Urbanization, State Formation, and Cooperation, by Justin Jennings and Timothy Earle: Case study extracts and Conclusion..
Abstract
Since at least the Enlightenment, scholars have linked urbanization to state formation in the evolution of complex societies. We challenge this assertion, suggesting that the cooperative units that came together in the earliest cities were premised on limiting outside domination and thus usually acted to impede efforts to create more centralized structures of control. Although cities often became the capitals of states, state formation was quicker and more effective where environments kept people more dispersed.
Data from the Andes and Polynesia are used to support this argument. In the Lake Titicaca Basin, household- and lineage-based groups living in the city of Tiahuanaco structured urban dynamics without the state for the settlement’s first 300 years, while similarly organized Hawaiian groups that were isolated in farmsteads were quickly realigned into a state structure. By decoupling urbanization from state formation, we can better understand the interactions that created the world’s first cities.
Case Study: Tiwanaku
By the end of the first millennium AD, the prehistoric city of Tiahuanaco was the capital of a state that controlled much of the Lake Titicaca Basin. The state is named after the city—another example of our long-standing conflation of urbanization and state formation—although we use here the alternate spelling “Tiwanaku” for the state.
Urbanization began at Tiahuanaco around 500 AD, yet the first clear evidence for a Tiwanaku state dates to after 800 AD. Tiwanaku was, ultimately, a regionally organized polity with a professional ruling class, a commoner class, and a highly centralized and internally specialized government. This state, however, was created through the reconfiguring of cooperative, egalitarian, and kin-based cooperative units that organized city life during the settlement’s first 300 years.
Located 3,840 m above sea level, Tiahuanaco sits near Lake Tititcaca on the high, semiarid plain of the Altiplano. The lake had long been an attractive area for settlement, because its abundant aquatic resources and favorable climate made cultivating potatoes, quinoa, and other high-elevation crops possible. Year-round settlements could be found in the region by the end of the third millennium BC, with these weakly consolidated villages often breaking apart when population exceeded 200 people. Pre-Tiwanaku villages, over time, became organized as house societies. …
… Tiahuanaco first rose to regional prominence because it catered to the desires of an atomized population locally grounded into cooperative kin units. The size of these units waxed and waned over a millennium, based on the ability of religious leaders to metaphorically encapsulate larger numbers of individuals as members of the same family. Ritual centers brought groups together, but they also highlighted the differences between groups—through distinct architectural assemblages, practices, and offerings— thus reinforcing the localized, kin-based legitimization of authority. The cooperative units that built Tiahuanaco were perhaps best characterized as house societies that were materialized into compounds and, as basal units expanded, neighborhoods. The interplay between these units led toward greater specialization but also reinforced the factional competition that for generations inhibited centralization and state formation.
Case Study: Hawai’i
… Are we simply missing the Hawaiian cities? On functional grounds … [it has been argued that] Honaunau and other Hawaiian royal centers can be considered cities, but no population aggregation is observed. Nothing approaches the low-density urbanism found in Southeast Asia (Khmer Empire) and Mesoamerica (Maya states). In these situations, tens of thousand of heterogeneously organized people concentrated in districts around central places, meeting our definition for a city.
The lack of urbanism in the Hawaiian state is remarkable only because of our adherence to a civilization concept that merges urbanization and state formation. Cities did not form in Hawai’i because of an enduring dispersed settlement pattern, lack of storable staples, poorly developed transport, and an absence of market-based specialization that created key dynamics for settlement aggregation elsewhere. The only regional hierarchy observed was the late prehistoric structure of religious temples, but cross-culturally even these monuments were modest in scale. Quite simply, the economic basis of the Hawaiian states did not encourage urbanism, and the lack of large settlements did not limit pristine state formation.
The low-density colonizing populations of Hawai’i likely formed a fairly open society, although ideas of status were surely retained from a general Polynesian structure of rank.
The subsequent population expansion filled the landscape and intensified its use, creating circumscribed zones of highly productive agriculture eventually claimed through conquest by a ruling elite.
Substantial surpluses supported managers, warriors, and priests in the process of institutional reformulation. A bargain between chiefs and commoners created surplus extraction that, at the same time, required chiefs to maintain a moral economy with well-managed farming systems, access to wild resources of uplands and sea, and ceremonial legitimacy.
In all situations, this bargain was critical to the formation of hierarchies, but in some situation like the Hawaiian Islands, a largely rural population had little room to maneuver. The need for the labor power of commoners never made them simple pawns in the process, but the fact that they became tethered to particular land allocations made them easily enumerated and supervised in a rural-based political economy of staple production.
