Europe and the People Without History
... In 1968, Kathleen Gough published "Anthropology and Imperialism," wherein she argued that anthropologists had "failed to study Western imperialism as a social system, or even to adequately explore the effects of imperialism on the societies we studied" (Gough 1968: 19). Shortly thereafter, Eric Wolf and Joseph Jorgensen (1970) penned "Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand," wherein they denounced the participation of professional anthropologists in US counterinsurgency operations. Subsequently, in 1973, Talal Asad published his influential volume, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. ...
... It is such plunder that has, since Marx, earned the moniker of so-called primitive accumulation. It has included the enforced labor of enslaved Africans on "New World" plantations, which financed Western European capitalist industrialization (Williams 1944;Mintz 1985: 66). It has included, as well, coerced Indigenous labor in Latin American mines, such as Potosí, in what is now Bolivia, which served as mercantile Spain's primary source of silver from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, but which consumed over that same period some eight million Indigenous lives (Galeano 1973: 38-41). ...
... For capitalism in the colonies and capitalism in the metropole were mutually constituted. Atlantic slavery, for instance, was integral to the financing of European industrialization, as C.L.R. James (1989James ( [1963: 8) and Eric Williams (1944) both recognized. Sidney Mintz (1985: 51-52) added that the regimentation of enslaved labor on Caribbean plantations served as the organizational model for industrial labor regimes in European factories. ...
What can a critical analysis of imperialist political economy offer the decolonial turn in the contemporary social sciences? How might revisiting “classic” anti-imperialist thought and politics from the global South push scholars and activists to envision a more revolutionary decolonization? And how, in our discipline’s history, have anthropologists variously opposed or been complicit with the workings of imperialist power? In this article, and in the special issue of Dialectical Anthropology that this article introduces, we engage these questions with a call to bring imperialism “back in” to anthropological research and analysis. Our proposal, however, is not simply for an anthropology of empire, but for an anthropology against empire—a project, that is, not solely of interpreting imperialism, but of aiding its abolition.
... Such an interpretation remains valid to some extent, but with the passage of time it became apparent to me that the reasons driving people to cover up conflict were more complex and overarching. In my view, the tendency of official heritage rhetoric to conceal politics, with its interests, tensions and stickiness, and render it unspeakable, as well as the move to suppress social life with its interconnections and passions, along with the removal of the concrete practices of real social actors, seemed to be indices of a more general tendency, specific to neoliberal political and economic systems, to decouple the sphere of production from that of consumption (Wolf 1982;Harvey 2007). The dematerialization of the economy, which can take place through the increasingly pronounced removal of the materiality of social ties, relations of domination and forms of exploitation, corresponds to a dematerialization and mediatization of social and cultural life. ...
In the past 6 years that have followed the initial launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a discussion on its extension (SDG + 1/SDG18) emerged. The SDG18 quest is interpreted as a collective pursuit for meaning on SDGs and the future of our planet, based on 23 different proposals. This article aims at a detailed analysis of these 23 proposals and their meanings within the SDGs framework which directly connects with urban trends and transitions. Methodologically, this paper is supported by online research on SDG18 proposals and a content analysis. This leads to three main categories based on the criteria of aims/claims for the SDG18: (1) country ownership as national interest; (2) societal cooperation as both a fear and an emphasis of the SDG framework and (3) cultural purposes. Throughout our analysis, the latter category resonates with the core dyads of humanity: nomadic–sedentary and rural–urban. The category was divided in two subcategories: an Anthropic Techno-explosion Purpose (a nomadic-urban-progress trend) and an Ecologic Consciousness Purpose (a sedentary-rurban-degrowth trend). These are what we describe as the two Purposes at Large, framing the dialogue about our future as human beings. Finally, assuming the relevance of this dialogue, we urge the General Secretary of the UN to create an annually SDG18 Forum.
