Toward A Networks and Boundaries Approach CA Final

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009
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Toward a Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

The Late Shang Case by Roderick B. Campbell
The past 10 years have seen a reorientation of archaeological political theory from a focus on neoevolutionary classication and state origins to a focus on the operation of ancient polities. This trend, while promising, nonetheless frequently retains problematic habits of earlier approaches, including the tendency to slip into reductionist classicatory exercises. Furthermore, I argue that the naturalized experience of nation-states and the legacy of modernist political theory form an unexamined yet pernicious inuence. In ancient contexts, the reied anachronism of the state is better understood in terms of a nexus of networks of power and authority and the imagined political communities with which they articulate. I suggest that both polity networks and polity ideas should then be analyzed in terms of their discursive, practical, and material aspects and the relationships between them. Relatively understudied and still undeservingly peripheral to the generation of ancient political models in archaeology, Shang China will form the basis of a case study in the application of the networks and boundaries approach proposed here. Drawing on archaeological, epigraphic, and transmitted textual sources, I will sketch an outline of Shang political geography, discursive structures, practices of power/authority, networks of capital, and boundaries of political identity.
Introduction
Nearly 30 years ago, K. C. Chang (1980, 364) critically engaged the then-fashionable typological exercises of neoevolutionary theory and the place of Shang China within it, claiming that the Shang data pose some denitional problems and arguing that China be taken seriously in formulating generalizations about ancient polities. Unfortunately, nearly three decades later, early China is still the playground of typological exercises derived from other parts of the ancient world and has served as an opportunity more to project pregiven assumptions about early complex polities than to build new theory. The Chinese situation, moreover, is not unique but rather an instantiation of troublesome tendencies in archaeological political theory today. The lingering mental habits of neoevolutionism and structural-functionalist political theory have led current archaeological theorizing in some problematic directions. I will argue that the notion of the state is just as
Roderick B. Campbell is a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Study of the Ancient World (Box 1837/70 Waterman Street, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, U.S.A. [roderickbcampbell@gmail.com]). This paper was submitted 5 VII 08 and accepted 21 IX 08.
much a conceptual stumbling block as is the much-critiqued chiefdom. Indeed, the state serves archaeological political theory as a kind of end of history but is, in fact, an illusory and anachronistic projection of modern political contingencies. I argue that archaeologists must shed these tendencies and adopt more historically sophisticated approaches if they wish to fulll archaeologys potential for contributing to a political anthropology of deep time. In the end I hope to show both how current theory has not adequately served the Chinese case and how the Shang example could be used to build better models. Indeed, through describing Shang sources of power, the discourses they were embedded in, practices they were constituted through, and resources that made them possible, I aim both to demonstrate how the Late Shang polity operated and to sketch the outline of a comparative historical framework.
Post-neoevolutionary Theory: Promise and Problems

A perennial research topic in archaeology, the study of archaic states (Feinman and Marcus 1998), early civilizations (Trigger 2003), and early complex polities (A. Smith 2003) has seen some major changes in the past 10 years or so. In large part this is due to an avowed shift away from the ty-
2009 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2009/5006-0003$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/648398
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pological exercises that occupied much of the earlier work on the origins of state societies to a focus on how ancient polities operated (Feinman and Marcus 1998; Trigger 2003; Van Buren and Richards 2000, 7). The previous focus on social evolutionary types (e.g., bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states) and the evolutionary paths that linked them has been criticized extensively on a number of grounds, including the difculty of tting the variety of observed societies into a few available types (Blanton et al. 1996; Yoffee 2005); the implausibility of nding prime movers responsible for causing movement from one evolutionary stage to the next (Van Buren and Richards 2000); the oversimplication behind the assumption of lockstep social, political, and economic development in holistic, evolutionary stages (Yoffee 1993); and the decontextualization involved in trait list approaches (Trigger 2003; Yoffee 2005). In addition, the functionalist and adaptionist assumptions under which much neoevolutionary theorizing on the origins of the state was conducted (Paynter 1989) tended to leave little scope for local cultural logics (Wolf 1982), while agency, when it appeared at all, generally took the form of rational action assigned to disembodied entities such as the state or elites. This critique of neoevolutionary theory and call for a refocus on how ancient polities operated have generated a number of new approaches showing both promising directions and problematic tendencies. The most positive tendency has been a general unpacking of the neoevolutionary states package of features: cities, civilizations, political cultures, and authority structures are now generally seen as taking on a variety of forms providing different possibilities for early complex polities. The renewed focus on cities (M. Smith 2003; Yoffee 2005), for instance, makes it possible to think about how urban spaces might contribute to the constitution of social and political orders. In this way of thinking, cities become active participants in constructing political landscapes rather than simply epiphenomena of a certain degree of sociopolitical complexity (A. Smith 2003; Yoffee 2005). Moreover, investigating urban organization and the concomitant constitution of nonurban landscapes (Yoffee 2005) returns material and spatial qualities to early complex polities (A. Smith 2003; M. Smith 2003). Likewise, the useful distinction being drawn between states and civilizations makes the latter more than merely a shorthand for state-level society but rather a kind of cultural order leaking beyond the boundaries of city and state (Feinman and Marcus 1998; Trigger 2003; Yoffee 1993, 2005). At once setting early complex polities within a wider context, the focus on civilization also moves the discussion of political orders into the realm of cultural production and away from the functionalist, adaptionist assumptions of control-systems theory. The return of political culture and legitimation to the equation of power in early complex polities has also nuanced the monolithic state of control-systems models. From the vari-
ability of moral and institutional orientations toward the concentration of power foregrounded by Blanton (1998) to Baines and Yoffees (1998) advocacy of order and legitimacy as key to understanding early polities, the sociocultural discourse of power is increasingly seen as more than ideological superstructure. Nevertheless, despite these promising new directions in research, the lingering habits of earlier archaeological political theory can still be seen in many recent approaches. The widely inuential dual-processual model of Blanton et al. (1996), for instance, although broadening a control-systems model with the addition of political culture, conceives of it in functionalist and instrumental terms as leadership strategies (Pauketat 2007). What started off as a promising critique of controlsystems theory (Blanton 1998) ended up as a new typological exercise replete with trait lists (Yoffee 2005). The problematic essentialism of the dual-processual model, moreover, can be seen in a recent application to Neolithic China in which the Middle and Late Neolithic societies of Shaanxi and Henan provinces are characterized as corporate, while the East Coast cultures are said to be network (L. Liu 2004), effectively foreclosing the issue of how particular ancient Chinese polities operated with a typological exercise (see Pauketat 2007 for a similar argument concerning Mississippian polities). If, however, Bourdieu (1977, 1990) is correct in theorizing the existence of social elds, each with its own rules or logics (e.g., the rules of the court, the army, or the family), or Mann (1986) is correct in claiming that there are multiple sources of social power, then rather than determining which of two overarching leadership strategies characterized a given polity (let alone an entire culture area!), it would be more useful to identify local sources of power and understand their elds of production and mutual articulations. Attendant on the newfound interest in cities, states, and civilizations, city-states and territorial states have entered the shared vocabulary of archaeologists and, among some scholars, have also given rise to a new typological exercise (e.g., Trigger 2003). In essence, the distinction between these two types of states boils down to either a dual or a monistic formulation of political geographic possibilities and origin narratives for early complex polities. The rst narrative is that of territorial expansion and the forced invention of a centralized governing apparatus in order to effect lasting consolidation, as postulated for Egypt (Savage 1997) or China (Liu and Chen 2003; Trigger 2003). The second is that of a kind of peer-polity interaction (Renfrew and Cherry 1986) scenario wherein competition sparks increasing social, political, and economic development in competing centers, as postulated for Mesopotamia (Trigger 2003) or China (Yates 1997; Yoffee 2005). The obvious problem with these categories is that raised against the typologies of a previous generation of archaeological theory: can all the diversity of ancient political forms really be reduced to one or two types without inicting some procrustean violence on the evidence (Cowgill 2004, 542)? Is, for instance, the Aztec polity really analogous to
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those of ancient Sumer and Akkad, as Trigger (2003) implies in terming both situations city-states? Are all ancient polities really either Egypt-like or Mesopotamia-like? Or are the options even more limited, according to Marcus (1998), where archaic states are expansive, internally differentiated, and highly centralized or they are not states? Or contrarily, are states necessarily born of cities in competition with other cities? The answers to these questions have essentially limited the parameters of discourse on ancient China and many other regions. Another problematic residue of neoevolutionary approaches, or perhaps the early and mid-twentieth-century modernist political theory that spawned them, is the exclusive focus on elites and a top-down understanding of power and authority. Thus, the dual-processual model is concerned with leadership strategies, Baines and Yoffees (1998) order, legitimacy, wealth model focuses on inner elites, and even A. Smith (2003) chooses to write about the production of authority rather than its resistance. Resistance and authority, however, are dialectically inseparable (Foucault 1995; Giddens 1982). Indeed, what is resistance to one might simultaneously be a claim to authority by another. Despite this, the scholarship on ancient Chinese polities is full of characterizations of authority in terms of elite monopolies of sacred power (Chang 1983; Vandermeersch 1977) or political economies of elite prestige goods (Liu and Chen 2003; Underhill 2002). Missed in this focus on elites, however, yet crucial to any understanding of authority are the reasons why the majority follow or the effects their resistances or potential counterclaims have on shaping the practices of those in more strategic positions. Indeed, if one can conceive of power institutionally and personally distributed and of some agents occupying more strategic positions within this dynamic network than others, then there ought to be a continuum of relational power wielders stretching from subalterns to the most powerful.1 If we add in the observation that legitimated, institutionalized power has a multiplicity of sources, then the term elites becomes an even cruder tool of analysis. If we wish to investigate how ancient polities operated, then we need to understand the particular ways in which the relational dialectic of authority was produced and resisted, its sites, its limitations, and the variety of its sources. Too Many States (or Modernist Illusions in the Postmodern Era) If it would be better to analyze the relationships between urban centers, polities, and their wider contexts than to debate the classication of early states, then even the focus on states, with its methodological assumption of a bounded political entity, is problematic. As Wolf (1982, 3) wrote more than 20
1. Some good examples of this principle of a continuity of statuses and dynamism in their expression can be seen in mortuary studies such as those of Flad (2002) and Tang (1999a).
years ago, sociology, history, and anthropology have problematically reied what were originally only heuristically bounded units of analysis, yet
the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like nation, society, and culture name bits and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the eld from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of understanding.
Focusing on how ancient states worked essentially ensures a comparative study of isolated cases, while focus on the state limits the conceptual boundaries of those cases to a reied category that seems to serve archaeological political theory as an end of history, ignoring the ve millennia or so of sociopolitical development between the rst archaic states and the modern nation-states that gave rise to the political models on which archaeological states are based (Y. Ferguson 2002). Wolf once said that anthropology needs to discover history, and the same could be said for archaeological political theory (see also Kohl 1989). One important step in this direction would be to recontextualize ancient polities as bundles of relationships within elds of culture, economy, and power and then comparatively investigate their continuities and transformations over time. Indeed, even in modern contexts, authors such as Abrams (1988, 82) have argued that the state is an illusion:
the state is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is. . . . There is a state-system . . . a palpable nexus of practice and institutional structure centered in government and more or less extensive, unied and dominant in any given society. . . . There is, too, a state idea, projected, purveyed and variously believed in in different societies at different times. . . . The relationship of the state-system and the state-idea to other forms of power should and can be central concerns of political analysis.
This suggests that the study of political forms through time ought to abandon the reied state and instead distinguish between systems or networks of power/governance and the polity idea(s) or imagined communit(ies) of political identity. The nature of these networks of power, the boundaries of political community, and their relationships through time become three foci of investigation to replace the study of the state. Nevertheless, just as focus on urban and nonurban environments and civilizational orders has expanded the previous investigation of archaic states, state systems, state ideas, and their relationships must be set back within both their specic sociophysical environments and wider world contexts. In the following sections I will outline an approach to studying polity networks and polity ideas, as well as their articulations
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with each other and the worlds from which they are abstracted. Networks of Power Mann (1986) powerfully presents the argument that societies should be reenvisioned as overlapping networks of four sources of power: economic, ideological, military, and political. Nevertheless, while Manns core idea of social networks seems promising (in light of both Wolfs and Abramss points above), to avoid the Eurocentrism implicit in his tendency to reify power sources into the institutions of the church, the army, the guilds, and the state, actual sources of power (or capital in a Bourdieuian sense) should be investigated on a local, contextual basis. Ideology, moreover, rather than being a separate source, ought to be seen as an inherent property of the circulation of power. Indeed, since at least Weber, the legitimation of power or authority has been considered a central problematic of political theory. Thus, along these lines, Bourdieu (1998, 33) writes that
the genesis of the state is inseparable from the process of unication of the different social, economic, cultural (or educational), and political elds which goes hand in hand with the progressive constitution of the state monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence.
For writers like Bourdieu (see also A. Smith 2003), both the unication of power and its concomitant legitimation are at the heart of the state (or as I would prefer, the state system). Unlike most archaeological theorists of complex polities, however, Bourdieu, with Weber, is writing about the genesis of modern states. While I emphatically do not want to divide history into the absolute categories of the modern and the traditional, the extent to which modern political experiences can be projected back into antiquity ought to be an object of investigationbut one that would require archaeologists to question their naturalized assumptions as citizens of nation states (Y. Ferguson 2002). The degree to which various sources of power were concentrated in the hands of particular actors or institutions and the means through which power was legitimated ought then to form part of the subject of inquiry in investigations of early complex political networks rather than being an element of initial assumptions. Violence and Authority. In addition, for all the utility of studying the production of authority, there is always the potential for the violence invoked in Bourdieus (1998) discussion of state genesis to escape discourses of legitimation or to be mobilized against or independently of the state monopoly. Indeed, in recent discussions of nation-states and the postCold War world order, the large number of failed states, the inuence of transnational corporations and nongovernment agencies, and the rise of ethnic conicts have led many analysts to question the naturalness of a world composed of states (B. Ferguson 2002; Y. Ferguson 2002; Wolf 2002), the
universal suitability of this European model (Y. Ferguson 2002), and, indeed, its continued relevance to the increasingly globalized world (Krohn-Hansen and Nustad 2005). While the death of the state may be premature (Alonso 2005), this discussion should at least underline for archaeologists the historical contingency of the modern nation-state as fact or idea and, by implication, the contingency of ancient political forms as well. One of the products of this critical rethinking of the state has been a return of the concept of sovereignty and its relationship to violence. Probably no one has been as inuential in this discussion as Agamben (1998), who argues that a key aw of Western political philosophy lies in its conceptualization of constituting and constituted power in an alternating historical relationship. Thus, constituting power, frequently associated with revolutionary or pacifying violence, is seen as conned to the initial establishment of political orders (Elias 1994). Within the constituted power structures of the stable state, with its putative monopolies over the use of force and the production of authority, violence can then be presented as an anomaly. Agamben (1998) argues, however, that the original relationship of violence to authority is always a part of sovereign relations. In a dynamic view of political organization, then, authority must be constantly produced in tandem with continuously emergent sources of power (including violent interventions). The ongoing consolidation or dissolution of authority in a single institution or agent, or multiple institutions or agents, is complicated, moreover, by the potential operation of de facto sovereignty by agents wielding the ability to kill, punish and discipline with impunity (Hansen and Stepputat 2006, 296). Thus, in short, I am arguing that we ought to investigate ancient polity networks contingently and dynamically rather than as the stable end points of a process of monopolization (whether seen in terms of control or authority), that we should be sensitive to the potential multiplicity of power sources and their local contexts and conditions, and that we should see the production of authority as being in a dynamic relationship with the circulation of power. As important as the construction of authority or the understanding of the processes of its concentration is, even in the most distopian Orwellian visions of society, the work of legitimation is never quite nished, and the violence that is part of the circulation of power always at least partially escapes the production of authority. Violence is generally assumed to be an exception to normal stable sociopolitical orders, in our modern statist way of thinking, but a cursory look at any hundred years of human history will show the omnipresence of violence and its role in the creation, dissolution, or dynamic maintenance of social and political networks. Discourse, Practice, and Resources of Power/Authority. If constituting violence and constituted authority are always in dynamic tension and the concentration or distribution of power sources is historically contingent, then we still have to consider
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the practical question of how to envision these power/authority networks. Following Bourdieu (1990, 1998, 2000), the links between the resources of power (various forms of capital) and the actual operation of power are the durable dispositions of socialized bodies; the orienting, enabling, and limiting qualities of socialized space (Lefebvre 1991; A. Smith 2003); and the prosthetic mediation of socialized things (Latour 1993). In the terms I am developing here, I would name this analytical level that of practice. Practices of power are, however, at once made possible and limited by their material conditions and, at the same time, give rise to and are partially articulated through discourses of authority. I thus envision power/authority networks as dynamic, tripartite, and overlapping discursive, practical, and material networks of constituted authority and constituting violence. Polity Ideas: Boundaries of Identity If conceiving of polities as overlapping networks of power/ authority usefully destabilizes their reication, the experience of political community is generally one of more or less permeable boundaries, of insiders and outsiders and more or less salient identities. Andersons (1991) approach to modern nation-states as imagined communities produced through such patterning technologies as mass media, maps, ags, and universal education offers a useful point of departure. If these technologies and practices pattern the collective political imaginations of the citizens of nation-states, what were the practices, technologies, and sociophysical spaces that produced ancient political communities? Moreover, if universal citizenship is a feature particular to modern nation-states, then we must also be attentive to the potential variability and multiplicity of the political identities of agents embedded in polity networks in other times and places. Should we speak of a polity idea or polity ideas? Among which segments of society were these senses of community salient? If there are generally multiple networks of power and boundaries of identity, how might these relate to one another? For instance, one might simultaneously be a member of a descent group, a religious community, a military unit, and a larger polity. To what degree might these identities be consolidated within an overarching political identity? In what circumstances might one or the other become relevant? Polity Structures and Polity Ideas This potential multiplicity of identity complicates the polity idea just as much as the possible dispersal and disjuncture of power/authority networks nuance the polity system. Like networks of power/authority, political communities also have their discursive, practical, and material aspects. As Abrams (1988) noted, polity ideas and polity networks are necessarily interrelated, but they are not the same thing. Thus, for example, the ideology of presidential authority and the legitimacy of its expansion in the war on terror were linked to
American identity and patriotism in the wake of 9/11, but neither discourse exhausted the other. In short, there may be convergences and disjunctures between power/authority networks and political identities, as well as among their analytical levels. Thus, ineffective ideologies may be at odds with practical perception or material means, once-powerful socializing practices may lose their ideological justication or material basis, and products or resources once key to political economies might decline in signicance or have their role radically transformed in changing times. Historically, the formation of more or less totalizing political identities and polity structures may go hand and hand, but if the claim that nation and state became identied with each other only in relatively recent times is valid, then we must see the relationships between political identities and the circulation and institutions of power/authority as an analytical problem. Crucial arenas for this articulation are the discourses of authority and the degree to which their associated practices produce and assimilate cohesive political identities. A related but separate issue is that of the nature of the relationship between power and political identity: as Foucault (1995) pointed out, there is a world of difference between citizen and subject, though either may be more or less well integrated into structures of power. Thus, in addition to the ways in which networks of discourse, practice, and capital circulate power and produce authority, their cohesive or solvent effects on identity and the nature of the political subjectivities they produce must also be investigated.
Early Chinese Polities

