The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepesentations of Nomadic Inner Asia

This is a polemical and thought-provoking work that seeks to recalibrate what the author presents as misguided assumptions regarding the internal structure and dynamics of Inner Asian society. Based on his fieldwork in Mongolia, David Sneath concludes that “nothing like the popular image of kinship had existed in Mongolia” (p. 1). Moreover, the conceptualizations of “tribe” and “clan” that prevailed in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, with its emphasis on egalitarian “segmentary kinship” groups (p. 156), were premised on “colonial-era notions of tribalism.” Weighted with the “pejorative, colonial baggage” associated with the word “tribe” (p. 52), they produced a skewed vision of the history of the peoples of the steppe, requiring outside catalysts (neighboring sedentary states) to bring kinship-based “timeless … nomadic, tribal society” (p. 3) to statehood. Kinship, clan, and tribe (disputed conceptual categories in modern anthropological literature and not without problems for historians; see p. 64) are set...