The EU’s pursuit of the CAI with China was based on economic interest. Since the initiation of formal relations between the EEC and China in 1975, economic interest has been the core of EU policy, and as EU policy documents make clear, the penetration of the market in China by European companies has been a central goal of the EU. In its initial period the EU-China relationship was dominated by trade, both in terms of policy and real economic exchanges. In the 2010s investment moved to the top of the EU agenda, and the EU became the demandeur for the CAI. In the EU’s view, the relationship with China, including FDI, was unbalanced in favour of the latter. The relationship required rebalancing through what the EU called reciprocity and a level playing field. The CAI was a tool through which the imbalance between the open EU investment regime and the restrictive Chinese regime could be altered in favour of the interests of EU companies. However, this view of the lack of reciprocity in the EU-China relationship does not explain the EU’s pursuit of the CAI, which must be understood in a wider context of political economy. The centring of FDI in EU policy occurred following the crisis of 2008 in which China became the driver of global economic growth while the EU economy stagnated. While on the surface investment between the EU and China was small, EU investment in China became increasingly important to European economies and companies. Rather than being driven by the exclusion of EU FDI in China, the EU pursuit of the CAI was driven by increasing dependence of EU economies and companies on investment in China. However, the penetration of the market in China was not equally distributed among EU member states, with some benefitting much more than others.
The intersections of global to local neoliberal policies, settler colonialism, and forced displacement are complex. Vestiges of imperialism, these factors are prevalent within Southeast Asia (SEA) and contribute to widespread commercial exploitation and human trafficking within the region. As research demonstrates, the legacy of colonial rule and more recent neocolonial foreign policies provide a roadmap for understanding the prevalence of human trafficking within SEA. Following a brief introduction, we outline key tenets of AsianCrit theory as articulated within the field of education (Iftikar and Museus, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 31:935–949, 2018). This framework guides our review of SEA history, context, issue-specific policies, and recommendations for increasing educational opportunities among SEA women and girls. Second, we present an overview of the historical, political, and economic context of specific SEA nations, offering background information on factors driving regional commercial exploitation and related trafficking abuses. We also examine the US Department of State Trafficking in Persons Reports (2020, 2022). Finally, we develop a set of educational policy and practice recommendations to address and prevent those factors that drive regional and nation-specific human trafficking. These recommendations include improving educational access, opportunities, and resources for women and girls who are either economic migrants or refugees and, thus, potential victims of human trafficking.
Eric Wolf is conventionally credited with reframing the term “political ecology” through the lens of political economy in the early 1970s. However, he never engaged with what by the 1980s was already a growing transdisciplinary field. An inspiring book in the genealogy of political ecology, Europe and the people without history said little about the emerging approach. Nevertheless, I argue that despite its limited focus on ecological issues, the book's vision and method can still provide insights for envisioning an anthropologically minded political ecology of value that combines the heuristic skills of ethnographic research with the systemic analysis of global capitalist-driven environmental change. To this end, the article brings Wolf's strategic use of Marxian frameworks into conversation with the Marxian ecological critique of value.
This article explores Wolf's insistence in EPHW that he was practicing “Marxian” rather than Marxist anthropology. It presents the reasons for Wolf's distancing from “Marxism” and discusses to what extent these remain relevant today. It then moves to offer suggestions on working more explicitly toward the “contradictory unity of theory and practice” that characterizes any good scholarship drawing on Marx—including Wolf's. Finally, I discuss instances in my own work of trying to move within a Marxian/Marxist dialectic: the way I employed a Wolfian analysis to contribute insights of use to a broader politics of labor and formulate an immanent critique of existing Marxist practices. The article ends by presenting radical inspiration from one of my Marxist-Ambedkarite interlocutors in Kerala.
In order to cast light on the limits and merits of Wolf's recourse to the concept of mode of production, I set up a dialogue between Europe and the people without history and the roughly contemporary intervention known as the “Brenner debate.” Wolf provides a mode of production solution and Brenner provides a class struggle solution to envisioning historical process. To explore the analytical strength of bringing Brenner to bear upon Wolf, an analysis of entangled agro-industrial crises in the Spanish province of Huelva is presented. A Wolfian framework, augmented by Brenner's focus on class struggle, reveals how the appropriation of nature and the exploitation of labor are conjoined and reinstates agricultural wage labor in its central position in the reproduction of the regional agricultural model.
In Wolf's EPWH , the importance of debt for scaffolding the expansion of the capitalist mode of production was shown repeatedly, despite not being treated as a distinct phenomenon. In the forty years that have gone by since the publication of the book, financial debt has gained centrality in global accumulation processes. The advancing frontier of financialization, reminiscent of that of earlier capitalist expansion, as well as its effects on particular groups and localities, has been a recurrent object of analysis in recent anthropological scholarship, often with a focus on the sphere of circulation and consumption. This article contends that the Wolfian conceptual toolkit, and particularly the notion of labor, should be brought back into the equation for addressing debt and credit relations in contemporary times.
