Ancient Maya Political Dynamics

5. Internal Dynamics, Bureaucracy, and Political Centralization: The Middle Scale of Political Analysis

5 Internal Dynamics, Bureaucracy, and Political Centralization The Middle Scale of Political Analysis In this chapter I explore Classic Maya political dynamics by scrutinizing the internal organization of Maya polities, or the middle scale of political analysis. One of the key variables may be the presence (or absence) of a bureaucracy. The existence of a bureaucracy is tied to the old debate about the degree of centralization in Classic Maya states; Chase and Chase (1992) argue that “centralized bureaucracies were clearly in evidence at sites like Tikal and Caracol” (309). More important, though, the existence of a Maya bureaucracy relates to the nature of internal political processes and human agency in Classic Maya polities. To better understand the connection between centralization and bureaucracies , we need to reflect on what anthropologists mean by centralization . While definitions abound, we can take Roscoe’s definition (1993) as a useful starting point: political centralization is the concentration of decision-making in the hands of a few or as few as possible. Thus, political centralization requires a cadre of officials or administrators who carry out the political decisions of the few and who monitor the populace to ensure that these decisions are followed. Maya scholars often envision this body of officials as a bureaucracy, but in this chapter, I argue that this name might not be appropriate for Classic Maya administrations. The potential existence of a Classic Maya bureaucracy also relates to new perspectives on power dynamics, as articulated by Stein and Rothman in their “organizational dynamics of complexity” model for the Near East (Stein and Rothman 1994; Stein 1994b, 1998; Rothman 2004) and by Marcus (1998) in her “dynamic model” for the Maya area (see also Iannone 2002; 112 · Ancient Maya Political Dynamics Demarest 1992, 1996c; Foias 2003, 2007). Following these new perspectives, our discussion must change from whether or not a polity is centralized to how centralized a polity is and from whether or not a bureaucracy is present to the degree of bureaucratization. Because power is now seen as always in flux, political analysis must better define political processes and strategies that are the ongoing attempts of rulers and other active political factions or actors within Maya polities to centralize power.1 Most sociologists view bureaucracy as a central feature of modern industrial societies (beginning with Weber 1964 [1947]), and some historians argue that the first centralized bureaucracies appeared in European states during the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries (Kiser and Cai 2003). However, there are earlier examples, including the Qin Chinese Empire (221–206 BC) (Kiser and Cai 2003) and some ancient Near East civilizations . Sumerian city-states of the Early Dynastic periods (ca. 2900–2350 BC) and later empires of the Near East also had proto-bureaucratic administrations , but these may not have been centralized under the state, and seemed to have operated as parallel organizations in temples and royal palaces (Liverani 1996; Maisels 1999; Rothman 1998, 2004; Wiesehofer 1996). Maisels (1999) locates the beginning of bureaucratization in ancient Sumer and describes the Lagash temple functionaries from the Ur III period (the late third millennium BC) in the following manner: “Here we find ‘high managerialism’ of an order that did not appear until the twentieth century AD” (167). In other words, although bureaucratization reached its maturity in modern times, the process evolved in some states in earlier periods. It is also important to note that these ancient bureaucracies (or administrations ) may be political, military, or ecclesiastical. While I begin this chapter by exploring whether Maya polities had bureaucracies , I consider other issues of the internal organization of these kingdoms, such as the nature of their administration and finance institutions . Variations in internal political organization as seen in the examples I describe below highlight that politics is a result of the interplay of local circumstances, successful and unsuccessful strategies by leaders and factions , alliances or compromises among these individuals or factions, and the material resources at the disposal of these individuals or factions. Bureaucracy and the Qin Chinese Empire Kiser and Cai (2003) outline why the process of bureaucratization begins at such an early date in the earliest Chinese Empire, the Qin Dynasty (221–206 The Middle Scale of Political Analysis · 113 BC). Based on their cross-cultural analysis, Kiser and Cai argue that two factors cause the beginning of bureaucratization. The first is intense warfare because “military competition and war force states to adopt more efficient bureaucratic forms,” and...