toward a networks and boundaries approach ca final

� 2009 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2009/5006-0003$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/648398

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009 821

Toward a Networks and BoundariesApproach to Early Complex Polities

The Late Shang Case

by Roderick B. Campbell

The past 10 years have seen a reorientation of archaeological political theory from a focus onneoevolutionary classification and “state origins” to a focus on the operation of ancient polities. Thistrend, while promising, nonetheless frequently retains problematic habits of earlier approaches, in-cluding the tendency to slip into reductionist classificatory exercises. Furthermore, I argue that thenaturalized experience of nation-states and the legacy of modernist political theory form an unex-amined yet pernicious influence. In ancient contexts, the reified anachronism of “the state” is betterunderstood in terms of a nexus of networks of power and authority and the imagined politicalcommunities with which they articulate. I suggest that both polity networks and polity ideas shouldthen be analyzed in terms of their discursive, practical, and material aspects and the relationshipsbetween them. Relatively understudied and still undeservingly peripheral to the generation of ancientpolitical models in archaeology, Shang China will form the basis of a case study in the applicationof the networks and boundaries approach proposed here. Drawing on archaeological, epigraphic,and transmitted textual sources, I will sketch an outline of Shang political geography, discursivestructures, practices of power/authority, networks of capital, and boundaries of political identity.

Introduction

Nearly 30 years ago, K. C. Chang (1980, 364) critically engagedthe then-fashionable typological exercises of neoevolutionarytheory and the place of Shang China within it, claiming that“the Shang data pose some definitional problems” and ar-guing that China be taken seriously in formulating general-izations about ancient polities. Unfortunately, nearly threedecades later, early China is still the playground of typologicalexercises derived from other parts of the ancient world andhas served as an opportunity more to project pregiven as-sumptions about early complex polities than to build newtheory.

The Chinese situation, moreover, is not unique but ratheran instantiation of troublesome tendencies in archaeologicalpolitical theory today. The lingering mental habits of neo-evolutionism and structural-functionalist political theory haveled current archaeological theorizing in some problematic di-rections. I will argue that the notion of “the state” is just as

Roderick B. Campbell is a postdoctoral Research Associate at theJoukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Study of the AncientWorld (Box 1837/70 Waterman Street, Providence, Rhode Island02912, U.S.A. [[email protected]]). This paper wassubmitted 5 VII 08 and accepted 21 IX 08.

much a conceptual stumbling block as is the much-critiqued“chiefdom.” Indeed, the state serves archaeological politicaltheory as a kind of “end of history” but is, in fact, an illusoryand anachronistic projection of modern political contingen-cies. I argue that archaeologists must shed these tendenciesand adopt more historically sophisticated approaches if theywish to fulfill archaeology’s potential for contributing to apolitical anthropology of deep time.

In the end I hope to show both how current theory hasnot adequately served the Chinese case and how the Shangexample could be used to build better models. Indeed,through describing Shang sources of power, the discoursesthey were embedded in, practices they were constitutedthrough, and resources that made them possible, I aim bothto demonstrate how the Late Shang polity operated and tosketch the outline of a comparative historical framework.

Post-neoevolutionary Theory:Promise and Problems

A perennial research topic in archaeology, the study of “ar-chaic states” (Feinman and Marcus 1998), “early civilizations”(Trigger 2003), and “early complex polities” (A. Smith 2003)has seen some major changes in the past 10 years or so. Inlarge part this is due to an avowed shift away from the ty-

822 Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009

pological exercises that occupied much of the earlier work onthe origins of state societies to a focus on how ancient politiesoperated (Feinman and Marcus 1998; Trigger 2003; Van Burenand Richards 2000, 7). The previous focus on social evolu-tionary types (e.g., bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states) and theevolutionary paths that linked them has been criticized ex-tensively on a number of grounds, including the difficulty offitting the variety of observed societies into a few availabletypes (Blanton et al. 1996; Yoffee 2005); the implausibility offinding prime movers responsible for causing movement fromone evolutionary stage to the next (Van Buren and Richards2000); the oversimplification behind the assumption of lock-step social, political, and economic development in holistic,evolutionary stages (Yoffee 1993); and the decontextualizationinvolved in “trait list” approaches (Trigger 2003; Yoffee 2005).In addition, the functionalist and adaptionist assumptionsunder which much neoevolutionary theorizing on the originsof the state was conducted (Paynter 1989) tended to leavelittle scope for local cultural logics (Wolf 1982), while agency,when it appeared at all, generally took the form of rationalaction assigned to disembodied entities such as the state orelites.

This critique of neoevolutionary theory and call for a re-focus on how ancient polities operated have generated a num-ber of new approaches showing both promising directionsand problematic tendencies. The most positive tendency hasbeen a general unpacking of the neoevolutionary state’s pack-age of features: cities, civilizations, political cultures, and au-thority structures are now generally seen as taking on a varietyof forms providing different possibilities for early complexpolities.

The renewed focus on cities (M. Smith 2003; Yoffee 2005),for instance, makes it possible to think about how urbanspaces might contribute to the constitution of social and po-litical orders. In this way of thinking, cities become activeparticipants in constructing political landscapes rather thansimply epiphenomena of a certain degree of sociopoliticalcomplexity (A. Smith 2003; Yoffee 2005). Moreover, inves-tigating urban organization and the concomitant constitutionof nonurban landscapes (Yoffee 2005) returns material andspatial qualities to early complex polities (A. Smith 2003; M.Smith 2003).

Likewise, the useful distinction being drawn between statesand civilizations makes the latter more than merely a short-hand for “state-level society” but rather a kind of culturalorder leaking beyond the boundaries of city and state (Fein-man and Marcus 1998; Trigger 2003; Yoffee 1993, 2005). Atonce setting early complex polities within a wider context,the focus on civilization also moves the discussion of politicalorders into the realm of cultural production and away fromthe functionalist, adaptionist assumptions of control-systemstheory.

The return of political culture and legitimation to the equa-tion of power in early complex polities has also nuanced themonolithic state of control-systems models. From the vari-

ability of moral and institutional orientations toward the con-centration of power foregrounded by Blanton (1998) toBaines and Yoffee’s (1998) advocacy of order and legitimacyas key to understanding early polities, the sociocultural dis-course of power is increasingly seen as more than “ideological”superstructure.

Nevertheless, despite these promising new directions in re-search, the lingering habits of earlier archaeological politicaltheory can still be seen in many recent approaches. The widelyinfluential dual-processual model of Blanton et al. (1996), forinstance, although broadening a control-systems model withthe addition of political culture, conceives of it in functionalistand instrumental terms as “leadership strategies” (Pauketat2007). What started off as a promising critique of control-systems theory (Blanton 1998) ended up as a new typologicalexercise replete with trait lists (Yoffee 2005). The problematicessentialism of the dual-processual model, moreover, can beseen in a recent application to Neolithic China in which theMiddle and Late Neolithic societies of Shaanxi and Henanprovinces are characterized as “corporate,” while the EastCoast cultures are said to be “network” (L. Liu 2004), effec-tively foreclosing the issue of how particular ancient Chinesepolities operated with a typological exercise (see Pauketat 2007for a similar argument concerning Mississippian polities). If,however, Bourdieu (1977, 1990) is correct in theorizing theexistence of social fields, each with its own rules or logics(e.g., the rules of the court, the army, or the family), or Mann(1986) is correct in claiming that there are multiple sourcesof social power, then rather than determining which of twooverarching leadership strategies characterized a given polity(let alone an entire culture area!), it would be more useful toidentify local sources of power and understand their fields ofproduction and mutual articulations.

Attendant on the newfound interest in cities, states, andcivilizations, city-states and territorial states have entered theshared vocabulary of archaeologists and, among some schol-ars, have also given rise to a new typological exercise (e.g.,Trigger 2003). In essence, the distinction between these twotypes of states boils down to either a dual or a monisticformulation of political geographic possibilities and originnarratives for early complex polities. The first narrative is thatof territorial expansion and the forced invention of a cen-tralized governing apparatus in order to effect lasting con-solidation, as postulated for Egypt (Savage 1997) or China(Liu and Chen 2003; Trigger 2003). The second is that of akind of peer-polity interaction (Renfrew and Cherry 1986)scenario wherein competition sparks increasing social, polit-ical, and economic development in competing centers, as pos-tulated for Mesopotamia (Trigger 2003) or China (Yates 1997;Yoffee 2005). The obvious problem with these categories isthat raised against the typologies of a previous generation ofarchaeological theory: can all the diversity of ancient politicalforms really be reduced to one or two types without inflictingsome procrustean violence on the evidence (Cowgill 2004,542)? Is, for instance, the Aztec polity really analogous to

Campbell A Networks and Boundaries Approach to Early Complex Polities 823

those of ancient Sumer and Akkad, as Trigger (2003) impliesin terming both situations “city-states”? Are all ancient politiesreally either Egypt-like or Mesopotamia-like? Or are the op-tions even more limited, according to Marcus (1998), wherearchaic states are expansive, internally differentiated, andhighly centralized or they are not states? Or contrarily, arestates necessarily born of cities in competition with othercities? The answers to these questions have essentially limitedthe parameters of discourse on ancient China and many otherregions.

Another problematic residue of neoevolutionary ap-proaches, or perhaps the early and mid-twentieth-centurymodernist political theory that spawned them, is the exclusivefocus on elites and a top-down understanding of power andauthority. Thus, the dual-processual model is concerned with“leadership strategies,” Baines and Yoffee’s (1998) “order, le-gitimacy, wealth” model focuses on “inner elites,” and evenA. Smith (2003) chooses to write about the production ofauthority rather than its resistance. Resistance and authority,however, are dialectically inseparable (Foucault 1995; Giddens1982). Indeed, what is “resistance” to one might simulta-neously be a claim to authority by another. Despite this, thescholarship on ancient Chinese polities is full of characteri-zations of authority in terms of elite monopolies of sacredpower (Chang 1983; Vandermeersch 1977) or political econ-omies of elite prestige goods (Liu and Chen 2003; Underhill2002). Missed in this focus on elites, however, yet crucial toany understanding of authority are the reasons why the ma-jority follow or the effects their resistances or potential coun-terclaims have on shaping the practices of those in morestrategic positions. Indeed, if one can conceive of power in-stitutionally and personally distributed and of some agentsoccupying more strategic positions within this dynamic net-work than others, then there ought to be a continuum ofrelational power wielders stretching from subalterns to themost powerful.1 If we add in the observation that legitimated,institutionalized power has a multiplicity of sources, then theterm “elites” becomes an even cruder tool of analysis. If wewish to investigate how ancient polities operated, then weneed to understand the particular ways in which the relationaldialectic of authority was produced and resisted, its sites, itslimitations, and the variety of its sources.

Too Many States (or Modernist Illusions inthe Postmodern Era)

If it would be better to analyze the relationships betweenurban centers, polities, and their wider contexts than to debatethe classification of early states, then even the focus on states,with its methodological assumption of a bounded politicalentity, is problematic. As Wolf (1982, 3) wrote more than 20

1. Some good examples of this principle of a continuity of statusesand dynamism in their expression can be seen in mortuary studies suchas those of Flad (2002) and Tang (1999a).

years ago, sociology, history, and anthropology have problem-atically reified what were originally only heuristically boundedunits of analysis, yet

the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality

of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble

this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify

reality. Concepts like “nation,” “society,” and “culture”

name bits and threaten to turn names into things. Only by

understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and

by placing them back into the field from which they were

abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and

increase our share of understanding.

Focusing on how ancient states worked essentially ensuresa comparative study of isolated cases, while focus on the statelimits the conceptual boundaries of those cases to a reifiedcategory that seems to serve archaeological political theory asan end of history, ignoring the five millennia or so of socio-political development between the first archaic states and themodern nation-states that gave rise to the political models onwhich archaeological states are based (Y. Ferguson 2002). Wolfonce said that anthropology needs to discover history, andthe same could be said for archaeological political theory (seealso Kohl 1989). One important step in this direction wouldbe to recontextualize ancient polities as bundles of relation-ships within fields of culture, economy, and power and thencomparatively investigate their continuities and transforma-tions over time.

