Scholars inhabit particular academic micro-environments, and the battles we choose to fight derive as much from the rhythms and themes of our subfields, our intellectual homes or battlegrounds, as from shared issues animating debate across the disciplines. David Sneath’s biting critique of the intellectual history and uses of the terms “clan,” “tribe,” and “ethnos” unmasks the colonial politics inherent in the way those terms have been deployed in the study of non-European, particularly Inner Asian nomadic societies. His essay, a model of clarity, brevity, and insight, casts a merciless light on the systematic obfuscations and deliberate denials of evidence required to maintain a kinship-based picture of tribal societies. Sneath has little tolerance for the work of anthropologists and historians complicit in the ongoing colonial enterprise of consigning “other” societies to an organic, prepolitical state of clan connections and consanguinity, while reserving the far more desirable condition of political state-building to the evolutionarily more advanced nations. What Sneath has accomplished here is extraordinary. He efficiently encapsulates over a century of work on nomadic societies, establishing not only its imperial and social evolutionary roots but also the hard work that has gone into maintaining the earlier vision in the face of contradictory evidence. He writes: “The era of European colonialism powerfully exported the term ‘tribe’ as an administrative category and established it as a description of collective identity throughout much of the colonized world.” “The true grounds for the term had always been to distinguish civilized from barbaric societies.” Sneath’s animosity toward these concepts clearly stems from the iron grip they hold on his field of study and the objectionable implications of the ways they have been deployed.
In reading his critique, what strikes me is not only how compelling his argument is but also how differently the same sets of terms resonate in different historiographical contexts. From the perspective of early modern Russian history, my own area of expertise, the lines of engagement have been very differently constituted, and the politics of intellectual opposition almost inverted. The scholarly traditions of Muscovite and early Imperial Russian historiography have endowed the notions of “kinship” and “lineage” with entirely different political valences. In particular, the positions of dominant and revisionist approaches are precisely the opposite of those Sneath describes.
Russia has generally been included, though grudgingly and with reservations, in the family of European nations. Perhaps in part for that reason, the language of clan and tribe has rarely been invoked in connection with Russian history, except to the extent that Russianists have been drawn to the concept of “patrimonialism.” This notion appealed to nineteenth-century authors working in a Hegelian mode, whereby an early stage of history was governed by a “kinship principle” (rodovoe nachalo), which was destined to give way to a more rational “state principle” (gosudarstvennoe nachalo). Even within this model, however, patrimonialism and kinship denoted concentration of power at the top and center, in the hands of the patrimonial ruler. For the most part, the story of Russia’s historical development has been severely constrained by a state-centered, top-down model. According to this statist imagination, the amorphous, disaggregated mass that was the Russian people could formulate no impulse toward organization. The state alone, under the leadership of strong rulers and expansive institutions, offered a unifying and mobilizing core, for good or for ill. Russia’s entry into the pages of history came thanks to the top-down efforts of an ambitious and activist state structure. Statist historians noted the inability of the population to move beyond its chaotic formlessness in the earliest chapters of the Rus’ chronicles, when the people, understanding their own lack of political ability or vision, invited the Varangians to come rule over them. The same statist conception pervades the picture of Russia throughout its history, and across the political spectrum. The conservative Karamzin, writing in the early nineteenth century, attributed all of Russia’s post-Muscovite dynamism to the energy of Peter the Great and the state system he introduced, one that was capable of wresting Russia out of its stupor and into an age of growth and mastery. Even Gramsci famously wrote, “In Russia the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed.”^[1] In the land of the tsars, in popular and scholarly imagination, in the works of political radicals and conservatives alike, the animating force was widely understood to rest firmly at the top, a superimposition over the shapeless, inert mass of the population.
Countering the State School model has not been an easy historiographic position to develop. Populist and Slavophile historians of the second half of the nineteenth century explored the possibilities of identifying mass movements and popular rebellions as significant forces on the Russian landscape, but many of these efforts frayed at the seams, pressured by romanticizing visions of the Russian Soul or revolutionary visions, not entirely borne out by evidence, of an inherently socialist peasant mentality. During the Soviet era, one might expect that the statist vision would have vanished from the sanctioned interpretive repertoire, but it did not. The state remained the primary actor in most Soviet treatments of Russia’s premodern and early modern past, although class took on a new salience. Feudalism, which Sneath faults his colleagues for refusing to acknowledge among their nomadic subjects, was rigidly foisted on the Muscovite past, regardless of its uncomfortable fit with the evidence. These framing devices held Soviet histories closely to a set narrative in which the state directed and the masses occasionally resisted.
It was only the most courageous and independent-minded of historians working under the Soviet academic system who spoke out to question the official orthodoxy, and it is striking, in light of Sneath’s review, that the language they found to articulate their critique was precisely the language of kinship, clan, and lineage. They used these notions to combat the conceptual tyranny of statism, feudalism, and class. Already in the early Soviet era, S. B. Veselovskii raised the idea that the most peculiar and puzzling moment in all of Muscovite history, Ivan the Terrible’s bizarre Oprichnina, when he divided his land in two and authorized one half to prey upon the other, might be understood in terms of elite clan solidarities and rivalries.^[2] His suggestions were picked up, though without explicit acknowledgment, in slightly later studies of Ivan the Terrible and of other episodes in Muscovite history. Studies of the court, of landholding, and honor litigation (mestnichestvo), and other topics gingerly incorporated elements of kinship. Moving back further in historical time, another maverick among Soviet academics, I. Ia. Froianov, also boldly breached the walls of the established narrative, by which medieval Kievan princes ruled over a feudal society of serfs and vassals, and replaced it with a model eerily reminiscent of the tribal model that so offends Sneath. Kievan princes ruled at the sufferance of their kinsmen and subjects, they responded to the demands of the community, and the society they governed displayed none of the hallmarks of feudalism that the Soviet vision demanded. Instead of a set of nested hierarchies of vassalage and serfdom, Kiev Rus’ was characterized by a diverse population of small independent farming communities, and urban elites whose wealth derived from a combination of trade and plunder. Landholding on any large scale did not exist. In questioning both the existence of feudalism and the rootedness on the land, Froianov replicated some of the moves decried by Sneath as part and parcel of the European colonialist drive to impose a “conceptual apartheid between state and tribal societies.” But in the Russian context, his moves were radical ones, decoupling the historical vision from the stultifying requirements of a prescribed model and bringing interpretation in line with the evidence.
