What is a polity? Subversive archaism and the bureaucratic nation-state 2018 Lewis H. Morgan Lecture

Abstract

In this revised text of the 2018 Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture, we encounter two communities—one a village in highland Crete, the other a small enclave in the old core of Bangkok—against which bureaucratic forces have exercised disproportionate violence, claiming to do so in response to what are openly admitted to be infractions of formal law. The particularly harsh punishments meted out to these communities, in contrast to what has happened to other, otherwise similarly insubordinate local groups, calls for a specific explanation. This would seem to lie at least partly in the residents’ tactic of subversive archaism, in which residents, through a variety of performative acts, challenge the mor..