As noted above, lingering tendencies to essentialize, reify, and classify; to characterize power solely in terms of elite agency; and to fail to account for historical contingency and variety have served to undercut some of the achievements of recent scholarship on ancient polities in general but China in particular. Pauketats (2007) argument that past and current approaches alike have foreclosed truly historical understandings of ancient political situations, even as the window for studying them is rapidly closing, holds especially true for China. At a time when Chinas landscape is being altered at an unprecedented rate, early Chinese political anthropology is being poorly served by both the traditional historiographic and the Marxist approaches of older Chinese archaeologists (Falkenhausen 1993), as well as the newer models being imported from the West. None of these approaches investigates the dynamic particulars of ancient Chinese political forms so much as assumes them, based on either anachronistic projection or the parameters of abstract models. My intention, then, is to take a small step in the direction of addressing this problem through the application of a networks and boundaries approach to the Late Shang polity. I show how the resulting vantage point allows us to get beyond the city-state/ territorial state dichotomy, to investigate political culture without reducing it to corporate/network dualisms, and to
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explore the production of sociopolitical orders as dynamic and multivalent interplays of continuously constituted authority and constituting (and deconstituting) violence. Background The Shang polity network and polity idea discussed here are more precisely those of the Late Shang dynasty (ca. 12501050 BCE; table 1), centered in the Great Settlement Shang near modern Anyang (g. 1). The Shang is also the name of the second of the rst three dynasties of traditional Chinese historiography and an archaeological culture. In terms of sources, Anyang is among the longest and most intensively excavated sites in China, while the Late Shang is the rst period for which a corpus of contemporaneous writing survives: around 50,000 pieces of inscribed oracle bones (Keightley 1997) and several dozen short bronze-vessel inscriptions.2 Transmitted texts, purporting to describe Shang events but written hundreds of years later, form another, secondary source. The Late Shang polity at Anyang, then, with its relative richness of evidence, offers the earliest mature conditions for the study of Bronze Age political networks in East Asia. Imagining the Shang: Discursive Hierarchies of Authority In discussing the Late Shang polity, I will begin with what is usually the stated or unstated point of departure in discussions of states: the projected image of state power and its structures. I will then attempt to demonstrate the contingency and dynamism of the assumed thingness of the Shang polity with its attendant conation of discursive visions and practical realities, ows of power, and communities of identity. The vision of the polity presented here is one derived from the vantage of the Shang kings oracle bone divinations and, as such, is a composite of royal assumptions and tendentious claims structured through a ritualized negotiation with the gods and ancestors that itself underwent change over the course of the Late Shang period (Chang 1987). One of the most striking things about this reconstructed royal discourse on power, its logics, and its sources is the incorporation of gods and ancestors into the hierarchy of authority. Thus, complicating A. Smiths (2003, 107) claim that political authority lays a presumptive claim to be the authority of last resort, the political worldview of the Late Shang is incomprehensible without the realization that the social and political community included the dead as well as the living and that the authority of last resort was that of not the king but the high god Di. Below him were the powers of the land and the high dynastic
2. The oracle bone inscriptions, as mostly records of royal divination, are a rich source of information about the concerns of the Late Shang kings. Shang bronze inscriptions, on the other hand, consist of mostly ancestor dedications, with a few of the longer ones recording the vessel casters receipt of a reward of cowry shells for service rendered to the king or another patron.
Table 1. Ancient mainland East Asian chronology