Indeed, even in modern contexts, authors such as Abrams(1988, 82) have argued that the state is an illusion:

the state is not the reality which stands behind the mask of

political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our

seeing political practice as it is. . . . There is a state-system

. . . a palpable nexus of practice and institutional structure

centered in government and more or less extensive, unified

and dominant in any given society. . . . There is, too, a state

idea, projected, purveyed and variously believed in in dif-

ferent societies at different times. . . . The relationship of

the state-system and the state-idea to other forms of power

should and can be central concerns of political analysis.

This suggests that the study of political forms through timeought to abandon the reified state and instead distinguishbetween systems or networks of power/governance and thepolity idea(s) or imagined communit(ies) of political identity.The nature of these networks of power, the boundaries ofpolitical community, and their relationships through time be-come three foci of investigation to replace the study of thestate. Nevertheless, just as focus on urban and nonurban en-vironments and civilizational orders has expanded the pre-vious investigation of archaic states, state systems, state ideas,and their relationships must be set back within both theirspecific sociophysical environments and wider world contexts.In the following sections I will outline an approach to studyingpolity networks and polity ideas, as well as their articulations


with each other and the worlds from which they areabstracted.

Networks of Power

Mann (1986) powerfully presents the argument that societiesshould be reenvisioned as overlapping networks of foursources of power: economic, ideological, military, and polit-ical. Nevertheless, while Mann’s core idea of social networksseems promising (in light of both Wolf’s and Abrams’s pointsabove), to avoid the Eurocentrism implicit in his tendency toreify power sources into the institutions of the church, thearmy, the guilds, and the state, actual sources of power (orcapital in a Bourdieuian sense) should be investigated on alocal, contextual basis. Ideology, moreover, rather than beinga separate source, ought to be seen as an inherent propertyof the circulation of power. Indeed, since at least Weber, thelegitimation of power or authority has been considered acentral problematic of political theory. Thus, along these lines,Bourdieu (1998, 33) writes that

the genesis of the state is inseparable from the process of

unification of the different social, economic, cultural (or

educational), and political fields which goes hand in hand

with the progressive constitution of the state monopoly of

legitimate physical and symbolic violence.

For writers like Bourdieu (see also A. Smith 2003), both theunification of power and its concomitant legitimation are atthe heart of the state (or as I would prefer, the state system).Unlike most archaeological theorists of complex polities, how-ever, Bourdieu, with Weber, is writing about the genesis ofmodern states. While I emphatically do not want to dividehistory into the absolute categories of the modern and thetraditional, the extent to which modern political experiencescan be projected back into antiquity ought to be an object ofinvestigation—but one that would require archaeologists toquestion their naturalized assumptions as citizens of nationstates (Y. Ferguson 2002). The degree to which various sourcesof power were concentrated in the hands of particular actorsor institutions and the means through which power was le-gitimated ought then to form part of the subject of inquiryin investigations of early complex political networks ratherthan being an element of initial assumptions.

Violence and Authority. In addition, for all the utility of study-ing the production of authority, there is always the potentialfor the violence invoked in Bourdieu’s (1998) discussion ofstate genesis to escape discourses of legitimation or to bemobilized against or independently of the state monopoly.Indeed, in recent discussions of nation-states and thepost–Cold War world order, the large number of failed states,the influence of transnational corporations and nongovern-ment agencies, and the rise of ethnic conflicts have led manyanalysts to question the naturalness of a world composed ofstates (B. Ferguson 2002; Y. Ferguson 2002; Wolf 2002), the

universal suitability of this European model (Y. Ferguson2002), and, indeed, its continued relevance to the increasinglyglobalized world (Krohn-Hansen and Nustad 2005). Whilethe death of the state may be premature (Alonso 2005), thisdiscussion should at least underline for archaeologists thehistorical contingency of the modern nation-state as fact oridea and, by implication, the contingency of ancient politicalforms as well.

One of the products of this critical rethinking of the statehas been a return of the concept of sovereignty and its re-lationship to violence. Probably no one has been as influentialin this discussion as Agamben (1998), who argues that a keyflaw of Western political philosophy lies in its conceptuali-zation of constituting and constituted power in an alternatinghistorical relationship. Thus, constituting power, frequentlyassociated with revolutionary or pacifying violence, is seen asconfined to the initial establishment of political orders (Elias1994). Within the constituted power structures of the stablestate, with its putative monopolies over the use of force andthe production of authority, violence can then be presentedas an anomaly. Agamben (1998) argues, however, that theoriginal relationship of violence to authority is always a partof sovereign relations. In a dynamic view of political orga-nization, then, authority must be constantly produced in tan-dem with continuously emergent sources of power (includingviolent interventions). The ongoing consolidation or disso-lution of authority in a single institution or agent, or multipleinstitutions or agents, is complicated, moreover, by the po-tential operation of de facto sovereignty by agents wielding“the ability to kill, punish and discipline with impunity”(Hansen and Stepputat 2006, 296).

Thus, in short, I am arguing that we ought to investigateancient polity networks contingently and dynamically ratherthan as the stable end points of a process of monopolization(whether seen in terms of control or authority), that weshould be sensitive to the potential multiplicity of powersources and their local contexts and conditions, and that weshould see the production of authority as being in a dynamicrelationship with the circulation of power. As important asthe construction of authority or the understanding of theprocesses of its concentration is, even in the most distopianOrwellian visions of society, the work of legitimation is neverquite finished, and the violence that is part of the circulationof power always at least partially escapes the production ofauthority. Violence is generally assumed to be an exceptionto normal stable sociopolitical orders, in our modern statistway of thinking, but a cursory look at any hundred years ofhuman history will show the omnipresence of violence andits role in the creation, dissolution, or dynamic maintenanceof social and political networks.

Discourse, Practice, and Resources of Power/Authority. If con-stituting violence and constituted authority are always in dy-namic tension and the concentration or distribution of powersources is historically contingent, then we still have to consider


the practical question of how to envision these power/au-thority networks. Following Bourdieu (1990, 1998, 2000), thelinks between the resources of power (various forms of cap-ital) and the actual operation of power are the durable dis-positions of socialized bodies; the orienting, enabling, andlimiting qualities of socialized space (Lefebvre 1991; A. Smith2003); and the prosthetic mediation of socialized things (La-tour 1993). In the terms I am developing here, I would namethis analytical level that of “practice.” Practices of power are,however, at once made possible and limited by their materialconditions and, at the same time, give rise to and are partiallyarticulated through discourses of authority. I thus envisionpower/authority networks as dynamic, tripartite, and over-lapping discursive, practical, and material networks of con-stituted authority and constituting violence.

Polity Ideas: Boundaries of Identity

If conceiving of polities as overlapping networks of power/authority usefully destabilizes their reification, the experienceof political community is generally one of more or less per-meable boundaries, of insiders and outsiders and more orless salient identities. Anderson’s (1991) approach to modernnation-states as “imagined communities” produced throughsuch patterning technologies as mass media, maps, flags, anduniversal education offers a useful point of departure. If thesetechnologies and practices pattern the collective politicalimaginations of the citizens of nation-states, what were thepractices, technologies, and sociophysical spaces that pro-duced ancient political communities? Moreover, if universalcitizenship is a feature particular to modern nation-states,then we must also be attentive to the potential variability andmultiplicity of the political identities of agents embedded inpolity networks in other times and places. Should we speakof a polity idea or polity ideas? Among which segments ofsociety were these senses of community salient? If there aregenerally multiple networks of power and boundaries of iden-tity, how might these relate to one another? For instance, onemight simultaneously be a member of a descent group, areligious community, a military unit, and a larger polity. Towhat degree might these identities be consolidated within anoverarching political identity? In what circumstances mightone or the other become relevant?

Polity Structures and Polity Ideas

This potential multiplicity of identity complicates the polityidea just as much as the possible dispersal and disjuncture ofpower/authority networks nuance the polity system. Like net-works of power/authority, political communities also havetheir discursive, practical, and material aspects. As Abrams(1988) noted, polity ideas and polity networks are necessarilyinterrelated, but they are not the same thing. Thus, for ex-ample, the ideology of presidential authority and the legiti-macy of its expansion in the “war on terror” were linked to

American identity and patriotism in the wake of 9/11, butneither discourse exhausted the other. In short, there may beconvergences and disjunctures between power/authority net-works and political identities, as well as among their analyticallevels. Thus, ineffective ideologies may be at odds with prac-tical perception or material means, once-powerful socializingpractices may lose their ideological justification or materialbasis, and products or resources once key to political econ-omies might decline in significance or have their role radicallytransformed in changing times.

Historically, the formation of more or less totalizing po-litical identities and polity structures may go hand and hand,but if the claim that nation and state became identified witheach other only in relatively recent times is valid, then wemust see the relationships between political identities and thecirculation and institutions of power/authority as an analyticalproblem. Crucial arenas for this articulation are the discoursesof authority and the degree to which their associated practicesproduce and assimilate cohesive political identities. A relatedbut separate issue is that of the nature of the relationshipbetween power and political identity: as Foucault (1995)pointed out, there is a world of difference between citizenand subject, though either may be more or less well integratedinto structures of power. Thus, in addition to the ways inwhich networks of discourse, practice, and capital circulatepower and produce authority, their cohesive or solvent effectson identity and the nature of the political subjectivities theyproduce must also be investigated.

Early Chinese Polities

As noted above, lingering tendencies to essentialize, reify, andclassify; to characterize power solely in terms of elite agency;and to fail to account for historical contingency and varietyhave served to undercut some of the achievements of recentscholarship on ancient polities in general but China in par-ticular. Pauketat’s (2007) argument that past and current ap-proaches alike have foreclosed truly historical understandingsof ancient political situations, even as the window for studyingthem is rapidly closing, holds especially true for China. At atime when China’s landscape is being altered at an unprec-edented rate, early Chinese political anthropology is beingpoorly served by both the traditional historiographic and theMarxist approaches of older Chinese archaeologists (Falken-hausen 1993), as well as the newer models being importedfrom the West. None of these approaches investigates thedynamic particulars of ancient Chinese political forms somuch as assumes them, based on either anachronistic pro-jection or the parameters of abstract models. My intention,then, is to take a small step in the direction of addressing thisproblem through the application of a networks and bound-aries approach to the Late Shang polity. I show how the re-sulting vantage point allows us to get beyond the city-state/territorial state dichotomy, to investigate political culturewithout reducing it to corporate/network dualisms, and to


Table 1. Ancient mainland East Asianchronology

Longshan Ca. 3000–1800 BCEErlitou Ca. 1800–1600 BCEEarly Shang Ca. 1600–1400 BCEMiddle Shang Ca. 1400–1250 BCELate Shang Ca. 1250–1050 BCEWestern Zhou Ca. 1050–771 BCE

explore the production of sociopolitical orders as dynamicand multivalent interplays of continuously constituted au-thority and constituting (and deconstituting) violence.

Background

The Shang polity network and polity idea discussed here aremore precisely those of the Late Shang dynasty (ca. 1250–1050BCE; table 1), centered in the Great Settlement Shang nearmodern Anyang (fig. 1). The Shang is also the name of thesecond of the first three dynasties of traditional Chinese his-toriography and an archaeological culture.

In terms of sources, Anyang is among the longest and mostintensively excavated sites in China, while the Late Shang isthe first period for which a corpus of contemporaneous writ-ing survives: around 50,000 pieces of inscribed oracle bones(Keightley 1997) and several dozen short bronze-vessel in-scriptions.2 Transmitted texts, purporting to describe Shangevents but written hundreds of years later, form another, sec-ondary source. The Late Shang polity at Anyang, then, withits relative richness of evidence, offers the earliest matureconditions for the study of Bronze Age political networks inEast Asia.

Imagining the Shang: Discursive Hierarchies of Authority

In discussing the Late Shang polity, I will begin with what isusually the stated or unstated point of departure in discussionsof states: the projected image of state power and its structures.I will then attempt to demonstrate the contingency and dy-namism of the assumed “thingness” of the Shang polity withits attendant conflation of discursive visions and practicalrealities, flows of power, and communities of identity.

