that they could have been used in a number of senses. The most important role appears to have been played by the obog, affiliation with which was determined by the kinship links expressed through the term urug. A group of people denoted by this term may exist within the obog, but may also split from it, constituting a new group. As a part of a group, urug denotes lineage, and as such this term is used most frequently in the text of the “Secret History.” It was necessary to be a kinsman (urug) in order to have the right to take part in the group sacrificial ritual at a burial place. The group rituals could only be performed by members of the respective groups, and regulation of the performance of such rituals was one of the group functions.
In the “Secret History” one can also trace the relation between the notions obog and irgen. This relation is expressed in the fact that the obog becomes the basis of another social unit that takes the group’s name. This form is denoted in the source as irgen, ulus, or ulus irgen, where those terms appear to be virtually synonymous. The use of two different words derived from the languages of two different linguistic groups (Turkic ulus and Manchurian irgen) with the same meaning is explained by the complex polyethnic composition of the Mongols who in this era were at the stage of active ethnogenesis. In the Mongolian source the term irgen is also used to denote, for example, the Tatars in general and particular groups of Tatars, Mongols and Kiyats (part of the Mongols); the forest peoples in general, or, say, one of these peoples, the Tumats, and so forth.^[13]
All this testifies that we are dealing here with a rather typical cross-cultural phenomenon. For example, in the Byzantine sources the term ethnos was used to denote both all Huns in general and their parts – the Avars, the Sabirs, and so on. Herodotus used the term ethnos for all Scythians in general and for separate peoples living in Scythia. The social unit denoted by the Mongolian terms irgen and ulus was not a state. Both terms are very close in meaning to the Greek ethnos with its meanings “people, ethnic group, tribe.” Study of the terms irgen and ulus that were used in the ethnic as well as political senses has shown that in Mongol society of this era, political consciousness coincided with ethnic consciousness, which attests to the undifferentiated character of the social consciousness and the pre-state organization of Mongol society. The identity of ethnic and political consciousness is witnessed not only by the ethnic/political polysemy of the above-mentioned terms but also by the partial identity of their meaning with the meaning of the term obog.
Undoubtedly, part of David Sneath’s important contribution lays in his denial of tribal and clan institutions in late medieval and early modern Mongol society. However, the reality was much more complex. Kinship has always coexisted with territorial organization in nomadic societies. Since medieval sources do not provide us with adequate data regarding the local institutions of Mongolian society, we extrapolate from the available Buryat data. This is not proof by itself, but it gives an idea of a social complexity that Sneath overlooks. Moreover, it reminds us of the ongoing importance of kinship in contemporary social practices. As anthropologists, we routinely observe this phenomenon during our field research.
As our informants indicate, a group of relatives gathering together for a sacral ceremony at the burial place of the ancestor-shaman usually includes both close (cousins, second cousins) and distant relatives living in different parts of Buryatia. Some of them no longer share a last name, but all are connected by blood kinship and are designated as urgaa or manay uraguud (“our relatives by blood”). According to one informant, in his group the ceremony is led by the grandfather who is the oldest representative of uraga/uruga. The name of this kinship group is Shaglantan urag and it belongs to a community whose self-designation is Tertee ug garbaltan (“Tertee by descent” – in Buryat ethnology, Tertee is the designation of one of the Buriat clans) and it unites a number of blood-related urags. Even now this extended group meets once every three to four years at a certain ancestral place by the river.
So, several urags formed the structure that can be called clan or kin, or rod in Russian (Buryat obog/otog/omog, aimag, esege). This was first and foremost a genealogical structure. Constant population mobility can hardly explain the coincidence of Buryat kin with their administrative-economic unites. The nineteenth-century Russian colonial officials classified the Buryat clan (Russian rod) as an administrative unit. As the governor-general of Eastern Siberia wrote in 1858:

“It happens often that nomadic inorodtsy (aliens) attributed to a particular kin leave it because of the lack of suitable lands and for hunting and relocate to other quite distant places; having found there more sufficient means for existence, they settle in these new places and create nomadic camps (kochev’e) for a permanent stay.”^[14]