Longshan Erlitou Early Shang Middle Shang Late Shang Western Zhou Ca. Ca. Ca. Ca. Ca. Ca. 30001800 BCE 18001600 BCE 16001400 BCE 14001250 BCE 12501050 BCE 1050771 BCE
ancestors and then a descending hierarchy of ancestral spirits in order of generational seniority, down to the living king and his subordinates (Keightley 1999, 2000; g. 2). The authority of Di and, to a lesser extent, the powers and ancestors included control of the weather, the harvest, victory or defeat in war, the building or continuance of settlements, sickness, childbirth, and good or ill fortune in general: in short, the prosperity and continued existence of the king and his people, as these oracle bone divinations indicate.
1. Tested: This coming Gui Mao day Di may order wind. (672 obverse)3 2. Tested: It is Di who curses our harvest. (10124) 3a. Tested: It is Guo of Zhi whom the King should meet to attack the Ba Fang. (For if the King does,) Di will grant us aid. (6473) 3b. Tested: It is not Guo of Zhi whom the king should join with to attack the Ba fang. (For if the King does,) Di will perhaps not grant us aid.
Not only did Di, the powers of the land, and the ancestors control many crucial aspects of daily life in the Late Shang scheme of things but also the logic of beseeching and mollifying (Y. Liu 2004) and the discourse of gifting, feasting, reporting, and receiving orders or mandates all nd parallel in the kings own interaction with subordinates (Keightley 2000). Compare, for instance, the following divinatory inscriptions concerning the king making reports and receiving orders from the ancestors with analogous examples of subordinates and allies reporting to and being given orders by the king.
4. Reporting: Cracked on Dingsi day, diviner Bin tested: (We should conduct a) liao-burning sacrice to Wanghai [an ancestor] (offering) ten juvenile animals and mao-split ten bovines and three juvenile animals to report (that the King) will join with Wang and mount an expedition against Xia Wei. (6527) 5. Reporting: Guo of Zhi [an ally], reporting said: the Tu Fang have mounted an expedition into my eastern borders, [harming] two settlements. The Gong Fang also raided the elds of my western borders. (6057) 6. Ordering: X Shen day cracked, Ke tested: Da Ding [an
3. Oracle bone inscriptions cited in the text will be referred to by their index numbers in collections such as the heji (Guo 1978) and huadong (ZSKY 2003a).
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Figure 1. Late Shang Anyang. ancestor] calls upon the King to press (an attack against) [Prince] Bu. (6887) 7. Ordering: Xinsi day cracked, Zheng tested: this cycle (?) levy men and call upon Fu Hao [a royal consort/general] to attack the Tu Fang, (for if we do) we will receive divine aid. Fifth month. (6412)
At Late Shang Anyang, then, as Keightley (2000, 101) has argued, The living and the dead were . . . engaged in a communal, ritually structured conversation. The kings position in this chain of being, stretching from the high god Di through the royal ancestors to the lowest captives and livestock, was that of privileged mediator with the royal dead. The discourse of royal power thus was in the idiom of hierarchical kinship expressed through the language of tribute and reward, commanding and reporting, transgression, and punishment. The kings paramount status and claims to universal lordship can also be inferred from his sacrices to the four di-
rections and their invocation in the four ramps of the royal tombs at Anyang (g. 3). Late Anyang period bronze inscriptions, too, marked time by the kings sacricial cycle and his campaigns, constructing him as steward of the worlddomesticating technologies of sacrice and war. The potency of the Shang kings discursive hegemony moreover, of the Shang ritual order and the kings place within itis strikingly attested in divinations concerning the Shang royal sacrice found in the Zhouyuan on predynastic Zhou oracle bone fragments (Cao 2002). Though well beyond the distribution of Late Shang ceramic traditions (and, thus, Shang culture; g. 4), these inscriptions and, indeed, the received Zhou tradition suggest that while the Zhou eventually successfully contested the terms of the Shang world order, they did so within its discursive framework. Moreover, the magnitude of the sacricial remains associated with burials in the royal cemetery and attested in the oracle bone inscriptions, as well as the relative size of the royal
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Figure 2. The Shang kings discursive hierarchy of authority.
tombs (g. 3), all depict the Shang kings as unique and their ancestral rites as foci of unmatched ows of social energy. Nevertheless, in the crucial arena of burial and ancestor construction, most of the symbolic capital of lineage aggrandizement was not monopolized by the kings, and ancestral status was achieved through distinction in number, quality, and size of offerings as much as through qualitative distinction (Campbell 2007). Indeed, if the king was lineage leader of lineage leaders, then his status, though of a higher order, was nevertheless of the same type as that of other leaders of powerful lineages whose settlements dotted North China. As leader of the cult of the royal ancestors, the king was responsible for leading ritual that involved the distant progenitors of many of the high elites (Zhu 2004) and, by perhaps ctitious extension, the rank and le lineage members as well. This leadership and the kings position between the ancestors and the people were then balanced with both responsibilities to those below and demands from the ancestors above to rule well or suffer calamity and divine retribution. The Kings City and the Great Settlement Shang. Beyond the royal cemetery and palace-temple area, the Great Settlement Shang itself evoked the hegemonic ideology of the king. Indeed, a prevalent view concerning Bronze Age Chinese cities is that they were kings cities (Chang 1985; Shen 2003), pointing to the role of the king in the construction of urban
sites and the placing of the lineage temples and dynastic tombs as their raison detre. In this view, the capital is said to be the created center of political and religious activity, or, in Wheatleys (1971) terms, a centripetalizing ceremonial center. Diachronically speaking, the Great Settlement Shang emerged from a centuries-old Central Plains tradition characterized by singular megasites centering expansive networks of ceremonial and everyday material culture (g. 1). Not only were each of the successive Central Plains megacenters of the second millennium BCE by far larger than any other contemporaneous site but also they shared a common tradition of large-scale rammed-earth palace-temples within a walled or moated enclosure at the center of the site, large bronze casting foundries and other workshops, richly furnished tombs, and sacrice of increasing scale and elaboration. During the Late Shang period, the Central Plains megacenter was the Great Settlement Shang at Anyang (g. 1). Reaching 30 km2 in area at its peak, Anyang greatly overshadowed any contemporary or prior site found to date within the area of modern China in its size, the scale of its bronze production, the wealth of its tombs, and the magnitude of its sacricial practices. Nevertheless, though Anyang has been the focus of investigations since the early twentieth century and has been discussed in many works since then (e.g., Chang 1980; Li 1977; Thorp 2005), the actual structure and developmental history of the site as a whole (as opposed to the
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Figure 3. Royal cemetery and sacricial remains. The numbered tombs are those of Shang kings; the large tomb and the two-ramped tombs may have been the tombs of consorts and other royal family members. Most of the smaller rectangular pits are sacricial.
palace-temple area and royal cemetery) have only recently become objects of investigation. The current understanding of the sites development is that it rapidly grew around a palace-temple core, increasing from 12 to 30 km2 in the century between 1250 and 1150 BCE (ZSKY 2003b). In addition to the large, enclosed rammedearth structures of the palace-temples, a great settlement,
in Central Plains Bronze Age terms, also contained workshops for the production of strategic objects (most prominently bronze-casting foundries), sacricial areas, and the wellendowed tombs of prominent ancestors. All of these features were present from the beginning of the Late Shang period, though the subsequent expansion of residential and burial remains around the site core was accompanied by an increase
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Figure 4. Late Shang Period China. 1, Shang, Metropolitan subtype; 2, Shang, Anqiu subtype; 3, Shang, Qianzhangda subtype; 4, Shang, Subutun subtype; 5, Shang, Tianhu subtype; 6, Shang, Laoniupo subtype.
in (at least) bronze production (Li 2003a). In other words, the characteristic package of a Central Plains megacenter was in place from the beginning of the Great Settlement Shang, implying that from its inception it was conceived of and constructed as a central place. Nevertheless, while the central role of the Shang kings, with their circumscribed palace-temple area, matchless tombs, and monumental sacrice, cannot be ignored in shaping the ritual, political, and even economic character of the capital, a consideration of the nature of Shang kingship and the broader organization of society suggests a more complicated reality than royal ideology attempts to portray. One suggestive account of the social dynamics of a capital site is offered in the Pangeng chapter of the Shangshu (Legge 1994).4 Though probably written during the centuries after the Zhou conquest
4. The Shangshu, or Book of Documents, is an early Chinese text composed of the purported speeches of prominent gures.
of the Shang (Shaughnessy 1993, 378), this text purports to describe the speeches of the Shang king Pangeng in his efforts to move the capital.5 The text claims that not only was the establishment of a new settlement and the abandonment of the old mandated by the royal ancestors through divination but also ancestral curses would fall on those who resisted the kings command. Hierarchical reciprocity, proper order, and moral-religious imperative occupied the center of this discourse, as the king, at turns cajoling and threatening, made speeches to both leaders and commoners.6 In this monologue, the king appears embedded in a structure of authority that
5. This conquest occurred sometime around 1050 BCE, with some authors arguing for more specic dates, such as 1046 (Duandai 2000; Pankenier 1981) or 1045 (Nivison 1983). 6. This dualistic distinction between leaders/rulers/chiefs and commoners/ruled/people is one made by the text and is common to Western Zhou and Shang sources alike.
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prominently included the dead, with his preeminent place secured by his ancestors position among those of his subordinates. Pangengs speech also suggests the contingency and moral framework of the kings power, the potential for other leaders to cause trouble, and the necessity of building consensus through both dire threats and moral suasion. While the grammar and usage of the Pangeng chapter indicates that it did not reach its current form in the Shang period, the framing of persuasion in terms of ancestral curse and the contingent authority of the king accords well with the contemporaneous oracle bone inscriptions. The feasting or hosting of ancestors by other ancestors in hierarchical order (Keightley 2000), as well as the idea that the continuation or founding of settlements was based on the will of the gods and ancestors determined through divination, also nds expression in Shang oracle bone inscriptions, as the following oracle bone inscription suggests:
8. Bing Chen day cracked, Ke tested: it may be that Di will end this settlement. (14209)
hierarchical, descent-based communities linked together through an ideology of shared descent and common (but nevertheless hierarchically organized) participation in marriage, war, sacrice, and feasting (Campbell 2007; Tang 2004; see Zhu 2004 for the argument that in the Shang period North China was generally organized in these terms). This structural observation, in turn, has great signicance for understanding the networks of Late Shang power. Political Landscape. Beyond Anyang, the Late Shang landscape was dotted with other lineage-based communities (Akatsuka 1977; Chang 1980; Song 1994; Zhu 2004) sharing ritual and, to a lesser extent, everyday material culture with the Anyang center. Indeed, the extent of the Anyang horizon was vast (g. 4), if smaller than the apogee of the Middle Shang horizon a century or so earlier (ZSKY 2003b), and, as the Zhou example suggests, the ideology of Shang hegemony may have been no less extensive. Nevertheless, although the borders of the Shang state are usually made coextensive with the distribution of Shang culture (in fact, ceramic tradition might be more accurate), as Cohen (2001) has pointed out, the assignation of ethnic and political identities to divisions in formal ceramic classication is problematic. If pots do not equal people and the extent of the Shang state would be better formulated in terms of the idea of Shang polity and its not necessarily coextensive networks of authority, then how are we to reconstruct the Shang political landscape? Unfortunately, the answer must be largely negative, with the current state of archaeology in China. We can speak of a metropolitan Shang ecumene and its regional subtypes (g. 4), of sites that had been occupied for centuries, and of lingering local traditions.8 We can note that other material cultural traditions surrounded those of the Shang (g. 4)some with their own extensive spheres of inuence (such as Sanxingdui in Sichuan)and that there appear to be interactions between these zones and the Shang (stoneware from the Yangtze, chariots from the north, cowry shells from the Indian Ocean, etc.), but, ultimately, without studies attempting to investigate production, distribution, and consumption linked to the social and political meanings of things, neither the current patchy understanding of ows of commodities nor material cultural inuences tell us much that is certain about Shang power networks or political identities. If, for example, the historical geographic reconstructions of the polities Zhi and Xing are correct (Zheng 1994), the former, a stalwart Shang ally (see no. 5 above), was located beyond the distribution of Shang ceramic traditions, while the latter, a Shang enemy, would have shared a common material culture with the Shang metropole (g. 4). Indeed, the oracle bone inscriptions suggest
