Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

23
evolutionists themselves but preferred to study “structures” and “institutions”
more or less statically on the grounds that, to their minds, any reconstruction of
deep historical (evolutionary) sequences in non-literate cultures could not but
be as speculative as it was in the writings of Tylor, Morgan, Spencer and other
unilinear evolutionists (as far as, actually, there had been no evolutionists of
any other sort by that time).
The very fact of evolutionism’s return to the big stage of
anthropological theory due to Leslie White did not set the problem of the state’s
inevitability going as White’s way of thinking was not less unilinear and
(probably because of the necessity to carry on severe struggle against “antievolutionists”)
even more rigid than that of the evolutionists of the 19 th – early
20 th centuries. In the Soviet Union evolutionism (in the form of dogmatic
Marxism, in anthropology based on canonization of the ideas of Morgan in
their Marx and Engels’s interpretation) had been the only officially allowed
teaching since the early 1930s. Curiously (and at the same time so tragically
for many scholars soon subjected to repressions!), the ideas that contained a
grain of non-unilinearity – those of the Asiatic mode of production (Marx) and
of two distinctive pathways to the state: the Western, through privatization of
the means of production, and the Eastern, through usurpation of political
functions (Engels), were declared… non-Marxist, contradicting “true Marxism”
(see, e.g., Lynsha 1995; Kradin 2004: 43–46).
The impetus for a breakthrough was given by seminal works by Julian
Steward (vide stricto 1955/1949). As it is well known, he did not argue that the
state could be not the only possible crown of socio-political evolution.
However, he substantiated the idea of evolutionary pathways’ multiplicity – the
very thought that cultures can evolve differently, at least on the way to state.
This thought was not at all accepted for granted. For such younger classics of
American neoevolutionism as, for example, Morton Fried (1967; 1970/1960),
Elman Service (1971/1962; 1975), Robert Carneiro (1970; 2003: 110–115), or
even Marshall Sahlins (1960) 14 the unilinear approach in general and to the
universality of the state in particular has remained much closer. Also at least
till publication of Ideology and the Formation of Early States (Claessen and
Oosten 1996a), unilinearity was characteristic of the Early State concept
(Carneiro 1987: 757; Skalnнk 1996: 84–85; Bondarenko 1998c: 18–22;
Bondarenko and Korotayev 2000d: 12–13; Kradin 1998: 10–12), one of the
most deeply and thoroughly elaborated Europe-born theories of preindustrial
societies’ socio-political evolution.
The evident fact that a great many of societies have never transformed
into states they still tended to see as the result of their devolution or, more
often, of sticking on a lower, preliminary stair of the only evolutionary staircase
leading up to the state (for example, due to “the law of evolutionary potential”
[Service 1960]). Nonetheless, by now world anthropology has produced a
significant number of penetrating publications on the multiplicity of pathways