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The Political Landscape Constellations of Authority in
Early Complex Polities 1st Edition Adam T. Smith Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): Adam T. Smith
ISBN(s): 9781417525638, 1417525630
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 4.16 MB
Year: 2003
Language: english
The Political Landscape
The Political Landscape
Constellations of Authority
in Early Complex Polities

Adam T. Smith

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley / Los Angeles / London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2003 by
The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Adam T.
The political landscape : constellations of authority in early
complex polities / Adam T. Smith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-520-23749-8 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-520-23750-1
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Political anthropology. 2. Landscape archaeology—Political
aspects. 3. Landscape assessment. I. Title.
GN492.2 .S64 2003
306.2—dc21 2003005058

Manufactured in the United States of America

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements

of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).8
To my parents, with love and thanks
 Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Surveying the Political Landscape 1

1. Sublimated Spaces 30

2. Archaeologies of Political Authority 78

3. Geopolitics 112

4. Polities 149

5. Regimes 184

6. Institutions 232

Conclusion: Toward a Cartography of Political Landscapes 271

References Cited 283

Index 315
 Illustrations

Figures
1. The death pit of Queen Puabi of Ur. 2
2. Andy Warhol, Electric Chair (1965). 4
3. Four continental views of early complex polities. 18
4. Christaller’s geometric lattice of settlement location. 39
5. A site size histogram for two eras of settlement on the
Susiana plain of southwestern Iran. 41
6. The representational aesthetics of central place theory. 44
7. Central Mesoamerica showing major Preclassic and
Classic period Maya sites. 117
8. Periodization and chronology of lowland Mesoamerica. 118
9. Two enduring models of Classic period lowland Maya
geopolitical organization. 119
10. A Thiessen polygon lattice applied to Classic Maya settle-
ment, and a nearest neighbor array. 124
11. A central place hub-and-spoke array superimposed
on remotely sensed sacbeob around Calakmul. 128
12. Site distances along existing routes and pathways, northeast
Peten, Guatemala. 129
13. A diagram of bilateral political relationships centered
on Calakmul. 132
14. The Classic period Maya lowlands from the perspective
of Calakmul. 134
15. The House of the Governor, Uxmal. 138

ix
x ILLUSTRATIONS

16. Copan Stela A. 140

17. Seibal Stela 10. 142
18. The Palette of Narmer, Late Predynastic, ca. 3150–3125 b.c. 150
19. Eastern Anatolia and southern Caucasia showing major
Urartian sites of the ninth to seventh centuries b.c. 157
20. A periodization of Bronze and Iron Age southern Caucasia
and a chronology of the Urartian kings. 158
21. The Late Bronze Age fortress of Tsakahovit. 167
22. Late Bronze and Early Iron Age fortress sites in the region
of Mt. Aragats. 171
23. Urartian fortresses in the region of Mt. Aragats. 172
24. Known Late Bronze Age sites in the Tsakahovit Plain,
Armenia. 173
25. Architectural and topographic plans of three pre-Urartian
fortified political centers from southern Caucasia. 174
26. Architectural and topographic plans of two imperial period
Urartian centers on the Ararat plain. 176
27. Architectural and topographic plan of Teishebai URU,
a reconstruction period Urartian center on the Ararat plain. 179
28. Architectural and topographic plan of the Urartian fortress
at Aragats. 180
29. Mesopotamia and its surroundings, third and early second
millennia b.c. 191
30. A carved stone relief from the palace of Sennacherib at
Nineveh (ca. 704–681 b.c.). 206
31. Upper section of the stela of the law code of Hammurabi,
ca. 1792–1750 b.c. 207
32. Fragment from the Stela of Ur-Namma. 208
33. Architectural plan of Ur during the Third Dynasty and early
Old Babylonian periods with modern topographic contours. 212
34. Kassite period map of Nippur inscribed on clay tablet. 217
35. City plan of Babylon during the Neo-Babylonian period
of the mid-first millennium b.c. 218
36. Residential areas at Ur during the Third Dynasty and early
Old Babylonian periods: the EM Site. 221
37. Residential areas at Ur during the Third Dynasty and early
Old Babylonian periods: the AH Site. 222
38. A spatial graph of the AH Site at Ur. 223
39. The new architecture of the German federal regime, Berlin. 234
40. Comparative views of Urartian masonry. 240
 ILLUSTRATIONS xi

41. Architectural plan of Argishtihinili West. 242

42. A spatial graph of Argishtihinili West. 243
43. Architectural plan of Erebuni. 246
44. A spatial graph of Erebuni. 247
45. Architectural plan of Teishebai URU. 251
46. A spatial graph of Teishebai URU. 252
47. A selection of fortress elements on Urartian bronze bowls
from Teishebai URU. 256
48. Two pieces of an Urartian bronze fortress model
from Toprakkale. 257
49. A fragment of an Urartian bronze belt. 258
50. An Urartian stone block with carved relief from Kefkalesi. 262
51. An Urartian bronze plaque from Erebuni. 264

Table
1. Nearest Neighbor Distances for Classic Period Maya Sites
in the Northeast Peten. 127
 Acknowledgments

Perhaps because this book is concerned with the role that landscapes play
in our lives, it is di‹cult for me to reflect on the many individuals who
contributed to the manuscript except in terms of the places where the book
took shape. The present study owes a profound debt to the institutions
where it was pursued and the numerous friends, colleagues, and students
who oªered thoughtful critical reflections on the manuscript as it moved
through various drafts. The work began as a theoretical problem that de-
veloped out of the dissertation research that I conducted in southern Trans-
caucasia while a student at the University of Arizona in Tucson. T. Patrick
Culbert, David Killick, and Ana Alonso all played important roles in de-
veloping the conceptual perspectives that drove me to explore the impli-
cations of emerging spatial theory for an archaeology of politics. I owe a
particularly sizable debt to the late Carol Kramer, who not only super-
vised my research but also took on the role of mentor. It is with great sad-
ness that I contemplate completing this work without her. And I grieve
for the future students of anthropology now deprived of her knowledge,
wit, independence, and dedication.
The research project expanded dramatically while I was a post-doctoral
fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan, Ann Ar-
bor. What had begun as an inquiry into Urartian uses of landscape de-
veloped into a project in comparative political anthropology that sought
to examine overlapping sets of issues in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica.
A number of colleagues at Michigan played profound roles in shaping
the analytical dimensions of this book. Susan Alcock, John Cherry, Piotr
Michalowski, Jeªrey Parsons, and Henry Wright all provided a great deal

xiii
xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

of assistance in thinking through various elements of the project, from

the highly detailed to the broadly theoretical. I particularly want to thank
Norman Yoªee for serving as that most sought after of colleagues: the
friendly, supportive, and careful critic. I owe him an incalculable debt for
his guidance and support. I would also like to thank those students of
Professor Yoªee who read and commented on early drafts of the present
work. And I must convey my gratitude to the Michigan Society of Fel-
lows, an extraordinary institution, for oªering an exceedingly pleasant
environment for scholarly work and discussion. A number of my col-
leagues oªered very useful comments on portions of the text and the over-
all design of the work, including Paul Anderson, Alaina Lemon, and James
Boyd White.
Only after I joined the faculty of the University of Chicago did the
manuscript reach fruition. I am indebted to many colleagues and students
who oªered trenchant criticism on various drafts of chapters or provided
critical rejoinders standing in the corridors of Haskell Hall. The partici-
pants in my graduate seminars on “Landscape” and “The Archaeology of
Political Life” provided valuable insights into the shape of the theoreti-
cal argument. Helpful comments were also provided by participants in
the Chicago Theoretical Archaeology Workshop. I want to thank Ian
Straughn, who read large swaths of the manuscript at a very early stage;
Patrick Scott, who proved a thoughtful critic in the Theoretical Archae-
ology Workshop; and Peter Johansen, who provided cogent commentary
that helped to refine my thinking on several issues.
Many of my colleagues oªered exceedingly useful advice and critiques
of various arguments and points developed in the text, including Andrew
Apter, Michael Dietler, Nadia Abu el-Haj, Alan Kolata, and Nicholas Kou-
choukos. John L. Comaroª gave several chapters a close, critical reading
that helped me to tighten my argumentation and fill in gaps in my under-
standing of the State. I particularly want to thank Robert McC. Adams,
who provided an important boost of encouragement as the manuscript
entered its final form as well as numerous insightful comments and
thoughtful suggestions. In addition, several colleagues in the Oriental In-
stitute have been extremely generous with their time and their ideas. Tony
Wilkinson provided very thoughtful reflections and comments on the
problems of landscape as viewed from the Near East. MacGuire Gibson,
John Saunders, and John Larsen provided much appreciated help with
key illustrations.
A word of acknowledgment must also be extended to numerous col-
leagues from diverse places who oªered extensive comments and critiques
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv

that forced me to argue various issues much more closely. I owe a great
debt first and foremost to Ruben Badalyan of the Institute of Archaeol-
ogy and Ethnography in Yerevan, Armenia, who has been an insightful
colleague and supportive friend since I first started conducting fieldwork
in Caucasia. I also want to thank Pavel Avetisyan, also of the Institute of
Archaeology and Ethnography in Yerevan, for his suggestions and thoughts
on various issues raised in the following pages. My thanks to Philip Kohl
for first introducing me to the archaeology of southern Caucasia. Both
Cynthia Robin and Patricia Cook provided a great deal of expertise on
Maya archaeology, without which I would undoubtedly have been lost.
Geoª Emberling oªered helpful reactions to my account of landscape,
particularly as applied to early Mesopotamia. Ruth Van Dyke provided a
great deal of extremely helpful commentary on issues of space and land-
scape. And I must also thank the two anonymous reviewers who read the
manuscript for the University of California Press and provided me with
highly detailed readings of the manuscript that helped both in my argu-
mentation and in the construction of the narrative.
Throughout the process of writing this book, I have been guided by
the staª of the University of California Press, including Marian Olivas,
Suzanne Knott, Julia Johnson Zaªerano, and Stanley Holwitz. Stan was
remarkably patient as this book gained in intensity and argumentation
even as it missed a couple of deadlines.
Finally, I must thank my family for their patience and enthusiasm. It
can fairly be said that without my wife, Amy, this project would never
have been completed. No acknowledgment can express my thanks for her
patience, love, and support. Without my parents, who stoked my abid-
ing interest in politics (albeit with substantially diªerent ends in mind!),
this project would never have begun. And it is with thanks for beginnings
that I dedicate this book to them.
 Introduction
Surveying the Political Landscape