8. Shang regional subtypes, or leixing, are subdivisions within a tradition, or wenhua. This designation indicates that the assemblages of these sites tend to look more like metropolitan assemblages than those of neighboring traditions, but nonetheless they are different enough from the former to merit being called subtypes. Late Shang tradition is divided into six regional subtypes, including that of the metropole.
The Pangeng chapter thus concisely suggests two important aspects of Shang royal settlements: their divinely mandated creation accomplished through the coerced and cajoled movement of populations and the organization of those populations in terms of descent and ancestral relationship. This image is borne out by recent work at Anyang that suggests that both residences and burials pattern into spatially discrete, internally hierarchical clusters distinguished from each other by differences in burial practice and bronze-vessel insignia (Tang 2004; ZSKY 2003b). Given the ample evidence for nonroyal ancestor veneration on display in the ancestral dedications found in bronze ritual vessels; jade implements; the sacricial pits discovered in cemeteries outside of the royal burial ground, such as Hougang and Dasikongcun (ZSKY 1994); and oracle bone divinations concerning the mobilization of forces in terms of zu clans/lineages, these clusters of residence and burial were almost certainly descent based.7 Indeed, the structural homologies found across all classes of burial, as well as the long-term trend toward elite emulation seen in ordinary tombs, suggest a shared tradition of mortuary practice or ancestor creation that included not only lineage leaders but also rank-and-le lineage members (Campbell 2007). The monolithic implications of the phrase kings city are thus complicated by the diffuse networks of ancestral community, just as the scattering of key industries, such as bronze workshops throughout the urban center (Li 2003a), and the widespread presence of their products in tombs in the lineage cemeteries undermine the idea of strict central control (Campbell 2007; Tang 2004). These lines of evidence, taken together, suggest that the social landscape of the Great Settlement Shang was made up of a patchwork of internally
7. The handle-shaped objects found in the tomb Hougang 91M3 were painted with ancestor names (ZSKY 2005, 2126).
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that the Late Shang political landscape was one of shifting alliances and near-constant warfare. A related point can be made with the clan insignia found on many Late Shang period bronze vessels. Networks of common-descent groups, as evidenced by clusters of insigniabearing bronzes in tombs across China, stretched beyond the distribution of Shang material culture and suggest that webs of blood and marriage extended across the permeable boundaries of Shang civilization and exceeded the kings use of them.9 To take just one example, a cluster of rich tombs found at Lingshi in Shanxi Province, dating from the end of the Late Shang to the beginning of the Western Zhou (ca. 11001000 BCE), contained a number of bronze vessels and weapons bearing the insignia bin. The bin insignia has also turned up in graves at Anyang, yet archaeological and paleographic evidence suggests that this area of Shanxi lay beyond the Shang cultural and political orbit, after the rst reigns of the Late Shang period (Xia 2005; ZSKY 2003b). In summary, the organization of the Great Settlement Shang and, indeed, the political landscape beyond, in terms of hierarchical descent groups (along with their settlements, ancestral temples, burial grounds, and workshops), created the opportunity for both consolidation and resistance. The networks of lineage polities could, in theory, be drawn together into a single power structure and indeed were represented as such by the king, but their dispersed and segmental nature also provided opportunities for resistance, rebellion, or simply withdrawal, as is amply attested in both received text and oracle bone inscriptions. Thus, the idea of Shang divine hegemony, though widespread enough to reach the Zhou, evoked a variety of responses, even within its shifting reach: from loyalty to grudging acceptance or outright rebellion. Moreover, beneath even this imperfect ideological surface, the structural limitations of the practices that produced authority and the networks of capital that in turn supported them further complicate the picture of the Shang polity.
Practices of Authority and the Exercise of Power Though the kings structure of authority in the Late Shang was gured in discourse as a hierarchy of lineages organizing the living, the dead, and the powers of the land in a single overarching scheme, it nevertheless remains to examine the practices through which this discourse was maintained, made effective, or contested. As mentioned earlier, the distinctive markers of Shang civilizationthe repositories of technological innovation, labor, and valueseem largely to revolve around ancestor veneration: from the bronze ritual vessels of ancestral sacrice and feasting to the rammed-earth palace9. Indeed, transmitted texts are full of accounts of the movement of settlements (and the lineages and lineage temples along with them) to more favorable locations.
temple platforms and the increasingly monumental tombs of the lineage elites. Indeed, from the vantage point of the oracle bone divinations, the chief concerns of the kings appear to have been war, sacrice, and hunting. While from a modern Western perspective these three practices might seem to have little overlap, in the Late Shang they were all signicantly intertwined with the ancestral cult, violence, and the construction of authority. In the cases of divination and sacrice, as the primary media of communication with the higher echelons of the structure of authority, the importance of these practices to the construction of legitimacy is obvious. Moreover, in the Late Shang, what could be termed the ancestral-ritual complex (osteomantic practices [Flad 2008], the bronze-casting industry [Li 2003a], the sacricial economy, and the mortuary arena of ancestor construction [Campbell 2007; Tang 2004]) reached a dramatic zenith, transforming previous metropolitan traditions in both scale and elaboration.10 While it is difcult to know how to interpret the relative underdevelopment of the ancestral-ritual complex prior to the Late Shang or the decline of some of its components in the Western Zhou, it could be said that the social energy expended on ancestor veneration and its relevance to hierarchy and authority were never greater than at Late Shang Anyang. Given that the authority of the king was of a greater order but a type similar to that of other powerful lineage leaders, it is perhaps not surprising that divination and sacrice were not practices limited to the king. Not only have nonroyal inscribed oracle bones been discovered at Anyang, Zhouyuan (Cao 2002), and Jinan (SDDKY et al. 2002) but also more than 90% of the bones used in divination at Anyang were not inscribed, and many of these were likely used in noncourtly divination (Flad 2008). Likewise, as mentioned above, sacrice and ancestor veneration were not limited to the royal cult. In fact, nearly the entire population participated in the tournament of value (Appadurai 1986) that was Late Shang burial and ancestor creation (Campbell 2007; Puett 2002; Tang 2004). These key arenas of ancestral authority, then, although hierarchically structured through genealogical place, were not, as has frequently been claimed (Chang 1980, 1983; Keightley 1999; Vandermeersch 1977), a royal monopoly. Indeed, at least for the rst half of the Late Shang, what chiey separated the kings divination, sacrice, and burial from those of the other elites were the vastly greater resources at his disposal.11 A dramatic example of the monumental expenditures in service of the royal ancestor cult can be seen in the estimated
10. Indeed, there were developments within this complex of practices even within the Late Shang period. Although a description of these changes and their relationships to changing polity networks and ideas would enhance the dynamism of the account given here, it would push this article beyond an acceptable length to do so. 11. It lies beyond the scope of this paper to chronicle the changes in royal ritual over the course of the Late Shang period, but sufce it to say that there is a movement toward systematization, economization, and structural differentiation (Campbell 2007; Ito 1996; Keightley 1999).
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Figure 5. Weapons in Late Shang tombs. Guojiazhuang tomb 160, shown here, is an especially rich example of the custom of burying the dead with weapons. Halberds, spears, and arrows were the most commonly interred weapons, with axes and broadswords found in larger, richer tombs (Liu 2003; Tang 2004).
10,000 human sacricial victims in the royal cemetery (g. 3). Oracle bone divinations also corroborate the large numbers of human victims offered in royal sacrice (especially at the beginning of the Late Shang), where hundreds could be offered in a single event. Insofar as these victims were largely or exclusively war captives, reduced to sacricial livestock
(interchangeable, in some instances, with cattle or sheep), they served to display the kings awesome power of punishment. Though a monumental spectacle of violence, the sacrice of enemy captives was doubly productive of authority through both the ex post facto legitimation of the kings divine approval demonstrated in the military success that reduced these
once-dangerous enemies to sacricial livestock and the continuation of ancestral favor secured through the sacrice itself. The conduct of warfare in the Late Shang was intimately linked with ancestor veneration and sacrice to the extent that sacrice initiated, punctuated, and concluded campaigns and perhaps even motivated some of them (e.g., heji 199). If the royal ancestral-ritual complex was dedicated to the domestication of the myriad dangers of the world gured as conforming to the will of the ancestors, warfare was a technique dedicated to the pacication of the human world gured as service to the ancestral order. That warfare was cast in terms of punishment and ordering can be seen in the terms for military campaigns: zheng , cognate with zheng corstraight. The linkage rect, and zhi , cognate with zhi between violence and authority, moreover, is suggested in the argument that the graph for king wang (OBI ) is the graph for axe yue (OBI ) tipped on its side (Lin 1998). Indeed, sets of yue axes are associated with high status in Anyang tombs (Liu 2003; Tang 2004), while weapons form the second major category of symbolic capital behind bronze feasting vessels (Campbell 2007; Liu 2003; g. 5).12 Hunting also gures prominently among the kings concerns, and as the example below suggests, it was carried out on a considerable scale.
9. On this day (the King) hunted, and indeed captured (game). (We) [caught] tiger, one; deer, forty; foxes, [two] hundred and sixty four; antlerless deer one hundred and fty nine. (10198)
sumed under the headings of exchange and the disposal of resources. Just as an unequal ow of gifts (Yan 1996) existed between the king and the royal ancestors, there is evidence for ows of gifts or tribute from subordinates and of rewards and dispensations from patrons. This took the form of gifts of jade blades or bronzes (ZSKY 1987); the tribute of divinatory materials, captives, and cattle; the rewards of cowry shells commemorated in bronze inscriptions; and the special favor shown some in the kings ritual intervention on their behalf. The disposal of people, land, and resources was also analogous to Dis power to approve or end settlements and thus control the distribution of people in the landscape. This kind of authority was manifested in the human world in the practice of relocating defeated groups, setting up subordinates in new locales (Qiu 1993), levying people for various tasks (including war and agriculture), and the granting of the accumulation of places to favored subordinates, such as is commemorated in a Late Shang bronze inscription ( Xiaochen Yue Fangding). The Shang kings discourse of universal authority ideologically circumscribed by ancestors above and kinsmen below and segmentally structured by kin groups was thus prominently practiced through divination, sacrice, hunting, war, and gifting. These hierarchy-enacting practices of domestication were, however, not the exclusive monopoly of the king but rather sites of potential contest predicated in turn on ows of resources.
Lewis (1990) has argued that warfare and hunting were inseparable in early China, while Keightley (2000) and Fiskesjo (2001) have noted that the royal hunt served as a kind of domesticating practice, like war, but was conducted (mostly) against the animal world. Like the military campaigns they were sometimes a part of, royal hunts demonstrated the potency of the king and the approval or submission of the spirits of the land he moved through. In essence, then, the related concerns of the king for sacrice, hunting, and war can all be seen as facets of a program of world domestication or ordering. These practices partially produced what Baines and Yoffee (1998) have termed a civilizational order. Nevertheless, as practices of authority that drew some of their effectiveness from the incorporation of the interests and traditions of the population at large, there was always the potential for rival or subversive claims and appropriations and thus disjuncture between the aims and work of legitimation and the violence that these three practices shared. Another key social eld (or set of social elds) partaking of the general discursive structure of authority seen in the relations between the living and the ancestors could be sub12. The yue-axe as status marker in East Asia has, in fact, a much earlier pedigree, as do weapons in general and feasting vessels (see Bennett 2007 for the latter and Underhill 2002 for the former).
