The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities

2. Archaeologies of Political Authority

c h a p t e r 2 Archaeologies of Political Authority The moment we utter the words “the state” a score of intellectual ghosts rise to obscure our vision. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems It is not coincidental that the vision of modern political analysis came to be obscured just as the spatial dimensions of human life were systematically dismissed as elements of explanation, interpretation, and critique. Only at rare moments in twentieth-century thought—when the highly abstract theoretical position aªorded by the State (capitalized to reflect its universalist ambition) has receded in the face of direct accounts of the production of relationships of authority—has political life been described in explicitly spatial terms. In perhaps the most important of these accounts, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn employed a geographic trope to describe “that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered geographically, like an archipelago, was, in a psychological sense, fused into a continent” (1985: x). The significance of this rich spatial metaphor for the penal apparatus of the Stalinist regime echoes beyond its literary eªectiveness. Solzhenitsyn ’s account suggests that political regimes must be understood in terms of the particular places that they carve out for themselves—that politics not only occupies land but also operates by and through landscapes. Furthermore , The Gulag Archipelago suggests that these politically produced landscapes are not conceivable solely as problems of form. The successful operation of the Gulag lay not only in the direct experience of spaces occupied by state power—a system of punishment and incarceration that 78 stretched from the cells of the Lubyanka in central Moscow to the work camps of Kolyma in Siberia—but also in the way these discontinuous spaces were articulated in the minds of those it ensnared into a coherent landscape of authority. The lingering importance of Solzhenitsyn’s account to the way we conceptualize politics lies less in the descriptions of labor camps now abandoned to the Siberian tundra than in his exposure of the State as an illusory object of political practice, analysis, and criticism—a pretension to coherence placed on disparate and heterogeneous processes operating across a host of contiguous and noncontiguous places that together constitute political landscapes. The potency of the State as an idea arises from its representation of politics as entirely removed from space and place; the State appears complete and immune to contestation precisely because it has no geography—there is no place one can go to argue with it. Due to this lack of location built into the concept, the question “Where is the State?” though entirely reasonable, sounds quite peculiar. The only possible answer to the question is that the State is both everywhere and nowhere. The State is everywhere in that it has been implicated in every aspect of our daily lives, from the production of culture and economy on a global scale to the creation of personal identities. But the State is also nowhere. Although more than 180 political entities today are described as states, it is impossible to locate the State in the same way that we can observe governments and visit nations. From this simultaneously invisible and omnipresent conceptual location, the State provides an eªective mask for political practices precisely because it obscures the inherently spatial operation of power (as an apparatus of domination) and legitimacy (as a representation of that apparatus). The State is thus a highly problematic concept for investigations of politics and one that any attempt to spatialize understandings of political life must directly confront. Since the mid-twentieth century, the study of early complex polities has come to focus resolutely on the State. Political anthropology, the one field that has traditionally grappled with issues of political complexity beyond the narrow sociohistorical window of the modern, has centered its investigations of early complex polities on discrete political types set in universal histories. These accounts assemble various political formations into historical trajectories and thus render translucent the conditions under which polities coalesce, transform, and collapse (Adams 1966; Childe 1950; Engels 1990; Johnson and Earle 1987; Morgan 1985; Sanderson 1995; Service 1975; Steward 1972;Yoªee 1993. At the proximal end of this developmental sequence lies the State (Fried 1967; Harris 1979; Sanderson ARCHAEOLOGIES OF POLITICAL AUTHORITY 79 1995; Service 1975). Although this approach has served relatively well in constructing a typology of political forms (such as Simple Chiefdom, Complex Chiefdom, and Archaic State...