Inspired by the “current interest in the distributed nature of state power,” David Sneath defines “the state as a form of social relation, rather than as the sort of distinct ‘extrasocial’ structure” in The Headless State.^[1] In particular, Sneath sees “the state as a process, a way of exercising codified power.”^[2] Consequently, he takes “the decentralized and distributed power found in aristocratic orders” as a form of the state for they “exhibited aspects of both governmentality and sovereignty in the Foucauldian sense.”^[3] In fact, Sneath’s scheme suggests that while the “Weberian model of the ideal-typical bureaucratic state” is the modern form of the state, the “aristocratic state” (though the author himself does not use this phrase) is the premodern form with its centralized and decentralized variants.^[4]
Subsequently, Sneath transcends “the traditional dichotomy between state and nonstate society.”^[5] Since Sneath finds aristocracy “on both sides of the traditional dichotomy,” “the distinction between state-organized and stateless societies becomes meaningless.”^[6] By banishing tribalism from the era of recorded history, Sneath in effect establishes “aristocratic orders” as the masters of premodern history. Thus, in the era of recorded history, especially in the area discussed, we find societies organized and shaped by aristocratic orders, that is, for Sneath, by state-like powers. The state organizes, shapes, creates and constructs the societies. In fact, what he suggests at the end of the day is that “societies are made by” the state rather than by some “bottom-up processes.” Ultimately, Sneath seeks to overcome the traditional dichotomy between the state and the society by accepting that “the ‘state is simply a social relation, in as much as it is the codified power of the social formation.’”^[7]
In order to bring “the aristocratic orders” to the fore, Sneath launches a revealing “critique of the colonial-era scheme of political evolution from tribal to state society and the associated concepts of kinship and pastoral-nomadic society as distinctive social types.”^[8] Pierre Bourdieu once noted that “state bureaucracies and their representatives are great producers of ‘social problems’ that social science does little more than ratify whenever it takes them over as ‘sociological’ problems.”^[9] This seems to have been the case with tribalism. Indeed, while European colonial administrators, mindful of their superiority, widely exported the term “tribe” as a colonial and administrative institution into colonial areas, the nineteenth-century evolutionists, believing in the unity of humankind and its development and advancement, turned it into a pre-state, kin-based, and bottom-up stage of human societal development. Social sciences rooted in this tradition not only “ratified” but also “rationalized” and institutionalized this scheme. With this evolutionist reification the “national populist notions of culture and society as solidarities and wholes built by bottom-up processes” were also accepted as “one of the ‘earliest acts of human intelligence.’”^[10]
Showing how this evolutionary framing of human societies was largely driven by the “commitment to the articles of faith of populist democratic politics” on the side of the writers and how it was built upon distorted interpretations of historical and ethnographic data, Sneath literally dispels the myth of kinship society.^[11] In his critique, “kinship organization” or “clan” appear not “as pre-state social building blocks that the nineteenth century social theory assumed” but as “products of the state, not precursors to it.”^[12] Indeed, armed with the scheme that Sneath criticizes, anthropological scholarship saw Inner Asian societies as essentially tribal and pre-state because these societies were nomadic and were subjects of either the Qing or the Romanov Empires. Inscribing this vision onto the historical and ethnographic data, anthropological scholarship on Inner Asia made obog (and similar indigenous institutions) into a “clan,” the building block of the kinship society, thus misrepresenting Inner Asian societies as tribal and pre-state. However, “on closer examination, it was not ‘kinship society’ but aristocratic power and statelike processes of administration that emerged as the more significant features of the wider organization of life on the steppe.”^[13] In his turn, Sneath advances a novel reading of obog as a “house,” an “aristocratic descent group” or a “petty dynasty” limited “to the nobility who were clearly distinguished from their subjects.” As with the cases of the Jürkin and the Tayichi’ut, “the organization of people into named unilineal descent groups with political functions was an act of state administration in much of Inner Asia.”^[14] As a result, “the deployment of descent and genealogy,” which the evolutionist scholarship took as evidence of the kinship society, reincarnates in Sneath’s reading “as technologies of power and forms of governance that administer political subjects.”^[15] “The success of aristocratic houses or lineages over very long periods of time, in both centralized states and other political formations, reveals descent and kinship as enduring techniques of power and aspects of stratification rather than their antithesis.”^[16]
In fact, as early as 1982, Rudi Paul Lindner argued that a “medieval Eurasian nomadic tribe was a political organism open to all who were willing to subordinate themselves to its chief and who shared interests with its tribesmen.”^[17] Scholars of medieval Mongolia mostly subscribe to this view.^[18] Thomas Allsen, for instance, writes that “though defined in genealogical terms, the lineage and the tribe were essentially political entities composed of individuals whose ties of blood were more often fictive than real. In the steppe, common political interest was typically translated into the idiom of kinship. Thus, the genealogies of the medieval Mongols (and other tribal peoples) were ideological statements designed to enhance political unity, not authentic descriptions of biological relationships.”^[19] Yet, as Sneath puts it, all these scholars “continue to use the term ‘tribe’” and employ it as an analytic category, mostly, it seems, “for want of a better term.”^[20]
