Yoffee states that, “cities are transformative social environments in which states themselves are created (p. 45),” and he focuses exclusively on urban examples. While it is widely held that cities are a major site for the development of complex (or, perhaps more appropriately, stratified) societies and state genesis (to use Bourdieu’s terminology, which I quite like), the presence of dense habitation does not necessarily a state make. We could think about this in terms of simple geometry: a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square; or, to input our terms: urban living does not indicate or necessarily produce a “state”, but states generally develop in urban environments.
I would like to expand on some of the comments Omur has made regarding the fact that the majority of the discourse on state formation and the development of complex societies completely overlooks the Neolithic period in favor of addressing urban development in the Uruk period. I think this may, in part, be a result of the genealogy of the discipline; that Mesopotamia is held to be the “cradle of civilization” (as I was taught in high school) and that the Uruk period is where the evolutionary process is catalyzed. However, upon further consideration of the attributes we believe to be integral to urban environments, namely: shared cultural practices and knowledge space, shared visual culture, monumental architecture, collective identity, dense population, etc., many of these features are present in Neolithic society.
Catalhoyuk, a Neolithic site in south central Anatolia, was occupied from the 7th to the 6th millennium BCE. The areas of the site excavated by James Melaart (in the 1960’s) and Ian Hodder (from the 1990’s to the present) indicate a sizeable community living in densely packed domestic structures (no public spaces or buildings have been identified). The architecture of these houses is incredibly uniform—both externally and internally. Through careful excavation and attention to minute detail, specific activities carried out in certain areas within the house have been identified. For example, the cooking hearths in most houses were placed along the south wall, with buchrania often placed above them and platforms for sitting activities and sleeping are found lining the walls. The decoration within these houses followed a consistent aesthetic and symbolic milieu. Hodder, using Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, suggests that the rigid shaping of domestic space worked to shape the cultural practices and ideologies of the people at Catalhoyuk and through repetition worked to reinforce these practices for generations.
All this evidence indicates that within Catalhoyuk there was a shared visual vocabulary, shared cultural practices and a dense population, from which we might surmise that there was a shared collective identity. Given the fact that Catalhoyuk specifically, and Neolithic civilizations in general are not associated with a “state-level” civilization, it would seem errant to suggest that this shared vocabulary was imposed from above (as we often speak of urban environments in the context of state). It seems natural that through shared knowledge production and exchange, these forms of domestic architecture, organization of space, and location of practices were shaped organically through people living in a densely populated area.
Where am I going with this? I think that by looking at the features and organization of Neolithic society we can reassess the way we think about cities “birthing” states. In agreement with Casey’s response (and in keeping with Borges in “The Lottery in Babylon”), I think it is productive to think about cities—their spheres of public exchange and performance, shared visual culture—and the states that grow out of them as organic processes. If we think about knowledge and information being shared among densely populated areas, then it is the ability to control and disseminate this knowledge that leads to some people holding power over others (Yoffee, p.98, Bourdieu’s capital). But the “performance of the state” is probably (at least initially) operating within and materializing itself within this sphere of shared knowledge and culture.