Flows of Capital Discourses of power and legitimacy deal with the way authority is gured in a particular setting. Practices of authority locate the sites at which peoples orientations toward that structure of power are naturalized or contested. The distribution and circulation of the resources (Giddens 1979, 1981, 1982, 1993) or capital (Bourdieu 1977, 1990, 2000) required for those practices, however, demark a real limitation of power. Although in many cases, because of the current state of research and past proclivities of Chinese archaeology, it is difcult to do more than speculate about the ows in which certain forms of capital circulated, there are instances where archaeological and epigraphic information can be marshaled to provide at least a schematic understanding. Divination. Royal divination (and to a lesser extent, that of other elites) was elaborated both materially and ritually (Flad 2008), involving scribes, diviners, those who prepared the bones for cracking (often the royal consorts), and the king himself as chief diviner and prognosticator. As many scholars have noted, the diviners frequently bear the names of places and polities in the Shang world, and it is generally believed that, particularly in the rst half of the Late Shang period, divinatory specialists came from all over the Shang world to
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participate in the royal divination (Akatsuka 1977; Ito 1996; Keightley 1999; Takashima and Yue 2000).13 The scribes, too, though anonymous, were possessors of a specialized knowledge that appears to have been quite restricted in extent (Smith 2008). Given the bronze inscription evidence that Shang scribes were taken to the Zhou capital to serve the Western Zhou court after the conquest, knowledge of writing and the scribes themselves would likely have constituted scarce and coveted resources. Elite divination was also distinguished by its expensive media: cattle scapula and turtle plastrons. What are essentially accounting records sometimes inscribed on the margins of the oracle bones provide evidence of the networks through which these materials arrived at court. Essentially, the turtle plastrons tended to be sent in from more distant agents (politically and probably geographically), while the cattle scapula, or the cattle themselves, tended to be requisitioned by the court from nearby places (Keightley 1978). Nevertheless, there are also divinations (as opposed to accounting notations) concerning the tribute or gift of cattle. This follows the pattern of other categories of resources and suggests that capital owed through networks that can be broadly divided into two types: direct, intensive, routine networks and indirect, diffuse, contingent networks (Campbell 2007). The boneaccounting notations suggest the rst type (even if scapula and plastron did not travel exactly the same routes), while the divinations about cattle tribute suggest, by the very fact that they were the subject of divination, the uncertain, nonroutine characteristics of the second kind of network.
Flows of Sacricial Resources. The networks of knowledge and material that supported the royal sacricial regime were even more massive, elaborate, and resource consuming. Cattle and human captives gure prominently in Shang royal sacrice and, perhaps not surprisingly, are the two most common items of tribute divined about. Indeed, given the thousands of human sacricial victims found in the royal cemetery (g. 3) and the palace-temple area and mentioned in the oracle bone inscriptions, the procurement of captives for sacrice would have to have been a major preoccupation, as, in fact, hundreds of divinatory inscriptions such as the examples below indicate.
10. [indeed] Mi shackled qiang-captives, capturing twenty and ve; scalps (?), two. (499) 11. Cracked on Xin Qiu day, tested: As for the qiangcaptives that X brought, the king will inspect them at the gate. (261) 12. Tested: call upon Long to bring in qiang-captives. (272 reverse)
13. There were also networks of nonroyal divinatory practice over much of what is now China. Flad (2008) gives an account of these practices and their development over time.
The scale of cattle consumption, on the other hand, is hinted at not only in the oracle bones, where hundreds of animals could be sacriced in a single event, but also in the limited zooarchaeological work that has been done at Anyang to date, such as a midden located near the palace-temple area containing nearly 100,000 fragments of cattle bone (ZSKYAG 1992) and the large workshops dedicated to hairpin production almost exclusively from cattle metacarpals and metatarsals (ZSKY 1994). Interestingly, cattle and captives, the spoils of war, are nearly the only things divined about being sent into the court from more distant allies and sometime enemies (Campbell 2007). Other networks of the royal sacricial complex are more difcult to gauge. Work performed on bronze workshops at Anyang conrms the vast scale of production that Anyang tombs and modern bronze collections had suggested (Li 2003a).14 Bronze-vessel production on the scale it occurred at Anyang would have required large-scale charcoal production and woodcutting: the mining, smelting, transporting, and, nally, casting of vast quantities of metal, as well as the clay, potters, and kilns to produce the moldsmore than 40,000 fragments of which have been excavated thus far (Li 2003a; ZSKY 2003b). Although sourcing studies are still in their infancy in China, lead isotope research has suggested that, for at least the rst half of the Late Shang, a signicant portion of the Anyang bronzes contained high radiogenic lead, a feature they share with contemporaneous bronzes found along the Yangtze from Sichuan to Jiangxi (Jin et al. 2003). Neutron-activation analysis on samples of the glazed stoneware found in some rich Anyang tombs suggests that they may also have had a Yangtze origin (Chen et al. 1999; a conclusion supported by the forms and distributions of this pottery type), while the cowry shells common in Shang tombs and given as gifts by the king and other patrons may have come from as far away as the Indian Ocean (Li 2003b; Peng and Zhu 1995). Although the details remain murky, important resources of Shang practices of authority owed through direct and indirect networks that extended far beyond the limits of Shang hegemony. The knowledge of multicomponent-mold bronze-vessel casting, though a specialized and coveted resource like writing and divination, was widely distributed by the Late Shang period (Bagley 1999). Moreover, although the details are unclear, the presence of Anyang-type vessels among local innovations at distant sites, with evidence of local casting such as Laoniupo (Liu 2001) near modern Xian, suggests that networks of bronze-casting knowledge, in the form of either people or artifacts, extended over wide areas. The circulation of this form of technological capital, crucial to the Shang symbolic economy of authority, bespeaks both a potential integrative mechanism connecting smaller, more peripheral sites with the
14. The tomb of just one royal consort contained more than 1,625 kg of bronze (Chang 1983, 103), while a single bronze cast for another consort weighed 875 kg.
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great traditions and technical virtuosity of the metropole and a decentralized distribution of knowledge and practice that provided fertile ground for competition and counterclaims to authority (Bagley 1999).
War. The practice of war revealed in the oracle bone inscriptions and hinted at in the widespread presence of weapons and symbols derived from weapons in Late Shang tombs also shows a pattern of direct and indirect networks, of a hegemonic center but also decentralized resources. If we consider that an estimated 40% of the male burials at Anyang contain some form of weapon, that number of weapons was fairly strongly (r p 0.6) and signicantly (0.01) correlated with tomb size (g. 6; Campbell 2007), and that certain weapon forms were used as symbols of rank and authority (Liu 2003; Tang 2004), we can see both a relationship between weapons and hierarchy and their broad distribution among the population. Given that the basic unit of social and political life (including war) was the zu lineage/clan and the widespread distribution of weapons in mortuary contexts, warfare in the Late Shang appears to have involved much of the adult male populationindeed, as suggested by the following bone inscriptions, regarding the large numbers of troops levied for war:
13. Cracked on Xinsi day, [ ] tested: levy Fu Haos three thousand, levy an army of 10,000 and call upon them to attack the [ ] [Fang]. (39902)
From the vantage point of the oracle bone inscriptions, the shifting boundaries and networks of Shang alliance and dominion give an overall impression of almost ceaseless conict, ranging from small-scale raids to major campaigns involving thousands of combatants. Moreover, looking closely at the nature of the interactions between the king and the places and agents mentioned in the oracle bones, one can make a tripartite division of both Shang political networks and imagined community (Campbell 2007; Lin 1982). There was an inner realm of subordinates and direct, routine networks of coercion and authority; a middle zone of nominally subordinate but practically independent leaders, of indirect control and sporadic intervention; and a still further zone demarking the shifting boundaries of the Shang world order, a horizon of enemies, rebels, and barbarians at which the apparatus of military domestication was ceaselessly aimed (g. 7).
Hunting. The royal hunt, too, shows a pattern of intensive but geographically restricted networks of hunting destinations, as well as a web of more distant and less frequently traveled places. Indeed, the notion of hunting as mastery not only over animals but also over the spiritual and political landscape in general can be seen in divinations about the king hunting in recently conquered areas (e.g., heji 41075). Nevertheless, like most practices of authority in the Late Shang, the king had no monopoly over the hunt (contra Fiskesjo 2001), as divinations concerning the auspiciousness of the
Figure 6. Scatterplot of tomb volume (m3) versus number of weapons interred. The sample contained 940 undisturbed lineage cemetery tombs. Most of the larger and all of the ramped tombs in these cemeteries were looted, skewing the sample toward smaller, poorer graves.
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Figure 7. Schematic diagram of the Late Shang polity structure.
kings joining with or meeting allies for a hunt suggest (e.g., heji 27907) and the nonroyal inscriptions recording ziprince/lineage leader hunting conrm (e.g., huadong 234). Shang elite hunts then drew together military resources (weapons, men, horses, dogs, and chariots), land, and animals (and sometimes people) in performances of political authority and cosmological order.
Harvest and Levies. Given the emerging picture of the Late Shang polity as being composed of inner intensive networks of capital and outer indirect networks, it is perhaps not surprising that divinations about harvest and levying are restricted to places that are strongly afliated with the Shang (Campbell 2007). The kings routine extractions and ows of resources thus came from networks of places within a more restricted pacied zone, a network of sites of sacrice, hunting, agriculture, and levying. Beyond this lay a less secure zone of shifting networks of allies and endemic conict from whence less regular gifts owed and through which major campaigns were launched against enemies beyond.
practices of authority. Discursively, then, the king was the one man, lineage leader of the apex lineage in a network of hierarchically arranged descent groups, and the Great Settlement Shang and its surrounding royal demesne were the si fang zhi ji, or pivot of the four quarters (Legge 1991, 643). Shang practices of authority, however, operated in limited and frequently indirect networks over a fractious landscape. They were potential sites of contestation and required the ceaseless attention of the king. Indeed, the violence evident in this complex of techniques of domestication is perhaps so striking because of the necessity of continually constituting the world order. The performance of the Shang kings sovereignty had to be repeated across the landscape in counterpoint to that of rivals and rebels. Nevertheless, the resources on which the king could draw to support his authoritative practices were far more restricted than the universal dominion suggested by his discursive structure of authority, tapering off rapidly beyond limited networks of more or less direct control. Beyond this zone (and even to a certain extend within it), the king had to rely on webs of alliance, exchange, sporadic coercion, and ritual order (g. 7).
Summary: Late Shang Networks of Power/Authority. Although the multiple sources of power identied here for the Late Shang civilizational order all tended to be concentrated in the person of the king, there were other privileged actors in these
Political Community: Late Shang Boundaries of Identity The Shang polity idea itself was conceived in terms of layers: Shang at the center and the lands of the four directions sur-
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rounding it. For those embedded in Shang political networks, moreover, the most immediate unit of social and political identity would have been the descent group: an imagined community of the living and dead with its own leader and eponymous place, produced and maintained through common ancestral sacrice, feasting, burial, and war. Just as subordinate or allied leaders reported enemy attacks on their settlements, elds, and borderlands (no. 5), the royal divinations also refer to people of subordinate places in terms of their places of origin.
14. Cracked on Wuxu day, the men of Que will cut grass/ herd at X. (20500)
legacy of the preceding millennium of megacenters? Whatever the case, a unied, hierarchical ordering of the world has proven to be an ideal of great resilience and longevity across the millennia of Chinese history.
Conclusion
