Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Mobility, Political Complexity And Community Organization

对许多人来说，欧亚大草原上的游牧民族是长期与世隔绝的产物，他们总是按照自然环境的要求迁徙，是“坚忍的”人物。然而，田园游牧历史和考古记录的特殊性使研究人员能够分析与更广泛的变量有关的政治组织的一般问题。从比较的角度来看，重要的是要了解在快速流动、幅员辽阔和人口密度低的条件下，政治战略如何以不同的方式发挥作用。这项研究项目解决的主要问题是，草原政治如何为政治制度的发展提供可供选择的轨迹的范例，这对人类社会采用或不采用更复杂的组织形式的方式有什么启示？因此，草原社会研究解决的人类学问题本身不一定是“田园”问题，而是考虑到个人和群体流动性的关于人类组织的一般性问题。这个项目提出了这样一个问题：在东部草原游牧民族建国的早期阶段，社区规模的政治发展是什么样子的？为了解决这个问题，这项研究将探索“自下而上”的过程在地方对政治变革的接受、配置和颁布中发挥作用，这些变革导致了蒙古第一个区域规模的政体--匈奴国家。该项目将在蒙古中北部开展工作，利用调查和挖掘数据分析当地和非当地陶瓷的中子活化分析揭示的交换关系，以及匈奴时期之前和期间聚落模式的趋势。田园游牧生活的独特性为政治制度的转变提供了一个引人入胜的案例研究，并为世界其他地区，包括美索不达米亚、东非和中央安第斯山脉提供了有希望的经验教训。因此，目前的研究将阐明游牧社区普通家庭采取政治行动的能力，然后询问这一观点如何为人类学理解社会政治复杂性的替代轨迹提供信息。

For many, nomads of the Eurasian steppe are "stoic" figures that are the product of a long life lived in isolation, always moving as the natural environment dictates. The distinctiveness of the pastoral nomadic historical and archaeological records, however, allows researchers to analyze general questions of political organization in relation to a wider range of variables. It is important from a comparative perspective to know how political strategies play out differently over conditions of rapid mobility, extensive territories, and low population density. The main questions addressed by this research project are how do steppe polities provide examples of alternative trajectories for development of political systems and what does this tell about the ways in which human societies do or do not adopt more complex forms of organization? Accordingly, the anthropological questions addressed by studies of steppe society need not be "pastoral" questions per se, but general questions on human organization that take into consideration individual and group mobility.This project raises the question of what does community scale political development look like during the earliest stages of statehood among eastern steppe nomads? To address this question, the research will explore the "bottom-up" processes at play in the local acceptance, configuration, and enactment of political change that led up to the first regional scale polity of Mongolia - the Xiongnu state. Working in north central Mongolia, the project will use survey and excavation data to analyze exchange relationships as revealed by neutron activation analysis of local and nonlocal ceramics and trends in settlement patterns prior to and during the Xiongnu Period. The distinctiveness of the pastoral nomadic lifeway presents a fascinating case study for the transformation of political systems and holds promising lessons for other parts of the world including Mesopotamia, East Africa, and the Central Andes. As such, the current study will shed light on the capacity for political action by common households within a nomadic community and then ask how this perspective informs anthropological understanding of alternative trajectories for socio-political complexity.