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Inner Asia and the Spatial Politics of Empire pp 17–46Cite as

Overcoming the Tyranny of Distance: Culture Contact and Politics

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Abstract

Archaeologists have devised many different frameworks for treating the organizational effects of interregional interaction. Inner Asian statehood must be understood from the vantage point of multi-regional interaction and therefore requires a clear statement of the relationship between long-distance relationships, exchange, and political organization. By drawing on the anthropological concept of entanglement, this chapter sets out a model for social interaction, interregional contacts, and local politics that is suitable for the Inner Asian case study.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For useful and brief overviews of relational sociology in Europe and North America see Donati 2007 and Mische 2011. Informative discussions of the differences between structuration and practice theory and recent relational approaches are provided by Crossley (2011: 24–28), Bottero (2009), Dépelteau (2008), and Emirbayer and Mische (1998).

  2. 2.

    In contexts where political negotiations have become highly formalized and controlled (i.e., institutionalized), the predictability of these outcomes might even be compared to scripted public theater (Scott 2009: 4). However, I would argue that such political arenas are a relatively recent phenomenon derived from centuries of experimentation with state techniques for political monitoring.

  3. 3.

    For two entirely different concepts of “scaling-up” see Knappett 2009: 16–17 and Turchin 2009: 198–197.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    William Honeychurch

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Honeychurch, W. (2015). Overcoming the Tyranny of Distance: Culture Contact and Politics. In: Inner Asia and the Spatial Politics of Empire. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1815-7_2

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