Perhaps never in two thousand years has the reality of the state been
so dim in men’s minds.
Richard Wright, “Two Letters to Dorothy Norman”

In 1928, the Illustrated London News published a sensational pair of im-

ages based on C. Leonard Woolley ’s excavations at the ancient Mesopo-
tamian city of Ur that seemed to capture political authority at the very
instant of its reproduction.1 The precociously cinematic illustrations
depicted the tomb of Queen Puabi at a moment in the mid-third millen-
nium b.c. when the retainers of the recently dead royal were assembled
in the “Great Death Pit,” preparing to accompany the queen into the after-
life.2 In the first image, guards, servants, oxen, and carts are set in place
around the vaulted chamber of the interred queen (fig. 1a). Although the
individual figures in the scene appear rather stiª, the eªect of the tableau
is one of anticipation; the lack of movement presages a dramatic de-
nouement. The grisly succeeding image portrays the climactic resolution
of the scene (fig. 1b). Woolley ’s excavations revealed slaughtered animals

1. The Illustrated London News ran no fewer than 30 reports on Woolley ’s excavations at
Ur over years of active excavations at the site (Zettler 1998: 9).
2. Several texts believed to bear directly upon third millennium b.c. Mesopotamian bur-
ial practices, such as The Death of Gilgamesh and The Death of Ur-Namma, indicate that deities
and rulers could have palaces in the afterlife and that the burial of the retinue was to enable
the departed to “continue living in the style to which he [or she] was accustomed” (Tin-
ney 1998: 28).

1
2 INTRODUCTION

figure 1. The death pit of Queen Puabi of Ur as reconstructed by A. Fores-

tier of the Illustrated London News (June 23, 1928). a. In the pit, attendants,
oxen, and carts are arrayed in front of the vaulted tomb of the dead queen.
b. (opposite) After the sacrifice, the arrayed bodies of humans and animals
litter the pit while a cutaway of the tomb reveals the interred royal. (Courtesy
of the Illustrated London News picture library.)

and poisoned attendants littering the floor of Puabi’s antechamber, a

spectacle of consumption that reinforced the power of the royal regime
to command and the dedication of Ur’s civil community to the existing
political order. Although the violence of the scene gives the illustrations
a voyeuristic quality, what is most intriguing about Puabi’s tomb is not
the brutality of political authority at work. Rather, Woolley ’s excavations
in the Royal Cemetery at Ur revealed a vision of political authority that
was firmly located in the persons and apparatus of the royal regime, a
spatial immediacy conveyed in the illustrations by the backgrounded
tomb. Politics in ancient Ur, the tomb of Puabi indicates, was set firmly
in place.
A more chilling vision of the physical sacrifice of political subjects at the
hands of ruling authority is found in Andy Warhol’s (1965) silk screens of
the electric chair at Sing Sing prison (fig. 2). Here we find a modernist vi-
sion of authority established by the absence both of the condemned (cre-
ating an ominous sense of the potential insertion of the viewer) and of au-
thorities (present only as the mechanized apparatus of capital punishment).
 INTRODUCTION 3

The sign on the wall demanding silence accomplishes the final eªacement
of both the political subject (rendered mute even at the final moment) and
the political regime itself, which vanishes behind the instruments of rou-
tinization. The series of silk screens works most powerfully in the dramatic
repetition of the same image, washed with shifting color tones. In this rep-
etition, Warhol created a powerful image of the modernist State’s relation
to its subjects—possessed of the same authority to command the ultimate
sacrifice of political subjects as the kings and queens of Ur, yet profoundly
unlocatable, simultaneously nowhere and everywhere.
4 INTRODUCTION

figure 2. Andy Warhol, Electric Chair (1965). Silkscreen ink on synthetic

polymer paint on canvas, 22 × 28 in. (The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh;
Founding Collection. Contribution of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts, Inc. Photo: Richard Stoner.)

The death pit of Queen Puabi and Warhol’s electric chair present im-
ages of the reproduction of political authority through the sacrifice of what
Michel Foucault (1979a: 138) called the “docile bodies” of subjects. In the
former, authority is quite close at hand, locatable in the present body of
the royal contained within the architecture of her tomb. In the latter,
power is vested in a technology of execution, but the place of authority
is entirely obscured. The State, as Richard Wright complained in 1948,
has indeed dimmed in the political imagination during the epochs sepa-
rating Puabi’s death pit and Sing Sing’s electric chair. Within modern con-
ceptions of the political, it has become increasingly di‹cult to define where
authority is located, to understand not only (meta)historical transfor-
mations in regimes—the resolute focus of modernist inquiry—but also
the constitution of authority at the intersection of both space and time.
Wright’s suggestion that the Cheshire Cat–like disappearance of the State
boasts a genealogy far deeper than the modern era opens analytical space
 INTRODUCTION 5

for an archaeological approach to the problem, one that juxtaposes the

contemporary concerns of political thought with interpretations of land-
scapes forged by early complex polities. More than any other of the social
sciences, archaeological perspectives on political life must directly con-
front the di‹culties posed by understanding authority through places—
in the ruins of built environments, distributions of artifacts, and images
of town and country.
This book addresses the constitution of political authority in space and
time through the making and remaking of landscapes in early complex
polities—ancient political formations in which authority was predicated
on radical social inequality, legitimated in reference to enduring representa-
tions of civil community, and vested in centralized organs of governance—
in order to re-emplace the operation of political power and the manu-
facture of political legitimacy by governing regimes. (See chapter 2 for
an extended definition of “early complex polity.”) How do landscapes—
defined in the broadest sense to incorporate the physical contours of the
created environment, the aesthetics of built form, and the imaginative
reflections of spatial representations—contribute to the constitution of
political authority? Are the cities and villages in which we live and work,
the lands that are woven into our senses of cultural and personal identity,
and the national territories within which we are subjects merely stages on
which historical processes and political rituals are enacted? Or do the forms
of buildings and streets, the evocative sensibilities of architecture and vista,
and the discursive aesthetics of place conjured in art and media consti-
tute political landscapes—broad sets of spatial practices critical to the for-
mation, operation, and overthrow of geopolitical orders, of polities, of
regimes, of institutions? The central concern behind these questions is
not the description and elaboration of landscapes in and of themselves,
but how politics operates through landscapes.

A Topology of Political Landscapes: Defining Terms

In opening a discussion of landscapes in political life, we might reflect on
the following scenes:

moscow, October 4, 1993 ( New York Times)—Dozens of tanks and armored

personnel carriers loyal to President Boris Yeltsin today bombarded the rebel-
held Russian parliament building, after thousands of armed anti-government
demonstrators had routed police Sunday, seized key buildings in the capital,
and fought a pitched battle with guards at the state television complex.
6 INTRODUCTION

belfast, July 19, 1998 (CNN.com)—Police and soldiers, enforcing an order

by the government-appointed Parades Commission, prevented members of
the Orange Order, Northern Ireland’s largest Protestant brotherhood, from
marching down the Garvaghy Road in Portadown, 25 miles (40 km) south-
west of Belfast, on July 5. Orangemen massed on the hillside near a rural church
every night for a week, underlining their determination to follow their tradi-
tional parade route.

jerusalem, November 16, 1998 (CNN.com)—In comments broadcast on

Israeli radio, [then defense minister Ariel] Sharon urged Jewish settlers to grab
West Bank hilltops before a permanent agreement is reached on the area where
Palestinians hope to build an independent homeland. “Everyone there should
move, should run, should grab more hills, expand the territory,” exhorted
Sharon. “Everything that’s grabbed will be in our hands. Everything we don’t
grab will be in their hands.”