Europe and the people without history ( EPWH ), published in 1982, challenged anthropology's focus on localism, synchronism, and culturalism, providing a meticulous exposition of multiscalar social relationships in motion. Wolf's bundles of “key relationships” of accumulation and social reproduction formed a breakthrough for holistic relational and realist modes of explanation. Wolf's vision remains essential in capturing capitalism's ongoing uneven and combined concoctions. This theme section revisits EPWH's immanent possibilities – cut short by the “cultural turn” – through critical engagement with Wolf's intellectual toolkit and particularly by building on his analysis as practiced in EPWH. It thereby extends Wolf's vision to questions of political ecology, debt and financialization, hidden histories of class struggle, the contradictory unity of theory and practice, and “planning” as a distinct logic of organizing value.
I take up the “modes of production” presented by Eric Wolf in Europe and the people without history as a set of tools for broad, systemic, and critical thinking about diversity and change in economic and political organization, including the changing forms of capitalist accumulation and the sources, and limits, of capital's planetary preponderance. I argue that Wolf's analysis centers problematics of “making,” “taking,” and “relating” that are necessary to critically assess how our collective capacities to create and destroy are mobilized, directed, and appropriated within and across polities, institutions, and circuits of value. I further argue for the importance of a fourth problematic, “planning,” highlighting the crucial political questions raised by the purposeful allocation of time, energy, and resources, as both actuality and potentiality.
It is time for anthropology to reclaim truth and speak it to capitalist power more forcefully. The rise of post-truth and the truth of our planetary socioecological predicaments demand this. How to do so is not straightforward. Recalibrating deconstruction and finding a new balance between epistemic solidities and shifting sands is only part of the task. The greater anthropological challenge is reorienting ethnography from frictions (how “global connections” fragment) to tensions (how and why contradictory global connections came about and endure or not). To explore this reorientation, I propose a political ecology of truth and the cultivation of a planetary ethnography . Both aspire to do anthropological justice to the dramatic transformations in our dominant planetary consciousness and the contradictory socioecological predicaments this is mired in.
This chapter shows that cultural anthropology has always had a professional proximity to the subject of nature and has dealt with the environment in various ways. The causes of the Anthropocene may not be perceived by us as individuals, but the effects will be experienced locally and differently in the long term. The concepts and goals of countermeasures are also local. This shows that the local access and the holistic approach of cultural anthropology opens a fruitful window to understanding the Anthropocene. In this section of the book, I criticize currently dominant approaches to the Anthropocene in cultural anthropology because they avoid scientific findings, obscure the specific geological deep time, and generally provide more artistic contributions. The chapter presents very different anthropological approaches, and I also attempt to do justice to directions and positions that I do not represent based on my scientific assumptions, such as the more-than-human approaches or posthumanism.
A prominent theme of The Dawn of Everything is Graeber and Wengrow’s effort to knock down what they believe is the ‘Edenic’ original human innocence component of ‘modern social theory’. To support this position, The Dawn of Everything relies on examples from numerous materially and administratively complex societies. Here I suggest that Graeber and Wengrow are motivated to associate anyone advocating for human arrangements which are less materially or administratively complex as effectively right-wing in psychological and political outlook. Although Graeber and Wengrow never directly say this, it is a theme which can be discerned throughout The Dawn of Everything . They promote a model that anything other than progressivist thought is not only ‘childlike’ and ‘primitive’, but also that such ‘primitivist’ tendencies are effectively politically right. Driven by this logic, The Dawn of Everything attempts to situate a prehistoric left/right divide, with certain hunter-gatherers representing the right and settled agriculture societies representing the left. They do this mainly through their total avoidance of ever making any distinction between two separate adaptations that were alternative to evolving urban civilisation and its politics. One of these adaptations is what Graeber and Wengrow refer to as the ‘heroic societies’. The other is that of people pursuing small-in-scale, non-resource-intensified subsistence lifeways, for the agent-based purposes of maintaining actual autonomy.
Reassessing conventional evolutionary beliefs on the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer societies, this research explores overlooked dimensions of social organisation, addressing aspects such as social inequality and its contestation through the conscious manipulation of space within fortified settlements in West Siberia. Academic discourse often marginalises emerging economic imbalances in hunter-gatherer societies as mere preconditions for farming and social stratification. However, this research confronts such oversimplified narratives that typically distinguish between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ hunter-gatherers. Drawing on Graeber and Wengrow’s (2021) critique of these classifications in The Dawn of Everything , the study advocates for a nuanced perspective on social inequality and the diverse societal responses to it.