The vision of the polity presented here is one derived fromthe vantage of the Shang king’s oracle bone divinations and,as such, is a composite of royal assumptions and tendentiousclaims structured through a ritualized negotiation with thegods and ancestors that itself underwent change over thecourse of the Late Shang period (Chang 1987). One of themost striking things about this reconstructed royal discourseon power, its logics, and its sources is the incorporation ofgods and ancestors into the hierarchy of authority. Thus, com-plicating A. Smith’s (2003, 107) claim that political authoritylays a “presumptive claim to be the authority of last resort,”the political worldview of the Late Shang is incomprehensiblewithout the realization that the social and political communityincluded the dead as well as the living and that the authorityof last resort was that of not the king but the high god Di.Below him were the powers of the land and the high dynastic

2. The oracle bone inscriptions, as mostly records of royal divination,are a rich source of information about the concerns of the Late Shangkings. Shang bronze inscriptions, on the other hand, consist of mostlyancestor dedications, with a few of the longer ones recording the vesselcaster’s receipt of a reward of cowry shells for service rendered to theking or another patron.

ancestors and then a descending hierarchy of ancestral spiritsin order of generational seniority, down to the living kingand his subordinates (Keightley 1999, 2000; fig. 2).

The authority of Di and, to a lesser extent, the powers andancestors included control of the weather, the harvest, victoryor defeat in war, the building or continuance of settlements,sickness, childbirth, and good or ill fortune in general: inshort, the prosperity and continued existence of the king andhis people, as these oracle bone divinations indicate.

1. Tested: This coming Gui Mao day Di may order wind.

(672 obverse)3

2. Tested: It is Di who curses our harvest. (10124)

3a. Tested: It is Guo of Zhi whom the King should meet

to attack the Ba Fang. (For if the King does,) Di will grant

us aid. (6473)

3b. Tested: It is not Guo of Zhi whom the king should

join with to attack the Ba fang. (For if the King does,) Di

will perhaps not grant us aid.

Not only did Di, the powers of the land, and the ancestorscontrol many crucial aspects of daily life in the Late Shangscheme of things but also the logic of beseeching and mol-lifying (Y. Liu 2004) and the discourse of gifting, feasting,reporting, and receiving orders or mandates all find parallelin the king’s own interaction with subordinates (Keightley2000). Compare, for instance, the following divinatory in-scriptions concerning the king making reports and receivingorders from the ancestors with analogous examples of sub-ordinates and allies reporting to and being given orders bythe king.

4. Reporting: Cracked on Dingsi day, diviner Bin tested:

(We should conduct a) liao-burning sacrifice to Wanghai

[an ancestor] (offering) ten juvenile animals and mao-split

ten bovines and three juvenile animals to report (that the

King) will join with Wang and mount an expedition against

Xia Wei. (6527)

5. Reporting: Guo of Zhi [an ally], reporting said: “the

Tu Fang have mounted an expedition into my eastern bor-

ders, [harming] two settlements. The Gong Fang also raided

the fields of my western borders.” (6057)

6. Ordering: X Shen day cracked, Ke tested: Da Ding [an

3. Oracle bone inscriptions cited in the text will be referred to by theirindex numbers in collections such as the heji (Guo 1978) and huadong(ZSKY 2003a).


Figure 1. Late Shang Anyang.

ancestor] calls upon the King to press (an attack against)

[Prince] Bu. (6887)

7. Ordering: Xinsi day cracked, Zheng tested: this cycle

(?) levy men and call upon Fu Hao [a royal consort/general]

to attack the Tu Fang, (for if we do) we will receive divine

aid. Fifth month. (6412)

At Late Shang Anyang, then, as Keightley (2000, 101) hasargued, “The living and the dead were . . . engaged in acommunal, ritually structured conversation.” The king’s po-sition in this chain of being, stretching from the high god Dithrough the royal ancestors to the lowest captives and live-stock, was that of privileged mediator with the royal dead.The discourse of royal power thus was in the idiom of hi-erarchical kinship expressed through the language of tributeand reward, commanding and reporting, transgression, andpunishment.

The king’s paramount status and claims to universal lord-ship can also be inferred from his sacrifices to the four di-

rections and their invocation in the four ramps of the royaltombs at Anyang (fig. 3). Late Anyang period bronze inscrip-tions, too, marked time by the king’s sacrificial cycle and hiscampaigns, constructing him as steward of the world-domesticating technologies of sacrifice and war.

The potency of the Shang king’s discursive hegemony—moreover, of the Shang ritual order and the king’s place withinit—is strikingly attested in divinations concerning the Shangroyal sacrifice found in the Zhouyuan on predynastic Zhouoracle bone fragments (Cao 2002). Though well beyond thedistribution of Late Shang ceramic traditions (and, thus,Shang “culture”; fig. 4), these inscriptions and, indeed, thereceived Zhou tradition suggest that while the Zhou eventuallysuccessfully contested the terms of the Shang world order,they did so within its discursive framework.

Moreover, the magnitude of the sacrificial remains asso-ciated with burials in the royal cemetery and attested in theoracle bone inscriptions, as well as the relative size of the royal


Figure 2. The Shang king’s discursive hierarchy of authority.

tombs (fig. 3), all depict the Shang kings as unique and theirancestral rites as foci of unmatched flows of social energy.Nevertheless, in the crucial arena of burial and ancestor con-struction, most of the symbolic capital of lineage aggran-dizement was not monopolized by the kings, and ancestralstatus was achieved through distinction in number, quality,and size of offerings as much as through qualitative distinction(Campbell 2007).

Indeed, if the king was lineage leader of lineage leaders,then his status, though of a higher order, was nevertheless ofthe same type as that of other leaders of powerful lineageswhose settlements dotted North China. As leader of the cultof the royal ancestors, the king was responsible for leadingritual that involved the distant progenitors of many of thehigh elites (Zhu 2004) and, by perhaps fictitious extension,the rank and file lineage members as well. This leadershipand the king’s position between the ancestors and the peoplewere then balanced with both responsibilities to those belowand demands from the ancestors above to rule well or suffercalamity and divine retribution.

The King’s City and the Great Settlement Shang. Beyond theroyal cemetery and palace-temple area, the Great SettlementShang itself evoked the hegemonic ideology of the king. In-deed, a prevalent view concerning Bronze Age Chinese citiesis that they were “king’s cities” (Chang 1985; Shen 2003),pointing to the role of the king in the construction of urban

sites and the placing of the lineage temples and dynastic tombsas their raison d’etre. In this view, the capital is said to bethe created center of political and religious activity, or, inWheatley’s (1971) terms, a centripetalizing ceremonial center.

Diachronically speaking, the Great Settlement Shangemerged from a centuries-old Central Plains tradition char-acterized by singular megasites centering expansive networksof ceremonial and everyday material culture (fig. 1). Not onlywere each of the successive Central Plains megacenters of thesecond millennium BCE by far larger than any other contem-poraneous site but also they shared a common tradition oflarge-scale rammed-earth palace-temples within a walled ormoated enclosure at the center of the site, large bronze castingfoundries and other workshops, richly furnished tombs, andsacrifice of increasing scale and elaboration.

During the Late Shang period, the Central Plains mega-center was the Great Settlement Shang at Anyang (fig. 1).Reaching 30 km2 in area at its peak, Anyang greatly over-shadowed any contemporary or prior site found to date withinthe area of modern China in its size, the scale of its bronzeproduction, the wealth of its tombs, and the magnitude ofits sacrificial practices. Nevertheless, though Anyang has beenthe focus of investigations since the early twentieth centuryand has been discussed in many works since then (e.g., Chang1980; Li 1977; Thorp 2005), the actual structure and devel-opmental history of the site as a whole (as opposed to the


Figure 3. Royal cemetery and sacrificial remains. The numbered tombsare those of Shang kings; the large tomb and the two-ramped tombs mayhave been the tombs of consorts and other royal family members. Mostof the smaller rectangular pits are sacrificial.

palace-temple area and royal cemetery) have only recentlybecome objects of investigation.

The current understanding of the site’s development is thatit rapidly grew around a palace-temple core, increasing from12 to 30 km2 in the century between 1250 and 1150 BCE(ZSKY 2003b). In addition to the large, enclosed rammed-earth structures of the palace-temples, a “great settlement,”

in Central Plains Bronze Age terms, also contained workshopsfor the production of strategic objects (most prominentlybronze-casting foundries), sacrificial areas, and the well-endowed tombs of prominent ancestors. All of these featureswere present from the beginning of the Late Shang period,though the subsequent expansion of residential and burialremains around the site core was accompanied by an increase


Figure 4. Late Shang Period China. 1, Shang, Metropolitan subtype; 2,Shang, Anqiu subtype; 3, Shang, Qianzhangda subtype; 4, Shang, Subutunsubtype; 5, Shang, Tianhu subtype; 6, Shang, Laoniupo subtype.

in (at least) bronze production (Li 2003a). In other words,the characteristic package of a Central Plains megacenter wasin place from the beginning of the Great Settlement Shang,implying that from its inception it was conceived of and con-structed as a central place.

Nevertheless, while the central role of the Shang kings, withtheir circumscribed palace-temple area, matchless tombs, andmonumental sacrifice, cannot be ignored in shaping the ritual,political, and even economic character of the capital, a con-sideration of the nature of Shang kingship and the broaderorganization of society suggests a more complicated realitythan royal ideology attempts to portray. One suggestive ac-count of the social dynamics of a capital site is offered in the“Pangeng” chapter of the Shangshu (Legge 1994).4 Thoughprobably written during the centuries after the Zhou conquest

4. The Shangshu, or “Book of Documents,” is an early Chinese textcomposed of the purported speeches of prominent figures.

of the Shang (Shaughnessy 1993, 378), this text purports todescribe the speeches of the Shang king Pangeng in his effortsto move the capital.5 The text claims that not only was theestablishment of a new settlement and the abandonment ofthe old mandated by the royal ancestors through divinationbut also ancestral curses would fall on those who resisted theking’s command. Hierarchical reciprocity, proper order, andmoral-religious imperative occupied the center of this dis-course, as the king, at turns cajoling and threatening, madespeeches to both leaders and commoners.6 In this monologue,the king appears embedded in a structure of authority that

5. This conquest occurred sometime around 1050 BCE, with someauthors arguing for more specific dates, such as 1046 (Duandai 2000;Pankenier 1981) or 1045 (Nivison 1983).

6. This dualistic distinction between leaders/rulers/chiefs and com-moners/ruled/people is one made by the text and is common to WesternZhou and Shang sources alike.


prominently included the dead, with his preeminent placesecured by his ancestors’ position among those of his sub-ordinates. Pangeng’s speech also suggests the contingency andmoral framework of the king’s power, the potential for otherleaders to cause trouble, and the necessity of building con-sensus through both dire threats and moral suasion. Whilethe grammar and usage of the Pangeng chapter indicates thatit did not reach its current form in the Shang period, theframing of persuasion in terms of ancestral curse and thecontingent authority of the king accords well with the con-temporaneous oracle bone inscriptions. The feasting or host-ing of ancestors by other ancestors in hierarchical order(Keightley 2000), as well as the idea that the continuation orfounding of settlements was based on the will of the godsand ancestors determined through divination, also finds ex-pression in Shang oracle bone inscriptions, as the followingoracle bone inscription suggests:

8. Bing Chen day cracked, Ke tested: it may be that Di will

end this settlement. (14209)

The Pangeng chapter thus concisely suggests two importantaspects of Shang royal settlements: their divinely mandatedcreation accomplished through the coerced and cajoled move-ment of populations and the organization of those popula-tions in terms of descent and ancestral relationship. This im-age is borne out by recent work at Anyang that suggests thatboth residences and burials pattern into spatially discrete,internally hierarchical clusters distinguished from each otherby differences in burial practice and bronze-vessel insignia(Tang 2004; ZSKY 2003b). Given the ample evidence for non-royal ancestor veneration on display in the ancestral dedi-cations found in bronze ritual vessels; jade implements; thesacrificial pits discovered in cemeteries outside of the royalburial ground, such as Hougang and Dasikongcun (ZSKY1994); and oracle bone divinations concerning the mobili-zation of forces in terms of zu clans/lineages, these clustersof residence and burial were almost certainly descent based.7

Indeed, the structural homologies found across all classes ofburial, as well as the long-term trend toward elite emulationseen in ordinary tombs, suggest a shared tradition of mortuarypractice or ancestor creation that included not only lineageleaders but also rank-and-file lineage members (Campbell2007).