In each of these episodes, the created environment is not simply a back-

drop for political activities but rather the very stake of political struggle. It
is the spaces themselves—the Russian parliament building, Garvaghy Road,
the hilltops of the West Bank—and the real and imagined landscapes in
which they are situated—a post-Soviet Russia, an autonomous Northern
Ireland, an independent Palestine—that are fought over, argued over, and
died for. During such moments of intense crisis, the spatiality of political
authority comes into focus with striking clarity as the security of regimes,
the integrity of polities, and the reproduction of national communities hinge
on the resolution of problems of spatial form, extent, distribution, and rep-
resentation.3 Similarly, the contestation of political authority—resistance
to its commands and attempts to seize its controls—relies on a cartographic
vision, a spatialized understanding of the sites of singular importance to
reproduction and transformation. It is this spatialized understanding of
movements against the dominant political apparatus that Georges Bataille
struck on when he suggested that the storming of the Bastille in 1789 must
be understood as an expression of “l’animosité du peuple contre les mon-
uments qui sont ses véritables maîtres [the animosity of the people against
the monuments that are their true rulers]” (1929: 117).
The prominence of the landscape in episodes of authority in crisis begs
the more general question of the everyday significance of space and place
in civil life. What currency can the concept of a political landscape have
in the quotidian realm of everyday politics? The phrase “political land-

3. Considerable anthropological attention has recently been given to the spatiality of

crises in Northern Ireland (e.g., Feldman 1991).
 INTRODUCTION 7

scape” is deceptively multivalent for a term as familiar to pundits as schol-

ars. As a colloquial expression, the phrase generally refers to the array of
governmental and opposition forces at a given point in time. This is the
sense of the phrase used in political reportage, generating a host of arti-
cles describing the political landscapes of Europe, of the U.S. health-care
debate, of the Republican Party, and so forth (see, for example, Gottfried
1995; Burka 1994). It is to this purely metaphoric denotation that Michelle
Mitchell (1998) appeals in her study of the impact of Generation X on tra-
ditional political allegiances, subtitled How the Young Are Tearing Up the
American Political Landscape. Although useful in journalistic contexts, the
analytical utility of this sense of political landscape is limited by the shal-
lowness of the spatial metaphor. That is, landscape in this sense refers only
to a stylized sketch of intersecting political forces, as useful in its tropic
conventions as “political climate.” However, the impetus to create even
a caricatured cartography descriptive of allied and opposed political forces
suggests that the phrase is worth unpacking.
There is a more literal sense of the political landscape, one that describes
the physical ordering of the created environment by political forces. It is
this sense of the term that J. B. Jackson (1970) employed in a lecture de-
livered at the University of Massachusetts in 1966. For Jackson, founder
of the journal Landscape, the political landscape describes the “mega-
structure” of the American created environment, a skeleton composed of
highways, boundaries, meeting places, and monuments on which all other
segments of the spatial order are hung. Jackson’s vision of the political
landscape is teleological in that its features emerge in relation to its ends
rather than in the process of its formation: “the political landscape, the
landscape designed to produce law-abiding citizens, honest o‹cials, elo-
quent orators, and patriotic soldiers” (1984: 39). One practical criticism
that can be leveled at Jackson’s vision is that his sense of what physical
forms might be traced to political sources was far too restricted. As stud-
ies such as Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1990) and James Kunstler’s The
Geography of Nowhere (1993) make clear, political action can be located
throughout the created environment: in the form of a park bench designed
to prevent homeless people from intruding on gentrifying neighborhoods,
in the zoning rules that push homes back from the street and encourage
the sprawl of strip malls, in the gridded layout of streets and access routes.
Indeed, in a pedestrian sense we might consider how each time a red light
halts our progress, we are interpellated (in an Althusserian [1971] sense)
as subjects of a mechanized authority codified by the instrumentality of
the political landscape.
8 INTRODUCTION

To press beyond the purely experiential sense of the term, a denota-

tion centered on the flow of goods and bodies, “political landscape” also
carries a more semiotic sensibility, one that employs politically generated
signs to shape our sense of place. For example, the most prominently it-
erated value shaping the establishment of public spaces in the United States
during the late nineteenth century was the attempt to create democratic
places where middle-class values might be paraded for the edification and
encouragement of lower social strata (Olmsted 1971). In contrast, the cen-
tral value orienting the configuration of public space today is the insula-
tion of that same middle class from contact with the poor. A wide range
of recent policies has been designed to reduce the openness of public gath-
ering places by physically removing or intimidating the undesirable seg-
ment of the population (such as former New York City mayor Rudolph
Giuliani’s criminalization of homelessness through sweeps of popular
New York tourist destinations) or by encouraging the public to congre-
gate in privately held (but publicly subsidized) places that sequester the
life of the city into massive o‹ce and shopping centers (such as Detroit’s
Renaissance Center, Atlanta’s Peachtree and Omni Centers, and Los An-
geles’s Bunker Hill and the Figueroa corridor [Davis 1990]). This trans-
formation in American attitudes toward public spaces has only been pos-
sible insofar as political authorities have come to embrace corporatism as
a strategy for dealing with social problems.4
The embedding of civic values within the concept of landscape leads
to a third sense of “political landscape.” In this construction of the term,
built features evoke aªective responses, enlisting emotions generated by
sensory responses to form and aesthetics in service to the polity. It is pre-
cisely this use of the term that James Mayo employs in his examination of
American war memorials. As Mayo notes in framing his study, “War is
the ultimate political conflict, and attempts to commemorate it unavoid-
ably create a distinct political landscape. . . . As an artifact a memorial helps
create an ongoing order and meaning beyond the fleeting and chaotic ex-
periences of life” (1988: 1). In this use of the phrase, the political landscape
is constituted in the places that draw together the imagined civil com-
munity, a perceptual dimension of space in which built forms elicit aªec-
tive responses that galvanize memories and emotions central to the expe-
rience of political belonging. Here we might think of the triumph of the
Vietnam War Memorial, which succeeds precisely because it eulogizes a

4. See Low 2000 for a discussion of the adverse impact of the erosion of public space
upon democratic politics and society.
 INTRODUCTION 9

divisive episode in U.S. history in terms that elicit not a sharp rebuke of
a failed policy but a rededication of observers to the civil community.5
A final reading of “political landscape” arises from the etymological
roots of “landscape” to describe a genre of pictorial image and centers on
the impact of representations on our imagination of political life. De-
scribed during the Renaissance as “of all kinds of painting the most in-
nocent, and which the Divill himselfe could never accuse of idolatry ” (Ed-
win Norgate, Miniatura, quoted in Gombrich 1966: 107; see also Mitchell
2000: 193), the genre of landscape painting was castigated in modernist
circles as naïve in its ostensible ambition to provide a pure aesthetic ren-
dering of a wholly natural world. Martin Warnke, Anne Bermingham,
and W. J. T. Mitchell (among others) have led a recent reevaluation of the
sources of landscape painting, arguing that such images assimilate a wholly
created environment to the political ends of rulers: “The ruler may be por-
trayed as controlling the forces of nature; alternatively he may appear as
the distributor of her gifts and so confirm her superior status” (Warnke
1995: 145). The political landscape in this sense describes a representation
of space whose ordering aesthetic derives from the goals and ambitions
of regimes. Warnke also describes how features of the built environment
impinge on how we perceive those worlds. In describing one of the most
prominent elements of European political landscapes, Warnke points out
that “[c]astles not only use topographical features for practical purposes,
but call for mental attitudes” (ibid.).
As Warnke’s analysis suggests, we should not be surprised to find that
not only do the physical features of the political landscape encourage aªec-
tive responses in the viewers but they may also have a profound impact
on how we imagine idealized landscapes. From the eerily panoptic me-
dieval castle of the Disney theme parks that surveys a 1950s fantasy-scape
Main Street USA to the purely digital geographies of Multi-User Domains
(MUDs), our imagined landscapes regularly pivot around a central ap-
paratus of political authority—a civil axis mundi.6 The impact of these
imagined spatial sensibilities, centered on the imminent presence of a po-

5. See Hass 1998 on the conflict that surrounded the construction of the Vietnam War
Memorial and the role of national memory in understanding its continued e‹cacy.
6. A large number of digital inquiries into the consequences of cyberspace for tradi-
tional notions of city and territory can be found on the internet, including Hypernation
(http://duplox.wz-berlin.de/netze/netzforum/archive.20may96/0201.html), Refugee Re-
public (www.refugee.net/), and the Amsterdam Digital City (www.dds.nl/dds/info/
english/engelsfolder95.html). On the architecture of the Disney theme parks, see the pa-
pers in Marling 1997.
10 INTRODUCTION

litical apparatus, is not hard to tease out from an American popular cul-
ture obsessed with conspiracies, eavesdropping, and the near omniscience
credited to governments on television ( The X-Files), on film (3 Days of the
Condor, The Conversation, Enemy of the State, JFK, The Parallax View), and
in literature ( Vineland, American Tabloid).7
To summarize, there are at least three senses of the term political
landscape that provide a conceptual platform for the examination of the
spatial constitution of civil authority:
· an imaginative aesthetic guiding representation of the world at hand;
· a sensibility evoking responses in subjects through perceptual dimen-
sions of physical space; and
· an experience of form that shapes how we move through created
environments.

