Toward a Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

Abstract

The past 10 years have seen a reorientation of archaeological political theory from a focus on neoevolutionary classification and “state origins” to a focus on the operation of ancient polities. This trend, while promising, nonetheless frequently retains problematic habits of earlier approaches, including the tendency to slip into reductionist classificatory exercises. Furthermore, I argue that the naturalized experience of nation‐states and the legacy of modernist political theory form an unexamined yet pernicious influence. In ancient contexts, the reified anachronism of “the state” is better understood in terms of a nexus of networks of power and authority and the imagined political communities with which they articulate. I suggest that both polity networks and polity ideas should then be analyzed in terms of their discursive, practical, and material aspects and the relationships between them. Relatively understudied and still undeservingly peripheral to the generation of ancient political models in archaeology, Shang China will form the basis of a case study in the application of the networks and boundaries approach proposed here. Drawing on archaeological, epigraphic, and transmitted textual sources, I will sketch an outline of Shang political geography, discursive structures, practices of power/authority, networks of capital, and boundaries of political identity.

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