Do other cases of nonurban, early states exist that would bolster the Hawaiian case? Because urbanism is used to define states archaeologically, states without cities may simply have been missed, and research is required to resolve this question. Except for a strong historical record, Hawaii and Tonga would probably have not been recognized as states. Work on low-density urbanism suggests that the degree of settlement aggregation was highly variable across archaic states, and no necessary linkage between the variables exists.
Conclusions
A closer consideration of the evolution of cooperation and control challenges our long-standing association between cities and states. Cooperation evolved among humans as a mechanism to thwart destructive status competition within small groups. The more egalitarian, group-oriented, structural relations that shaped the lives of mobile hunter-gatherers endured in modified forms among sedentary groups—effectively capping inequality and village size.
In those rare cases of greater aggregation, people adopted a variety of coping mechanisms, including increased basal-unit size, ritual elaboration, and greater compartmentalization. They often effectively resisted, however, the imposition of the crosscutting hierarchical relations fundamental to state formation.
Inclusive institutions like those that structured much of village and herder life tend to be self-reinforcing, as they empower a broad swath of society and keep the political playing field level. Such inclusive institutions thus may have shaped the organization of early cities as they emerged, initially independent of states.
Cities, of course, ultimately anchored most ancient states. Yet later political, economic, and social structures should not be uncritically projected back into contexts of incipient urbanization when small, egalitarian-oriented, cooperative groups likely prevailed. Aggregation initially worked to reinforce inter-group differences as peoples’ identities hardened in the face of outsiders.
Those who sought to create an overarching state structure would have needed to break the power of these self-sufficient groups by creating top-down mechanisms of control that included the use of priests, craft specialists, and warriors. State formation processes varied widely, in part because aggrandizers in different regions wrestled with quite disparate relationships linking urban populations together.
The focus at Tiahuanaco was on ritual, as an emerging elite used city-wide (if not region-wide) celebrations to assert a privileged position while still honoring the smaller cooperative units that structured life in the settlement. This, however, was a multigenerational process—a Tiwanaku state formed only 300 years after urbanization began.
When the link between urbanization and state formation is sundered, it becomes easier to recognize those cases of non-urban state formation as well as those cases where urbanism did not result in a state. In our Hawaiian case study, we see the former occurring within an environmental context that restricted aggregation. Those living in Hawai’i, like those in the Titicaca Basin, were resistant to attempts at creating hierarchical relationships beyond the community chiefs that controlled their modal units. Leaders worked for their people, and in both cases cooperative groups were likely hostile to attempts to interfere with local lifeways. Yet Hawaiians, dispersed in isolated farmsteads, were closely tethered to their land. They could not aggregate and thus could not as easily slow efforts at hierarchical control and state formation.
Tremendous variation existed in the percentage of a polity’s population that lived in it its primate center. The range of chiefdom populations living in central places varied widely, from 3% to 100%, and research on low-density urbanism stresses how mature, long-lasting states have developed without the classic city model . The link between settlement sizes and political centralization is not straightforward—a sparsely settled site like Honaunau could be a royal center with deep and wide-ranging impacts on surrounding communities.
Yet to call Honaunau a “city” both obscures the transformative aspects of population aggregation and chains us to a deeply flawed civilization stage of development that equates urbanization and state formation. State formation is a centralizing process that brings people together under a ruling class. The political center of a state might be constantly on the move, as in the theater state of nineteenth-century Bali (Geertz 1980), or, as in Inca Cusco, have its population intentionally restricted to elites and their retinues.
Having many people in one place tends to make hierarchical control more difficult to assert and maintain, and leaders must depend on positive attractions, such as ceremonial elaboration, rather than on cruder means of control through the political economy.
Cities are thus not the harbinger of the state that theories of cultural evolution have long assumed. These sites may instead represent one of the hardest settlement types in which to control people, because of their fluid and faceless (to administrators) character.
Divisions between neighborhoods can be difficult to overcome, and assertions of crosscutting hierarchies are frequently rebuffed. Seen in this light, early state formation was often more difficult in urban settings. Centralization, when it occurred, was often a fraught, multigenerational process that emphasized resource mobilization to support hyperelaborated ceremonialism and solutions to emerging urban disorder.
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The Source of today’s exhibit has been:
Justin Jennings and Timothy K. Earle, Urbanization, State Formation, and Cooperation: A Reappraisal, Current Anthropology, Volume 57, Number 4, August 2016
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