After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies

13. Before and After Collapse: Reflections on the Regeneration of Social Complexity

Before and After Collapse Reflections on the Regeneration of Social Complexity Alan L. Kolata This book addresses an extraordinarily complicated sociohistorical phenomenon :theregenerationofculturalcomplexityintheaftermathofstatecollapse. The case studies presented here graphically demonstrate the highly variable nature of this process. One might be tempted to say that each case of societal regeneration is unpredictable, historically contingent, unique, and therefore analyzable only in its own terms. Most of the authors in this book do, in fact, present empirically rich instances of regeneration processes that pertain to highly specific historical, cultural, and environmental circumstances. Generally eschewing the comparative impulse, these authors emphasize the contingent and locally embedded quality of the social regeneration of complexity. One can readily understand this perspective given the exceptionally variable social and historical trajectories through which complex societies developed globally. Some contributors (most notably Bronson and Schwartz), however, explicitly grapple with more general theoretical frameworks that may enable intriguing comparisons across time, space, and cultural traditions. As Glenn Schwartz perceptively notes in his introductory chapter, the regeneration of social complexity in the wake of the collapse of urbanized, state-level societies and empires has rarely been a topic of sustained scholarly analysis, despite its inherent value for comparative historical and social science research.This may be because the aftermath of empire is often imagined as a period of cultural degradation, a backsliding into “dark ages” shorn of the rich material trappings of imperial splendor. The initial decline of social complexity after state collapse apparently renders this period of transformation less compelling as an object of analysis for many historians, art historians , and archaeologists. The study of “high civilization”still remains the holy grail of historical scholarship. But this is at once a parochial and an elitist conception, one that fails to acknowledge that the regeneration of cultural 13 Reflections on the Regeneration of Social Complexity 209 complexity, in whatever forms it takes, is a complex process of social change fascinating in its own right. Principled theoretical and empirical analyses of regeneration in the aftermath of collapse have enormous potential for informing us about the structural nature of complex society and the processes through which states and empires are formed and sustained in the first instance . The various chapters of this book represent richly varied attempts to explore this potential both through empirical analysis of individual case studies and through more general, comparative perspectives. To understand the regeneration of social complexity after some form of state disintegration or collapse, one must recognize and account for the historical specificities of prior structures of rule, authority, and governmentality . By“governmentality”here I mean the socially and historically contingent crucible of coercion and consent that composes the underlying lineaments of state power. Regeneration of social complexity, if such occurred after collapse of a state formation, can follow any number of structural pathways, depending on the nature of various externalities present during the reconstitution of complex society. Such externalities might include the social, political, economic , and environmental processes by which state collapse was engendered in the first instance, or the nature of historical, political, and economic relationships with neighboring states. In short, the conditions of possibility for the social regeneration of complexly structured societies,as well as the specific character of that regeneration, are directly dependent upon the principles and structures of government prior to collapse. Any convincing analysis of the regeneration of social complexity after state collapse must account for the“time-binding”material and social effects of prior governmental actions—the specific political ecology of the state prior to its disintegration. The analysis of political disruption must take account of the historical continuities between pre- and postcollapse social formations as much as the nature of the disjunctions produced in the aftermath of state disintegration. One can readily imagine, for instance, that it matters considerably for such an analysis whether the historical trajectory of state formation and governance entailed the forceful imposition of direct control over territories, resources, and populations by some form of dominant political, economic,and military power,or whether state structure and governance was sustained through indirect networks of political alliance,social exchange,and commodity circulation via trade and mutually accepted tributary or clientage relationships. The former circumstance involves the imposition of hegemony and sovereigntyoversubjugatedpeoplesbyauthoritiesthatgovernwiththefullpanoply 210 Alan L. Kolata of the instruments of daily administration, surveillance, persuasion, cooptation , and coercion. Here territorial annexation, imposition of externally derived laws and regulations, cultural absorption of subject populations, and often a powerful, colonial...