The case study of fortified hunter-gatherer settlements in West Siberia challenges perceptions of human history, showing foragers building fortifications for over eight millennia. Global archaeological evidence usually connects such structures in foraging communities to surplus economies and socio-political inequalities. To investigate whether the fortified sites in Siberia can also be correlated with socio-economic differentiation, I employ a standard statistical approach based on the Gini index, while critically scrutinising its application to archaeological contexts. The study assesses changing patterns of social inequality in this region over time. Its findings reveal architectural adjustments as responses to societal changes, potentially fostering denser cohabitation to strengthen communal solidarity amidst rising social inequalities. Despite Graeber and Wengrow’s (2021) criticism of the Gini index, this inquiry empirically resonates with their concept of societal self-awareness and flexibility, highlighting the agency of people as ‘architects’ of their own social arrangements and enriching our understanding of societal dynamics in the past.
In the visionary “Theses on the Concept of History” (1940), Walter Benjamin wrote: “With whom does historicism actually sympathize? The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors. […] According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried in the procession. They are called ‘cultural treasures’. […] They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great geniuses who created them, but also to the anonymous toil of others who lived in the same period.
Since 2011, Morocco has been experiencing major politicalupheavals. From the February 20th movement to the birth of theHirak Al-Rif in 2017, numerous mobilizations broke out all overthe country. Each of these mobilizations has its own specificities,both in terms of the forms of demands and the contexts in whichthey took place. This article aims to make a productive contribu-tion to this global reflection by offering an innovative rereadingof the dynamics of social and political transformation in NorthAfrica, more specifically in Morocco. It does so by analyzing theincreasing social conflicts between the State’s efforts to privatizeland and natural resources to revitalize the economy, and margi-nalized populations who resist their dispossession. It will examinehow 2011’s revolutionary movements opened new opportunitiesfor marginalized communities to claim their rights. As a result ofthe destabilization of existing power structures, power relationsbetween marginalized groups and the State have become increas-ingly radicalized: from the struggle for housing and access topublic services—primarily water and electricity—in informal urbanareas to the struggle for land rights and access to resources inrural areas. Throughout the article, it will be shown that thesemobilizations have challenged, in their own way, the methods bywhich the Moroccan state appropriated and managed its territory.
The commodification of native resources was central to the genesis of colonial markets. Many self-sufficient polities inhabited the preconquest Andes and did not rely on regular market exchange. The discovery of the Potosí mines motivated migration and urban growth to a level never seen before: for the first time, a large urban community needed a regular supply of commodities. The Native communities of the surrounding region produced part of the food and resources consumed in Potosí. The Andean fishing communities of Tarapacá (northern Chile) form one such case. This work addresses the creation of the first modern Andean commodities by analyzing the archaeological and documentary remains of an early seventeenth-century colonial fishery at the mouth of the Loa River, exploring its occupants, spaces, daily praxis, and the social mechanisms involved in seafood commodification. Results show the degree to which the fishery depended on the labor of Native Camanchaca fishers, their techniques and technologies and the actions of powerful entrepreneurs, but also on the persistence of Andean ceremonial and political arrangements. Commercialization and the market expanded through the preservation of fish for deferred consumption and the strategic movement of the resource through multiple distribution channels and communities.
The postulate of adequacy had been extensively questioned and deepened in the area of hermeneutics and interpretive social sciences. Some of the protagonists of this ongoing debate stress that the interpretation of human action has much in common with the interpretation of semiotic objects including texts and narratives. This debate goes back to a long tradition in the philosophy of human or social sciences. Here, considering recent exchanges in the fields of the history of ideas, rhetoric, and ethnography, we address basic epistemological and methodological issues about the interpretation of meaning and its adequacy. We argue that one must ascertain performativity on both sides of the meaning process: on the side of the semiotic object (speech acts, social rituals, texts, images…) and on the side of the interpreter (second-degree understanding, description, explanation…) We also argue that this theoretical discussion is more relevant and fruitful for the humanities and social sciences when it includes the question of writing strategies. In this way, it is possible to envision the practical moment of hermeneutic understanding, embracing its material, ethical, and political dimensions.