These three dimensions of the political landscape organize the spatial stud-
ies of authority in early complex polities undertaken in the present work.
Each of the studies explored in chapters 3 through 6 has been organized
in tripartite fashion around experience, perception, and imagination in
order to provide an encompassing description of political landscapes.
It is unsurprising that the phrase “political landscape” should be so mul-
tivalent given the plural meanings of its component terms. “Landscape”
is di‹cult to define in part because it is so familiar. Used by artists, ar-
chitects, developers, geologists, geographers, historians, and archaeolo-
gists (to name only a few), the term has varying denotations and conno-
tations. Jackson (1979: 153) once sighed that, though he had spent a career
talking and writing about landscapes, the concept continued to elude him.
Denis Cosgrove (1993: 8–9) has cogently suggested that the term land-
scape refers to the totality of the external world as mediated through sub-
jective human experience. In more direct terms, landscape is land trans-
formed by human activity or perception. If land is an objective concept,
a physical solid that composes the surface of the planet, then landscape
can be understood as land that humans have modified, built on, traversed,
or simply gazed upon. Because of this sense of human production that
inheres in the term, landscape must be understood not simply as space or
place but as a synthesis of spatiality and temporality. That is, because land-

7. It is important to note that this cartography of governmental panopticism is a post-

war vision that contrasts markedly with the images of governmental loci as places of security
that dominate much New Deal era literature and film (Szalay 2000).
 INTRODUCTION 11

scapes are “made,” to use the term that W. G. Hoskins employed (so aptly
borrowed by E. P. Thompson), they enclose both a diachronic sense of
extent and a synchronic understanding of duration (see Hoskins 1977;
Thompson 1963). The term thus resists the Hegelian trap of segregating
time and space as analytical dimensions that, as we shall see, has bedev-
iled modernist accounts of political life.
We can thus disentangle the oft-conflated concepts of space, place, and
landscape in the following terms. If space refers to the general concepts
of extension and dimension that constitute form, then place, following
the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), refers to how specific locales become
incorporated into larger worlds of human action and meaning. Landscape
then refers to the broad canvas of space and place constituted within his-
tories of social and cultural life. Landscape arises in the historically rooted
production of ties that bind together spaces (as forms delimiting physi-
cal experience), places (as geographic or built aesthetics that attach mean-
ings to locations), and representations (as imagined cartographies of pos-
sible worlds).
A far more di‹cult term to pin down is the modifying adjective in our
titular phrase, “political.” Politics, in some form, encompasses or intrudes
on every dimension of our lives. It lies not only with the administrators
of institutions that constitute the most recognizable forms of govern-
mental authority but also in the caseworkers and teachers that intercede
in relations between parents and children or the regulations and proce-
dures that delimit the links between employer and employee. And yet if
the analysis of landscapes is to have any specificity to its objects, there is
compelling reason to attempt—for the purposes of analysis—to delimit
a sphere of the political within which we might trace spatial features back
to specific sets of social relationships rooted in the production and re-
production of specific horizons of power and legitimacy.
There are a number of ways in which we might carve out a distinct po-
litical sphere to provide a specific locus for the present discussions. One
approach would be to simply restrict the political to the apparatus of gov-
ernment. Although such an eªort has di‹culties even within the com-
paratively straightforward context of modern secular liberal democracies,
it is largely unworkable within studies of early complex polities, where
lines separating political, religious, military, economic, social, familial, and
other forms of authority tend to be rather faintly drawn. Rather than as-
pire to set the political within a neatly carved out sociological sphere of
formal locations, I will describe it within a specific set of relationships cen-
tral to the production, maintenance, and overthrow of sovereign au-
12 INTRODUCTION

thority. These include geopolitical relationships among polities, ties be-

tween subjects and regimes that inscribe the polity, links among elites and
“grassroots” organizations that constitute political regimes, and relations
and rivalries among governing institutions.8 The studies undertaken in
chapters 3 through 6 engage with each of these sets of relationships in
turn. I do not suggest that these four sets of relationships exhaust the po-
litical, merely that they are central to politics and civil life.9

The Topography of Political Landscapes:

Philosophical Contexts
Despite the readily apparent spatiality of political life—the ways in which
political life is created, fostered, challenged, broken down, and reconsti-
tuted in the production of fields, roads, buildings, parks, cities, commu-
nities, and polities—landscape has remained curiously underdeveloped in
traditional accounts of the forms and transformations of authority. Keith
Basso (1996: 31) has eloquently described how Western Apache histories
attend much more profoundly to where events occurred rather than when,
because place and placemaking root the past in the surrounding landscape.
The opposite may be said for the dominant trends in social science, where
approaches to political life have been primarily concerned with when (both
in specific and in meta senses) and far less interested in where. Thus, it is
important at the outset of this investigation to describe briefly what is at
stake in developing a landscape perspective for contemporary theoriza-
tions of politics.
Dominant modernist accounts of political life explicitly marginalize
space and place in explanation and critique. Foucault noted the general
animosity of twentieth-century Marxism to the development of a spatial
sensibility, recounting a public incident during which he was upbraided
for his interest in the spatial dimensions of social life. His critic argued
that “space is reactionary and capitalist, but history and becoming are revo-
lutionary ” (1984: 252, emphasis in original). This oft-cited encounter per-
fectly captures the central ontological premise suªused throughout the
primary traditions of modern political thought. From Marxism and lib-

8. By “grassroots” I mean sociocultural organizations, such as kin groups, neighborhood

groups, and professional societies, that often play critical supporting roles in providing ver-
tical links between the elites of regimes and basal-level interest groups (see Mollenkopf 1992).
9. I use the terms civic and civil broadly to refer to the political community of a polity.
 INTRODUCTION 13

eral political theory to political sociology and anthropology, explanation

and critique typically hinge on describing the transformation of polities
over time. As the geographer Edward Soja has observed, “So unbudge-
ably hegemonic has been this historicism of [the modern] theoretical con-
sciousness that it has tended to occlude a comparable critical sensibility
to the spatiality of social life” (1988: 10–11). Henri Lefebvre tracks the birth
of this temporal privilege to Hegel, who codified the proposition that “his-
torical time gives birth to that space which the state occupies and rules
over” (Lefebvre 1991: 21). As the temporality of history assumes the cen-
tral explanatory role in an understanding of political production, the spa-
tiality of the State is demoted to a purely mechanical problem of engi-
neering, with little enduring relevance to a general understanding of either
the emergence of political forms or the imagining of proper civil orders.
Although a thorough investigation of the relentless temporocentrism of
modernist political theory is beyond the scope of this book, a brief
overview should bring the problem into focus. (For expanded discussions
of space and time in political thought, see Agnew 1999; Alonso 1994; Har-
vey 1996; Howard 1998; Kuper 1972; Soja 1985, 1988.)
The temporality of political life was transformed into revolutionary
history by Marx such that the critical spatial problems of material pro-
duction were transposed into primarily historical questions:

[W]e must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, there-
fore, of all history . . . that men must be in a position to live in order to be
able to “make history.” But life involves before everything else eating and
drinking, housing, clothing and various other things. The first historical act
is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of
material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condi-
tion of history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly
be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life. (Marx 1986: 174, emphasis
mine).

By recasting the complex spatiotemporal problems of procuring food and

water and enclosing living areas as exclusively historical acts, Marx re-
phrases the temporal privilege defined by Hegel in strictly material terms
but does not alter the highly sublimated nature of its spatial presupposi-
tions. As Marxism came to be elaborated in the twentieth century, space,
as a dimension of social life, came to be not simply of marginal impor-
tance but in some cases explicitly counter-revolutionary (as in Georg
Lukács’s [1971] suggestion that spatial diªerence serves to define the ex-
tant false consciousness whose primacy falls away when a fully realized
14 INTRODUCTION

class consciousness provides a sublime view on the logic of history [see

also Lefebvre 1991: 22]).
Although diªerent in its emplotment, the historicism underlying mod-
ern liberal political thought provides a similarly underdeveloped account
of the spatial dimensions of civil life. In the absence of a spatial account
of politics, analysis and critique tend to become unmoored from the world
at hand, forced to seek grounding in purely theoretical ideal situations.
The result is a vision of politics divorced from any place, such as that ad-
vanced by John Rawls’s canonical work, A Theory of Justice. Rawls describes
the creation of the just society out of the choices made by fully rational
agents whose national, ethnic, class, and gender identities are hidden be-
hind a veil of ignorance. In other words, everything that might lend a sense
of place is described a priori as an obstacle to justice. As John Gray (1992)
noted in a fiercely polemical critique, Rawls’s approach to political theory
(which has largely set the agenda for the past 30 years [Ankersmit 1996:
3]) hinges on the misguided hope that all humans will shed allegiances and
local identities to unite in a universal vision of the just political order—
that space will finally recede as relevant to civic communities. Although
Gray ’s indictment of Rawls grows organically from his post-Thatcherite
resistance to the obliterating eªects of the capitalist market, his contention
that political thought must come to terms with spatial diªerence or else
find itself unprepared for the current era dominated by reemergent na-
tional, religious, and ethnic particularisms certainly rings true.
For political sociology and anthropology, approaches to public life that
attempt to provide a general understanding of the nature of civil society,
the failure to articulate an account of how authority operates in landscapes
has resulted in the reification of a set of analytical types and models as if
they were real facets of political activity. A growing number of important
studies have detailed how institutions, roles, and ruling groups come to
be vested with authority. But in general, sociological and anthropologi-
cal approaches to politics continue to muster such studies to amplify mod-
els of the evolution of the State over time rather than to explicate the work-
ings of polities through landscapes as spaces produced, reproduced, and
razed over time. (The most recent influential works in this long tradition
include Harris 1979; Johnson and Earle 1987; Mann 1986; Sanderson 1990,
1995; Service 1975; Trigger 1998.) Political anthropology ’s sense of space
has been traditionally drawn from mid-twentieth-century political geog-
raphy, predicating its analytical units on segmented territories and neu-
tralized locations that provide stages for performances and rituals (Fortes
and Evans-Pritchard 1940; see also MacIver 1926).
 INTRODUCTION 15