However, as Sneath makes clear, the term was a legacy of the colonial era double standard later “rationalized by structural functionalist modeling.”^[21]
Bringing the “aristocratic orders” to the fore and magnifying the 1640 assembly of the Khalkha and Oirat aristocracies that adopted the Mongol-Oirat Code, Sneath advances a novel concept of the “‘headless state,’ a configuration of statelike power formed by the horizontal relations between power holders, rather than as a result of their mutual subordination to a political center” to explain the political organization of Inner Asian societies.^[22] In particular, a “political environment, in which almost all of the operations of state power exist at the local level virtually independent of central bureaucratic authority” is the “headless state.”^[23]
According to Sneath, “the local power relations that since ancient times have made the Inner Asian state possible were reproduced with or without an overarching ruler or central ‘head.’” Moreover, “…in Inner Asia many of the forms of power thought to be characteristic of states actually existed independently of the degree of overarching political centralization.” “Power relations were inescapably present; certain configurations—such as domestic and aristocratic orders—have been reproduced and have acted as the substrata of power in a series of historical polities that have resembled the centralized, bureaucratized ‘state’ to a greater or lesser degree.” Furthermore, “the political relations of aristocrats determined the size, scale, and degree of centralization of political power.” “The centralized ‘state,’ then, appears as one variant of aristocracy.”^[24] “The tendency… for steppe polities to fragment… is better seen as the result of processes that produced more or less centralized and imperial versions of an existing aristocratic order.”^[25] Thus, the state or the centralized state appears as “a temporary structure resting on” the aristocratic substrata. Indeed, Sneath asserts, “the recognition that stratification and the state relation are not dependent upon a centralized bureaucratic structure makes it easier to discern the substrata of power, the aristocratic order that lay at the base.”^[26] Thus, according to Sneath, it is not the (centralized) state that produces aristocracy (or the aristocratic orders) but it is the aristocracy that produces the state.
How principally different, then, is this scheme from that of Thomas Barfield whom Sneath criticizes? If we put aside the former’s unwarranted subscription to segmentary opposition and his frontier extortion theory, in terms of scheme, at the base, instead of the non–kin-based “tribal political organization” of Barfield we find “the aristocratic order” intact, and above, in place of the temporary “imperial confederacies,” we have temporary “polities that have resembled the centralized, bureaucratized ‘state’ to a greater or lesser degree.” Thus, we still find the same scheme of two-tiered political organization for Inner Asia: the lower is indigenous, intrinsic or essential to Inner Asia; the higher is rather extraneous or exceptional to Inner Asia. At any rate, the state for Barfield or “the centralized state” for Sneath is an exception to Inner Asia rather than the norm. Both authors start out from what they see at the base, or what is intrinsic to Inner Asia, “the tribal political organization” or “the aristocratic orders.” In fact, Sneath’s work implicitly suggests that aristocracy was present from the dawn of history. Paying no attention to the genesis and transformation of aristocracy but taking the latter as a self-evident fact, Sneath’s contribution constructs another “essentially timeless and unchanging” vision of hierarchical aristocratic societies in Inner Asia. One might say that Barfield’s essentially tribal Inner Asia reincarnates as Sneath’s essentially aristocratic one.
Alas, I have to disagree with this particular two-tiered scheme and the essentializing tendency it implies. True, most premodern states were patrimonial-dynastic and the rulership was solely the privilege of aristocrats (or the best men of the realm), usually hereditary. No doubt, “stratification, forms of territorialization, taxation, corvée, and military service” existed in Inner Asia since at least the time of the Xiongnu Empire, from the earliest state on record in Inner Asia. I do agree with Sneath that the ruling houses displaced each other rather than entire peoples. However, I believe that states like Xiongnu not only reproduced the above characteristic of state power relations and made their subjects internalize them but also defined who among their subjects should be aristocrats or rulers and administrators (what Foucauldians call governmentality).
Take, for example, the Chinggisid patrimonial dynasty that dominated most of the area covered in Sneath’s book. While Chinggisid legitimacy was upheld in most of this area down to the modern period,^[27] the Chinggisid Great Khans ruled Mongolia until 1634, effectively and nominally. The Chinggisid nobilities ruled the Mongols to the middle of the twentieth century.^[28] Why is this so? Because of the aristocratic order that lay at the base? I do not think so. Nor do I attribute it to all-time powerful central authority. The Chinggisid legitimacy was respected not because the central authority was in a position to reinforce it at all times but because the idea of statehood and rulership embodied in the Chinggisids was so thoroughly accepted by the societies under discussion, and first of all by the self-conscious Chinggisid nobilities themselves. Did the Chinggisid state create these nobilities or the other way around?