Earlier on I raised the issue of the discourses, practices, technologies, and sociophysical spaces that produced ancient political networks and their imagined communities. For the Late Shang polity I have attempted to give a partial answer to those questions, focusing on war, sacrice, divination, and, to a lesser extent, burial. Other scholars might have focused on other practices, and, certainly, more could have been said on such topics as feasting or elite gifting. The sketch I have given of Shang political identities and networks of power could have also been made more dynamic had I attempted to work in evidence for change within some of the politys networks of resources, the reordering of certain practices of authority, and the shifting political geography and military fortunes of the dynasty. My intention here, however, was not so much to give a complete analysis of Late Shang political networks as it was to provide a suggestive illustration of a networks and boundaries approach. Even this partial investigation of Late Shang polity networks of power/authority and boundaries of identity, however, yields a far more complex picture than current archaeological models account for. Substantively speaking, the Shang polity ts neither the territorial model nor the city-state model, with its discursively expansive yet practically and materially restricted scope. It was centered on an urban megasite but conceived in terms of lands as well as settlements. Moreover, early Chinese centers could be and were moved, a mobility of place that points to the existential core of the polity being its ruling lineage rather than its territory or its cities. The Shang dynasty is recorded as having begun with an expansive conquest, yet the oracle bone divinations depict a shifting and contentious political landscape demonstrating that the variety and uidity of historical political geographies cannot be given justice by a dichotomous narrative of consolidated expansion or peer-polity interaction. The importance of sacrice, burial, and war as universally participated, general structuring institutions highlights patterning practices of authority as sites of contestation and the perils of purely top-down approaches. The kings power was neither absolute nor uncontested: his practices of authority emanated from and were empowered by the broader traditions of nonroyal lineages on whose behalf it was supposedly wielded. That the very networks of power/authority utilized by the Shang kings could be and ultimately were mobilized against the dynasty shows their structural and ideological limits. Indeed, the multiplicity and multivalence of Shang sources of power far exceed the dualism of corporate/ network leadership strategies, and their study would have been
The imagined community of Shang, then, was neither homogeneous nor monolithic but rather context dependent and multilayered, referring to a city, the central lands of the king and its zu-lineages, and, most expansively but diffusely, the entire assemblage of royal networks of power. Seen from the vantage of a state idea, unlike Andersons modern nationstates, with their mass education, media, ags, maps, and universal citizenship, the Shang polity would have been most salient to those directly involved in its central practices of authority: war and sacrice. Nevertheless and despite the fact that war and ancestor veneration were general structuring institutions, performances of the political and natural order involving most of the population, they were also structurally segmental and hierarchically instantiated in terms of access and reward. This meant that the very logic of enfranchisement, of political participation and community, was graded. Shang would have been a term most signicant to the king and other privileged actors within his networks of authority who participated in royal ritual, war, feasting, and gifting. For the majority of the population, however, the most salient political community was likely that of the lineage in which their own participation in war, ancestor veneration, and other practices of community were situated. While it is possible that the men of Que mentioned above thought of themselves as Shang in contexts of general mobilization against external enemies, given that internal and external could and did rapidly shift, it is probably more accurate to view the boundaries of Shang polity ideas as multiple and overlapping. In addition to the overarching hegemonic polity idea of the Shang kings, there were the more powerful political identities of local ruling clans with their own networks of settlements and below them the individual lineages themselves. Although it may have been the dream of the Shang kings to unify these separate identities into a single nested hierarchy, the reality was that the subunits of Shang hegemony were frequently in conict with both the center and each other, even while networks of kinship and alliance stretched off beyond the reach of royal power and were, to varying degrees, independent of it. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that overlaying this volatile and segmented political landscape was a normative politicoreligious imaginary that envisioned a single ultimate power, on earth as in heaven. Could this have been an ideological
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greatly hampered by attempting to t Shang polity networks into one or the other of those theoretical shoes. The larger point I wish to make, however, is that the state is not the end of political history; much less is it a thing or even an idea that can be projected back over millennia of social and political innovation. The modern nation-states that gave rise to the political theory on which most archaeological theorizing is based were nothing like the political orders of the ancient world. For instance, it would be trivial to show radical difference in comparing the Shang polity to that of the Peoples Republic of China: from the discursive structure of authority to its practices and networks of resources. The Shang and the PRC as imagined communities are also completely different both in terms of their constituents and in the ways of their imagining. If the state really was the totalizing and universalizing reality toward which nineteenth- and twentieth-century political organization moved (and away from which we may now be headed in the twenty-rst century)that is to say the product of a particular historical situation predicated on a specic set of technologies, institutions, and ideologiesthen it stands to reason that earlier political formations, with vastly different resources, networks, and legitimating practices, cannot usefully be lumped under the heading state. Archaeological political models must engage the millennia of sociopolitical development between modern and ancient political organizations and imaginations. Archaeologists need to complete the break from neoevolutionary theory and get beyond constructing typologies, trait lists, mechanistic models, and functionalist teleologies to the investigation of polity systems, polity ideas, and their various articulations. Polity systems, in turn, ought to be studied in terms of their discursive structures of authority, their practices of power and legitimation, and the networks of capital (social, symbolic, economic, coercive, etc.) that support them, while polity ideas can be seen in terms of imagined communities or boundaries of identity created through patterning practices intertwined with networks of power and legitimation. This approach, I would argue, offers a translocal methodology exible enough to accommodate the various possibilities of complex sociopolitical forms through human history and promises the possibility of a political anthropology of deep time.
Comments
John Baines Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, Pusey Lane, Oxford OX1 2LE, United Kingdom (john.baines@orinst.ox .ac.uk). 9 IV 09 Roderick Campbell addresses difculties with theoretical approaches of archaeologists to dening and understanding states, using the extremely rich case of Late Shang Anyang as the exemplar on which he tests his new perspective. His critical review of existing literature and his focus on what early civilizations did, rather than on how they might be classied, are very welcome. In responding to his stimulating treatment, I use my own eld of ancient Egypt as a point of reference and contrast. The Shang case lies somewhere in the middle of the polarity, of which Campbell is rightly wary, between city-state and territorial patterns. The dominant royal center of Anyang sat at the heart of a political landscape that was anything but uniform or rigidly demarcated. Campbell identies three levels of Shang control in his idealized gure 7, but as he notes, the diagram is neater than the ancient reality, in which more distant polities could be more rmly under Shang control than nearer ones, while evidence from pottery styles shows that material culture and political afliations do not map onto one another. Connections with regions far beyond Shang controlalthough hardly beyond that of the preceding Erligang phasewere essential for acquiring some raw materials for products of elite culture. This complex, uid conguration, which seems to have been maintained at the cost of constant warfare (so far as war was not valued as an end in itself), lasted just a couple of centuries. Campbell uses the term networks to encompass both relations with other polities and the lineage organization of the core society. The former are attested through inscriptions on oracle bones, while the latter is modeled primarily through analogy with other periods and categories of sources. Without oracle bones, we could not know much about these networks. This means that the Anyang case might not be easy to generalize and compare with other civilizations. Moreover, other lines of evidence for elite values, notably the vast corpus of bronzes that display a wide variety of styles and develop strongly through the period, may bring different perspectives. Where suitable sources are available, generalization can perhaps be achieved in terms of other aspects of the record. Campbell identies three overlapping core activities of the Shang rulers as war, hunting, and sacrice. Together with the creation of monumental settingsoften for sacricethis group of concerns is very similar to those of rulers in many civilizations: that is, what rulers and elites did and displayed to others. What they did required the labor of the mass of the population, whose material culture and probably symbolic
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the postdoctoral support received during the writing and revising of this article, rst at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, and then at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University. I would also like to thank Anne Porter, Norman Yoffee, and an anonymous reviewer for their suggestions on how to improve previous drafts of this article.
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lives were impoverished in favor of rulers and elites (Wengrow 2001; Yoffee 2001). Another feature common to different civilizations is the constitution of their imagined communities. Campbell notes that the god Di, the powers of the land, and the ancestors formed the peak of the Shang hierarchy and were integral to it. We cannot know how far this vision commanded assent in the wider society, but we can compare it with the explicit statement of the kings role in an Egyptian text of the second millennium BCE that divides the beings in the cosmos into the gods, the dead, the king (as the fulcrum of the whole), and humanity (e.g., Baines 2007, 182). As Trigger (1993, 11012; 2003, 67073) noted, elite beliefs and practices such as these are more consistent across different civilizations than any material or technical base. Issues of networks and boundaries can be explored within these modes of action as well as alongside them. Very different patterns are known. In ancient Mesopotamia, the civilization appeared around a millennium before any dominant power emerged, while concerns partly comparable with those of the Shang are attested across numerous polities, with a strong sense of shared cultural values but without any political supremacy. By contrast, in third-millennium Egypt, where polity and boundaries, both political and cultural, were largely coextensive, networks of contact with other societies were weakly developed. Defeat of enemies seems to have been more a matter of rhetoric than of waging war, while the accessible record presents the king as so dominant that he created forms and networks for himself more than he adhered to practices shared with the elite. These differences between civilizations are better observed and operationalized through Campbells lens of networks and boundaries than through the trait list approaches he criticizes, and the exercise in comparison itself is instructive. Nonetheless, I nd myself thinking that the distinctive forms in which elites invested so much could yield more for the comprehension of individual civilizations. Campbell does not contrast the diversity of Anyang elite products with the uniformity of the Erligang phase a couple of centuries earlier. In view of the vast scale of Anyang and its prodigal use of resources, this limitation is eloquent evidence for a very different approach to networks and boundaries in two periods in the same region and seemingly with no fundamental change in the civilization. Networks and boundaries can identify that difference; can they contribute to analyzing it? I hope they can.
Rowan Flad Harvard University, Department of Anthropology, 11 Divinity Avenue, Peabody Museum 57G, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, U.S.A. (rad@fas.harvard.edu). 18 III 09 Campbells provocative paper presents challenges not only to standard interpretations and discourse on Shang civilization,
its particular case study, but also, more generally, to the treatment of complex societies in anthropological archaeology. Archaeological approaches to the Shang dynasty and other early Chinese polities have long been focused primarily on cultural history or mired in models formed in other contexts and unproblematically applied to the Chinese case. Here Campbell attempts to extract the Shang from this situation by proposing a exible framework that he argues is suitable for approaching civilizations on their own terms. He argues that instead of classifying social organization using categories such as the state, we should be focusing on organizing principles. For societies that cohered into politically dened systems, this involves minimally teasing out the networks of authority and power that constitute the politys system of governance on the one hand and the ideas of political community and interconnectedness that tie people together in an idealized polity on the other. Polity networks and polity ideas are thus argued to exist in some form in all polities but differ according to local logics and practices. For the Shang, Campbell contends that the primary means by which networks of authority were established and maintained were the practices through which resources of power were motivated, particularly kinship ties, including ancestor worship, and violence in the form of warfare and sacrice. Bronze production, distribution, and use as symbols of authority and gifts that tied elites together are other aspects of Shang material culture that would have served this purpose but that Campbell does not discuss in much detailprobably because of the disproportionate attention that bronze tends to get in Shang scholarship (e.g., Allan 2007; Bagley 1999). As for polity idea, I gather that this is created and sustained through ritual behavior, including activities such as the hunt, hierarchical reciprocity, speech giving, divination, and sacricealthough it is clear that many of these practices feed into polity networks as well. In fact, in many activities there seems to be a dialectical feedback that would occur between their effects on polity networks and polity ideas. For example, Campbell proposes that the participation of the entire population in Shang burial rites and ancestor creation would have contributed to the establishment and maintenance of power and authority. The same practices would have been vital to the construction of the polity ideas associated with the Shang state. In general, the concept of polity idea seems underdeveloped relative to the polity network aspect of the article. This is true both in the more abstract, theoretical component of the paper and in the Shang case study. It may be, however, exactly this aspect of the Shang case that requires more concerted effort if we are not only to work out effectively the organizing principles of the Shang polity but also to understand the degree to which the idea of Shang was present in different geographical regions. It would also be productive to move beyond political networks in our attempts to understand the context of the Shang polity in the Chinese Bronze Age. Both polity network and
