As its subtitle implies, this book is a polemic that takes aim at practically all scholarship on nomadic pastoral societies, not only in Inner Asia but worldwide. Sneath declares that clans and lineages did not exist in these societies but were imposed upon them by historians and anthropologists blinded by colonial and evolutionary biases. In his view such societies were organized around aristocratic elites who dominated ordinary nomads to create “headless states” which served their own class interests.
Sneath's center of attention is Mongolia. During the Manchu Qing dynasty, nomads were indeed reduced to subjects within fixed banner units ruled by princes to whom they were permanently tied. Projecting this model onto earlier periods is more problematic and would require a far more detailed analysis to make it persuasive. His quick run through two thousand years of steppe history that stresses the existence of decimal military units and long-lived ruling dynasties fails to do this. In particular, he does not explain why nomadic polities there alternated between those with highly centralized leadership (Xiongnu, Tűrk, Uighur, Mongol) and those that were headless. Others have attributed this to the nomads' relationship with China, but Sneath insists that nomadic political organization in Mongolia was the product of internal and not external dynamics. However he provides only conjectures for how this might have happened. Similarly the state is defined so broadly as to lose all real meaning.
What Sneath calls a headless state others would call a confederation. And contrary to his assertion that anthropologists remain wedded to a genealogical conical clan model, the more common view is that such Inner Asian confederations were the products of reorganization enforced by division from the top down rather than alliance from the bottom up. It has long been accepted that “actual” kinship relations (based on principles of descent, marriage, or adoption) were evident mostly within smaller units: nuclear families, extended households, local lineages and clans that got weaker as the group's size grew. In other words, Sneath conflates social structure with political structure as opposed to examining how they interact.
While one may disagree with Sneath's analysis of Inner Asian nomadic societies, he is clearly in command of the material concerning them. The same cannot be said when he extends his argument to the nomads of Central Asia, the Middle East, and even Africa. He contends that all the anthropologists who ever worked among them were wrong in describing the existence of lineages or clans. Since his own fieldwork did not include these areas, he cites disputes about the significance of lineage or clan structures as evidence of their non-existence. As one who saw and described such systems in Afghanistan, this onslaught of theoretical certitude brought to mind a challenge once issued by Marx (Groucho, not Karl): “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” Far from being under the sway of Western colonialists or nineteenth-century social evolutionary theorists such as Louis Henry Morgan, contemporary students of nomadic societies here have been far more influenced by the fourteenth-century Arab social historian ibn Khaldun. It was he who claimed that ‘asabiyya (group feeling) was the product of close kinship ties or patron-client relationships that developed most strongly among tribal peoples such as the Bedouin who made a fetish of the purity of their descent groups. Ibn Khaldun also noted that these societies were highly egalitarian and that dynastic leadership rarely lasted four generations. Sneath may be correct that scholars have underestimated the influence of aristocratic social orders in Inner Asia, but this cultural acceptance of hierarchy was much weaker or non-existent among nomadic pastoral societies elsewhere.
The Headless State devotes itself primarily to demolition—tearing down existing notions of how pastoral nomadic societies were organized and worked. What it lacks is a superior alternative. Each chapter is a set piece that could easily stand alone. This is unfortunate because nothing better buttresses the critique of other models than the presentation of obviously better ones.
