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- Convenors:
-
Florian Mühlfried
(Ilia State University Georgia)
Hans Steinmüller (London School of Economics)
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- Chair:
-
Natalia Buitron
(University of Cambridge)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 14 University Square (UQ), 01/007
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel is about the nightmares that haunt egalitarianism: What are they? And how do they relate to the scales of the imagation?
Long Abstract:
Whereas anthropologists take great efforts to understand how "egalitarian societies" operate without centralized power and institutionalized means of coercion, they have paid less attention to the nightmares that haunt these societies. We'd like to explore these nightmares and the ways they relate to, or maybe even underpin political practices orientated towards an egalitarian treatment of people. Instead of foregrounding an ethos of "keeping up with the Joneses" based on sanctioning wealth and individual success, we take nightmares literally and ask for their role in egalitarian worldmaking. Nightmares can have (at least) three meanings in relation to egalitarianism:
• Violent nightmares help maintaining a productive dynamics of autonomy and mutuality and prohibit the emergence of commensuration and scaling
• The core of these nightmares is 'egalitarianism', as commonly understood: a dialectics of freedom and submission, which is a zero-sum game where the freedom of some relies on the submission of others
• These nightmares are thus the flip-side of an autonomous imagination: that cannot be tied into hierarchies and scales, and instead engages with them productively and moves beyond them.
We are interested in ethnographic and theoretical explorations of the affective and generative dimensions of "real existing egalitarianism". Contributions should explore visions of doom, relations of mistrust, gratuitous violence, or any imaginative practice that is directed against the emergence of the "cold monster of the state" (Clastres).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Sabina Cvecek (Field Museum, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
The paper addresses social organization at Çukuriçi Höyük, an Early Bronze Age site in western Anatolia from anthropological perspectives. It showcases how material evidence of sharing and competition between households allows us to infer egalitarian, hierarchical, and/or heterarchical relations.
Paper long abstract:
Inferring egalitarian relations for societies for which we do not have a record of whether egalitarianism as a notion existed, remains challenging. In the absence of a writing system, state, and legislation, through which (in)equality may be imposed top-down, the Early Bronze Age archaeological record from western Anatolia offers us an insight into a place at the boundaries of the Early States. By comparing archaeological evidence from different socio-spatial units – such as households – to each other, social relations can be inferred. Such a bottom-up perspective allows us to examine the local, people-centered motivations for a specific organization of their social worlds. At the same time, linking the insights of relations between households to a top-down approach allows us to examine a particular social structure or social order against the archaeological data. Have dwellers at the settlement of Çukuriçi Höyük (beginning of 3rd millennium BC) organized themselves in more-or-less egalitarian, hierarchical, or heterarchical terms? How egalitarian can a sedentary, metal-producing society be? What local practices, directed against the emergence of states, can be inferred from Çukuriçi? These questions will be addressed through the method of household archaeology combined with historical anthropology and anthropological comparison. While being unable to access indigenous imagination and nightmares, the evidence of the Near Eastern weight system in western Anatolia attests to the embeddedness of Çukuriçi in the large-scale network of the Near Eastern Early States. Nevertheless, dwellers at Çukuriçi continued sharing metalworking knowledge and hunting trophies rather than hoarding goods and information within a particular household.
Remi Hadad (Fyssen Foundation UCL Institute of Archaeology)
Paper short abstract:
The monuments and funerary practices of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic are parts of a fractal collectivity, the interstices of which are haunted by the remains and representations of singular and troubled bodies.
Paper long abstract:
The large settlements of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Levant and Anatolia (9500-6500 BCE) are known for their elaborate monumental architecture and refined funerary practices. This complexity was probably not entirely “egalitarian”, but neither did it translate into marked social differences: the monuments were neither tombs nor elite residences, while the dead bodies were often divided up and accumulated together in the same spots. All in all, the archaeological findings do not easily fit models of stratification vs. equality, but can be understood through the notion of an embodied person as a whole that can be fragmented, yet is itself fragment of a wider whole. Rather than an association of equals, neolithic collectivist sociality was “fractal”, playing on the self-similarity of scale and suppressing discrete and indivisible units.
In this relational context, however, individuals do have a place. In the deep enclosed rooms of the monuments, where only a small fraction of society could have entered, solitary and asocial creatures waited in the dark. In the ruins of some of these buildings, archaeologists also found the tortured remains of selected bodies, excluded from usual funerary treatments and subjected to an untimely death. If ever there was ‘egalitarianism’ in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, it must be found in the nightmares of this solitude.