Nancy Munn has documented both the disengagement of time from

space in early-twentieth-century anthropology (citing Evans-Pritchard’s
privileging of an abstract “oecological time” in opposition to a parallel
“oecological space” as a foundational intellectual position) and recent at-
tempts to regain perspective on the co-constitution of time and space by
putting “subjects back in their bodies” (Munn 1992: 97, 105). The rise of
practice-oriented perspectives on actors and actions has brought with it
a reconsideration of the links between space and time, most notably in
the writings of Giddens and Bourdieu (see, for example, Bourdieu 1977;
Giddens 1984). However, as Munn points out, neither structuration nor
practice theory are particularly convincing in their claims to spatial sen-
sitivity. Whereas the former fails to provide any real account of how space
is implicated in either (re)producing structures or constraining agents,
the latter reiterates the traditional privileging of time over space in strate-
gic relationships among actors: the very context in which we might gain
a new understanding of the spatiotemporal co-constitution of political
life (Munn 1992: 106–8; Saunders 1989; Urry 1991: 160–61). Thus, de-
spite a general movement within social and anthropological theory to fo-
cus on practices, actors, and actions, a formal reconsideration of the the-
ory and analytics that have long separated space from time within the
dominant traditions of social thought has not generally followed.10 In the
absence of such a transformation in the traditional intellectual parame-
ters of political analysis in the social sciences, the social evolutionary per-
spective on the deeper history of modern states contends with few rivals.
However, three major consequences (at least) result from the endur-
ing focus on the evolution of the State as the guiding backstory of con-
temporary political thought. First, as Philip Abrams (1988: 81–82) has ar-
gued, the State comes to be reified as a thing in itself, allowing the concept
to act as a mask for the various messages and practices of domination and
subjection that are at the heart of political production. Thus the State, as
an analytical concept, is at best an illusory focus for research that lends
coherence and continuity to a disparate set of authority relationships that
are highly discontinuous; at worst, it is an instrument of domination in
itself. Second, exclusive attention to the creation of the State in history
leaves humans so divorced from everyday political production and re-
production that the stakes of transformation are far exceeded by the scale
on which such changes can be generated. Only full-scale revolution—or,

10. Munn’s (1986) remarkable study The Fame of Gawa points clearly toward a highly
nuanced understanding of the intersection of space and time within sets of social practices.
16 INTRODUCTION

even more debilitating from the perspective of political activism, a major

transformation in the adaptive systems of surrounding environments—
can bring about movement from one formal type of political organiza-
tion to another. Such “superstition,” as Roberto Unger (1997: 6) has ob-
served, “encourages surrender” rather than a constructive engagement of
political theory and practice. From such theoretical sources, it should be
unsurprising that we find ourselves at the dawn of the twenty-first cen-
tury without a plausible critical project for civil society. Third, by defining
the State a priori as a product of evolution—of primarily metahistorical
processes—the landscapes that manufacture and preserve the authority
of regimes, that encourage the identification of a regime with the land,
that organize the way alternative forms can be imagined, are dismissed as
incidental to politics. As a result, political action is left without a sense of
place that might provide a locus for orienting reflection on the contem-
porary order and for developing new possibilities for civil life.
The foregoing discussion is not intended to suggest that the dominant
contemporary approaches to the political sphere have no sense of space.
They most certainly do. But the spatial within these strains of modernist
thought remains highly sublimated as a component of both theory and
practice, occluded behind the juggernaut of temporal determination. The
theoretical agenda of the present work is to illuminate the implicit de-
scriptions of space that support the explanatory privileges accorded tem-
porality in political thought and to shift the analytical terrain to recog-
nize landscape as a conceptual locus for detailing the intersection of time
and space. The temporality of landscape, I argue, is rooted not in meta-
level transformations but in the highly practical procedures of produc-
tion, reproduction, and reformation defined in interwoven sets of polit-
ical relationships.
To leave the political unmoored from the landscape, to allow it to float
across society and culture as a conceptual ghost ship simultaneously any-
where and nowhere, is to obscure the practical relations of authority that
constitute the civil sphere. Without an account of the constitution of au-
thority in the production of landscapes, political analysis drifts farther from
everyday life, trading agency for determinism and imposed routines for
general laws. By refusing to cede the landscape any role in processes of
political formation, administration, and collapse, perceived regularities
in structure are unduly amplified. Fifteenth century a.d. Venice, fifth cen-
tury a.d. Tikal, and third millennium b.c. Uruk disappear into the sin-
gular category labeled “States” despite what would seem the rather salient
facts of their highly variable form, geography, and spatial aesthetics. This
 INTRODUCTION 17

is not to argue for any form of geographic or ecological determinism. But

by bracketing even the most pedestrian facts of geographic and architec-
tural diªerence, similarities in structure are imagined as regularities that
inhere in a type; laws of political transformation gain priority over any
account of how civil relationships actually worked.
Over the past 40 years, a great deal of writing and thought in various
fields within the social sciences has concentrated on how to create a crit-
ical approach to the spatiality of politics. In attempting to break down
the essential Hegelian historicism of thought about the State, writers such
as Lefebvre, Soja, and David Harvey (about whom much more will be
said in chapter 1) have assailed the epistemological premises on which evo-
lutionary narratives had been predicated. Why then does the development
of a critical sense of the production of authority in both space and time
remain so thoroughly marginal to political thought? There are undoubt-
edly a number of answers to this question, but, even as the Hegelian tem-
poral privilege is battered on epistemological and theoretical levels, per-
haps the most formidable bulwark to the sublimated spatial consciousness
remains—what Marx, and later Antonio Gramsci, called “real history ”
(Gramsci 1971: 182; Marx and Engels 1998: 43).

An Archaeology of Political Landscapes:

(Meta)histories of the State
It is the simple glance backward from modern nation-states to the ancient
world that provides the strongest foundation for despatialized approaches
to contemporary politics. Both traditional historicism and social evolu-
tionism, metahistorical programs originally outlined in the nineteenth cen-
tury, provide a profound backstory for modern political formations in
which the State—conceived of as both a coherent social type and a broadly
defined apparatus of government—rises inexorably, if not inevitably, out
of roots put down in prehistory. The most prominent story of the State,
that provided by social evolutionism, unfolds over the course of six millen-
nia in a handful of disparate regions from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica.
When transposed to diverse locales, its simplistic melody remains extra-
ordinarily consistent.
The temporocentric story of politics begins with the Pristine State—
an original, autochthonous political formation built on radical social in-
equality and centralized governmental institutions that emerged first on
the alluvial plain between the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and in
18 INTRODUCTION

figure 3. Four continental views of early complex polities: prominent

sociopolitical horizons and key sites. (Map source: ESRI Data & Map CD.)

the Nile River valley. Sometime later, the Pristine State developed in a
handful of other regions, including northern China, the Indus valley,
Mesoamerica, and the Andes mountains (fig. 3). The Pristine State gen-
erally assumes one of two possible forms: regional state (for example, Old
Kingdom Egypt) or city-state (for example, the interlinked urban poli-
ties of Early Dynastic southern Mesopotamia). As the Pristine State grew
in complexity, it influenced surrounding regions either through impe-
rial expansion or inter-regional political economy, thus sparking subse-
quent episodes of “secondary ” State formation.11 At the end of this ever-
expanding network of secondary States lies the modern incarnation that,

11. For a recent eªort to theorize the relations between fourth millennium b.c. southern
Mesopotamian pristine states and polities on their periphery, see Algaze 2001a. For counter
arguments that eªectively question the explanatory integrity of traditional pristine/secondary
divisions from the perspective of Mesopotamia’s “periphery,” see Frangipane 2001 and Stein
1999, 2001.
 INTRODUCTION 19

through its articulation of capitalist production and global colonialism,

brings the State to its current position as the extant political formation.
The problem with this story does not rest in its archaeological facts;
it does seem quite clear at present that the polities of southern Mesopo-
tamia, Egypt, the Indus valley, northern China, Mesoamerica, and the
Andes do represent the earliest experiments with complex orders of po-
litical authority in each region. (Depending on how we define both a ge-
ographic region and complexity, the same might be said of a large num-
ber of polities traditionally regarded as secondary States, including
Scythia, Angkor, and Minoan Crete.) Rather, the weakness of the social
evolutionary story of global State formation lies at its intellectual foun-
dations, in its assumption that su‹cient explanation of sociopolitical
transformation resides at the intersection of general social types with
metahistorical process. The spatial dimensions of political life, whether
understood as the created environment in which politics takes place or
the imagined spatial sensibilities behind the promulgation of new orders,
are dismissed as epiphenomenal to the fundamental temporal axis of po-
litical transformation.12
A society ’s position in an evolutionary matrix, whether stringently
or broadly conceived, is thought to determine its spatial configuration.
Spatial forms are thus considered useful as benchmarks for social devel-
opment but hold no interpretative status in themselves. This aspatial vi-
sion of political history comes in hard-line and more moderate forms,
reaching its Whiggish apotheosis in a recent claim that, whereas restart-
ing natural evolution would result in a whole new array of biological
forms, a reprise of social evolution would engender the exact same re-
sults (Sanderson 1995: 7). Such breathtaking historical determinism fol-
lows inexorably from the over-privileging of temporality and reckless
inattention to space that lies at the core of modernist political thought.
Yet even if we set aside such examples of cold-blooded determinism, the
narrative of the evolution of the State created out of the archaeological
and historical records bolsters the modern disinterest in spatial dimen-
sions of authority and thus inhibits any attempt to make the political
sources of space and place relevant to discussions of civil life past,
present, or future.
However, if we take a more archaeological perspective, the spatiality
of political action can be located deep in human political history. One of

12. Contrast, for example, Aristotle’s (1988) description of the spatial orders that obtain
for each idealized constitutional form.
20 INTRODUCTION

the earliest literary accounts of the origins of complex political commu-

nities opens with a recitation of the construction activities of King Gil-
gamesh at the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia—the earliest urban
center in the world—hinting that place-making was considered to be the
primordial political act.

