Civilisation recast is a small but challenging book. The authors are social anthropologists with many years of fieldwork to their names. Feuchtwang is an expert on East Asia, having published on topics ranging from popular religion to the inter-generational experience of trauma in modern China and Taiwan. Rowlands has published extensively on the ethnography and long-term history of West African societies, and is also known for his many seminal contributions to archaeological theory and cultural heritage. Comparisons between China and Africa—especially around the theme of ancestors—provide the most consistent thread running throughout their book, and a platform for their wider discussions of the concept of civilisation.
They begin by drawing a contrast between dominant European and Chinese attitudes to civilisation, the former characterised by a sense of temporal rupture (our structural distinctions between prehistoric, archaic, ancient and modern), and the latter by an equally profound sense of continuity stretching back over the millennia. Both attitudes are in a sense artifices, removed from, or imposed onto, quite different historical realities. The question addressed throughout the book is whether a deep-time perspective—informed by archaeological, historical, genetic and ethnographic data—can be brought to bear in understanding the contrasting forms taken by these two concepts of civilisation, or whether we should regard them instead as constructs of a free-floating past. Such a past is essentially there to be invented in whatever forms modernity requires of it.
The authors favour the former possibility, and in that sense, the book is a challenge to much theorising in cultural heritage studies, which treats the past as an infinitely malleable resource. This point is slightly camouflaged throughout the book, but appears prominently right at the end, in a brief final section on ‘Civilisations and their heritage’. It will be obvious to the reader by now that civilisations, for Feuchtwang and Rowlands, have nothing to do with trait lists of cultural or technological achievements such as literacy and urbanism, except in the sense that these are criteria of achievement through which European societies deny civilised status to others, relegating them to the standing of ‘archaic societies’. Nor are civilisations, for them, to do with the origins of the state, or not only that. Civilisation, in their view, encompasses political economy in various ways.
In the early sections of the book, the authors outline an intellectual history for their position, in which Marcel Mauss and Louis Dumont emerge as the central figures. Mauss for his interest in separating the concept of civilisation from those of state-hood and nationhood, using it instead as a descriptor of inter-societal borrowings and trans-cultural flows, which must be refused in order to constitute bounded identities. Dumont for his approach to ideology, which allows them to analyse civilisations as durable sets of aspirations or ideal types of personhood, which persist over extremely long time spans in particular world regions. They insist that these forms of civilisation are not immutable. They are the product of flows and encounters across societal boundaries, which have to be constantly re-negotiated and transformed in light of historical experience.
Seen in this light, modern discourses on civilisation are to be understood as further transformations of these more enduring cultural dispositions. Feuchtwang exemplifies this point in relation to modern Chinese notions of governmentality, which he relates to more elementary and ancient principles of filial piety and sage rule. Rowlands—at various points in the book—argues for similar long-term continuities in West Africa, this time made evident through the example of ancestor cults and their remarkably persistent role as vehicles of political centralisation. The most ambitious parts of the book come in its middle sections, where the authors seek to trace the prehistoric roots of these distinct principles of civilisation, which by now are more clearly defined as modes of self-fashioning, appealed to in various ways by kings and commoners alike.
Here they rely most directly on the findings of archaeology and archaeological science, to argue that both the African and Asian traditions drew ultimately from a common reservoir of civilisational elements or cultural ‘packages’. That deep history of cultural interaction is traced through the suggestive distribution of material remains, especially evidence for long-range maritime circuits moving around quantities of unguents, spices, medicines, ivory, woods and metals, as far back as the Middle Holocene. The often violent cosmologies of Bronze and Iron Age kingdoms, which arose at that same time, were grounded in claims to control such inter-societal flows, policing the boundaries between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.
Rather than leading to the formation of exploited peripheries, this rise of kingdoms and empires produced a kind of mirror-image civilisation, or ‘chain of civilisations’, based on less hierarchical principles, a Neolithic version of the ‘global south’:
we can trace a southern corridor of interaction extending from Island Southeast Asia, parts of Melanesia, to South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa where the formation of states and empires based on coercive violence and control over people and resources did not occur. Instead the Neolithic transforms into increasingly extensive forms of interactive networks in which the dissemination of ritual knowledge, cults, and apotropaic powers of bodies and substances as well as the efficacy of techniques are of paramount importance (p. 94).
What Feuchtwang and Rowlands are doing here is not always entirely clear. One can quibble with many of their reconstructions, and some of their chronology, but my sense is that it will be important for archaeologists to engage with their arguments, nonetheless.
For what they seem to be offering is the basis for a completely new understanding of those world regions that European colonial archaeology neglected, precisely because they lacked such familiar criteria of civilisation as grand monuments, ancient writing systems and cities. Gaping holes left in the historical and archaeological records of regions such as Oceania or Central Africa left their indigenous populations vulnerable, and subject to the accusation that they lacked both history and their own forms of civilisation.
Civilisation recast challenges us to reverse this kind of epistemic violence, not just on ethical or humanitarian grounds (which is ultimately patronising), but by embracing new evidence, as it begins to reveal the durability and dynamics of other forms of civilisation, outside the canon of so-called ‘complex societies’. It is therefore best regarded as the beginning of something yet to be fully formulated: a work in progress.
