Collective Action (Other Keyword)
1-8 (8 Records)
Public assemblies were a common phenomenon in Iron Age and Early Medieval Europe. In these large collective meetings, important decisions concerning war, peace, the choice of military leaders, legislation and the administration of justice were taken. Together with their political role, they also fulfilled other simultaneous functions, including religious festivals and the holding of fairs. Once believed to be archaeologically invisible, recent research has identified the remains of a large...
Collective Action in State Building, Past and Present (2017)
I report on a comparative study of degrees of collective action in 30 premodern states and 30 contemporary nation-states. Contrary to the notion of democratic reform in state-building, I found roughly similar proportions of more and less collective (autocratic) states in the two samples. I propose a hypothesis for the failure of democratic reform drawn from collective action theory.
El Malinche and Tlaxcallan: A Field Guide to Taking Down Democracy (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Material Culture of the Spanish Invasion of Mesoamerica and Forging of New Spain" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Contact between the Conquistadores and the native peoples of Mexico 500 years ago was a watershed moment in human history. At its heart was the relationship between El Malinche (Hernán Cortés) and the Tlaxcalteca. Although much has been made of the role the resulting alliance played in the...
Intermediate Scale Socio-Spatial Units, Collective Action, and the State in Cross-Cultural Perspective (2015)
Collective Action Theory posits that states are the outcome of bargaining among the individuals, groups, and factions that make up the political community. Thus, the nature of intermediate scale socio-spatial units or social organizations that exist hierarchically between individual households and the state (e.g., corporate groups, clans, neighborhoods, communities, patron-client networks, etc.) plays a key role in determining the political-economic strategies employed by the architects of the...
Multiethnic Landscapes, Inclusive Identities, and Collective State Building (2018)
In small-scale societies, including territories of failed states and peripheries; regional landscapes are chaotic and rife with interpersonal violence, slaving, and social disorder, etc. Accordingly, organizing for collective defense and the management of common pool resources is vital for the survival of small communities occupying these zones. In such contexts, ethnic identities, constructed around concepts of blood, race, language, or locality, are important for achieving cooperation because...
A network theoretical analysis of the emergence of co-rulership in ancient Teotihuacan, Central Mexico (2016)
The political organization of Teotihuacan continues to be unknown. While some researchers see evidence for a powerful centralized hierarchy, others argue for a more collective form of government. We created an abstract computer model of hypothetical social relations among neighborhood-level representatives to show that such a distributed political network could in principle have been sufficient for globally optimal decision making, as long as there are community rituals and sections of the city...
Niche Construction and Common Pool Resource Management in Marginal Environments: A Diachronic Approach (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2018)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Anthropologists have long been concerned with the immense variety of collective institutions developed by small-scale societies to foster solidarity, inculcate values, and manage resources. Long-term studies tracking the development and maintenance of such institutions would greatly benefit a range of social science disciplines, but are unfortunately rare. To this end, the proposed project...
Power in Middle Range Societies: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (2016)
For most of the second half of the twentieth century Neoevolutionary theory dominated explanations for the rise of social complexity and inequality. However, beginning about two decades ago, scholars began to problematize this framework. The resulting body of theory, referred to as “alternative pathways to complexity”, introduced concepts of structure and agency and moved away from functionalism and systems theory. Despite these improvements in our theoretical toolkit, much scholarship continues...