Legacy of Israel in Judah's Bible : History, Politics, and the Reinscribing of Tradition (9781139774246) by Fleming Daniel E

Author:Fleming, Daniel E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

2. Tribe and State

I have chosen to avoid the term “state” in the context of this investigation. The category is widely used in discussion of ancient societies, applied to the polities of most institutionalized governance, often of largest scale and complexity.5 While I do not insist that the term must be abandoned for application to antiquity, I find that its use tends to be prejudiced toward individualized and centralized authority, and it is often embedded in a problematic scheme that makes it the evolutionary successor of tribes and chiefdoms.6 Because the Bible, along with other writing from the ancient Near East, offers its own terminology for isolating institutional political power with an individual head, I will speak of kings and kingship where specifically relevant and leadership where the categories are less precise or clearly defined. I embrace the term “tribe” as translating efficiently a mode of social and political organization that provides the possibility of association as peers, sometimes under the ideal of kinship.

The challenge, then, is to establish a conceptual system capable of integrating tribes and monarchy in what Adam Smith would call a political landscape. To this end, the new work of Anne Porter (2012) offers one of the most sweeping efforts to start afresh in understanding ancient society, particularly as this includes tribal or kin-based dimensions. For Porter, all of the recent and laudable attempts to reconfigure our interpretive models and terminology have foundered on the isolation of power into a world of “haves,” in opposition to all “have-nots”: “The end result of all this is ultimately still a problem of agency: only the elite have it.”7 The best reason to continue the theoretical investigation of the ancient state is that it provides unlooked-for ways to think about alternative and substate powers, “many of which are understood to be based in traditional if not archaic ways of being.”

This cautious openness to the ancient state as an analytical category brings Porter to the “tribe.” Echoing Adam Smith, who discards the term “state” as impossible to define for all its supposed instances, Porter concludes that the “tribe” was set aside by anthropologists because there is “no one set of common features derivable from multiple ethnographic examples that can give rise to a core meaning to this label.”8 The problem is that tribe and state are not categories of the same kind, to be set against one another as alternative formations. Tribal identifications are expressions of kinship as definition of belonging and not, and the important question is, “What is going on that prompts the tribe to behave in an exclusionary – or inclusionary – way?” The tribe itself, if we keep the term, is not in itself a political category, though it has a political aspect that is contingent on the individual features of each one's character and situation. Instead, it “should be defined as a set of social relationships based on idioms and/or practices of kinship and descent as the means through which people understand their place in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.