前现代治理的比较研究:从分类转向关系和网络

The Comparative Study of Pre-Modern Governance:Shifting from Categories to Relations and Networks

深度依赖考古材料的上古人类研究,大体上仍深陷在源自19世纪中叶的概念和框架之中。正如当时所需,这种经久不衰的框架主要立足于共时性文本和民族志的解释。这些方法帮助推动了过去半个世纪全球考古发现在广度和空间(多尺度)范围内巨大的实证性进展,然而通过它们所做出的研究及综述也产生了与当下范式预期不符的信息。有些学者便另辟蹊径。这里概述的新原则和新方法建立在过去几十年里通过考古学及相关学科所取得的成果之上。所提议的新概念框架探寻各种关联形态和并行进程,并聚焦于多样性和相似性的解释。

The study of humanity's deep past,which is heavily reliant on archaeological data,largely remains steeped in concepts and frames that have their roots in the midnineteenth century.As was necessary for that time,this highly durable framing was grounded principally in synchronic textual and ethnographic accounts.These approaches helped to propel the last half-century of great empirical progress in the breadth and spatial(multi-scalar)scope of global archaeological findings,yet these studies and the syntheses that they prompted also yielded information that did not accord with the expectations of the extant paradigms.Alternative pathways of change were recorded.New tenets and approaches that build on what we have learned through archaeology and related disciplines over the past decades are outlined here.The new conceptual framing proposed looks for relational patterns and parallel processes,with a focal lens on the explication of diversity as well as similarities.