[Gilgamesh] built the rampart of Uruk-the-sheepfold,

of holy Eanna, the sacred storehouse.
See its wall like a strand of wool,
view its parapet that none could copy!
Take the stairway of a bygone era,
draw near to Eanna, seat of Ishtar the goddess,
that no later king could ever copy.
Climb Uruk’s wall and walk back and forth!
Survey its foundations, examine the brickwork!
Were its bricks not fired in an oven?
Did the Seven Sages not lay its foundations?
(George 1999: I.i)

The Epic of Gilgamesh (discussed at greater length in chapter 5) is sepa-

rated from the episodes of political conflict that opened this introduction
by at least 4,000 years, not to mention by the gossamer veil dividing myth
from history. Yet they share a single intuition regarding the nature of po-
litical life: that the creation and preservation of political authority is a pro-
foundly spatial problem. Gilgamesh’s construction of the walls of Uruk
is rendered as a technological marvel (as an architectural work), a pious
devotion (to the glory of Ishtar), a genealogical fulfillment (of the work
of the Seven Sages), and a triumph of settlement planning (through the
quadripartite division of the city).
What emerges from the opening lines of the Gilgamesh epic is a sense
that the space of Uruk was no less a politically constituted place than that
of Moscow, the West Bank, or Garvaghy Road. Why then must places such
as Mohenjo-Daro and Nineveh, Tikal, and Teotihuacan languish as poorly
diªerentiated stages on which the State arises, reforms, and collapses?
How can the spaces of modern Moscow be instrumental in preserving
the authority of Yeltsin and Putin yet those of Babylon be superfluous to
the authority of Hammurabi?
The investigations in this book are intended to demonstrate that po-
litical transformations in early complex polities were predicated on the
production of very specific landscapes, thus undermining the “real” his-
tory that undergirds modernist temporocentric accounts of political life.
Although I focus on ancient polities, the underlying concern of the work
 INTRODUCTION 21

is the modern political formation in which both author and reader live.
Indeed, the central conceit of the book is that political formations now
visible primarily in ruins might provide the foundations for a modern
critical project. This archaeological vision of politics warrants a brief dis-
cussion at the outset.

The Ancient and the Modern:

Archaeology and Contemporary Politics
An overarching concern of The Political Landscape is to re-inject an archae-
ological perspective on political formation into what has largely become,
to its detriment, a resolutely presentist discourse. It is not coincidental
that, as the modern State has become increasingly dim in our minds, in
Richard Wright’s words, early complex polities have become increasingly
distant and irrelevant. In order to combat this invisibility, it is vital that
we attempt to bring the dimensions of early political life into better fo-
cus and thus provide a prism through which we might view contempo-
rary civil authorities. But the intellectual link between archaeologies of
complex polities and critiques of contemporary politics are not immedi-
ate or entirely straightforward. There are a number of lines along which
we might develop a cogent argument for the utility of archaeological per-
spectives to contemporary political analysis and criticism. The first cen-
ters on the role of material culture within archaeological accounts of pol-
itics. In contrast to the ephemeral nature of the State generated within
self-consciously postmodern social theory, archaeology ’s vision of poli-
tics has remained steadfastly centered on the intense physicality of power
and governance. Although at times this perspective regretfully descends
into naked materialism, this need not be the case, because the material
culture of politics is as recursively instrumental in shaping the imagina-
tion as it is in regulating subsistence economies.
Within a more historical vein, the utility of an archaeological per-
spective can be framed in reference to the perhaps apocryphal quip of a
late-twentieth-century Chinese diplomat. When asked to evaluate the
significance of the French Revolution, he responded that it was as yet too
soon to tell. The deep historical vision of archaeology has long been cen-
tral to both its intellectual mission and its popular appeal. However, stud-
ies of politics—and political anthropology more specifically—have tradi-
tionally had a rather ambiguous relationship to archaeology. Social
evolutionists, from Marx, Engels, and Lewis Henry Morgan to Elman
Service, Marvin Harris, and Morton Fried, have long engaged with ar-
22 INTRODUCTION

chaeological and epigraphic evidence to flesh out their idealized se-

quences; however, as evolutionism has fallen into disfavor, the historical
vision within political anthropology has become increasingly myopic, fo-
cusing primarily on the rise of colonialism and modern capitalism. Intel-
lectual ties between studies of early complex societies and anthropologies
of modern life were severed under a presumed opposition between the
historical particularities of global capitalism (the stuª of sociocultural an-
thropology) and the general metahistory of political evolution (the am-
bitions of anthropological archaeology). But this is most certainly a false
dichotomy. Transhistorical regularities are only one way of framing an in-
tellectual project that can articulate the ancient and the modern.
To resist the social evolutionary program need not entail consigning
early complex polities to the dustbin of history or theory. The temporal
distance that separates early complex polities from the modern can also
be understood as providing a unique lens for viewing political life that
lends our gaze a greater critical refinement through its profound historical
depth and encompassing geographic breadth. Rather than compressing
variation, investigations of early complex polities can revel in it, expos-
ing the multiplicity of political strategies as well as antecedents of con-
temporary ambitions. This is not because the modern and the ancient are
tied into a regular developmental chain but because the broad set of param-
eters that define current political life arose, were modified, set aside, and
reestablished over a much longer time than can be encapsulated in the
historically shallow term “the modern.” Thus the articulation of modern
and ancient can be framed around a historical anthropology of the polit-
ical centered on a critical sociology of relations of civil authority. This
frames the relationship as one not between theory givers (anthropologists)
and data givers (archaeologists and epigraphers) but rather between com-
plementary accounts of the complexities of political life engaged simul-
taneously with both theory and uniquely constituted records of author-
ity (see Humphreys 1978: 22).
The political devices of the modern world only seem particularly
clever and impenetrable when removed from history. For example, com-
pare the following declarations:

The earth was wilderness; nothing was built there; out of the river I built four
canals, vineyards, and I planted the orchards, I accomplished many heroic deeds
there. (Melikishvili 1960: #137)

[T]he object lesson [of expansion is] that peace must be brought about in the
world’s waste spaces. (Beale 1956: 32)
 INTRODUCTION 23

The latter comes from no less an authority on imperialism than Theodore

Roosevelt, whereas the former was inscribed by the Urartian king Argishti
I who ruled an expanding empire in southwest Asia from approximately
785 to 756 b.c. (see chapter 4). Both rulers were speaking of “wildernesses”
that had been occupied by other peoples for centuries; by reclassifying
them as “waste spaces,” expansion was not only conscionable, it was man-
dated. Roosevelt’s strategy of redescribing imperialism as a triumph of
order over the wild loses much of its grandeur, not to mention the force
of originality, once exposed as a new gloss on a very old practice.13
Studies of early complex polities can thus inform investigations of the
modern by assembling dialectical images—representations that juxtapose
modern theoretical problems with ancient practices to illuminate novel
approaches to repeated tropes of political representation. (On the di-
alectical image, see Buck-Morss 1989: esp. 67.) By casting representations
of early complex polities as dialectical images, we allow the historical so-
cial sciences (to twist a phrase loved by journalists) to speak the past to
power.14 If histories of rupture allow the past, no matter how remote, to
fade from view, consigned to a wholly incommensurable era, we lose the
moral sway that comes from a broadened imagination of political possi-
bilities. It is only through such an understanding of human politics be-
yond the modern that the imagination of alternative civil formations—
what Prasenjit Duara (1996: 151–52) refers to as “other visions of political
community ”—can truly flourish.
A final motive for examining politics through the lens of early com-
plex polities arises from the sense of recognition that their political his-
tories evoke in modern observers. Unlike studies of early hunter-gatherer
or small-scale agricultural communities that have traditionally framed their
examinations as explorations of “the Other,” investigations of early com-
plex polities have been driven since their inception by a sense of recog-
nition on the part of we moderns. In its crudest form, this recognition
can take the form of classical elitism, as reflected in a remark Anthony Pow-

13. Pierre Bourdieu (1999: 57) made a similar claim, arguing that reflection upon the
moments of initial formation (or “genesis”) provide a powerful foundation for critique:
“[B]y bringing back into view the conflicts and confrontations of the early beginnings and
therefore all the discarded possibilities, [historical reconstruction] retrieves the possibilities
that could have been (and still could be) otherwise.”
14. Henry Glassie (1977: 29) has noted the utility of material culture in giving a voice
to “the endless silent majority who did not leave us written projections of their minds,” al-
lowing archaeology to counter the “tales of viciousness” that provide the “myth[s] for the
contemporary power structure.” (See also Wylie 1999.)
24 INTRODUCTION

ell attributes to Harold Macmillan, that “one would have no di‹culty

talking to Cicero ‘if he came into Pratts’ [an exclusive London gentlemen’s
club]” (Powell 1995: 37–38). However, in a more subtle form this recog-
nition of the modern in the ancient can provide a sublime moral gravity
to political reflection, as in Shelley ’s “Ozymandias.” In that now-ruined
king’s command to “look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” we rec-
ognize in his pretensions the ultimate transience and incompleteness of
our own civil orders. Such a humane motivation to look for the pale reflec-
tion of our own politics in that of ancient (yet not so far removed) social
worlds can provoke a range of responses from optimistic assessments of
the righteousness of current forms of civil order to pessimistic conclu-
sions that the brutality of oppression has barely changed over 5,000 years.
Both of these responses to early complex polities are productive in their
own way insofar as they stimulate reflection on the nature of political au-
thority in our lives. And here lies the illumination that archaeological stud-
ies can provide: by describing how dimensions of social life produced and
reproduced political orders, the intersecting spatiality and historicity of
our own world may become slightly less transparent and the State slightly
less dim in our minds.

