Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-xtgtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T09:46:10.440Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Still Waiting for the Barbarians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2019

Adam T. Smith
Adam T. Smith*
Affiliation:
Department of AnthropologyCornell University216 McGraw Hall Ithaca, NY 14853USA Email: ats73@cornell.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It seems almost preordained that James Scott, a scholar who moves with profound agility between the worlds of anthropology and political science, should eventually work his way onto the intellectual terrain of the barbarian. Barbarians play a foundational role in the formation of both disciplines, populating both anthropology's ‘savage slot’ (Trouillot 2003) and political science's prelapsarian ‘state of nature’ (Palmeri 2016). In Scott's most recent book, Against the Grain, the barbarians who helped to shape the world's earliest states play a variety of consequential roles. They are at once the forces of resistance to centralizing power, the refugees seeking respite from sovereignty's infringements and the brigands of the borderlands who provide the slave labour and mercenaries that prop up the fragile state.

Type
Review Symposium
Information
Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , November 2019 , pp. 706 - 709
Copyright
Copyright © McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Coetzee, J.M., 1982. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York (NY): Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Cribb, R., 1991. Nomads in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F., 1986. Nomadology: The war machine. New York (NY): Semiotext(e).Google Scholar
Di Cosmo, N., 2002. Ancient China and its Enemies: The rise of nomadic power in East Asian history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fleming, D.E., 2004. Democracy's Ancient Ancestors: Mari and early collective governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Freud, S., 1989. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York (NY): W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Khatchadourian, L., 2016. Imperial Matter: Ancient Persia and the archaeology of empires. Oakland (CA): University of California Press.Google Scholar
Legg, S., 1971. The Heartland. New York (NY): Farrar, Straus & Giroux.Google Scholar
Nietzsche, F., 1989. Beyond Good and Evil. New York (NY): Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Palmeri, F., 2016. State of Nature, Stages of Society: Enlightenment conjectural history and modern social discourse. New York (NY): Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Porter, A., 2011. Mobile Pastoralism and the Formation of Near Eastern Civilizations: Weaving together society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rousseau, J.-J., 1992. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (eds. Masters, R.D. & Kelly, C.). Hanover (NH): University Press of New England.Google Scholar
Scott, J.C., 1998. Seeing Like a State: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, J.C., 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed. An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, A.T., 2015. The Political Machine: Assembling sovereignty in the Bronze Age Caucasus. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Trouillot, M.-R., 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the modern world. New York (NY): Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Wolf, E., 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley (CA): University of California Press.Google Scholar