Entrenched Disbelief: Complex Hunter-Gatherers and the Case for Inclusive Cultural Evolutionary Thinking

Advocates of traditional, agriculture-based models of sociopolitical evolution argue that the adoption of domesticates is requisite for developments such as sedentism, village life, ascribed status, hereditary leadership, and other features that underpin institutionalized political complexity. We counter in this essay with a well-documented suite of politically complex hunter-gatherer (CHG) societies that exhibit these same features, thereby demonstrating that reliance on agriculture per se—or any other specific food regime such as fishing—should be excised from explanations of emergent political complexity. Despite the failure of the agricentric model to account for a significant number of cases of institutionalized complexity, some of its architects remain entrenched in their disbelief and rigidly ignore the implications of CHG studies. By continuing to situate farming as foundational to everything complex, they perpetuate not only a story of human cultural evolution over the last 10,000 years that is incomplete but also a narrative that is incorrect. We reject subsistence (domesticates) as the central organizing principle and introduce here a new forum for thinking about how societies operate and evolve. We propose a model consisting of integrated platforms of societal dynamics that are inclusive (encourage discourse of all societies), nonprogressive, and serve as an organizational structure to discuss cultural evolution in any comparative or singular ethnographic context. The platforms are nonhierarchical and not fixed in order or importance. They are (1) agency and authority, (2) social differentiation, (3) participation in communal events, (4) organization of production, (5) labor obligations, (6) articulation of ecology and subsistence, and (7) territoriality and ownership. All sociopolitical cases and all topics can be productively discussed on these platforms, from bands to the largest empires, comparatively or diachronically. In the present article, we use the platforms to examine political evolution. We assemble considerable evidence that a variety of dietary regimes are associated with the emergence of institutionalized political complexity. Rather than diet, it is the ways people integrate and use labor that demands our attention.     

Leviathan and the bagpipe: Hobbes and the poetics of figuration in the English revolution

Though English humanists tended to emphasize the continuity between rhetoric and poetics, Thomas Hobbes confronted the tensions between those linguistic arts as they were practised in the early modern period. This essay argues that Hobbes’s reinvestment in rhetorical eloquence was accompanied by a renewed understanding of figurative expression’s uniquely poetic effects. Breaking from royalist writers who often insisted upon the literal truth of monarchical imagery, Hobbes adapted an approach to metaphor honed by parliamentarian polemicists in the English Revolution. In both his literary-critical epistle, the “Answer to Davenant”, and Leviathan, Hobbes used an awareness of language’s poetic dimensions to revise many of the master tropes of early modern discourse, deconstructing the epic invocation to the muse and fundamentally transforming the body politic. In the process, he demonstrated the power of poetic figuration as a philosophical instrument for collective knowledge.     

The Politics of Wandering in Michel de Certeau

This article examines Michel de Certeau’s analysis of the declining social and political authority of the Church and its political implications for the life of a Christian. In response to the shifting social dynamics of the West in the latter half of the twentieth century, de Certeau advocates for a poetics of “wandering” wherein Christians have no knowledge of their destination, no place to call their own, and no expectation of arrival. While his position provides enduring insights into the contours of religious belief, de Certeau’s analysis raises questions regarding a contemporary spiritual life. The article argues that de Certeau’s poetics of wandering neglects the dynamics of hope and anticipation in the life of a believer. Further attentiveness to these dynamics suggests a move from a poetics of wandering to a politics of wandering, which includes embracing a less institutionalized Christian political engagement and transgresses untenable secular/religious divides.     

Landscapes of death: GIS-based analyses of chullpas in the western Lake Titicaca basin

The western Lake Titicaca basin is marked by above-ground funerary towers, known as chullpas, located in a variety of geographical contexts and dating to the Late Intermediate Period, or LIP (AD 1100–1450), and Late Horizon (AD 1450–1532). Over the years, interpretations of these tombs have concentrated upon their roles as loci for ancestral veneration and their abilities to perpetuate memory, delineate social ties and territories, and demarcate access to resources. These views share the implicit or explicit assumption that these mortuary structures were intended to be highly visible. Yet this assumption has never been formally tested. By using GIS-based geospatial tools and statistical analysis, this paper investigates the extent to which chullpas surveyed in the western Lake Titicaca basin visually dominated the landscape. These tombs were not positioned in random locations; they exhibit a high degree of clustering and were built in highly visible areas that could be seen from sites of occupation and regions of economic importance such as Lake Umayo. This paper suggests that this landscape of death was deliberately constructed to have an enduring social impact.     

Alternative adaptive regimes for integrating foraging and farming activities

There are two distinct forager-farmer adaptive regimes evidenced in the ethnographic record: an ancillary and surplus cultivation regime. Societies characterized by these different regimes define different systems for allocating time to the production of domesticated plants. Cross-cultural patterns support the proposition that two socioecological conditions are logically necessary in order for an ancillary cultivation regime to develop and persist within a population of foragers. Wild resources must be sufficiently available, and farmers who produce a surplus of crops must be available to exchange with, live with or raid to redistribute crops after an episode of crop loss. The cross-cultural presence of two empirically distinct regimes for integrating foraging and farming is a useful frame of reference for evaluating how prehistoric foragers first integrated foraging and farming activities in archaeological contexts of secondary crop acquisition. A preliminary examination indicates that the ethnographic patterns are most consistent with the interpretation that the earliest farmers to inhabit the American Southwest produced at least a minimal surplus of domesticated plants. It is postulated that the adoption of a surplus cultivation regime by a population creates the adaptive opportunity for ancillary cultivation to develop and persist on a landscape.     

Overcoming ‘Simply Being’: Straight Sex,Masculinity and Physical Culture in Modern Egypt

This article considers the specific deployment of gender and sexuality in interwar Egypt against the general backdrop of a universalising colonial modernity, which since around the middle of the nineteenth century aimed at producing a repeatable subject everywhere. It examines the magazine Physical Culture as an artefact of that colonial modernity and as a watermark of an ineffable style of performing gender and sexuality – a culmination of nearly five decades of historicising Egypt and of exercising Egyptians. That the cultivation of healthy and desirable bodies was constrained by Egypt's asymmetrical location in a global economic and political order constituted by colonialism was a well‐established fact of social life by the end of the 1920s; consequently, the problem of the modern subject in Egypt was posed in terms that were not exclusively nationalist and examined in terms that were keenly attuned to circulations of global cultural forms and discursive practices. In the resulting process of subject formation, a gendered and sexualised other was also produced, as a de‐formation, wherein the terms of its prior being would no longer be intelligible.