We run tingz, tingz nah run we

Abstract

best interest through skilful manipulation of social circumstances and material resources. But another answer is that in many cases they didn’t submit; aggrandizers were curtailed by overt and subversive resistance to their ends. This point brings to the forefront one issue not fully addressed by Borake – the relationship between the theory of anarchism and the concept of egalitarianism. They are not the same thing – anarchism, with its emphasis on autonomy and decentralization, staves off centralization at a political level and maintains autonomy at a local level, but it does not necessarily maintain egalitarianism in all social contexts. Coast Salish societies of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America had significant inequalities, yet remained politically decentralized and maintained a high degree of autonomy in decision making (Grier 2017). In short, they traded off equality for autonomy. The empirical component of Borake’s study offers a fresh look at monumental constructions in Iron Age and medieval Scandinavia (monumental in the sense of Grier and Schwadron 2017). Most critical is the notion that we should see in many of the collective, expansive and iterative construction works she considers not the heavy hand of centralized power, but the product of decentralized collective action. How such enduring works can serve to reify decentralized politics and local autonomy has been quite underappreciated. Collective action in the service of autonomy might seem incongruous, but only from starting assumptions that preclude it (see Trigger 1990). We do get inklings of similar connections and practices from the archaeology of hunter-gatherer-fishers in the south-eastern US (e.g. Randall 2015; Wallis 2008), and similar to Borake’s study of Danevirke, there is a long arc to the construction process, often covering millennia, that reiterates, reinforces and at times remakes the social order over time. Similar ideas are also emerging from the Northwest Coast of North America (Grier, Angelbeck and McLay 2017). The archaeological question then becomes, how do we confidently recognize the products of anarchic organization in the archaeological record? Does a slow additive emergence and repeated investment in material thing sites directly imply networks, justified authority, autonomy and decentralization? That is Borake’s assertion in using the term ‘thing sites’ to describe such places – that the materiality and sociality of these places are embedded in a recursive and persistent relationship through time, reflecting expressions of anarchism principles. This is something we should be evaluating in archaeological contexts around the world. So I see strength in Borake’s application of anarchism as both a theoretical and an analytical framework. Ultimately this approach can provide a way to rethink aspects of the material record of collective action and its relation to a core set of principles that were undoubtedly operating in many social contexts in the past. In this sense, it offers a bottom-up theoretical perspective that can allow us to – in Borake’s words – ‘gain a more complex and nuanced understanding of how societies operate’ (p. 62; see also Furholt et al. 2019).