Yet, in a situation where most of the “public offices” were hereditary, the province of one generation tended to become the lordship of the next.^[29] Thus, whenever central authority wanes we see the emergence of petty kingdoms and princedoms, the new rivals for domination, in place of the former imperial provinces. This was the general situation in Mongolia in the early seventeenth century and it was very similar to that of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation of the same period.
The 1640 assembly seems to have been one of the last efforts to overcome the fragmentation that so beset the Mongols. But this effort failed and instead of creating a viable centralized structure it enforced and legalized the existing fragmentation. The Mongol-Oirat Code adopted by the assembly resulted in something akin to the Treaty of Westphalia.^[30]
As the newly published Qing archival documents show, the 1640 assembly of the Mongol aristocrats seems to have been an unfinished political enterprise undertaken by Zasagt Khan of Khalkha. Upon the death of the last Mongol Great Khan, Ligden, in 1634, Hong Taiji, the Manchu Khan, who had already won the allegiances of the majority of southern Mongolian nobilities, making the consorts and the sons of Ligden submit, came very near to claiming the Chinggisid throne. Alarmed about this development, as early as summer of 1635, Setsen Khan of Khalkha not only summoned Ligden’s consort to come to his court but also sent a memorandum to Hong Taiji informing that he had taken over “the jade great state/government”^[31] in place of Ligden for he was of “the same royal lineage.”^[32] However, by early 1636, Setsen Khan had dropped his claim, saying “Alas, Khutugtu Khan (Ligden Khan) broke the unbreakable state/government. [You], Setsen Khan (Manchu Khan), lead the pacifying state/government.”^[33] A few months later, the southern Mongolian princes with their Manchu and Chinese counterparts proclaimed the Dayiching Ulus and the era of Degedü Erdemtü and recognized Hong Taiji as their Khan, for he allegedly “united the Mongol ulus and took the jade seal (hasbau erdeni tamg-a)” of the Great Yuan Dynasty.^[34]
However, Zasagt Khan of Khalkha challenged Hong Taiji and proceeded to unify the rest of the Mongols under his leadership and the result was the 1640 assembly of the Mongol nobles. In fact, as Hong Taiji’s 1638 letter to Zasagt Khan shows, Zasagt Khan was unyielding and asserted that he was ruling some of the Mongols or “some parts of the six ulus,” while Hong Taiji, saying that “Heaven granted me all the Mongol ulus starting from the Lord of the six ulus,”^[35] claimed that his rule extended all over the Mongols.^[36] However, by 1640 Zasagt Khan’s claim was much augmented. As Hong Taiji’s 1640 letter to Zasagt Khan makes clear, Zasagt Khan was now claiming himself to be “the Lord of the throne and the legitimate Great Khan” of Mongolia, while Hong Taiji dismissed Zasagt Khan’s claim outright by affirming that “We thought that the Khan of Tsakhar^[37] was the Lord of the throne and the legitimate Khan” of all Mongolia.^[38] Again, Hong Taiji claimed that he himself was the lord of the Mongols, for Heaven had granted him “all the Mongol ulus” and “the Khan of Tsakhar, the legitimate Khan and the Lord of the throne.”^[39] Furthermore, Hong Taiji blamed Zasagt Khan for he “joined törö,” (törö nigedbe) with the vengeful Oirats, yet, he still proposed that Zasagt Khan “join törö”.^[40] Thus, the 1640 assembly was Zasagt Khan’s partially failed endeavor: the assembly, instead of enthroning Zasagt Khan as “the Lord of the throne and the legitimate Great Khan,” resulted in a sort of a treaty or a “headless state.” Thus, the 1640 assembly took place in the context of the collapse of legitimate Mongol central authority and it seems to have been Zasagt Khan’s attempt to claim the throne of the Great Mongol Khan.
In fact, the quoted passages clearly show that competing claims for supremacy were based on the existing order of governmentality or what was widely accepted as a notion of legitimate statehood and rulership, the legacy of the Chinggisid state. Certainly, Zasagt Khan’s claim must have been based on his belonging to “the same royal lineage” as he was a Chinggisid prince as Setsen Khan of Khalkha, and the 1640 assembly led him to augment his claim further. On the other hand, Hong Taiji, lacking the legitimacy Setsen Khan and Zasagt Khan of Khalkha enjoyed, had to support his claim on his succeeding of “the legitimate Khan and the Lord of the throne.” Certainly, his enthronement was legitimated by his alleged possession of the jade seal of the Great Yuan Dynasty.^[41]
In all probability, Mongolia at the dawn of the Chinggisid state experienced a similar political conflict. What the post-Chinggisid sources describe as Ong Khan of Kereyid was likely another belittlement of the last legitimate ruler of a waning power such as the “Khan of Tsakhar,” who in fact was the Great Khan of Mongolia. So, perhaps, beneath the headless state of 1640 was the Zasagt Khan of Khalkha, beyond the aristocratic orders were the great patrimonial-dynastic states of Inner Asia.