Practice and Political Centralisation: A New Approach to Political Evolution [and Comments and Reply]

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Abstract
The increasing isolation of political evolutionary theory from theoretical developments in cultural anthropology is evidenced by a proclivity to interpret social change primarily in terms of material or demographic conditions and contingencies and functional or adaptive processes. This approach overlooks the enormous range of nonmaterial circumstances to which actors and the political systems they create also respond and tends to leave the processes involved in the emergence of political hierarchy undescribed and the human agent dimly sketched at best. An alternative perspective that addresses these shortcomings is offered by practice theory, which insists on incorporating nonmaterial as well as material circumstances into social process, stressing the role of individual agents in using these conditions and contingencies to create social life. This paper attempts to demonstrate the value of practice theory for the study of political centralisation by drawing out and empirically testing its novel predictions about the relationship between centralisation and demography.

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