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polity idea start from the center at Anyang and look outward. But, obviously, the Shang did not exist in a political vacuum. I would think the Shang polity idea is necessarily centered on the Shang king and capital, but Campbell points out that multilayered components comprise the Shang. Might one think of these various aspects as involving multiple, intertwined ideas: city idea, kin idea, religion idea, status idea, and so on? In contrast, Shang networks of authority were likely fraught with competing claims to authority and power, especially in areas that were intermittently allied with or opposed to the Shang court. The polity network, therefore, can be described by the metaphor of a topography that had nodes where the intensity of political authority was high relative to other localities. One could take such a topographic model of political networks even further and consider how this political topography (similar to Campbells polity network) related to other conceptual topographies: economic, religious, environmental, military, and so forth. How closely does the political topography (polity network) parallel the topography of ritual practices or economic activities? Are they one and the same, or is the Shang polity characterized by a kind of geographical heterarchy? I pose these questions for future consideration.
Tang Jigen Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China (yinxu80@gmail.com). 19 V 09 A famous Western Zhou bronze ritual vessel Dayu Ding AA SS, cast during early tenth century BC, has well-known inscriptions recording the words of King Kang: I heard that the Shang lost the destiny offered by the haven, only the , Shangs chiefs Hou and Dian in periphery areas ( , ( ) . . .). The chiefs Hou and Dian in periphery areas are referred to as political structures outside of Shang core settlements in central China. In addition, in the chapter SS, the earliest textual records Jiu Gao of Shang Shu AA in Chinese history, it described chiefs Hou and Dian as Waifu , or controlled outside territories. Neifu , or controlled inside territories, as opposed to the Waifu, is also recorded clearly in the same texts. These records suggested that the Shang polity had a direct, controlled core territory and indirect, controlled periphery territories. Though archaeological work has offered various archaeological evidence that might prove the above social structure, unfortunately, in the entire past century, many scholars interpreted the Shang society by following the modern state structures or the theoretical models developed in Western anthropology or political sciences. Those above-mentioned textual records were ignored, and archaeological data pertaining to evidence of the Shang social structure were misunderstood because of fashionable theories or modern thinking. Scholars such as Sun Miao (1987) and Yang Shengnan (1994), for example, described the Shang society on the basis
of modern state structure. Interpretation of the Shang polity using theoretical models or Western anthropological concepts began even earlier. A typical example is categorization of the Shang into a slave society of the ve pigeonholes proposed by classic Marxists (Guo 1952; Lu 1936). After the 1980s, more Chinese scholars followed evolutionary theory and viewed Shang China at the state level (Si 1997). In recent years, concepts of early civilizations and early complex societies were introduced into China, and the concepts of citystate and territorial state were also employed for the study of early China (Liu and Chen 2003). As a result, archaeological data from China were lost to the chance of reconstruction of ancient Shang polities. Rod Campbells work lls the gap. His paper studies Shang China on the basis of archaeological data instead of popular theories. It discusses the discursive hierarchies of authority, the kings city (great settlement Shang), political landscape, practices of authority, and exercise of power. Finally, it arrives at a conclusion that the Shang polity ts neither the territorial model nor the city-state model, with its discursively expansive yet practically and materially restricted scope. This is probably the most suitable description to the Shang society so far. It proves the records of Dayu Ding and Jiu Gao of Shang Shu SS but presents us with a more complex picture of AA the Shang polity. Campbells study can be summarized as an example of contextual interpretations. I wish it would end the long history of pigeonhole games in the studies of the Shang society. However, exactly as Campbell himself stated, what he provided is a suggestive illustration of the networks and boundaries approach. If we take time dimension into account, it will be much more difcult to describe Shang China. The different features between Late Shang and its earlier periods seem to suggest that the political structure experienced important changes. In the four phases of the Yinxu material culture of the Late Shang, as read from oracle bones and learned from the grave goods in tombs, the Shang people gradually lost patience with their ancestors, suggesting a changing network of religious beliefs. Does it mean that the people in late phases lived in a different social polity? How can we evaluate its impacts on the Shang society? In recent years, Chinese archaeologists have started new research programs to understand the settlement patterns in central China, the detailed outline of the Great Settlement Shang. Ceramic petrological studies and bone isotope analyses have also been employed to study the relationship between the Shang people and their periphery areas. I expect Campbell to include all of this new knowledge and new data in his future study and to give an evaluation to the records Waifu and Neifu . In this way, I believe it will open opportunities for Chinese archaeology to contribute new knowledge to the past of our world.
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Li Min Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, A210 Fowler Building, 308 Charles E. Young Drive North, Los Angeles, California 90095-1510, U.S.A. (limin@humnet .ucla.edu). 19 IV 09 Campbells call for investigating the discursive, practical, and material aspects and their relationship makes an important theoretical contribution to the study of early societies. The observation of Shang as neither homogenous nor monolithic but rather context dependent and multilayered opens up diverse venues for understanding the multiple sources of social power in early China and offers a nuanced approach for understanding the political dynamics in ancient societies. A call for better historical or anthropological writing, however, does not have to come in the disguise of another model, especially when the aim was to liberate archaeological inquiries from a typological tendency. The problem of modeldriven research is its potential to reduce the rich historical dynamics to t the model. Such tendency is evident in the argument that the Shang dynasty is recorded as having begun with an expansive conquest, yet the oracle bone divinations depict a shifting and contentious political landscape demonstrating that the variety and uidity of historical political geographies cannot be given justice by a dichotomous narrative of consolidated expansion or peer-polity interaction. Here, Campbell projected the political dynamics of the Late Shang, whose oracle bone inscriptions rst appeared in the thirteenth century BCE, onto the period of the Early Shang in the sixteenth century BCE, when substantial archaeological evidence suggests a rapid territorial expansion during the Upper Erligang phase (Bagley 1999; Liu and Chen 2003; Tang 1999b). At a conceptual level, a central argument of Campbells paper is that research on the early state constitutes an illusory and anachronistic projection of modern contingencies onto ancient societies. Campbells argument of modern projection fails to account for the propositions of nation-state that trap the concept in its own distinctive place in the cosmology of modernity. The concept of the nation-state presupposes historical empire as the premodern other (Anderson 2006), while early states were considered the precursors of historical empires. This empire/nation-state dichotomy and the historical narrative built around it are as naturalized in modern experience as perceived citizenship in nation-states. In his critique, Wang Hui (2004, 2008) has brilliantly argued that the empire/ nation-state binary is accompanied by a host of expectations and assumptions based on the Wests narrative of its own modernity rooted in the nineteenth century. Hegel (1894, 109110) has this to offer on the destination of history: The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia is the beginning . . . The rst political form, therefore, which we observe in history is despotism, the second democracy and aristocracy, the third
monarchy. The nation-state construct occupies a central place in this historical narrative. However natural an archaeologist feels in his or her world as composed of nation-states, the fundamental proposition of modernity prevents a modern scholar from considering the prospect of a nation-state in Bronze Age China or any ancient society or the notion that history would have found its end by the second millennium BCE. Again, I nd Hegels (1894, 112) characterization of the state in China instructive: Empires belonging to mere space . . . [as distinguished from Time]unhistorical History;as for example, in China, the State based on the Family relation with a paternal Government. I see little space for projecting an image of the modern nation-state onto Hegels notion of premodern states in China that is modeled on kinship. The modern archaeologist would agree with Campbell that the modern nation-state is nothing like the political orders of the ancient world, though for very different reasons. The argument that we have been guilty of ignoring the ve millennia or so of sociopolitical development between the rst archaic states and the modern nation states that gave rise to the political models on which archaeological states are based is an exercise of practical reason ying in the face of the cosmologies of modernity. The critique of research on the early state as a projection of modern states ignores the broad spectrum of anthropological perspectives that have indeed not understood premodern society as a bounded political entity, for example, as Swiss cheese with many holes (Keightley 1983), as vertical archipelago (see Stanish 1992), as theater state (Geertz 1981), or as divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm (Anderson 2006, 7). These approaches manifest alternative ways to study historical changes in relations of power without abandoning the state as a conceptual tool. Archaeologists will never be entirely free from projections of their own experience, but I do not know any archaeologists, however different in their perspectives, who ever imaged an absolute and uncontested kingly power in their studysuch power existed neither in the present nor in the past. The notion of the state is central to understanding the processes of historical construction in societies; even changes in ideas and conceptions about the states power can produce real historical consequences. Archaeological inquiry into state formation could benet from understanding how its core symbols, conceptual vocabularies, and major institutions took shape in the course of human history, even under social conditions that bear little resemblance with modern nation-states.
John W. Olsen Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, 1009 East South Campus Drive, Tucson, Arizona 85721-0030, U.S.A. (jwo@arizona.edu). 23 III 09 In analyzing the Late Shang (ca. 12501050 BCE) polity, Roderick Campbells innovative networks and boundaries approach to understanding the style and content of mature Chi-