Given the constraints on scholarship in the Soviet Union, it is not surprising that much of the work of raising the matter of kinship and introducing ideas from the field of anthropology took place outside of those borders, among Western scholars. Edward L. Keenan pioneered the way with a series of widely circulated unpublished essays, produced in the 1970s, and an influential piece, “Muscovite Political Folkways,” published in 1986. Nancy Shields Kollmann’s masterful work, significantly titled Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345–1547, explored the kinship relations among key actors at the grand princely court through the mid-sixteenth century, and established that relations of blood and marriage not only determined status and standing at court but in fact comprised the essence of politics at that court. Rather than contend over issues of domestic or international policy or ideological orientation, she found, members of the ruling elite battled over matters of matrimonial connections and proximity, established through kinship or marriage, to the person of the ruler. Kinship and Politics offered a liberatory approach to Russian history, freeing the central narrative from the lock-hold of the top-down statist mode and freeing readers to think about other, dynamic forces operating underneath and in conjunction with the ruler, contributing to and profoundly shaping the state and its functions.^[3] Here, in stark contrast to the historiographic situation so revealingly established in Sneath’s piece, the political stakes of a kinship model were altogether different. The payoff of setting the state aside and delving into the kinds of bonds that allowed people to act in society was enormous.
Robert O. Crummey carried a similar story into the seventeenth century in his important monograph Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Elite in Russia, 1613–1689. Here he found that clans provided crucial lines of support and patronage for their members. Given the closely overlapping and interconnected ties that linked elite family, there was room for maneuver in hitching one’s fortune to one or another branch of the clan, allowing for the kind of “fictive kinship” or malleable kinship that Rudi Paul Lindner and others have described as operative among Mongols and Inner Asian nomads. In other words, Crummey finds that survival at court relied on the clever and successful playing on kinship connections and lineage, but that the game was played as much by manipulating the language and currency of kinship as through any actual “reality” of blood ties.^[4] Plausible deniability of kinship connections was just as important as positive claims to clan membership. Again, the themes that Sneath treats so compellingly in the context of an exclusionary evolutionary narrative of the history of nomads takes on altogether different coloring within Muscovite historiography. If kinship is seen as a malleable concept, a form of “strategizing behavior,” as Sneath approvingly notes in Bourdieu’s discussion of Kabyle society, then kinship models can prove to be extremely useful. Instead of freezing a society in a pre-political tribal state, a focus on kinship can help to animate the workings of a state and its constituent parts.
To take just one more example of this line of argument, John LeDonne developed the discussion of kinship to its logical extreme in a series of articles and an important monograph Absolutism and Ruling Class. The Formation of the Russian Political Order 1700–1825.^[5] LeDonne traces the survival and continuing political centrality of a small number of key families, linked into lineages and functioning with remarkable consistency across more than a century. So powerful were these lineages in monopolizing key positions at court, in the military, and in administration, that LeDonne concludes they constituted a ruling class that functioned in place of a state. LeDonne’s argument for Russia is thus precisely the inverse of Sneath’s for nomadic societies. LeDonne delights in toppling the long- unquestioned notion of an all-powerful state and substitutes for it a clan model, such as Sneath so appropriately undermines in the steppe context.
What is the upshot of this observation about the specificity of academic debates and the historiographic situatedness of revisionist polemics? As a tribute to the power of Sneath’s revelatory analysis, it is to underscore the extent to which the demons of one field may pose little threat in another, or, quite the contrary, may represent welcome harbingers of light in fields obscured by their own particular obfuscatory assumptions.
It is a tribute to the power of Sneath’s piece that his observations, thought field and foe-specific in many ways, also prove valuable within the confines of a field as distant from his own and as apparently antithetical in its internal debates and structures as early Russian history. Its value lies not only in alerting scholars to the political implications of the terms we adopt and the models we employ. Even in its specifics, Sneath’s article should cause some discomfort and provoke serious reexamination within Muscovite studies. The piece challenges the reader to acknowledge the invidious consequences of relegating entire peoples and cultures to a pre-political state of kin and clan, a move in which the Muscovite field has been to some extent complicit. In the drive to escape from the constraints of the Statist model and to find other ways of understanding court life, the excellent studies described above have perhaps moved too far in the other direction, toward an anthropological vision of a premodern culture evacuated of all formal politics. With their intense focus on kinship and marriage politics, these studies have to some degree elided the politics, the dynamics of rule, of war, of coercion and subjection, from the picture. Sneath’s critique of the anthropological literature on tribes and peoples offers a salutary reminder of the need to “bring the state back in.” Such moves are already afoot in Muscovite studies. Paul Bushkovitch’s recent biography of Peter the Great deals seriously with clan dynamics, and in particular offers a freshly politicized take on the old, familiar story of the contention between the two surviving branches of the tsarist line, the Naryshkins and the Miloslavskiis.^[6] Most of the book, however, focuses on the politics of international relations, on taxation, institution-building, and anti-corruption drives. This seems to me a welcome development, and one much in keeping with Sneath’s cogent and incisive observations.