The monolithic implications of the phrase “king’s city” arethus complicated by the diffuse networks of ancestral com-munity, just as the scattering of key industries, such as bronzeworkshops throughout the urban center (Li 2003a), and thewidespread presence of their products in tombs in the lineagecemeteries undermine the idea of strict central control(Campbell 2007; Tang 2004). These lines of evidence, takentogether, suggest that the social landscape of the Great Set-tlement Shang was made up of a patchwork of internally

7. The “handle-shaped objects” found in the tomb Hougang 91M3were painted with ancestor names (ZSKY 2005, 21–26).

hierarchical, descent-based communities linked togetherthrough an ideology of shared descent and common (butnevertheless hierarchically organized) participation in mar-riage, war, sacrifice, and feasting (Campbell 2007; Tang 2004;see Zhu 2004 for the argument that in the Shang period NorthChina was generally organized in these terms). This structuralobservation, in turn, has great significance for understandingthe networks of Late Shang power.

Political Landscape. Beyond Anyang, the Late Shang landscapewas dotted with other lineage-based communities (Akatsuka1977; Chang 1980; Song 1994; Zhu 2004) sharing ritual and,to a lesser extent, everyday material culture with the Anyangcenter. Indeed, the extent of the Anyang horizon was vast(fig. 4), if smaller than the apogee of the Middle Shang ho-rizon a century or so earlier (ZSKY 2003b), and, as the Zhouexample suggests, the ideology of Shang hegemony may havebeen no less extensive. Nevertheless, although the borders ofthe Shang state are usually made coextensive with the distri-bution of Shang culture (in fact, “ceramic tradition” mightbe more accurate), as Cohen (2001) has pointed out, theassignation of ethnic and political identities to divisions informal ceramic classification is problematic. If pots do notequal people and the extent of the Shang state would be betterformulated in terms of the idea of Shang polity and its notnecessarily coextensive networks of authority, then how arewe to reconstruct the Shang political landscape? Unfortu-nately, the answer must be largely negative, with the currentstate of archaeology in China. We can speak of a metropolitanShang ecumene and its regional subtypes (fig. 4), of sites thathad been occupied for centuries, and of lingering localtraditions.8 We can note that other material cultural traditionssurrounded those of the Shang (fig. 4)—some with their ownextensive spheres of influence (such as Sanxingdui in Si-chuan)—and that there appear to be interactions betweenthese zones and the Shang (stoneware from the Yangtze, char-iots from the north, cowry shells from the Indian Ocean,etc.), but, ultimately, without studies attempting to investigateproduction, distribution, and consumption linked to the so-cial and political meanings of things, neither the currentpatchy understanding of flows of commodities nor materialcultural influences tell us much that is certain about Shangpower networks or political identities. If, for example, thehistorical geographic reconstructions of the polities Zhi andXing are correct (Zheng 1994), the former, a stalwart Shangally (see no. 5 above), was located beyond the distribution ofShang ceramic traditions, while the latter, a Shang enemy,would have shared a common material culture with the Shangmetropole (fig. 4). Indeed, the oracle bone inscriptions suggest

8. Shang regional “subtypes,” or leixing, are subdivisions within a tra-dition, or wenhua. This designation indicates that the assemblages ofthese sites tend to look more like metropolitan assemblages than thoseof neighboring traditions, but nonetheless they are different enough fromthe former to merit being called “subtypes.” Late Shang tradition isdivided into six regional subtypes, including that of the metropole.


that the Late Shang political landscape was one of shiftingalliances and near-constant warfare.

A related point can be made with the clan insignia foundon many Late Shang period bronze vessels. Networks ofcommon-descent groups, as evidenced by clusters of insignia-bearing bronzes in tombs across China, stretched beyond thedistribution of Shang material culture and suggest that websof blood and marriage extended across the permeable bound-aries of Shang civilization and exceeded the king’s use ofthem.9 To take just one example, a cluster of rich tombs foundat Lingshi in Shanxi Province, dating from the end of theLate Shang to the beginning of the Western Zhou (ca.1100–1000 BCE), contained a number of bronze vessels andweapons bearing the insignia bin. The bin insignia has alsoturned up in graves at Anyang, yet archaeological and pale-ographic evidence suggests that this area of Shanxi lay beyondthe Shang cultural and political orbit, after the first reigns ofthe Late Shang period (Xia 2005; ZSKY 2003b).

In summary, the organization of the Great SettlementShang and, indeed, the political landscape beyond, in termsof hierarchical descent groups (along with their settlements,ancestral temples, burial grounds, and workshops), createdthe opportunity for both consolidation and resistance. Thenetworks of lineage polities could, in theory, be drawn to-gether into a single power structure and indeed were repre-sented as such by the king, but their dispersed and segmentalnature also provided opportunities for resistance, rebellion,or simply withdrawal, as is amply attested in both receivedtext and oracle bone inscriptions. Thus, the idea of Shangdivine hegemony, though widespread enough to reach theZhou, evoked a variety of responses, even within its shiftingreach: from loyalty to grudging acceptance or outright re-bellion. Moreover, beneath even this imperfect ideologicalsurface, the structural limitations of the practices that pro-duced authority and the networks of capital that in turn sup-ported them further complicate the picture of the Shangpolity.

Practices of Authority and the Exercise of Power

Though the king’s structure of authority in the Late Shangwas figured in discourse as a hierarchy of lineages organizingthe living, the dead, and the powers of the land in a singleoverarching scheme, it nevertheless remains to examine thepractices through which this discourse was maintained, madeeffective, or contested. As mentioned earlier, the distinctivemarkers of Shang civilization—the repositories of technolog-ical innovation, labor, and value—seem largely to revolvearound ancestor veneration: from the bronze ritual vessels ofancestral sacrifice and feasting to the rammed-earth palace-

9. Indeed, transmitted texts are full of accounts of the movement ofsettlements (and the lineages and lineage temples along with them) tomore favorable locations.

temple platforms and the increasingly monumental tombs ofthe lineage elites. Indeed, from the vantage point of the oraclebone divinations, the chief concerns of the kings appear tohave been war, sacrifice, and hunting. While from a modernWestern perspective these three practices might seem to havelittle overlap, in the Late Shang they were all significantlyintertwined with the ancestral cult, violence, and the con-struction of authority.

In the cases of divination and sacrifice, as the primarymedia of communication with the higher echelons of thestructure of authority, the importance of these practices tothe construction of legitimacy is obvious. Moreover, in theLate Shang, what could be termed the ancestral-ritual complex(osteomantic practices [Flad 2008], the bronze-casting in-dustry [Li 2003a], the sacrificial economy, and the mortuaryarena of ancestor construction [Campbell 2007; Tang 2004])reached a dramatic zenith, transforming previous metropol-itan traditions in both scale and elaboration.10 While it isdifficult to know how to interpret the relative underdevel-opment of the ancestral-ritual complex prior to the Late Shangor the decline of some of its components in the Western Zhou,it could be said that the social energy expended on ancestorveneration and its relevance to hierarchy and authority werenever greater than at Late Shang Anyang.

Given that the authority of the king was of a greater orderbut a type similar to that of other powerful lineage leaders,it is perhaps not surprising that divination and sacrifice werenot practices limited to the king. Not only have nonroyalinscribed oracle bones been discovered at Anyang, Zhouyuan(Cao 2002), and Jinan (SDDKY et al. 2002) but also morethan 90% of the bones used in divination at Anyang werenot inscribed, and many of these were likely used in non-courtly divination (Flad 2008). Likewise, as mentioned above,sacrifice and ancestor veneration were not limited to the royalcult. In fact, nearly the entire population participated in thetournament of value (Appadurai 1986) that was Late Shangburial and ancestor creation (Campbell 2007; Puett 2002; Tang2004). These key arenas of ancestral authority, then, althoughhierarchically structured through genealogical place, were not,as has frequently been claimed (Chang 1980, 1983; Keightley1999; Vandermeersch 1977), a royal monopoly. Indeed, atleast for the first half of the Late Shang, what chiefly separatedthe king’s divination, sacrifice, and burial from those of theother elites were the vastly greater resources at his disposal.11

A dramatic example of the monumental expenditures inservice of the royal ancestor cult can be seen in the estimated

10. Indeed, there were developments within this complex of practiceseven within the Late Shang period. Although a description of thesechanges and their relationships to changing polity networks and ideaswould enhance the dynamism of the account given here, it would pushthis article beyond an acceptable length to do so.

11. It lies beyond the scope of this paper to chronicle the changes inroyal ritual over the course of the Late Shang period, but suffice it tosay that there is a movement toward systematization, economization, andstructural differentiation (Campbell 2007; Ito 1996; Keightley 1999).


Figure 5. Weapons in Late Shang tombs. Guojiazhuang tomb 160, shownhere, is an especially rich example of the custom of burying the deadwith weapons. Halberds, spears, and arrows were the most commonlyinterred weapons, with axes and broadswords found in larger, richertombs (Liu 2003; Tang 2004).

10,000 human sacrificial victims in the royal cemetery (fig.3). Oracle bone divinations also corroborate the large num-bers of human victims offered in royal sacrifice (especially atthe beginning of the Late Shang), where hundreds could beoffered in a single event. Insofar as these victims were largelyor exclusively war captives, reduced to sacrificial livestock

(interchangeable, in some instances, with cattle or sheep), theyserved to display the king’s awesome power of punishment.Though a monumental spectacle of violence, the sacrifice ofenemy captives was doubly productive of authority throughboth the ex post facto legitimation of the king’s divine ap-proval demonstrated in the military success that reduced these

once-dangerous enemies to sacrificial livestock and the con-tinuation of ancestral favor secured through the sacrifice itself.

The conduct of warfare in the Late Shang was intimatelylinked with ancestor veneration and sacrifice to the extentthat sacrifice initiated, punctuated, and concluded campaignsand perhaps even motivated some of them (e.g., heji 199). Ifthe royal ancestral-ritual complex was dedicated to the do-mestication of the myriad dangers of the world figured asconforming to the will of the ancestors, warfare was a tech-nique dedicated to the pacification of the human world fig-ured as service to the ancestral order. That warfare was castin terms of punishment and ordering can be seen in the termsfor military campaigns: zheng , cognate with zheng “cor-rect,” and zhi , cognate with zhi “straight.” The linkagebetween violence and authority, moreover, is suggested in theargument that the graph for “king” wang (OBI ) is thegraph for “axe” yue (OBI ) tipped on its side (Lin 1998).Indeed, sets of yue axes are associated with high status inAnyang tombs (Liu 2003; Tang 2004), while weapons formthe second major category of symbolic capital behind bronzefeasting vessels (Campbell 2007; Liu 2003; fig. 5).12

Hunting also figures prominently among the king’s con-cerns, and as the example below suggests, it was carried outon a considerable scale.

9. On this day (the King) hunted, and indeed captured

(game). (We) [caught] tiger, one; deer, forty; “foxes,” [two]

hundred and sixty four; “antlerless deer” one hundred and

fifty nine. (10198)

Lewis (1990) has argued that warfare and hunting wereinseparable in early China, while Keightley (2000) and Fiskesjo(2001) have noted that the royal hunt served as a kind ofdomesticating practice, like war, but was conducted (mostly)against the animal world. Like the military campaigns theywere sometimes a part of, royal hunts demonstrated the po-tency of the king and the approval or submission of the spiritsof the land he moved through.