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nese Bronze Age society nearly accomplishes in just a few dozen pages what archaeologists and historians alike have been unable to achieve after decades of concentrated effort. I say nearly accomplishes in a respectful rather than a critical tone because, as he acknowledges, Campbells analysis is ultimately constrained by the nature of material cultural evidence generated by the Chinese archaeological community thus far. Nonetheless, by dening networks in terms of power and authority and boundaries with respect to identity, Campbell has provided a most welcome alternative view of Bronze Age practices of power that have dominated the literature on early Chinese civilization virtually since the rst oracle bones were discovered at the end of the nineteenth century. In my view, Campbells authoritative review of extant archaeological and historical evidence for the accumulation and conguration of power sensu lato in the waning years of the Shang Dynasty establishes a new framework for understanding the emergence of China from a muddled mass of competing polities that are differentially visible in the archaeological and historical records. I am particularly intrigued by Campbells take on the role that the monumental spectacle of violence played in dening the practices of political authority in Bronze Age China. As archaeologists become more sophisticated in their deployment of broadly based social science approaches to violence (e.g., Collins 2008) in interpreting past human behavior, archaeological and historical assemblages like those described by Campbell from Anyang will play an increasingly important role in the generation of new explanatory models for nascent social complexity both in China and beyond. Campbells focus is appropriately on the Late Shang Yin phase remains excavated in and around Anyang, Henan, in North China because this spot was, by any reasonable archaeological and historical measure, a nexus of the sort that Campbells networks and boundaries approach seeks to identify and illuminate. Nonetheless, Campbell successfully articulates that manifestation of Chinese Bronze Age culture with parallel nodes of authority in regions far aeld of the middle Yellow River valley, where the Shang phenomenon reached its zenith (see Campbells g. 4). I do wish the author had spent more time elucidating precisely what his denition of complexity is in unpacking the thorny problem of distinguishing Chinese Bronze Age polities, and I think his argument, effective as it is overall, could nonetheless be strengthened by examining more closely the ShangZhou transition, reduced by most authors to the military conquest of one ethnic subculture by another. Campbell clearly suspects that there is more going on in the transition from Shang to Zhou than meets the eye, and I would enjoy hearing more about how the bundles of relationships that dened the Shang core might also have impactedpossibly mitigatedtheir conquest by the Zhou, especially with respect to the role of violence that Campbell postulates was such an integral theme in Late Shang society. Indeed, where did the
preconquest Zhou fall in the Shang realm envisioned by Campbell in his concentric gure 7? I think the author has been remarkably successful in accomplishing what I take to be his principal goal: establishing a framework for a political anthropology of deep time that extends beyond the spatial and temporal coordinates of Late Shang China. Following Denzin and Giardina (2008), it is precisely the nature of the evidence itself that determines the extent to which we can be condent of our interpretations of the practice of authority, whether political, religious, or military, and Campbells nuanced interpretation of the Late Shang case bears this out. Campbells statement that it is remarkable that overlaying this volatile and segmented political landscape was a normative politicoreligious imaginary that envisioned a single ultimate power, on earth as in heaven is to my mind especially salient. Redening the rhetoric of human geography and self-identity that underlies early attempts to identify nations and differentiate peoples, exemplied classically in the work of Freud and Rimbaud (Wills 2008), should be the work of archaeologists, given the role of material culture and technology in creating those identities in the rst place. Campbells wonderful paper provides a clear point of departure for archaeologists working in a wide variety of past culture contexts, and I enthusiastically anticipate seeing his networks and boundaries approach applied in other world regions, perhaps especially in places such as West Africa, the Andes, and the greater Mississippi Basin, among others, where dispersed rather than highly nucleated urban forms were also the norm early on.
Reply
I would like to thank the commentators for their stimulating responses to my paper. I should stress that what I have presented is preliminary in terms of both a theoretical approach and a case study, and the above comments are doubly welcome for suggesting many promising avenues of future development. As I see it, in the comments two main issues emerged on which I would like to focus attention. The rst is the lack of historical depth in my sketch of Late Shang networks and boundaries. As both Baines and Tang correctly noted, I did not attempt to relate my sketch of the Late Shang polity to Middle or Early Shang situations, nor did I adequately address sweeping changes that took place in the middle of the Late Shang period or the Zhou conquest, as Tang and Olsen, respectively, noted. If a full study of Late Shang Anyang would require a book, an adequate treatment of the thousand years between 1800 and 800 BCE would probably require several. Though I might disagree on the details, I do, however, believe that my commentators are correct in their collective assessment that the synchronic sketch I presented
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of polity networks and boundaries would be complicated if set within the ow of history. As Sewell (2005, 178) notes, however, one needs a synchronic picture before one can show how it transforms over time. The second issue and a key point on which I am anxious not to be misunderstood is what I mean by polity networks. What I had in mind was something like Manns networks of social power. The advantage that networks holds over terms such as structure, in my opinion, is its invocation of openended interconnectivity, which is then to be contrasted with the boundaries of political community (contingent and varyingly porous though they may be). Considered as intertwined intentional, dispositional, and material constraints on and/or resources for action and being, networks were meant to encompass human interaction in general. Polity networks, then, analogous to Abrams state structure, were meant to refer to those networks of power/authority forming nexuses that might be termed polities. Therefore, what Baines refers to as the distinctive forms in which elites invested so much should not be considered something outside of networks of power/authority but rather key components of them. I am thus concerned that polity networks not be taken in too narrow a sense or as something that is categorically separate from religious, military, or economic networks. In my case study I attempted to show how key Late Shang practices of power included categories of action that could be termed religious, economic, social, and political. While one could choose to focus on networks that were less central to the polity or indeed on different polity nexuses, in response to Flad I would argue that such a change in focus would not yield other conceptual topographies, only different maps of the same territory. I would like to express my appreciation for Bainess comparative extension of my approach and push to make it properly diachronic. As noted above, a networks and boundaries approach has perhaps more in common with Bainess own preferred approach than Baines himself realizes. The difference is that I am advocating understanding ideologies, practices, and resources of authority in terms of nonelite as well as elite agency. I also believe that the generalizability issues of my case study implied by Baines are overstated. The reconstruction of any particular case will be tied to the contingencies of available sources of information, but theoretically recognizing the complexity of a phenomenon is crucial to accurately understanding it, even if we lack sources for aspects of that complexity. Bainess claim that while polity networks seem to have changed a great deal between the Erligang (ca. 16001400 BCE) and the Anyang (ca. 12501050 BCE) periods, the civilization did not raises the important issue of historical change and scales of time. On the one hand, one could say that there were broad continuities in the form of elite material culture throughout the Central Plains Bronze age. On the other hand, I would argue that not only does the Erligang-Anyang period show evidence of change venementielle but also the ancestrale
ritual complex in which this elite material culture is embedded underwent radical development and transformation. Bronze Age Central Plains civilization did indeed undergo change but insofar as civilization belongs to the longue duree, we should not expect it to change at the same rate as political institutions. I agree with Flad that polity ideas are the least theoretically developed or operationalized aspect of my approach. I also believe that they are probably the most difcult to study. Flad raises the tricky issue of analytically separating polity networks and ideas, noting that, in practice, they may be intertwined. I believe that Flads observations are correct but that there still exists the potential for disjuncture between polity ideas and discourses that support particular networks of authority. One can, for instance, be simultaneously a patriot and a rebel against a tyrannous rulership. In principle I think Flad is also correct in pointing out that practices and resources that support discourses of authority may also work toward producing imagined communities. The issue of how they do this work and to what extent, however, needs to be determined on a case-by-case basis. Although I disagree with Tangs comment that the Shang lost patience with their ancestors, Tang is correct in asserting that great changes took place over the course of the Late Shang period and that my sketch collapses 200 years into one synchronic image. I am currently working to better synthesize evidence of differing chronological resolution into a more properly historical account. I do intend to incorporate the exciting new research taking place at Anyang (and contribute to it), and I eagerly look forward to its publication. In response to Li, I wish to clarify that what I am presenting here is an approach, not a modeleven less a typology. My point was to try to come up with a exible framework for studying ancient polities that had only very general presuppositions about their structures or operation. I nd Lis contention that moderns are inescapably bound to a subconscious Hegelian episteme a fascinating but rather ambitious claim. I had something much less sweeping in mind when I said that living in a world of nation-states, we are accustomed to thinking in terms of bounded polities and that most current archaeological denitions of the state derive from early and mid-twentieth-century theorizing essentially describing the polities of Fordist high modernity (see denition in Flannery 1972 for a good example): centralizing, bureaucratizing, standardizing, monopolizing. Nevertheless, a division of the past few thousand years of history into archaic states, empires, and nation-states would still be a good example of just the kind of oversimplistic typology my approach is aimed at nuancing. I would, however, be leery of embracing Hegels essentializing, Orientalist vision of the timeless Chinese Empire. Li is correct in his claim that my brief review of the literature does not do full justice to the diversity of perspectives on ancient polities across disciplines. I made no claims to being exhaustive, and indeed Lis list could be greatly extended.
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Although I am not sure how Lis defense of the state squares with his comment that we do not need models, I would like to point out that state is being used in two distinct ways by Li and the authors he approvingly cites. The rst means essentially the same thing as polity, as in Geertzs theatre state, while the second denotes a specic stage of sociopolitical evolution (as in state formation) and a set of features that differentiates states from simpler forms of political entity. I do not nd the rst use particularly troubling, nor should the second be ruled out a priori. The freight carried by the second meaning of state, however, needs to be historically motivated, and I nd it difcult to think of a single conceptual box (or even three) in which to t all the diversity of political forms from Uruk to the United States. Nevertheless, the networks and boundaries approach is meant not so much to replace previous deep-time political typologies as it is to develop a more exible way of understanding political forms through time on which more sophisticated understandings of long- and short-term historical process might be based. I believe Olsen is correct in suggesting that complexity is an important missing component of my approach. Although my intention was to focus on how ancient polities worked (and leave aside the question of developmental typology), there is no reason why complexity should not join other qualitative and quantitative descriptors of networks and their nexuses. Indeed, this is probably a necessary addition in addressing diachronic change. The case of the Zhou is fascinating but controversial and complicated, involving sometimes contradictory archaeological, epigraphic, and received textual evidence. I do intend to write about the Shang-Zhou transition, but there is no space here for my still preliminary views. In response to the question of where the Zhou would t in the idealized schema of the Shang polity, they provide a great if complicated example of the dynamic nature of the Late Shang hegemony occupying all three zones (subordinate, ally, enemy) at different times. Roderick B. Campbell
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Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009

Toward a Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

Post-neoevolutionary Theory: Promise and Problems

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009

Campbell A Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009

Campbell A Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

Early Chinese Polities

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009

Table 1. Ancient mainland East Asian chronology

Campbell A Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009

Figure 2. The Shang kings discursive hierarchy of authority.

Campbell A Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009

Campbell A Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009

Campbell A Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

Campbell A Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009

Campbell A Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

Figure 7. Schematic diagram of the Late Shang polity structure.

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009

Campbell A Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009

Campbell A Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009

Campbell A Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009

Campbell A Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009

Campbell A Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009

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