As this quotation suggests, kin were a conglomerate of representatives of different kinship groups. The conglomerate got its name from one, usually the most numerous, group, which also functioned as this kin’s economic and administrative center. However all groups assembled in this unit retained memory of their lineage.^[15] Groups that were breaking away from the major urag could maintain their names and join other units. These communities consisting of related and unrelated urags were also designated as kin and called by the name of the nuclear kin. The merging of clans resulted in the formation of so-called territorial-administrative communities or simply administrative clans. Under these circumstances, kinship became tightly interwoven with administrative and territorial institutions. Genealogy and kinship continued to play an important social role in regulating and legitimizing ritual activities and everyday functioning of the society and in providing a basis for group identity.
Thus, we arrive at a view of ethnicity as a situational phenomenon. Individuals may change it (extend it or narrow it) depending on different personal, political, economic, and other interests. Ethnic identity is unstable, it heavily depends on the presence or absence of cultural boundaries with a neighboring ethnic group. Ethnicity is continually restructured, reinvented, and disputed.^[16]
The dynamics of political units under Chinggis Khan provides a good example of stability of the kin relationship. It is generally accepted that Chinggis Khan completely destroyed kinship and tribal institutions and instead introduced the decimal system. Take, however, the “Jami’u’t-tawarikh,”^[17] which lists all Chinggis Khan’s military chiefs and at least half of the members of the “thousands” of left and right hands of the Mongolian empire. As this chronicle testifies, in 21 of the 54 cases mentioned, the “thousands” units were composed on the basis of a single ethnic group. In 22 cases, the positions of “heads of thousand soldiers” were inherited by children and relatives.^[18]
In spite of Chinggis Khan’s intention to destroy the tribal system, the task proved impossible even for him. This was already obvious at the first kurultai (national assembly), which assembled after Chinggis Khan’s death (see “Secret History” § 269):

“In the Year of the Rat (1228), the princes of the right hand headed by Ca’adai and Batu; the princes of the left hand headed by Otcigin Noyan, Yegii and Yisiingge; the princes of the centre headed by Tolui; the princesses, the imperial sons-in-law, the commanders of ten thousand and those of a thousand, all assembled in full force at Kode’ii Aral on the Kelüren River. In accordance with the very decree by which Cinggis Qa’an had nominated him they installed Ogodei Qa’an as qan.”^[19]

The order of listing of the kurultai participants deserves special attention. The first mentioned are those whose influence was restricted during Chinggis Khan’s rule – his sons, brothers, and other blood relatives. The non-blood relatives (relatives by marriage) follow. And only then are military commanders named.
Even more indicative in this respect is § 280 of the “Secret History.” It opens with a direct statement:

“Thereupon Ogodei Qa’an said, “Elder brother Cha’adai and Batu, and the other brothers, princes of the right hand – all of them; Otchigin Noyan and Yegü, and the other brothers, all the princes of the left hand; the princesses and sons-in-law of the centre, and the commanders of ten thousand, of a thousand, of a hundred and of ten, have all together approved the following...”^[20]

