In 1974, Susan Lees and Daniel Bates argued that the introduction of canal irrigation in southern Mesopotamia gave rise to specialized pastoralism at the expense of mixed farming strategies. canal irrigation had higher labor needs than rain-fed farming, needs incompatible with the exigencies of both small-scale domestic, or sedentary (as stein 2004 calls it) herding and cereal cropping; and as well it reconfigured the space available for pasturing animals (Lees and Bates 1974: 189). household units therefore chose to pursue one subsistence strategy or the other, and those who pursued herding were forced to graze their herds farther away from the core irrigated zones, and, therefore, farther away from their social group. The reduction of land open to pasture because it was now irrigated, the greater population densities supported by irrigation, and the redistribution of population centers all contributed to the increasing physical marginalization of animal husbandry, and once households made their subsistence choice and became nomads they become “politically discrete and potentially predatory” (Lees and Bates 1974: 191) after only a very few generations. for although initially pastoralists would have had kin ties to the sedentary farmers with whom they exchanged goods, distance and mobility, fragmentation and dispersal, served to sever those social bonds.
This brief summary encapsulates why it is that, despite geographic contiguity and well-understood economic symbiosis, archaeologists still believe nomads to be essentially alien to urban and agricultural society in the Near east of the third and second millennia B. C., even after the shifts in consciousness brought by processual and especially post-processual paradigms. Whether or not one agrees with Bates and Lee’s depiction of the origins of specialized pastoralism, the fundamental ideas that the only available choice was one strategy or the other; that social integration is only maintained by personal presence; and that pastoralists have no affective, that is, social and/or emotional, ties beyond the boundaries of their own immediate group, have proved very powerful in our reconstructions of pastoralism in the past, perpetuating this pervasive idea of an innate, an endemic, separation, if not outright hostility between the sedentary/urban world and nomads. Sometimes the debt to Bates and Lees is explicit (Abdi 2003; McCorriston 1997: 526), sometime it is only implicit in an unexamined intellectual inheritance of the discipline (such as Archi 2006: 99), but in either case it is based on understandings that are no longer theoretically nor empirically valid for the following reasons:
• it is an understanding derived from our own unreflexive positioning in creating and then viewing the “other,” having long ago identified with, and privileged, the cultivation-based, urban world; 69
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• at the same time it derives from anthropological understandings of kinship as determined only by blood and as therefore bounded and ultimately exclusionary, views no longer sustainable within anthropology itself;
• it is deterministic, for while pastoralism no doubt has certain characteristics and constraints, these do not necessitate any inevitable outcomes;
• it takes insufficient account of issues of “time-space distanciation.”
While there are many histories that go into the first point, such as colonialism, historical materialism, and the role of anthropological analogy in archaeology, and a vast amount of recent work to elucidate the second point, it is the last two that are the focus of this paper. What is of essential interest about pastoralism is not so much the mechanics of animal husbandry, but what the mechanics of animal husbandry often (but by no means necessarily) lead to, that is, mobility. It is in mobility that the fundamental questions lie because mobility brings constraints, ones obviously to do with time and space, but also to do with organization. Explanatory interest therefore is vested in the effects of mobility on social, political, and economic life.
Although there are of course others, the key constraints on which this paper focuses are those of fragmentation and dispersal, for these are the factors that are assumed to result in that essential separation and disaffection between pastoralist and farmers that so thoroughly undergirds the perspectives of Near eastern studies. But separation is not an inevitable result of fragmentation and dispersal for it may be countered by the stretching/shrinking of time and space — distanciation as anthony Giddens (1981) terms it. I suggest there is evidence that indicates time and space was transcended in the ancient near east, certainly in the third and second millennia B. C., by an intricate mesh of social structures, political ideologies, religious beliefs, rituals, and other practices, that, whether consciously intended or not, had the effect of binding disparate, and distant, components of the sociopolitical entity into one. This complex of structure, thought, and practice was constitutive of ideologies of kinship — not kinship as pre-existing in actual connections through birth, although they are both present and implicit, but kinship as created and incorporative of networks of social relations no matter actual birth relations.
I discuss here two examples of the invocation of social networks as time-space distancia-tion. It must be stated categorically that these two examples are in no way adduced to prove each other; rather they are simply parallel, and independent, phenomena. They do, however, serve to elucidate each other when placed in apposition, for our sources in neither instance are complete. The first is a second-millennium illustration as found in the Mari texts: the meaning and significance of the place called Der. The second belongs to the third millennium, and consists of archaeological investigations at two sites that I propose are closely connected: Tell Banat and Tell Chuera.
World History
