Title: Early State, Developed State, Mature State: The Statehood Evolutionary Sequence
Abstract:The concept of the early state introduced by Henri J. M. Claessen and Peter Skalnik appears to have been the last among the great epoch-making political-anthropological theories of the 60s and 70s of ...The concept of the early state introduced by Henri J. M. Claessen and Peter Skalnik appears to have been the last among the great epoch-making political-anthropological theories of the 60s and 70s of the last century (e.g., Sahlins [1960, 1963, 1968], Service [1962, 1975], Fried [1967, 1975]), which did more than just giving a new consideration of sociopolitical evolution, its stages and models. One may even say that these theories succeeded in filling the evolutionary gap between the pre-state forms and the state, which had formed by that moment in the academic consciousness due to the fact that the accumulated ethnographic and archaeological data could hardly fit the prior schemes. However it seems that in comparison with other ‘stage’ theories from the above-mentioned list the theory of the early state has a number of important advantages, especially concerning the view on social evolution in general and the evolution of statehood in particular. No wonder that Joyce Marcus and Gary Feinman (1998: 6) mention Claessen and Skalnik among such scholars which do not believe in inevitability; they know that not every autonomous village society gave rise to a chiefdom, nor did every group of chiefdoms give rise to a state (see also Grinin 2007a). In the theory of the early state it was fundamentally new and important from a methodological point of view to define the early state as a separate stage of evolution essentially different from the following stage, the one of the full-grown or mature state. ‘To reach the early state level is one thing, to develop into a full-blown, or mature state is quite another’ (Claessen and Skalnik 1978b: 22). At the same time they (as well as a number of other authors) indicated quite soundly that not all early states were able to become and actually became mature ones (see e.g., Claessen and Skalnik 1978a; Claessen and van de Velde 1987b; Shifferd 1987). Thus there was formed exactly an evolutionary sequence of statehood inRead More
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 29
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