Understanding Early Large-Scale Collectives: A Global Perspective - Brossura

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1032856920 ISBN 13: 9781032856926

Casa editrice: Routledge, 2025

Riassunto

This volume brings together perspectives from different parts of the world that showcase the wide variety of practices, institutions, and ideologies that allowed for shared identities and coordinated actions across broad collectives. It shows that there are many ways that people can work together.

How did the world’s first large-scale collectives come into being? For much of our discipline’s history, the answer was the state. People learned how to be part of a larger community via political, economic, and social scaffolding that tended to build from earlier ways of living in a region. This scaffolding was often wobbly and always under construction―its flexibility often a design strength rather than a flaw. This book demonstrates that violence and rulers often played pivotal roles in large-scale collectives, but so did gender complementarity, markets, ritual centers, fictive kinship, and egalitarianism. Earlier evolutionary approaches tended to obscure both the variability and malleability of earlier political forms in a desire to find ideal types hidden beneath cross-cultural noise. This volume’s authors argue that this noise was politics-in-action and that there was no state, or other kind of polity, that was above the fray and divorced from the daily practices that brought people, animals, and other things together.

A better understanding of early collective action strategies provides a richer understanding of past politics and, just as importantly, demonstrates governance alternatives for our contemporary society that struggles to address climate change, pandemics, and other pressing challenges. This book will interest archaeologists and historians, as well as anyone who is curious about other ways that we can work together to solve common problems.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

Justin Jennings is Senior Curator of the Archaeology of the Americas at the Royal Ontario Museum and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Routledge
• Data di pubblicazione: 2025
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1032856920
• ISBN 13: 9781032856926
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 430
• Redattore: Jennings Justin
• Contatto del produttore: Taylor and Francis, GPSR Taylor and Francis; gpsr@taylorandfrancis.com; ; Taylor & Francis Verlag GmbH, Kaufingerstraße 24; München; 80331; Germania