Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

Preface
5
The story of this book is rather curious. It was written absolutely
unintentionally. It grew out of a short paper prepared for, and presented at the
panel “Alternativity in Cultural History: Heterarchy and Homoarchy as
Evolutionary Trajectories” that I had proposed (together with Prof. Carole L.
Crumley) for, and convened at the Third International Conference “Hierarchy
and Power in the History of Civilizations” held in Moscow, Russia in June
2004 (see the Conference book of abstracts, reports and proceedings: Alexeev
et al. 2004; Bondarenko and Kavykin 2004; 2005; Bondarenko and
Nemirovskiy 2006). The paper was so short that when the idea to publish the
panel’s proceedings appeared, I had to write some more pages for transforming
it into yet a rather short article. The article was submitted to the publisher
along with other contributions (see Bondarenko 2006) but I was already
thinking of writing a longer version for an academic journal. When the
manuscript approached its fortieth “standard page”, I finally understood that it
had become too long for a typical journal article. However, by that moment I
had already felt unable to make myself stop writing, just as now I could not
understand how less than a year before I was cudgeling my brains over the odd
and funny problem of how to make the text at least a dozen pages long. So, I
wrote this book out of despair: no other format of academic publication is able
to comprise so many words and pages. Nevertheless, the text has turned out
rather short again, this time for a book. So, the manuscript has passed the way
from a short paper to a short article to a short book. Yet my modest hope is that
the well-wishing reader will find in this opus some merits other than that it will
not take him or her too much time to read it. If this turns out the case, the
author will be even happier because though the book was really written
occasionally and unexpectedly for himself, it deals with the problematics which
he, this or that way, had been approaching and studying for not a short time at
all, to which he has eventually devoted almost twenty years of academic career,
in other words – of life.
Besides my wife Natasha and daughter Tanechka to whom I cordially
dedicate this book, I am indebted for constant support to my mother Lidia.
I also regard as my great honor and privilege this chance to express
deep and sincere gratitude to many colleagues. I would like to say “thank you”
once again to all the participants in that very panel on alternativity in cultural
history and to Carole Crumley (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
USA) who was preparing it and was to convene together with me but, to my
and all the panel participants’ great pity, could not come to the Conference. I
am grateful to David Small at Lehigh University (Bethlehem, USA) for
supplying me with a photocopy of the inspiring and groundbreaking