The missing link

This response paper will address two primary points: what exactly is a state, and several efforts to incorporate landscape into the discussion of state formation. The first point will be covered only briefly, since it really only reflects some general thoughts that I have had over the course of these first three weeks. The second responds to Casey’s prompt in class, which saw some limitations in the Bernbeck piece.

First off, although we have tried to come to some grips with what a state is in class, we haven’t exactly succeeded. In the second half of last week's discussion Omur asked the group to move towards an understanding, if not a definition per se, of a state. This was when Routledge’s point about the state needing to present itself as real was raised. Then Omur asked if we felt that we had, through reading and discussion, made progress on understanding the state as a concept. If I remember correctly, the general consensus is that we had. My personal opinion on this, however, is that we deconstructed the state with some success, but implicitly bought into its existence nonetheless. A case in point is that in answering what a state is we focused on what a state does instead: states make themselves real. I don’t necessarily see a problem in this point, but perhaps more discussion is required to bring the state and what states do into some sort of sync. I agree with Routledge’s and others’ suggestion that process is critical and that states are not uniformly defined, and I have myself stated in the first round of responses that things like ideology and state are slippery, changing through processes of negotiation, so I don’t think we need a single, all encompassing definition. But a leap from this to what states do seems lacking in some way.

This ties into landscapes in a nice way. Upon reflection, a good response to Casey’s question about how landscape studies address issues of state formation sees two lines of development. The first continues in the same vain of literature on what states do. Landscapes are seen as objects upon which action can be taken, meaning inscribed or appropriated, and always full of memory. Richard Bradley (1991, "Ritual, Time and History." World Archaeology 23(2): 209-19) wrote a nice piece on ritual, time and Stonehenge, suggesting that the association between a place and performative (in this case ritual) activity enters into long-term linkages (memories) between people, place, and meaning. Stonehenge, then, retains significance as a place of ritual significance over greats expanses of time, even though the nature of the rituals has changed a multitude of times. Legitimation through practice entered the site into continuous cycles of appropriation. A similar concept applies to the state, since it relates so clearly to power, authority, and the means through which groups or individuals attain these intangible things.

Adam Smith’s book (Political Landscapes), which we are scheduled to read, sees the landscape as a similarly powerful mechanism through which states and other societal types negotiate power, etc. Smith and Bradley also allow for meaning to be revoked from place, through processes of alteration and razing. What I like about such an approach is that it highlights the significance of human/place interaction on group and individual levels, yet neither example fully addresses beginnings. Maybe I’m just struggling to come to terms with the ‘always already there’-ness of the state?

Yet another approach to landscape, namely survey archaeology and the like, looks again at long-term activity on a regional scale, even if the term regional is vague in and of itself. This provides scope for questions about settlement hierarchies, economic integration, cross-cultural interaction, and on and on and on. If one starts with the significance of human/place interactions, broad views of how sites, villages, farmsteads, regions, cities, etc. change OR continue throughout the course of differing political and social interactions, it is perhaps possible to identify mechanisms of discourse between, for example, expanding states and the communities with which they engage. Yet even here we start with the state as already there, looking at its interactions and manifestations, not its arrival.