In essence, then, the related concerns of the king for sac-rifice, hunting, and war can all be seen as facets of a programof world domestication or ordering. These practices partiallyproduced what Baines and Yoffee (1998) have termed a “civ-ilizational order.” Nevertheless, as practices of authority thatdrew some of their effectiveness from the incorporation ofthe interests and traditions of the population at large, therewas always the potential for rival or subversive claims andappropriations and thus disjuncture between the aims andwork of legitimation and the violence that these three practicesshared.

Another key social field (or set of social fields) partakingof the general discursive structure of authority seen in therelations between the living and the ancestors could be sub-

12. The yue-axe as status marker in East Asia has, in fact, a muchearlier pedigree, as do weapons in general and feasting vessels (see Bennett2007 for the latter and Underhill 2002 for the former).

sumed under the headings of exchange and the disposal ofresources. Just as an unequal flow of gifts (Yan 1996) existedbetween the king and the royal ancestors, there is evidencefor flows of gifts or tribute from subordinates and of rewardsand dispensations from patrons. This took the form of giftsof jade blades or bronzes (ZSKY 1987); the tribute of divi-natory materials, captives, and cattle; the rewards of cowryshells commemorated in bronze inscriptions; and the specialfavor shown some in the king’s ritual intervention on theirbehalf.

The disposal of people, land, and resources was also anal-ogous to Di’s power to approve or end settlements and thuscontrol the distribution of people in the landscape. This kindof authority was manifested in the human world in the prac-tice of relocating defeated groups, setting up subordinates innew locales (Qiu 1993), levying people for various tasks (in-cluding war and agriculture), and the granting of the accu-mulation of places to favored subordinates, such as is com-memorated in a Late Shang bronze inscription (Xiaochen Yue Fangding).

The Shang kings’ discourse of universal authority ideolog-ically circumscribed by ancestors above and kinsmen belowand segmentally structured by kin groups was thus promi-nently practiced through divination, sacrifice, hunting, war,and gifting. These hierarchy-enacting practices of domesti-cation were, however, not the exclusive monopoly of the kingbut rather sites of potential contest predicated in turn onflows of resources.

Flows of Capital

Discourses of power and legitimacy deal with the way au-thority is figured in a particular setting. Practices of authoritylocate the sites at which people’s orientations toward thatstructure of power are naturalized or contested. The distri-bution and circulation of the resources (Giddens 1979, 1981,1982, 1993) or capital (Bourdieu 1977, 1990, 2000) requiredfor those practices, however, demark a real limitation ofpower. Although in many cases, because of the current stateof research and past proclivities of Chinese archaeology, it isdifficult to do more than speculate about the flows in whichcertain forms of capital circulated, there are instances wherearchaeological and epigraphic information can be marshaledto provide at least a schematic understanding.

Divination. Royal divination (and to a lesser extent, that ofother elites) was elaborated both materially and ritually (Flad2008), involving scribes, diviners, those who prepared thebones for cracking (often the royal consorts), and the kinghimself as chief diviner and prognosticator. As many scholarshave noted, the diviners frequently bear the names of placesand polities in the Shang world, and it is generally believedthat, particularly in the first half of the Late Shang period,divinatory specialists came from all over the Shang world to


participate in the royal divination (Akatsuka 1977; Ito 1996;Keightley 1999; Takashima and Yue 2000).13

The scribes, too, though anonymous, were possessors of aspecialized knowledge that appears to have been quite re-stricted in extent (Smith 2008). Given the bronze inscriptionevidence that Shang scribes were taken to the Zhou capitalto serve the Western Zhou court after the conquest, knowl-edge of writing and the scribes themselves would likely haveconstituted scarce and coveted resources.

Elite divination was also distinguished by its expensive me-dia: cattle scapula and turtle plastrons. What are essentiallyaccounting records sometimes inscribed on the margins ofthe oracle bones provide evidence of the networks throughwhich these materials arrived at court. Essentially, the turtleplastrons tended to be sent in from more distant agents (po-litically and probably geographically), while the cattle scapula,or the cattle themselves, tended to be requisitioned by thecourt from nearby places (Keightley 1978). Nevertheless, thereare also divinations (as opposed to accounting notations) con-cerning the tribute or gift of cattle. This follows the patternof other categories of resources and suggests that capitalflowed through networks that can be broadly divided intotwo types: direct, intensive, routine networks and indirect,diffuse, contingent networks (Campbell 2007). The bone-accounting notations suggest the first type (even if scapulaand plastron did not travel exactly the same routes), whilethe divinations about cattle tribute suggest, by the very factthat they were the subject of divination, the uncertain, non-routine characteristics of the second kind of network.

Flows of Sacrificial Resources. The networks of knowledge andmaterial that supported the royal sacrificial regime were evenmore massive, elaborate, and resource consuming. Cattle andhuman captives figure prominently in Shang royal sacrificeand, perhaps not surprisingly, are the two most commonitems of tribute divined about. Indeed, given the thousandsof human sacrificial victims found in the royal cemetery (fig.3) and the palace-temple area and mentioned in the oraclebone inscriptions, the procurement of captives for sacrificewould have to have been a major preoccupation, as, in fact,hundreds of divinatory inscriptions such as the examples be-low indicate.

10. [indeed] Mi shackled qiang-captives, capturing twenty

and five; scalps (?), two. (499)

11. Cracked on Xin Qiu day, tested: As for the qiang-

captives that X brought, the king will inspect them at the

gate. (261)

12. Tested: call upon Long to bring in qiang-captives. (272

reverse)

13. There were also networks of nonroyal divinatory practice overmuch of what is now China. Flad (2008) gives an account of thesepractices and their development over time.

The scale of cattle consumption, on the other hand, ishinted at not only in the oracle bones, where hundreds ofanimals could be sacrificed in a single event, but also in thelimited zooarchaeological work that has been done at Anyangto date, such as a midden located near the palace-temple areacontaining nearly 100,000 fragments of cattle bone (ZSKYAG1992) and the large workshops dedicated to hairpin produc-tion almost exclusively from cattle metacarpals and metatar-sals (ZSKY 1994). Interestingly, cattle and captives, the spoilsof war, are nearly the only things divined about being sentinto the court from more distant allies and sometime enemies(Campbell 2007).

Other networks of the royal sacrificial complex are moredifficult to gauge. Work performed on bronze workshops atAnyang confirms the vast scale of production that Anyangtombs and modern bronze collections had suggested (Li2003a).14 Bronze-vessel production on the scale it occurredat Anyang would have required large-scale charcoal produc-tion and woodcutting: the mining, smelting, transporting,and, finally, casting of vast quantities of metal, as well as theclay, potters, and kilns to produce the molds—more than40,000 fragments of which have been excavated thus far (Li2003a; ZSKY 2003b).

Although sourcing studies are still in their infancy in China,lead isotope research has suggested that, for at least the firsthalf of the Late Shang, a significant portion of the Anyangbronzes contained high radiogenic lead, a feature they sharewith contemporaneous bronzes found along the Yangtze fromSichuan to Jiangxi (Jin et al. 2003). Neutron-activation anal-ysis on samples of the glazed stoneware found in some richAnyang tombs suggests that they may also have had a Yangtzeorigin (Chen et al. 1999; a conclusion supported by the formsand distributions of this pottery type), while the cowry shellscommon in Shang tombs and given as gifts by the king andother patrons may have come from as far away as the IndianOcean (Li 2003b; Peng and Zhu 1995). Although the detailsremain murky, important resources of Shang practices of au-thority flowed through direct and indirect networks that ex-tended far beyond the limits of Shang hegemony.

The knowledge of multicomponent-mold bronze-vesselcasting, though a specialized and coveted resource like writingand divination, was widely distributed by the Late Shang pe-riod (Bagley 1999). Moreover, although the details are unclear,the presence of Anyang-type vessels among local innovationsat distant sites, with evidence of local casting such as Laoniupo(Liu 2001) near modern Xi’an, suggests that networks ofbronze-casting knowledge, in the form of either people orartifacts, extended over wide areas. The circulation of thisform of technological capital, crucial to the Shang symboliceconomy of authority, bespeaks both a potential integrativemechanism connecting smaller, more peripheral sites with the

14. The tomb of just one royal consort contained more than 1,625 kgof bronze (Chang 1983, 103), while a single bronze cast for anotherconsort weighed 875 kg.


Figure 6. Scatterplot of tomb volume (m3) versus number of weaponsinterred. The sample contained 940 undisturbed lineage cemetery tombs.Most of the larger and all of the ramped tombs in these cemeteries werelooted, skewing the sample toward smaller, poorer graves.

great traditions and technical virtuosity of the metropole anda decentralized distribution of knowledge and practice thatprovided fertile ground for competition and counterclaims toauthority (Bagley 1999).

War. The practice of war revealed in the oracle bone inscrip-tions and hinted at in the widespread presence of weaponsand symbols derived from weapons in Late Shang tombs alsoshows a pattern of direct and indirect networks, of a hege-monic center but also decentralized resources. If we considerthat an estimated 40% of the male burials at Anyang containsome form of weapon, that number of weapons was fairlystrongly ( ) and significantly (0.01) correlated withr p 0.6tomb size (fig. 6; Campbell 2007), and that certain weaponforms were used as symbols of rank and authority (Liu 2003;Tang 2004), we can see both a relationship between weaponsand hierarchy and their broad distribution among the pop-ulation. Given that the basic unit of social and political life(including war) was the zu lineage/clan and the widespreaddistribution of weapons in mortuary contexts, warfare in theLate Shang appears to have involved much of the adult malepopulation—indeed, as suggested by the following bone in-scriptions, regarding the large numbers of troops levied forwar:

13. Cracked on Xinsi day, [ ] tested: levy Fu Hao’s three

thousand, levy an army of 10,000 and call upon them to

attack the [ ] [Fang]. (39902)

From the vantage point of the oracle bone inscriptions, theshifting boundaries and networks of Shang alliance and do-minion give an overall impression of almost ceaseless conflict,ranging from small-scale raids to major campaigns involvingthousands of combatants. Moreover, looking closely at thenature of the interactions between the king and the placesand agents mentioned in the oracle bones, one can make atripartite division of both Shang political networks and imag-ined community (Campbell 2007; Lin 1982). There was aninner realm of subordinates and direct, routine networks ofcoercion and authority; a middle zone of nominally subor-dinate but practically independent leaders, of indirect controland sporadic intervention; and a still further zone demarkingthe shifting boundaries of the Shang world order, a horizonof enemies, rebels, and barbarians at which the apparatus ofmilitary domestication was ceaselessly aimed (fig. 7).

Hunting. The royal hunt, too, shows a pattern of intensivebut geographically restricted networks of hunting destina-tions, as well as a web of more distant and less frequentlytraveled places. Indeed, the notion of hunting as mastery notonly over animals but also over the spiritual and politicallandscape in general can be seen in divinations about the kinghunting in recently conquered areas (e.g., heji 41075). Nev-ertheless, like most practices of authority in the Late Shang,the king had no monopoly over the hunt (contra Fiskesjo2001), as divinations concerning the auspiciousness of the


Figure 7. Schematic diagram of the Late Shang polity structure.

king’s “joining with” or “meeting” allies for a hunt suggest(e.g., heji 27907) and the nonroyal inscriptions recording zi-prince/lineage leader hunting confirm (e.g., huadong 234).Shang elite hunts then drew together military resources(weapons, men, horses, dogs, and chariots), land, and animals(and sometimes people) in performances of political authorityand cosmological order.

Harvest and Levies. Given the emerging picture of the LateShang polity as being composed of inner intensive networksof capital and outer indirect networks, it is perhaps not sur-prising that divinations about harvest and levying are re-stricted to places that are strongly affiliated with the Shang(Campbell 2007). The king’s routine extractions and flows ofresources thus came from networks of places within a morerestricted pacified zone, a network of sites of sacrifice, hunt-ing, agriculture, and levying. Beyond this lay a less securezone of shifting networks of allies and endemic conflict fromwhence less regular gifts flowed and through which majorcampaigns were launched against enemies beyond.

