The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner AsiaIn this groundbreaking work, social anthropologist David Sneath aggressively dispels the myths surrounding the history of steppe societies and proposes a new understanding of the nature and formation of the state. Since the colonial era, representations of Inner Asia have been dominated by images of fierce nomads organized into clans and tribes—but as Sneath reveals, these representations have no sound basis in historical fact. Rather, they are the product of nineteenth-century evolutionist social theory, which saw kinship as the organizing principle in a nonstate society. |
Contents
Evolutionism and the Anthropological Imagination | |
Colonial and Imperial Orders and the Peripheral Polity | |
The Unilineal Descent Group and the Ordering of State Subjects | |
Neocolonial and Soviet Models | |
Nationstate History and the Notion of Identity | |