The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia

David Sneath

December, 2007
Cloth, 288 pages, 3 maps
ISBN: 978-0-231-14054-6
$50.00 / £29.50

List of Maps

1. Introduction

2. The Myth of the Kinship Society: Evolutionism and the Anthropological Imagination

3. The Imaginary Tribe: Colonial and Imperial Orders and the Peripheral Polity

4. The State Construction of the Clan: The Unilineal Descent Group and the Ordering of State Subjects

5. The Essentialized Nomad: Neocolonial and Soviet Models

6. Creating Peoples: Nation-state History and the Notion of Identity

7. The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders and the Substrata of Power

Notes

References

Index

Related Subjects

• East Asian Studies

About the Author

David Sneath is director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at Cambridge University and a lecturer in social anthropology. He conducted doctoral research in Inner Mongolia in the 1980s and since then has carried out research in Mongolia and other parts of Inner Asia.

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