Summary: Late Shang Networks of Power/Authority. Althoughthe multiple sources of power identified here for the LateShang civilizational order all tended to be concentrated in theperson of the king, there were other privileged actors in these

practices of authority. Discursively, then, the king was “theone man,” lineage leader of the apex lineage in a network ofhierarchically arranged descent groups, and the Great Settle-ment Shang and its surrounding royal demesne were the sifang zhi ji, or “pivot of the four quarters” (Legge 1991, 643).

Shang practices of authority, however, operated in limitedand frequently indirect networks over a fractious landscape.They were potential sites of contestation and required theceaseless attention of the king. Indeed, the violence evidentin this complex of techniques of domestication is perhaps sostriking because of the necessity of continually constitutingthe world order. The performance of the Shang king’s sov-ereignty had to be repeated across the landscape in counter-point to that of rivals and rebels. Nevertheless, the resourceson which the king could draw to support his authoritativepractices were far more restricted than the universal dominionsuggested by his discursive structure of authority, tapering offrapidly beyond limited networks of more or less direct control.Beyond this zone (and even to a certain extend within it),the king had to rely on webs of alliance, exchange, sporadiccoercion, and ritual order (fig. 7).

Political Community: Late Shang Boundaries of Identity

The Shang polity idea itself was conceived in terms of layers:Shang at the center and the lands of the four directions sur-


rounding it. For those embedded in Shang political networks,moreover, the most immediate unit of social and politicalidentity would have been the descent group: an imaginedcommunity of the living and dead with its own leader andeponymous place, produced and maintained through com-mon ancestral sacrifice, feasting, burial, and war. Just as sub-ordinate or allied leaders reported enemy attacks on theirsettlements, fields, and borderlands (no. 5), the royal divi-nations also refer to people of subordinate places in terms oftheir places of origin.

14. Cracked on Wuxu day, the men of Que will cut grass/

herd at X. (20500)

The imagined community of Shang, then, was neither ho-mogeneous nor monolithic but rather context dependent andmultilayered, referring to a city, the central lands of the kingand its zu-lineages, and, most expansively but diffusely, theentire assemblage of royal networks of power. Seen from thevantage of a state idea, unlike Anderson’s modern nation-states, with their mass education, media, flags, maps, anduniversal citizenship, the Shang polity would have been mostsalient to those directly involved in its central practices ofauthority: war and sacrifice. Nevertheless and despite the factthat war and ancestor veneration were general structuringinstitutions, performances of the political and natural orderinvolving most of the population, they were also structurallysegmental and hierarchically instantiated in terms of accessand reward. This meant that the very logic of enfranchise-ment, of political participation and community, was graded.“Shang” would have been a term most significant to the kingand other privileged actors within his networks of authoritywho participated in royal ritual, war, feasting, and gifting. Forthe majority of the population, however, the most salientpolitical community was likely that of the lineage in whichtheir own participation in war, ancestor veneration, and otherpractices of community were situated. While it is possible thatthe men of Que mentioned above thought of themselves asShang in contexts of general mobilization against externalenemies, given that “internal” and “external” could and didrapidly shift, it is probably more accurate to view the bound-aries of Shang polity ideas as multiple and overlapping. Inaddition to the overarching hegemonic polity idea of theShang kings, there were the more powerful political identitiesof local ruling clans with their own networks of settlementsand below them the individual lineages themselves. Althoughit may have been the dream of the Shang kings to unify theseseparate identities into a single nested hierarchy, the realitywas that the subunits of Shang hegemony were frequently inconflict with both the center and each other, even while net-works of kinship and alliance stretched off beyond the reachof royal power and were, to varying degrees, independent ofit. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that overlaying this volatileand segmented political landscape was a normative politi-coreligious imaginary that envisioned a single ultimate power,on earth as in heaven. Could this have been an ideological

legacy of the preceding millennium of megacenters? Whateverthe case, a unified, hierarchical ordering of the world hasproven to be an ideal of great resilience and longevity acrossthe millennia of Chinese history.

Conclusion

Earlier on I raised the issue of the discourses, practices, tech-nologies, and sociophysical spaces that produced ancient po-litical networks and their imagined communities. For the LateShang polity I have attempted to give a partial answer to thosequestions, focusing on war, sacrifice, divination, and, to alesser extent, burial. Other scholars might have focused onother practices, and, certainly, more could have been said onsuch topics as feasting or elite gifting. The sketch I have givenof Shang political identities and networks of power could havealso been made more dynamic had I attempted to work inevidence for change within some of the polity’s networks ofresources, the reordering of certain practices of authority, andthe shifting political geography and military fortunes of thedynasty. My intention here, however, was not so much to givea complete analysis of Late Shang political networks as it wasto provide a suggestive illustration of a networks and bound-aries approach.

Even this partial investigation of Late Shang polity networksof power/authority and boundaries of identity, however, yieldsa far more complex picture than current archaeological mod-els account for. Substantively speaking, the Shang polity fitsneither the territorial model nor the city-state model, withits discursively expansive yet practically and materially re-stricted scope. It was centered on an urban megasite but con-ceived in terms of lands as well as settlements. Moreover,early Chinese centers could be and were moved, a mobilityof place that points to the existential core of the polity beingits ruling lineage rather than its territory or its cities. TheShang dynasty is recorded as having begun with an expansiveconquest, yet the oracle bone divinations depict a shifting andcontentious political landscape demonstrating that the varietyand fluidity of historical political geographies cannot be givenjustice by a dichotomous narrative of consolidated expansionor peer-polity interaction.

The importance of sacrifice, burial, and war as universallyparticipated, general structuring institutions highlights pat-terning practices of authority as sites of contestation and theperils of purely top-down approaches. The king’s power wasneither absolute nor uncontested: his practices of authorityemanated from and were empowered by the broadertraditions of nonroyal lineages on whose behalf it was sup-posedly wielded. That the very networks of power/authorityutilized by the Shang kings could be and ultimately weremobilized against the dynasty shows their structural and ideo-logical limits. Indeed, the multiplicity and multivalence ofShang sources of power far exceed the dualism of corporate/network leadership strategies, and their study would have been


greatly hampered by attempting to fit Shang polity networksinto one or the other of those theoretical shoes.

The larger point I wish to make, however, is that the stateis not the end of political history; much less is it a thing oreven an idea that can be projected back over millennia ofsocial and political innovation. The modern nation-states thatgave rise to the political theory on which most archaeologicaltheorizing is based were nothing like the political orders ofthe ancient world. For instance, it would be trivial to showradical difference in comparing the Shang polity to that ofthe People’s Republic of China: from the discursive structureof authority to its practices and networks of resources. TheShang and the PRC as imagined communities are also com-pletely different both in terms of their constituents and inthe ways of their imagining.

If the state really was the totalizing and universalizing realitytoward which nineteenth- and twentieth-century political or-ganization moved (and away from which we may now beheaded in the twenty-first century)—that is to say the productof a particular historical situation predicated on a specific setof technologies, institutions, and ideologies—then it standsto reason that earlier political formations, with vastly differentresources, networks, and legitimating practices, cannot use-fully be lumped under the heading “state.” Archaeologicalpolitical models must engage the millennia of sociopoliticaldevelopment between modern and ancient political organi-zations and imaginations.

Archaeologists need to complete the break from neoevo-lutionary theory and get beyond constructing typologies, traitlists, mechanistic models, and functionalist teleologies to theinvestigation of polity systems, polity ideas, and their variousarticulations. Polity systems, in turn, ought to be studied interms of their discursive structures of authority, their practicesof power and legitimation, and the networks of capital (social,symbolic, economic, coercive, etc.) that support them, whilepolity ideas can be seen in terms of imagined communitiesor boundaries of identity created through patterning practicesintertwined with networks of power and legitimation. Thisapproach, I would argue, offers a translocal methodology flex-ible enough to accommodate the various possibilities of com-plex sociopolitical forms through human history and prom-ises the possibility of a political anthropology of deep time.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the postdoctoral support received duringthe writing and revising of this article, first at the Institutefor the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, andthen at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the An-cient World, Brown University. I would also like to thankAnne Porter, Norman Yoffee, and an anonymous reviewer fortheir suggestions on how to improve previous drafts of thisarticle.

Comments

John BainesFaculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, Pusey Lane,Oxford OX1 2LE, United Kingdom ([email protected]). 9 IV 09

Roderick Campbell addresses difficulties with theoretical ap-proaches of archaeologists to defining and understanding“states,” using the extremely rich case of Late Shang Anyangas the exemplar on which he tests his new perspective. Hiscritical review of existing literature and his focus on whatearly civilizations did, rather than on how they might beclassified, are very welcome. In responding to his stimulatingtreatment, I use my own field of ancient Egypt as a point ofreference and contrast.

The Shang case lies somewhere in the middle of the polarity,of which Campbell is rightly wary, between “city-state” and“territorial” patterns. The dominant royal center of Anyangsat at the heart of a political landscape that was anything butuniform or rigidly demarcated. Campbell identifies three lev-els of Shang control in his idealized figure 7, but as he notes,the diagram is neater than the ancient reality, in which moredistant polities could be more firmly under Shang controlthan nearer ones, while evidence from pottery styles showsthat material culture and political affiliations do not map ontoone another. Connections with regions far beyond Shang con-trol—although hardly beyond that of the preceding Erligangphase—were essential for acquiring some raw materials forproducts of elite culture. This complex, fluid configuration,which seems to have been maintained at the cost of constantwarfare (so far as war was not valued as an end in itself),lasted just a couple of centuries.

Campbell uses the term “networks” to encompass bothrelations with other polities and the lineage organization ofthe core society. The former are attested through inscriptionson oracle bones, while the latter is modeled primarily throughanalogy with other periods and categories of sources. Withoutoracle bones, we could not know much about these networks.This means that the Anyang case might not be easy to gen-eralize and compare with other civilizations. Moreover, otherlines of evidence for elite values, notably the vast corpus ofbronzes that display a wide variety of styles and developstrongly through the period, may bring different perspectives.

Where suitable sources are available, generalization can per-haps be achieved in terms of other aspects of the record.Campbell identifies three overlapping core activities of theShang rulers as war, hunting, and sacrifice. Together with thecreation of monumental settings—often for sacrifice—thisgroup of concerns is very similar to those of rulers in manycivilizations: that is, what rulers and elites did and displayedto others. What they did required the labor of the mass ofthe population, whose material culture and probably symbolic


lives were impoverished in favor of rulers and elites (Wengrow2001; Yoffee 2001). Another feature common to different civ-ilizations is the constitution of their imagined communities.Campbell notes that the god Di, the powers of the land, andthe ancestors formed the peak of the Shang hierarchy andwere integral to it. We cannot know how far this vision com-manded assent in the wider society, but we can compare itwith the explicit statement of the king’s role in an Egyptiantext of the second millennium BCE that divides the beingsin the cosmos into the gods, the dead, the king (as the fulcrumof the whole), and humanity (e.g., Baines 2007, 182). AsTrigger (1993, 110–12; 2003, 670–73) noted, elite beliefs andpractices such as these are more consistent across differentcivilizations than any material or technical base.

Issues of networks and boundaries can be explored withinthese modes of action as well as alongside them. Very differentpatterns are known. In ancient Mesopotamia, the civilizationappeared around a millennium before any dominant poweremerged, while concerns partly comparable with those of theShang are attested across numerous polities, with a strongsense of shared cultural values but without any political su-premacy. By contrast, in third-millennium Egypt, where polityand boundaries, both political and cultural, were largely co-extensive, networks of contact with other societies were weaklydeveloped. Defeat of enemies seems to have been more amatter of rhetoric than of waging war, while the accessiblerecord presents the king as so dominant that he created formsand networks for himself more than he adhered to practicesshared with the elite.

