Power from Below: Collectivity and Heterarchy in Global Perspective

This symposium focuses on how ordinary people self-govern or co-govern, creating complex polities that maintain egalitarian structures, espouse egalitarian ideologies, or both. We focus on systems of governance engineered to balance power, but also how they continuously develop, falter and are reshaped: some built directly on earlier egalitarian roots, others stemming from overthrow of authoritarian structures through a yearning for "return" to more balanced rulership – real or imagined. Archaeological concern with alternative forms of governance burgeoned after the "social turn" that took root in the 1980s, followed by convincing exploration of concepts like heterarchy and corporate organization in the 1990s and beyond. Today, the idea of differently-organized distributions of power no longer needs to be justified, leaving room to expand study into collective action, subaltern political movements, self-organized production, public assembly places, and political cohesion based on principles other than kinship and coercion. Contributions delve more deeply into this multidimensional space, where complex politicized actors, from commoner to ruler, can be studied. These once-invisible people can be discovered through the use of new methods and theories, fundamentally changing our perception of how past societies were constituted.