Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 6, 2023

The Comparative Study of Pre-Modern Governance: Shifting from Categories to Relations and Networks

(Abstract)

Gary Feinman

The study of humanity’s deep past, which is heavily reliant on archaeological data, largely remains steeped in concepts and frames that have their roots in the mid-nineteenth century. As was necessary for that time, this highly durable framing was grounded principally in synchronic textual and ethnographic accounts. These approaches helped to propel the last half-century of great empirical progress in the breadth and spatial (multi-scalar) scope of global archaeological findings, yet these studies and the syntheses that they prompted also yielded information that did not accord with the expectations of the extant paradigms. Alternative pathways of change were recorded. New tenets and approaches that build on what we have learned through archaeology and related disciplines over the past decades are outlined here. The new conceptual framing proposed looks for relational patterns and parallel processes, with a focal lens on the explication of diversity as well as similarities.