These differences between civilizations are better observedand operationalized through Campbell’s lens of networks andboundaries than through the trait list approaches he criticizes,and the exercise in comparison itself is instructive. Nonethe-less, I find myself thinking that the distinctive forms in whichelites invested so much could yield more for the comprehen-sion of individual civilizations. Campbell does not contrastthe diversity of Anyang elite products with the uniformity ofthe Erligang phase a couple of centuries earlier. In view ofthe vast scale of Anyang and its prodigal use of resources,this limitation is eloquent evidence for a very different ap-proach to networks and boundaries in two periods in thesame region and seemingly with no fundamental change inthe civilization. Networks and boundaries can identify thatdifference; can they contribute to analyzing it? I hope theycan.

Rowan FladHarvard University, Department of Anthropology, 11Divinity Avenue, Peabody Museum 57G, Cambridge,Massachusetts 02138, U.S.A. ([email protected]).18 III 09

Campbell’s provocative paper presents challenges not only tostandard interpretations and discourse on Shang civilization,

its particular case study, but also, more generally, to the treat-ment of complex societies in anthropological archaeology.Archaeological approaches to the Shang dynasty and otherearly Chinese polities have long been focused primarily oncultural history or mired in models formed in other contextsand unproblematically applied to the Chinese case. HereCampbell attempts to extract the Shang from this situationby proposing a flexible framework that he argues is suitablefor approaching civilizations on their own terms.

He argues that instead of classifying social organizationusing categories such as the state, we should be focusing onorganizing principles. For societies that cohered into politi-cally defined systems, this involves minimally teasing out thenetworks of authority and power that constitute the polity’ssystem of governance on the one hand and the ideas of po-litical community and interconnectedness that tie people to-gether in an idealized polity on the other. Polity networksand polity ideas are thus argued to exist in some form in allpolities but differ according to local logics and practices.

For the Shang, Campbell contends that the primary meansby which networks of authority were established and main-tained were the practices through which resources of powerwere motivated, particularly kinship ties, including ancestorworship, and violence in the form of warfare and sacrifice.Bronze production, distribution, and use as symbols of au-thority and gifts that tied elites together are other aspects ofShang material culture that would have served this purposebut that Campbell does not discuss in much detail—probablybecause of the disproportionate attention that bronze tendsto get in Shang scholarship (e.g., Allan 2007; Bagley 1999).

As for polity idea, I gather that this is created and sustainedthrough ritual behavior, including activities such as the hunt,“hierarchical reciprocity,” speech giving, divination, and sac-rifice—although it is clear that many of these practices feedinto polity networks as well. In fact, in many activities thereseems to be a dialectical feedback that would occur betweentheir effects on polity networks and polity ideas. For example,Campbell proposes that the participation of the entire pop-ulation in Shang burial rites and ancestor creation would havecontributed to the establishment and maintenance of powerand authority. The same practices would have been vital tothe construction of the polity ideas associated with the Shangstate.

In general, the concept of polity idea seems underdevelopedrelative to the polity network aspect of the article. This is trueboth in the more abstract, theoretical component of the paperand in the Shang case study. It may be, however, exactly thisaspect of the Shang case that requires more concerted effortif we are not only to work out effectively the organizing prin-ciples of the Shang polity but also to understand the degreeto which the idea of Shang was present in different geograph-ical regions.

It would also be productive to move beyond political net-works in our attempts to understand the context of the Shangpolity in the Chinese Bronze Age. Both polity network and


polity idea start from the center at Anyang and look outward.But, obviously, the Shang did not exist in a political vacuum.I would think the Shang polity idea is necessarily centered onthe Shang king and capital, but Campbell points out thatmultilayered components comprise the Shang. Might onethink of these various aspects as involving multiple, inter-twined ideas: “city idea,” “kin idea,” “religion idea,” “statusidea,” and so on?

In contrast, Shang networks of authority were likely fraughtwith competing claims to authority and power, especially inareas that were intermittently allied with or opposed to theShang court. The polity network, therefore, can be describedby the metaphor of a topography that had nodes where theintensity of political authority was high relative to other lo-calities. One could take such a topographic model of politicalnetworks even further and consider how this political topog-raphy (similar to Campbell’s polity network) related to otherconceptual topographies: economic, religious, environmental,military, and so forth. How closely does the political topog-raphy (polity network) parallel the topography of ritual prac-tices or economic activities? Are they one and the same, oris the Shang polity characterized by a kind of geographicalheterarchy? I pose these questions for future consideration.

Tang JigenInstitute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of SocialSciences, Beijing, China ([email protected]). 19 V 09

A famous Western Zhou bronze ritual vessel Dayu Ding AASS, cast during early tenth century BC, has well-known in-scriptions recording the words of King Kang: “I heard thatthe Shang lost the destiny offered by the haven, only theShang’s chiefs Hou and Dian in periphery areas” (“ ,

, ( ) . . .”). The chiefs Hou and Dian in peripheryareas are referred to as political structures outside of Shangcore settlements in central China. In addition, in the chapterJiu Gao of Shang Shu AA SS, the earliest textual recordsin Chinese history, it described chiefs Hou and Dian as Waifu

, or controlled outside territories. Neifu , or controlledinside territories, as opposed to the Waifu, is also recordedclearly in the same texts. These records suggested that theShang polity had a direct, controlled core territory and in-direct, controlled periphery territories.

Though archaeological work has offered various archaeo-logical evidence that might prove the above social structure,unfortunately, in the entire past century, many scholars in-terpreted the Shang society by following the modern statestructures or the theoretical models developed in Westernanthropology or political sciences. Those above-mentionedtextual records were ignored, and archaeological data per-taining to evidence of the Shang social structure were mis-understood because of fashionable theories or modern think-ing. Scholars such as Sun Miao (1987) and Yang Shengnan(1994), for example, described the Shang society on the basis

of modern state structure. Interpretation of the Shang polity

using theoretical models or Western anthropological concepts

began even earlier. A typical example is categorization of the

Shang into a slave society of the five pigeonholes proposed

by classic Marxists (Guo 1952; Lu 1936). After the 1980s,

more Chinese scholars followed evolutionary theory and

viewed Shang China at the state level (Si 1997). In recent

years, concepts of early civilizations and early complex so-

cieties were introduced into China, and the concepts of city-

state and territorial state were also employed for the study of

early China (Liu and Chen 2003). As a result, archaeological

data from China were lost to the chance of reconstruction of

ancient Shang polities.

Rod Campbell’s work fills the gap. His paper studies Shang

China on the basis of archaeological data instead of popular

theories. It discusses the discursive hierarchies of authority,

the king’s city (great settlement Shang), political landscape,

practices of authority, and exercise of power. Finally, it arrives

at a conclusion that the Shang polity fits neither the territorial

model nor the city-state model, with its discursively expansive

yet practically and materially restricted scope. This is probably

the most suitable description to the Shang society so far. It

proves the records of Dayu Ding and Jiu Gao of Shang Shu

AA SS but presents us with a more complex picture of

the Shang polity.

Campbell’s study can be summarized as an example of

contextual interpretations. I wish it would end the long history

of pigeonhole games in the studies of the Shang society.

However, exactly as Campbell himself stated, what he pro-

vided is a suggestive illustration of the networks and bound-

aries approach. If we take time dimension into account, it

will be much more difficult to describe Shang China. The

different features between Late Shang and its earlier periods

seem to suggest that the political structure experienced im-

portant changes. In the four phases of the Yinxu material

culture of the Late Shang, as read from oracle bones and

learned from the grave goods in tombs, the Shang people

gradually lost patience with their ancestors, suggesting a

changing network of religious beliefs. Does it mean that the

people in late phases lived in a different social polity? How

can we evaluate its impacts on the Shang society?

In recent years, Chinese archaeologists have started new

research programs to understand the settlement patterns in

central China, the detailed outline of the Great Settlement

Shang. Ceramic petrological studies and bone isotope analyses

have also been employed to study the relationship between

the Shang people and their periphery areas. I expect Campbell

to include all of this new knowledge and new data in his

future study and to give an evaluation to the records Waifu

and Neifu . In this way, I believe it will open oppor-

tunities for Chinese archaeology to contribute new knowledge

to the past of our world.


Li MinCotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California,A210 Fowler Building, 308 Charles E. Young Drive North,Los Angeles, California 90095-1510, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 19 IV 09

Campbell’s call for investigating “the discursive, practical, andmaterial aspects and their relationship” makes an importanttheoretical contribution to the study of early societies. Theobservation of Shang as “neither homogenous nor monolithicbut rather context dependent and multilayered” opens updiverse venues for understanding the multiple sources of so-cial power in early China and offers a nuanced approach forunderstanding the political dynamics in ancient societies.

A call for better historical or anthropological writing, how-ever, does not have to come in the disguise of another model,especially when the aim was to liberate archaeological in-quiries from a typological tendency. The problem of model-driven research is its potential to reduce the rich historicaldynamics to fit the model. Such tendency is evident in theargument that “the Shang dynasty is recorded as having begunwith an expansive conquest, yet the oracle bone divinationsdepict a shifting and contentious political landscape dem-onstrating that the variety and fluidity of historical politicalgeographies cannot be given justice by a dichotomous nar-rative of consolidated expansion or peer-polity interaction.”Here, Campbell projected the political dynamics of the LateShang, whose oracle bone inscriptions first appeared in thethirteenth century BCE, onto the period of the Early Shangin the sixteenth century BCE, when substantial archaeologicalevidence suggests a rapid territorial expansion during the Up-per Erligang phase (Bagley 1999; Liu and Chen 2003; Tang1999b).

At a conceptual level, a central argument of Campbell’spaper is that research on the early state constitutes an “illusoryand anachronistic projection of modern contingencies” ontoancient societies. Campbell’s argument of modern projectionfails to account for the propositions of nation-state that trapthe concept in its own distinctive place in the cosmology ofmodernity.

The concept of the nation-state presupposes historical em-pire as the premodern “other” (Anderson 2006), while earlystates were considered the precursors of historical empires.This empire/nation-state dichotomy and the historical nar-rative built around it are as naturalized in modern experienceas perceived citizenship in nation-states. In his critique, WangHui (2004, 2008) has brilliantly argued that the empire/nation-state binary is accompanied by a host of expectationsand assumptions based on the West’s narrative of its ownmodernity rooted in the nineteenth century. Hegel (1894,109–110) has this to offer on the destination of history: “TheHistory of the World travels from East to West, for Europeis absolutely the end of History, Asia is the beginning . . .The first political form, therefore, which we observe in historyis despotism, the second democracy and aristocracy, the third

monarchy.” The nation-state construct occupies a central placein this historical narrative.

However natural an archaeologist feels in his or her worldas composed of nation-states, the fundamental propositionof modernity prevents a modern scholar from consideringthe prospect of a nation-state in Bronze Age China or anyancient society or the notion that history would have foundits “end” by the second millennium BCE. Again, I find Hegel’s(1894, 112) characterization of the state in China instructive:“Empires belonging to mere space . . . [as distinguished fromTime]—unhistorical History;—as for example, in China, theState based on the Family relation” with “a paternal Govern-ment.” I see little space for projecting an image of the modernnation-state onto Hegel’s notion of premodern states in Chinathat is modeled on kinship. The modern archaeologist wouldagree with Campbell that the modern nation-state is “nothinglike the political orders of the ancient world,” though for verydifferent reasons. The argument that we have been guilty of“ignoring the five millennia or so of sociopolitical develop-ment between the first archaic states and the modern nationstates that gave rise to the political models on which archae-ological states are based” is an exercise of practical reasonflying in the face of the cosmologies of modernity.

The critique of research on the early state as a projectionof modern states ignores the broad spectrum of anthropo-logical perspectives that have indeed not understood pre-modern society as a “bounded political entity,” for example,as Swiss cheese with many holes (Keightley 1983), as verticalarchipelago (see Stanish 1992), as theater state (Geertz 1981),or as “divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm” (An-derson 2006, 7). These approaches manifest alternative waysto study historical changes in relations of power without aban-doning the state as a conceptual tool. Archaeologists will neverbe entirely free from projections of their own experience, butI do not know any archaeologists, however different in theirperspectives, who ever imaged an “absolute and uncontested”kingly power in their study—such power existed neither inthe present nor in the past.