A Map of the Present Work

The Political Landscape is informally divided into two parts. The first (chap-
ters 1 and 2) focuses on elaborating the central theoretical problems that
arise from an eªort to understand the constitution of authority through
landscapes; the second part (chapters 3–6) examines the role of landscapes
in four sets of political relationships describable in reference to the generic
terms of geopolitics, polities, regimes, and institutions. These relationships
are explored within three primary archaeological cases: the Classic period
Maya; the early first millennium b.c. kingdom of Urartu, and southern
Mesopotamia during the late third and early second millennia b.c.
Chapters 1 and 2 argue for two primary intellectual transformations in
the contemporary theorization of political life. The first, taken up in chap-
ter 1, centers on revising the conceptualization of space in the study of
early complex polities. Although the dominant traditions in modern ex-
aminations of early complex polities define space as prior to the social
world, such a philosophical stance relies on the highly problematic posi-
tion of defending either an absolute or a subjective ontology that describes
built environments as epiphenomena of historical process. Instead, I fol-
 INTRODUCTION 25

low recent directions in geographic thought that describe space as emerg-

ing in relations between objects, an ontological revision that demands an
account of landscapes as social artifacts that are produced and reproduced
through varying dimensions of spatial practice.
Rather than considering spatial forms as dependent elements of tem-
poral process (for example, the City as an accompaniment to the State),
this notion of spatial practice highlights the ways in which spaces are cre-
ated out of myriad social acts and actors ranging from the quotidian (such
as a family building an addition to their home) to the extraordinary (such
as the establishment of a polity ’s territorial boundaries through war or
treaty). We can examine the production of landscapes along intertwined
dimensions of spatial practice—in the bodily experience of spatial form,
in the perceptual interaction of sense with place and aesthetic, and in the
imagination of locale, world, and cosmos. No single dimension alone
can give a su‹ciently broad understanding of the spatiality of social life.
Within a holistic vision of social space, landscapes can be understood as
central elements in social production and reproduction. No longer con-
ceivable as mere stages on which more deep rooted determinants unfold,
the landscapes in which we live can be understood as instrumental in
shaping the way we move through the routines and surprises of our daily
lives, the aªective responses engendered by places of particular mean-
ing, and the ways in which we imagine our lives being reshaped. These
are the ways we interact with landscapes and the sources of their politi-
cal significance.
In chapter 2, I argue that, although the State has aªorded us concep-
tual cover for typological debate and varied emplotments of metahistor-
ical schema, it is a deeply flawed concept for an archaeology of politics.
The suªocating focus on the evolution of the State has left the study of
early complex polities without the theoretical apparatus for attending to
the central problem of political analysis: what did early complex polities
actually do? How did polities manufacture sovereignty? How did regimes
secure power and legitimacy? How were subjects ordered? In develop-
ing models of political life so entirely consumed by links between time
and types, we have been left with little idea as to how political practices
produced and reproduced authority.
The absence of models for describing the operation of archaic States
has led to a general diminishment of the import accorded politics vis-à-
vis religious and economic arenas in archaeological reconstructions of so-
cial life (Conrad and Demarest 1984; Mann 1986; Van de Mieroop 1992;
cf. Yoªee 1995) and to a reliance on the overly polarized concepts of co-
26 INTRODUCTION

ercion and consent to account for the solidarity of ancient political com-
munities (Marcus 1993: 134; cf. Smith and Kohl 1994). As political sci-
entists have long argued, the coalescence and administration of political
communities cannot be adequately described in terms of simple pushes
and pulls exerted by a governmental structure bent on subduing a recal-
citrant population (Friedrich 1958; Gadamer 1975; Hobbes 1998; Oake-
shott 1975). Rather, the central pillar of any political community is author-
ity, the asymmetric, reciprocal public relationships where one actively
practices a power to command that is confirmed by another as legitimate.
Chapters 3 through 6 examine the spatiality of political authority in
early complex polities in reference to the four pivotal sets of relationships
described above that in significant measure constitute civil life:
· the ties among polities that organize geopolitics;
· the links between subjects and regimes that create polities;
· the interaction of power elites and grassroots organizations that pro-
duce regimes; and
· the ties among institutions within a governing apparatus.

These four relationships are explored in reference to three archaeological

landscapes:
· the Classic period lowland Maya ( a.d. 250–900);
· the kingdom of Urartu (ca. 850–643 b.c.); and
· southern Mesopotamia from the Ur III period through the early Old
Babylonian period (ca. 2125–1880 b.c.).

Geopolitics, the focus of chapter 3, refers to the formation of a polit-

ical unit in space as coherent and distinct from neighboring polities. The
central problem addressed in this chapter is the relationship among poli-
ties as they interact within a wider ecumene. Thus the pivotal concern
of the chapter is to delineate spatial practices that shape the interpolity
order.
Chapter 4 attends to the spatial dimensions of relationships that con-
stitute polities, specifically the links between subjects and political au-
thorities. The discussions in this chapter are concerned with the spatial
production of internal coherence vital to the formation and routinization
of authority. This includes not only the delineation of defined territories
within which sovereignty is confined to the apparatus of a single authority,
but also the creation of political identities—the association of identity with
 INTRODUCTION 27

land through the demolition of prior commitments and the development

of a constructed memory of landscape.
The concept of the regime, the focus of chapter 5, is used in this study
to stand in for the host of implied structures and poorly articulated forms
typically addressed under the rubric of urbanism. Comparative anthro-
pology has shown that urbanism is not in itself a universal feature of com-
plex polities; furthermore, there is such dramatic variation in city form
within urbanized polities that it is truly impossible to speak of “the city ”
as a single historical space. By “regime” I mean the spaces defined by po-
litical and social elites with a direct interest in reproduction of structures
of authority in concert with broader coalitions supporting authoritative
rulers. Regime thus incorporates the spaces created both by the horizon-
tal circuits of prestige, influence, and resources among elites and by the
vertical ties (kin, ethnic, religious) that extend down to grassroots levels.
As a number of recent studies have suggested, many of the places that we
define as central to urban environments arise out of the practices of such
regimes (see, for example, Elkin 1987; Stoker 1996; Stone 1989). Fur-
thermore, it is in the context of regimes that we can explore the aestheti-
cization of a political apparatus through the sensual dimensions of for-
mal perception (such as the evocative potency of urban experience) and
the imaginative dimensions of representational media (such as the at-
tachment of values of civility and humanity to urban life).
Temple, palace, and market have long served as proxy terms for insti-
tutional complexes based on sacred, political, and economic power.
However, the actual spaces have rarely been described as fundamental to
institutional operation. Chapter 6 focuses on both the production of phys-
ical institutional spaces and tensions between rival imaginings of politi-
cal legitimacy. The built spaces of political institutions have often (par-
ticularly in the Classical world) been hailed as triumphs of human
architectural genius expressive of developing human creativity (see, for
example, Lloyd 1980: 12–13). However, they were more profoundly key
elements in the production of political authority, enabling regimes to reg-
ularize the demands placed on subjects. But despite the impression of co-
herence that regimes foster, institutions can also provide prominent sites
of factional competition. Thus, this chapter also addresses the spatial di-
mensions of institutional fragmentation that can promote crisis, frag-
mentation, and collapse.
The final chapter provides a concluding formulation of the central
themes of the book and contextualizes these discussions in reference to
three primary issues: the role of a constellatory analysis in a comparative
28 INTRODUCTION

archaeological program, the relationship between ancient landscapes and

contemporary politics, and the status of the early complex polity as an
object of analysis. These discussions are intended to point future theory
and research in potentially productive new directions.
Taken as a whole, The Political Landscape is an attempt to fill in a gap
between contemporary theorizations of civil life and investigations of pol-
itics in the ancient world. I try to find a balance between attention to gen-
eral theory, on the one hand, and a commitment to the details of archae-
ological and epigraphic explication, on the other. The archaeological
perspective oªered here is not assembled out of a regionally focused study
of a single case or a traditional eªort at cross-cultural comparison. Instead,
these archaeological studies outline constellations of intersecting politi-
cal practices. I adopted this constellatory approach to the material for two
reasons. First, due to the exigencies of preservation and traditions of re-
search, no one locale presents useful cogent evidence for all dimensions
of the political landscape. Thus, practical considerations demanded that
the discussions range beyond any single case study. Second, the book is
intended to help resuscitate a genre of anthropological writing that ex-
plores material in a comparative spirit without yielding to the reductionist
tendencies that tend to cripple many such works. Thus, it was critical that
each case be allowed to develop in its own right without the compression
that results from traditional comparison.
It is with some trepidation that I step away from the primary region of
my own field research in the Caucasus. However, to refuse to move our
theory-building beyond single emblematic regional cases threatens to rest
claims to interpretive priority on the unsatisfactory grounds of experience
rather than argumentation. Indeed, hesitancy to move beyond the single
case threatens to balkanize research programs that, within an anthropo-
logical archaeology, should flow quite freely into one another. Thus the
cases here are juxtaposed in order to tease out the central argument—that
polities in early complex societies operated through landscapes—without
suggesting that these practices have any logic beyond the historical con-
stellations of power and legitimacy constituting authority. I have restricted
the comparative horizon of the present study to early complex societies
only in order to provide for a closely delineated frame of reference. I do
not mean to restrict political landscapes to the narrow set of cases dis-
cussed here, just as I do not view the limited group of political relation-
ships at issue in subsequent chapters to preclude others. These steps have
been taken merely to focus an investigation that otherwise might have
easily grown to several volumes.
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Title: Jurgen and the law

A statement, with exhibits, of the Court's opinion, and
the brief for the defendants on motion to direct an
acquittal

Editor: Guy Holt

Release date: August 24, 2023 [eBook #71475]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Robert M. McBride &

Company, 1922

Credits: Charlene Taylor, Terry Jeffress and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JURGEN

AND THE LAW ***
Jurgen
and the
Law
This edition is limited to one thousand and
eighty numbered copies, of which one thousand
are for sale.