This article develops mobility-based categories for studying young people with and without a migration background. Most research on migrant youth uses the category of ethnicity, defined by a young person’s country of origin or that of their parents, or the category of generation, with migrants defined as first, second or 1.5 generation. But these categories hide the mobility that young people engage in, both for those youth who have migration in their biographies and those who do not. Mobility can entail migration, but also other kinds of trips such as study abroad, vacations, gap years, and family visits. In a globalising world the ability of young people to move is increasingly a marker of difference and therefore needs to be considered when studying young people’s lives. Using insights from the transnational and mobilities turns in the social sciences, this article argues that we need to develop new analytical categories that capture the various ways in which young people are mobile. Such mobility-based categories promise to shed light on young people’s lives in three ways. First such categories allow investigation of various elements of commonality and difference between youth, irrespective of where they or their parents come from. They allow us to go beyond the nation-state lens that still guides most large-scale migration research and to explore within-group differences. Second, mobility-based categories take young people’s past and present mobilities into account, allowing a temporal understanding of how mobility affects their lives. Finally, mobility-based categories are a way to operationalize the notion that mobility entails a process rather than a one-time move. The article explores what mobility-based categories could look like, based on a recent, large-N, primary data collection project on secondary-school student’s mobility in three European countries and one African one.
This chapter explores arraigo as the affective connection to land from the perspective of Bogota’s upper middle class. The common narrative of not being able to visit the finca epitomizes how my interlocutors see themselves most affected by the Colombian conflict. At the same time, their privileged relationship to land contrasts sharply with the realities of the rural population. The chapter offers an overview of the land-related aspects of the Colombian conflict and offers insights into the class-specific affective dimension of rootedness.
This study conducted a textual analysis of the Ramakien, or Thai Ramayana, composed in the late eighteenth century. Focusing on the depiction of Mandodari, Ravana’s consort, this investigation employed close reading and cultural context from the early Bangkok period to unpack the nuanced construction of ‘otherness’ in her portrayal. The research found that, given Ravana’s royal status in Thai literary tradition, Mandodari’s portrayal of sexuality and narratives in the Ramakien were intricately constructed to reinforce the inferiority of her husband, Ravana, who is Rama’s main antagonist, and to draw comparisons with Sita, Rama’s consort. The article further delved into the representation of Mandodari as a reflection of Thai monarchical ideology and sexual discourse in Siamese elites of the late 18th century, which arguably influenced till the coming of Western idea of sexuality in the second half of the 19th century, as well as Mandodari’s portrayal in contemporary Thai society. The epic’s genesis in the Siamese royal court underlines the intimate nexus between the Ramakien and the Thai monarchy.
Indigenous peoples the world over are speaking out for their rights in former colonial societies. The term Indigenous, derived from Latin, means within, originating where it is found, or belonging to a particular place by birth or origin, a temporal claim to a place. In an archaeological sense, the San can claim to be the true Indigenous people in all of southern Africa, having lived in the region for thousands of years, before any migrations, and well before any colonial onslaught. Yet in the Northern Cape, South Africa, well-known for a significant concentration of rock engravings and archaeological sites, the current San inhabitants are the most recent arrivals, with no record of an Indigenous population since at least the mid-nineteenth century. In 1999 the South African government resettled some 400 formerly military !Xu and Khwe families of different origins, language backgrounds, and histories in Platfontein without any deliberations about their relation to local boundaries, history or heritage. Indigeneity here is far more complicated and vexing. In this chapter I probe the quest for an authentic Indigenous past of ancient images, to show that the complex history of postcolonial locales demands that archaeologists attend to the dislocations and violence of global forces of the past hundreds of years. The insistence on ancient roots of Indigenous people in a place can effectively deprive them of a role in global history, and of agency in political events. Contested spaces, centuries of conflict, truce, and temporary agreements that fester and erupt with unsurprising regularity are all a part of the context that frames ancient images. We should account for this context when studying them, in order to avoid one-dimensional, simplistic notions of Indigenous heritage.
Over the past decades, Marxist-inspired approaches from the field of International Historical Sociology (IHS) have theorised the relationship between 16th and 17th Century European colonial expansion and the development of relations of production and economic growth on both sides of the Atlantic. In this article, we argue that such attempts – from Dependency Theory (DT), World-Systems Theory (WST), and Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) – are premised on a structuralist perspective which overextend the notion of capitalism and under examine the sphere of production, rendering divergent and distinct strategies of European colonialism a homogenous and under-historicised process. Embracing theoretical innovations from Geopolitical Marxism (GPM), we dispute this unitary logic of expansion, instead applying a radical historicist methodology to demonstrate that British and Spanish colonial strategies in the Americas (intra-imperial free trade vs. mercantilism) were shaped by nationally specific class relations (capitalism vs. feudalism/absolutism), generating unique patterns of settlement on the ground (mineral extraction vs. cash-crop production). Promoting historicism thus allows Marxist International Relations to better recognise the “making of” international order during the period of European colonial expansion from the 16th century onwards, and, in doing so, further understand its enduring legacies.