As these quotations show, the status of Chinggis Khan’s relatives was higher than that of his faithful comrades in arms. Does this fact not attest to the striking endurance of the nomadic tribal system that regenerated itself immediately after the death of Chinggis Khan, who in fact sought to destroy it? So far, this system has survived the reforms of “Man of the Second Millennium”, as well as European colonialism, and the Soviet totalitarian system.^[21] Even the Mongolian retinue (keshik) that traditionally formed on the basis of the personal loyalty of retainers to their lord, transformed under the Yuan Dynasty into a family enterprise. According to the “Secret History” (§ 227), the posts of commanders of four guards (at the time of Chinggis Khan, each guard served for one day out of every four days) had been hereditary since the time of Khubilai.^[22] In general, in the social organization of pastoral nomads, real kinship, fictive kinship, and territorial organization coexisted in complex relationships that constantly supported and reproduced each other.
Sneath offers an interesting and important constructivist interpretation of the politics of ethnicity in Inner Asia. He is undoubtedly right in saying that nomadic empires were not nations in the contemporary meaning of the term (one should note that none of today’s nomadologists considers the polities of Inner Asia to be nations either^[23]). More likely, this view was typical of ancient Chinese historians: Chinese chronicles paint the fall of the steppe empires in Inner Asia as the replacement of one nation by another. This is obviously a false picture: it was the elite (and the name of a given empire) that changed, while different nomadic groups continued living on the same steppe territories. Sneath stresses this point both in his book and in the AI article, and here we agree with many of his observations. We only regret that Sneath ignores work by Russian scholars. This is indeed strange (to say the least): as a Don Quixote of modern anthropology, he attacks the windmills of colonialism, but relies exclusively on the works of English-speaking scholars. Sneath’s historiographic choices represent, in our view, a typical example of academic colonialism.^[24]
In a number of works (which could help to further elaborate Sneath’s argument) we have provided a detailed analysis of ethnic dynamics in Inner Asia.^[25] Therefore, we limit ourselves here to the most general snapshot of the ethnic situation in the region at the turn of twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Kinship units of different ethnic identities took part in forming the Mongolian Empire. We can reconstruct these identities and boundaries between groups by analyzing the usage of ethnic/political terms in the original Mongolian medieval texts. The borders of cultural, geographical, and political commonality were drawn within the context of traditional power and political culture. Limiting access to power was one of the main objectives in the formation of a hierarchy of identities. Ethnic configurations as they had been constructed in the political practices of the Mongol Ulus allowed for the expression of duality through different codes: Tayichi’ud – Nukuz – Chino – Borjigin – Borte-Chino, and Mongol – Kiyat – Ghoa-Maral. The establishment of the Mongolian Empire by Ghinggis Khan and the designation of the ruling elite by the double ethnonym, Kiyat-Borjigin, signified an important stage of population politics in the region. If the second half of the twelfth century was characterized by a struggle for power between two leading ethnic groupings (Mongols and Taidziuts), Chinggis Khan’s rule signified the Mongols’ victory. Yet the processes of Mongolization described in the “Secret History” and the “Jami’u’t-tawarikh” cannot be understood as ethnic by nature (ethnogenesis). These were political processes, and thus the story of Mongolization under Chinggis Khan is the story of politogenesis.
We cannot pretend to reconstruct an accurate historical picture of this development, but we can identify some of the main tendencies of ethno- and politogenesis among the early Mongols. For this, we should keep in mind that the same name often serves as a general (urug, obog, yasun) or specific ethnic (obog, irgen, ulus) marker, or as a marker of power and polity. While general and ethnic usage of the terms presupposed some degree of homogeneity, political usages of the same terms allowed for heterogeneity of the defined units. Political terms were often interchangeable and were used in the texts in similar contexts. Undoubtedly, this makes interpretation difficult. It seems quite plausible, however, that alongside the common meaning of the name Mongol (as well as Borjigin), another – social – meaning formed. In this later meaning, Mongol referred to a military unit headed by the chief (the texts allow us to speculate that the first of the known chiefs was Khabul Khan). Thus the borders of the Mongol community broadened and the term started to be used as a marker of ethnic identity and designator of alliances of ethnic groups (warriors/nukers/bogols were included in the collective and the term bogol – meaning subordinate relation – was reinterpreted to mean a structure of connected social groups).^[26]
In conclusion, we want to emphasize that David Sneath set upon an impossible task – to critically deconstruct definitions of contemporary scholarship such as “kinship society,” “tribe,” and “feudalism.” Precisely these three concepts stimulated most of the discussion among anthropologists (especially kinship society and tribe) and historians (especially feudalism). As one scholar has remarked, these are “damned terms.” They are used in various contexts and their usage and meaning are treated in extensive bibliography. We still have no consensus about these categories, and it can probably never be achieved. Indeed, the genie has been out of the bottle for a while. Some of Sneath’s revisionist ideas about this genie are correct, yet many of his other ideas miss the point. Sneath challenges a few analytical constructs but at the same time creates another, no less questionable, set of mental configurations (“aristocratic pastoral order,” “headless state”). By showing that nomads were not primitive barbarians he significantly contributes to the anticolonialist trend. However, nomadic social structure was very far from the model of aristocratic hierarchy Sneath has constructed. Rejecting a unilinear evolutionism, he arrives at a similar result: he denies a difference between European medieval aristocrats and Inner Asia elite. This is a step backward that resembles the concept of patriarchal feudalism stated by Soviet Marxist anthropologists of the first half of 1930s. The nomadic world is too distinctive, and scholars should find ways to account for this distinctiveness. We do it by creating the nomadic “conceptual alternative,” that is, working with concepts such as “supercomplex chiefdom” and “xenocratic stateless nomadic empire.”^[27] The future and our colleagues’ objective judgment should determine whose approach – Sneath’s or ours – is closer to truth.