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The Power of Infrastructures: a Counternarrative and a Speculation

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Abstract

“Infrastructural power” refers to how states “penetrate” their societies and also how local organizations resist such attempts. This essay explores the latter sense of infrastructural power. First, it notes aspects of local power in ancient Mesopotamia, tracing the existence of councils and assemblies over about 3000 years and establishing the concept of a “heterarchy of power” in Mesopotamia, which is a counternarrative to assertions of totalitarian power by kings and central governments. There follows a cross-cultural review of selected other ancient cities and states in order to assess comparable and contrasting local organizations and degrees of infrastructural power. Finally, resistance to state power is explored, and a speculation about the qualities of stability and fragility of political power in early cities and states is advanced.

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Notes

  1. I originally composed this essay for the conference, “Infrastructural and Despotic Power in Ancient States,” organized by Clifford Ando at the University of Chicago, 10–12 April, 2014. Since the essay is a critique of the concept of despotic power in early states, or at least a qualification of how much power ancient states actually had, it does not fit in a forthcoming volume of the conference’s proceedings.

  2. The project requires a team of scholars, and the resulting book will perhaps look like an article in Science. That is, there would be an organizing author and a dozen or so co-authors. No single person has or can have the expertise to write such a book on the scale I envision, and it is hubristic to pretend otherwise. I thank Clifford Ando (and Seth Richardson) for the invitation to come to the Chicago conference and for the opportunity to try out some of the ideas expressed in this essay.

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Acknowledgments

Seth Richardson’s comments on this paper have improved its clarity. Daniel T. Potts supplied a key article. Thanks to both and to two anonymous reviewers.

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  1. 209 Polaco St., Santa Fe, NM, 87501, USA

    Norman Yoffee

  2. Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Norman Yoffee

  3. Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU, New York, NY, USA

    Norman Yoffee

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Yoffee, N. The Power of Infrastructures: a Counternarrative and a Speculation. J Archaeol Method Theory 23, 1053–1065 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9260-0

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