The notion of the state is central to understanding theprocesses of historical construction in societies; even changesin ideas and conceptions about the state’s power can producereal historical consequences. Archaeological inquiry into stateformation could benefit from understanding how its coresymbols, conceptual vocabularies, and major institutions tookshape in the course of human history, even under social con-ditions that bear little resemblance with modern nation-states.

John W. OlsenDepartment of Anthropology, University of Arizona, 1009East South Campus Drive, Tucson, Arizona 85721-0030,U.S.A. ([email protected]). 23 III 09

In analyzing the Late Shang (ca. 1250–1050 BCE) polity, Rod-erick Campbell’s innovative networks and boundaries ap-proach to understanding the style and content of mature Chi-


nese Bronze Age society nearly accomplishes in just a fewdozen pages what archaeologists and historians alike havebeen unable to achieve after decades of concentrated effort.I say “nearly accomplishes” in a respectful rather than a criticaltone because, as he acknowledges, Campbell’s analysis is ul-timately constrained by the nature of material cultural evi-dence generated by the Chinese archaeological communitythus far.

Nonetheless, by defining networks in terms of power andauthority and boundaries with respect to identity, Campbellhas provided a most welcome alternative view of Bronze Agepractices of power that have dominated the literature on earlyChinese civilization virtually since the first oracle bones werediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century. In my view,Campbell’s authoritative review of extant archaeological andhistorical evidence for the accumulation and configuration ofpower sensu lato in the waning years of the Shang Dynastyestablishes a new framework for understanding the emergenceof China from a muddled mass of competing polities that aredifferentially visible in the archaeological and historicalrecords.

I am particularly intrigued by Campbell’s take on the rolethat the “monumental spectacle of violence” played in defin-ing the practices of political authority in Bronze Age China.As archaeologists become more sophisticated in their de-ployment of broadly based social science approaches to vi-olence (e.g., Collins 2008) in interpreting past human be-havior, archaeological and historical assemblages like thosedescribed by Campbell from Anyang will play an increasinglyimportant role in the generation of new explanatory modelsfor nascent social complexity both in China and beyond.

Campbell’s focus is appropriately on the Late Shang Yinphase remains excavated in and around Anyang, Henan, inNorth China because this spot was, by any reasonable ar-chaeological and historical measure, a nexus of the sort thatCampbell’s networks and boundaries approach seeks to iden-tify and illuminate. Nonetheless, Campbell successfully artic-ulates that manifestation of Chinese Bronze Age culture withparallel nodes of authority in regions far afield of the middleYellow River valley, where the Shang phenomenon reachedits zenith (see Campbell’s fig. 4).

I do wish the author had spent more time elucidating pre-cisely what his definition of “complexity” is in unpacking thethorny problem of distinguishing Chinese Bronze Age polities,and I think his argument, effective as it is overall, could none-theless be strengthened by examining more closely the Shang-Zhou transition, reduced by most authors to the militaryconquest of one ethnic subculture by another. Campbellclearly suspects that there is more going on in the transitionfrom Shang to Zhou than meets the eye, and I would enjoyhearing more about how the “bundles of relationships” thatdefined the Shang core might also have impacted—possiblymitigated—their conquest by the Zhou, especially with respectto the role of violence that Campbell postulates was such anintegral theme in Late Shang society. Indeed, where did the

preconquest Zhou fall in the Shang realm envisioned byCampbell in his concentric figure 7?

I think the author has been remarkably successful in ac-complishing what I take to be his principal goal: establishinga framework for a political anthropology of deep time thatextends beyond the spatial and temporal coordinates of LateShang China. Following Denzin and Giardina (2008), it isprecisely the nature of the evidence itself that determines theextent to which we can be confident of our interpretationsof the practice of authority, whether political, religious, ormilitary, and Campbell’s nuanced interpretation of the LateShang case bears this out.

Campbell’s statement that “it is remarkable that overlayingthis volatile and segmented political landscape was a nor-mative politicoreligious imaginary that envisioned a singleultimate power, on earth as in heaven” is to my mind es-pecially salient. Redefining the rhetoric of human geographyand self-identity that underlies early attempts to identifynations and differentiate peoples, exemplified classically in thework of Freud and Rimbaud (Wills 2008), should be the workof archaeologists, given the role of material culture and tech-nology in creating those identities in the first place. Campbell’swonderful paper provides a clear point of departure for ar-chaeologists working in a wide variety of past culture contexts,and I enthusiastically anticipate seeing his networks andboundaries approach applied in other world regions, perhapsespecially in places such as West Africa, the Andes, and thegreater Mississippi Basin, among others, where dispersedrather than highly nucleated urban forms were also the normearly on.

Reply

I would like to thank the commentators for their stimulatingresponses to my paper. I should stress that what I have pre-sented is preliminary in terms of both a theoretical approachand a case study, and the above comments are doubly wel-come for suggesting many promising avenues of future de-velopment. As I see it, in the comments two main issuesemerged on which I would like to focus attention. The firstis the lack of historical depth in my sketch of Late Shangnetworks and boundaries. As both Baines and Tang correctlynoted, I did not attempt to relate my sketch of the Late Shangpolity to Middle or Early Shang situations, nor did I ade-quately address sweeping changes that took place in the mid-dle of the Late Shang period or the Zhou conquest, as Tangand Olsen, respectively, noted. If a full study of Late ShangAnyang would require a book, an adequate treatment of thethousand years between 1800 and 800 BCE would probablyrequire several. Though I might disagree on the details, I do,however, believe that my commentators are correct in theircollective assessment that the synchronic sketch I presented


of polity networks and boundaries would be complicated ifset within the flow of history. As Sewell (2005, 178) notes,however, one needs a synchronic picture before one can showhow it transforms over time.

The second issue and a key point on which I am anxiousnot to be misunderstood is what I mean by “polity networks.”What I had in mind was something like Mann’s networks ofsocial power. The advantage that “networks” holds over termssuch as “structure,” in my opinion, is its invocation of open-ended interconnectivity, which is then to be contrasted withthe boundaries of political community (contingent and vary-ingly porous though they may be). Considered as intertwinedintentional, dispositional, and material constraints on and/orresources for action and being, networks were meant to en-compass human interaction in general. Polity networks, then,analogous to Abram’s “state structure,” were meant to referto those networks of power/authority forming nexuses thatmight be termed “polities.” Therefore, what Baines refers toas “the distinctive forms in which elites invested so much”should not be considered something outside of networks ofpower/authority but rather key components of them. I amthus concerned that polity networks not be taken in too nar-row a sense or as something that is categorically separate fromreligious, military, or economic networks. In my case studyI attempted to show how key Late Shang practices of powerincluded categories of action that could be termed “religious,”“economic,” “social,” and “political.” While one could chooseto focus on networks that were less central to the polity orindeed on different polity nexuses, in response to Flad I wouldargue that such a change in focus would not yield “otherconceptual topographies,” only different maps of the sameterritory.

I would like to express my appreciation for Baines’s com-parative extension of my approach and push to make it prop-erly diachronic. As noted above, a networks and boundariesapproach has perhaps more in common with Baines’s ownpreferred approach than Baines himself realizes. The differ-ence is that I am advocating understanding ideologies, prac-tices, and resources of authority in terms of nonelite as wellas elite agency. I also believe that the generalizability issuesof my case study implied by Baines are overstated. The re-construction of any particular case will be tied to the con-tingencies of available sources of information, but theoreti-cally recognizing the complexity of a phenomenon is crucialto accurately understanding it, even if we lack sources foraspects of that complexity.

Baines’s claim that while polity networks seem to havechanged a great deal between the Erligang (ca. 1600–1400BCE) and the Anyang (ca. 1250–1050 BCE) periods, the civ-ilization did not raises the important issue of historical changeand scales of time. On the one hand, one could say that therewere broad continuities in the form of elite material culturethroughout the Central Plains Bronze age. On the other hand,I would argue that not only does the Erligang-Anyang periodshow evidence of change evenementielle but also the ancestral-

ritual complex in which this elite material culture is embeddedunderwent radical development and transformation. BronzeAge Central Plains civilization did indeed undergo change butinsofar as civilization belongs to the longue duree, we shouldnot expect it to change at the same rate as political institutions.

I agree with Flad that polity ideas are the least theoreticallydeveloped or operationalized aspect of my approach. I alsobelieve that they are probably the most difficult to study. Fladraises the tricky issue of analytically separating polity networksand ideas, noting that, in practice, they may be intertwined.I believe that Flad’s observations are correct but that therestill exists the potential for disjuncture between polity ideasand discourses that support particular networks of authority.One can, for instance, be simultaneously a patriot and a rebelagainst a tyrannous rulership. In principle I think Flad is alsocorrect in pointing out that practices and resources that sup-port discourses of authority may also work toward producingimagined communities. The issue of how they do this workand to what extent, however, needs to be determined on acase-by-case basis.

Although I disagree with Tang’s comment that the Shanglost patience with their ancestors, Tang is correct in assertingthat great changes took place over the course of the Late Shangperiod and that my sketch collapses 200 years into one syn-chronic image. I am currently working to better synthesizeevidence of differing chronological resolution into a moreproperly historical account. I do intend to incorporate theexciting new research taking place at Anyang (and contributeto it), and I eagerly look forward to its publication.

In response to Li, I wish to clarify that what I am presentinghere is an approach, not a model—even less a typology. Mypoint was to try to come up with a flexible framework forstudying ancient polities that had only very general presup-positions about their structures or operation.

I find Li’s contention that “moderns” are inescapablybound to a subconscious Hegelian episteme a fascinating butrather ambitious claim. I had something much less sweepingin mind when I said that living in a world of nation-states,we are accustomed to thinking in terms of bounded politiesand that most current archaeological definitions of “the state”derive from early and mid-twentieth-century theorizing es-sentially describing the polities of Fordist high modernity (seedefinition in Flannery 1972 for a good example): centralizing,bureaucratizing, standardizing, monopolizing. Nevertheless, adivision of the past few thousand years of history into archaicstates, empires, and nation-states would still be a good ex-ample of just the kind of oversimplistic typology my approachis aimed at nuancing. I would, however, be leery of embracingHegel’s essentializing, Orientalist vision of the timeless Chi-nese Empire.

Li is correct in his claim that my brief review of the lit-erature does not do full justice to the diversity of perspectiveson ancient polities across disciplines. I made no claims tobeing exhaustive, and indeed Li’s list could be greatlyextended.


Although I am not sure how Li’s defense of the state squareswith his comment that we do not need models, I would liketo point out that “state” is being used in two distinct waysby Li and the authors he approvingly cites. The first meansessentially the same thing as “polity,” as in Geertz’s “theatrestate,” while the second denotes a specific stage of sociopo-litical evolution (as in “state formation”) and a set of featuresthat differentiates states from simpler forms of political entity.I do not find the first use particularly troubling, nor shouldthe second be ruled out a priori. The freight carried by thesecond meaning of “state,” however, needs to be historicallymotivated, and I find it difficult to think of a single conceptualbox (or even three) in which to fit all the diversity of politicalforms from Uruk to the United States. Nevertheless, the net-works and boundaries approach is meant not so much toreplace previous deep-time political typologies as it is to de-velop a more flexible way of understanding political formsthrough time on which more sophisticated understandings oflong- and short-term historical process might be based.

I believe Olsen is correct in suggesting that complexity isan important missing component of my approach. Althoughmy intention was to focus on how ancient polities worked(and leave aside the question of developmental typology),there is no reason why complexity should not join otherqualitative and quantitative descriptors of networks and theirnexuses. Indeed, this is probably a necessary addition in ad-dressing diachronic change.

The case of the Zhou is fascinating but controversial andcomplicated, involving sometimes contradictory archaeolog-ical, epigraphic, and received textual evidence. I do intend towrite about the Shang-Zhou transition, but there is no spacehere for my still preliminary views. In response to the questionof where the Zhou would fit in the idealized schema of theShang polity, they provide a great if complicated example ofthe dynamic nature of the Late Shang hegemony occupyingall three zones (subordinate, ally, enemy) at different times.

—Roderick B. Campbell

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