This review admires Michael Marder’s inquiry as a parallel for which biosemiotics can find points of conceptual resonance, even as methodological differences remain. By looking at the dump of ungrounded semiosis – the semiotics of dislocating referents from objects, and its effects – we can better do the work of applying biosemiotics not just towards the wonders of living relations, but also to the manifold ways in which industrial civilization is haphazardly yet systematically destroying the possibility for spontaneous yet contextualized semiogenesis. Biosemiotics has much to gain by understanding the ways, gross and subtle, in which Anthropocenic hubris undercuts our own ability to make sense of the world, doubling down on overconfidence at the expense of meaning-making.
Masquerades form an important part of indigenous African religions, and headpieces of masks are found all over the world as an iconic African art form. Contrary to expectation, however, the geographical distribution of masking is very restricted, occurring only in three areas of the continent, mainly situated in the forested zones. I explain this peculiar distribution by tracing the ecological and historical parameters of the societies that harbor mask rituals. The main ecological factors are the absence of cattle and the type of horticulture, while a crucial historical element is the long history of slave raiding and trading to which the continent has been subjected. These factors have led to societies in which both gender and local power arrangements show a marked indeterminacy, operating as internal arenas between men and women, and between different groups of men. Crucial in the explanation of masquerades is the fact that masking is completely absent from societies that practice cattle husbandry with the Bos indicus species (zebu). Since sleeping sickness prohibits cattle husbandry, wherever the tsetse fly thrives, masks appear.
Tricontinentalism, the radical ideational universe of the Global South so important in the 1960s and 1970s, lost much of its original thrust with the neoliberal turn, and its contribution to global history has long been obscured. Recently, however, historians, political theorists and others have been studying its take on global justice and the multiple impacts of its political strategies, ideological rhetoric, identity formations, as well as its many transnational connections: traces still recognisable in the repertoire of social movements today. By unearthing these strands and constellations of global history, and by sometimes cooperating with activists, these scholars act as Foucauldian genealogists, laying bare sediments of historical agency that the hegemonic memory formation of neoliberalism had all but buried. Such efforts constitute a form of counter-history in the competitive field of political memory. This paper applies elements of mnemonic hegemony theory ( mht ) to analyse Tricontinental memory, with a particular focus on Latin America.
The first step in the Islamist invention of Islamic tradition is to establish a new understanding of Islam as din-wa-dawla: religion united with a state order. When Islamists speak of al-hall al-Islami (Islamic solution), they mean not democracy but rather a remaking of the existing political order in pursuit of the Islamic shari’a state. It is this idea, not violence, that is the hallmark and conditio sine qua non of Islamism. It is no exaggeration to contend that Islamism puts the unity of religion and state almost on an equal footing with shahadah (allegiance to Islam) as a test of how truly Islamic one is.
Political practices are fundamental for co-existence in human groups, yet the systematic investigation of such practices within prehistoric societies is still very much pending. Relevant discussions are often limited to cases of obvious asymmetric power relations and the alleged establishment of elites. In order to fill this complex gap in the current discussion we take a systematic approach exploring the nature and organisation of prehistoric power relations, decision-making and conflict resolution. We investigate changes in political practices through a diachronic set of case studies from prehistoric west Eurasia, examining the impact of these changes on the overall transformative processes of prehistoric sociality.
Here, we explore a set of parameters in five case studies from prehistoric Eurasia in order to characterise power relations and to reconstruct political negotiation and decision-making processes that constitute political practices. The case studies exhibit socio-political complexity in a variety of forms, encompassing a wide range of situations from Mesolithic Siberia, LBK Vráble Slovakia, Neolithic Pile-dwellings Switzerland, Copper Age Tripolye Ukraine, Neolithic and Bronze Age Schleswig-Holstein, to Iron Age Greece. As archaeological proxies, eight parameters have been identified as markers of political practice to be used as a comparative framework: community site, conformity/diversity, (critical) resource access and distribution, network configurations, organisation of decision-making, property rights, (violent) conflict and resolution, and knowledge.
In this chapter we aim to develop a systematic approach for the analysis of political practices in order to enable the identification of patterns of power relations within the prehistory of Eurasia. This way we will develop a long-term perspective on transformations of these practices at a geographical macro scale.
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