Copy Number 675

 JURGEN AND
THE LAW

A STATEMENT
With Exhibits, including the Court’s Opinion, and
the Brief for the Defendants on Motion to Direct
an Acquittal

EDITED BY

GUY HOLT

NEW YORK
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
1923
 Copyright, 1922, by
Robert M. McBride & Co.

Printed in the
United States of America

Published, January, 1923

JURGEN AND THE LAW
A STATEMENT
 A STATEMENT
If Mr. Cabell had not pre-empted the phrase, the words with which
he characterized the tale Jurgen might well be used as a title for an
account of the tale’s adventures with the law. Those adventures,
which the matter of this book commemorates no less effectively than
it helped to divert them from a less happy outcome, form indeed a
comedy of justice: a comedy which, perhaps, aroused more of
indignation than of mirth, and which, in its duration, somewhat
exceeded the time-limit that a canny dramatist allots himself, but
which ended appropriately on a note of justice, and thus showed
Mr. Cabell to be not only the maker of a happily descriptive phrase
but also somewhat of a prophet.
Well, the comedy of Jurgen’s suppression is ended. The book is
admitted once more to the freedom of the library, and the
pawnbroker is again at liberty to wander throughout the universe in
search of rationality and fair dealing. And in due course, time and the
wisdom of other generations will decide whether the pawnbroker, or
the book, or the adventures of either be in any way memorable.
Today, however, the vicissitudes of Jurgen are of indisputable
importance, if only because similar misfortunes may overtake yet
other publications. At the moment it appears that the position of
literature is less precarious than it has been in the recent past. For
the courts, of late, with gratifying accord have failed to detect
obscenity in a number of volumes at which professional
righteousness has taken offense, and there apparently is cause to
hope that legal precedent will dispel the obscurity which so long has
surrounded decency—within the meaning of the statute. Yet it is still
possible for an incorporated organization to waylay and imprison art:
to exercise by accusation a censorship which impermanence makes
no less dangerous. Until the difference between the liberty permitted
to art and the license forbidden to the vulgar be clearly defined, it
remains impossible for any artist to foreknow how fully he may
describe and thereby interpret life as he sees it, or for the community
to enjoy uninterrupted access to much of the best of ancient and
modern literature.
In the pages which follow is printed an argument that expressly
defines the test whereby that which is legally permissible and that
which is prohibited may be determined. It is, explicitly, an argument
in behalf of Jurgen, submitted at the trial of the publishers of that
book: and it is published in book form, in part because of its intrinsic
interest to all readers of Cabell, in part because it is a valuable
addition to the literature of censorship. But here there seems need to
preface the argument with a brief history of the Jurgen case.

II
It is now a trifle less than three years ago that a Mr. Walter J.
Kingsley, a theatrical press agent, sent to the literary editor of a New
York newspaper a letter[1] directing attention to James Branch
Cabell’s Jurgen as a source of lewd pleasure to the sophisticated
and of menace to the moral welfare of Broadway. Hitherto Jurgen
had found some favor with a few thousands of discriminating
readers; it had been advertised—with, its publishers must now admit,
a disregard of the value of all pornographic appeal—as literature.
Critics, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, had applauded the book
as a distinguished addition to American letters; three editions had
been printed and the tale promised to enjoy the success to which its
wit, its beauty and the profundity of its theme entitled it. No one, until
Mr. Kingsley broke silence, had complained of Jurgen as an obscene
production; no letters of condemnation had been received by the
publishers; and the press had failed to suggest that decorum, much
less decency, had anywhere been violated.
Mr. Kingsley’s letter altered affairs. Immediately a chorus in
discussion of Jurgen arose. In the newspapers appeared many
letters, some in defense of the book, others crying Amen to
Mr. Kingsley. Within a week, the merry game of discovering the “key”
to Jurgen was well under way and a pleasant, rather heated
controversy had begun. In the upshot some one sent a clipping of
the Kingsley letter to Mr. John S. Sumner, secretary of the New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice, calling upon him to do his duty.
Mr. Sumner procured a copy of the book, and, on January 14th,
1920, armed with a warrant, he entered the offices of the publishers,
seized the plates and all copies of the book and summoned the
publishers to appear in court the following day on a charge of
violating section 1141 of the Penal code.[2]
Thereafter the record is uneventful. Mr. Sumner’s complaint[3] was
duly presented and the case was called for formal hearing in the
magistrate’s court on January 23. Upon that date the defendants
waived examination and the case was committed for trial in the Court
of Special Sessions. The trial was set for March 8, but upon motion
of Mr. John Quinn, then Counsel for the Defense, who appeared
before Justice Malone, the case was submitted for consideration to
the Grand Jury which found an indictment against the publishers[4]
thereby transferring the case to the Court of General Sessions and
enabling the defendants to secure a trial by jury. On May 17, 1920,
the publishers pleaded not guilty ... and, until October 16, 1922,
awaited trial.
For, in New York, a “crime wave” was in progress. The courts were
crowded with cases which involved other than a possible technical
violation of the laws; and, however anxious to rid the docket of the
Jurgen case, neither the courts nor the District Attorney’s office could
do other than give precedence to the trials of persons charged with
more serious offenses.
On October 16, then, two and one half years after the indictment,
the Jurgen case was called before Judge Charles C. Nott in the
Court of General Sessions. A jury was drawn, the book was
submitted in evidence and the people’s case was presented. The
defendants, through their attorneys, Messrs. Goodbody, Danforth
and Glenn, and their counsel, Mr. Garrard Glenn, moved for the
direction of a verdict of acquittal, submitting, in behalf of their motion,
the brief which is printed hereinafter. The trial was adjourned for
three days; and on October 19, 1922, Judge Nott rendered his
decision, which also appears hereinafter, and directed the jury to
bring in a verdict of acquittal.

III
There ends the record of the tale Jurgen’s adventures with the law.
The record is, as has been said, uneventful. A book had been
impugned, that is all. An author had been vilified and his publishers
indicted; certain thousands of readers had been deprived of access
to a book which critical opinion had commended to their interest; and
author and publishers both had been robbed of the revenues from
whatever sale the book might have had during the nearly three years
in which it was removed from publication.
True, Mr. Cabell and his book had received much publicity....
There is a legend, indeed, that the author of Jurgen (and of a dozen
other distinguished books) owes much of his present place in letters
to the advertising which Mr. Sumner involuntarily accorded him. But
one may question that. An examination of the publishers’ files seem
to show that most of the expressions of admiration for Jurgen were
repetitions of an enthusiasm expressed before the book’s
“suppression.” And if the enthusiasm and the sympathy of
Mr. Cabell’s admirers were hearteningly evident, the attacks of his
detractors did not flag; and an inestimable number of persons,
knowing Mr. Cabell’s work only through the recorded opinions of
Messrs. Kingsley and Sumner, did certainly condemn him unread
and, shuddering, barred their library doors against him.... No,
Mr. Cabell owes no debt of thanks to the accusers of Jurgen.
But all this is by the way. The argument, which appears in the
following pages, is of importance not alone because it so ably
defends Jurgen, but because it defines, more clearly than any other
recent document, the present legal status of literature in America in
relation to permissible candor in treatment and subject matter. The
brief is not in any sense an argument in behalf of unrestricted
publication of any matter, however obscene, or indeed in behalf of
the publication of obscenity in any form. It is not a denial of the
community’s right to protect itself from offenses against good taste or
against its moral security, or to punish violation of the laws by which
the public welfare is safe-guarded.
But one need not be an apologist of license to perceive that there
is in a thoughtful consideration of every aspect of life no kinship to
indecency; or to perceive that the community cannot, without serious
danger to its own cultural development, ignore the distinction
between the artist’s attempt to create beauty by means of the written
word, and the lewd and vulgar outpourings of the pornographer.
When these two things are confused by a semi-official organization
which is endowed with suppressive powers, even when the courts
fail to sustain its accusations, the menace to the community is
measurably increased. As a protection against this menace the brief
presents, with admirable clarity, a legal test, the validity of which
common sense will readily recognize, for the determination of
literature as distinct from obscenity.
Guy Holt.
New York City,
November 14, 1922.
BRIEF FOR THE DEFENDANTS ON
MOTION TO DIRECT AN
ACQUITTAL
 INDEX
PAGE
I. The question presented is one of law,
which the Court should decide 20
II. The test is the literary as distinct from the
pornographic 21
III. In applying this test, all reasonable doubt
should be resolved in favor of the book 30
IV. In judging the book by the standards
above indicated, it must be read as a
whole, and, on that basis, it must be
upheld even though it may contain
portions which would not stand the test if
isolated 31
V. The book, read as a whole, sustains the
test of the law 34
VI. The passages, to which reference has
been made in the complaint originally
filed in Special Sessions, are not
indecent 57
VII. In conclusion 68
 Court of General Sessions of the
Peace
IN AND FOR THE COUNTY OF NEW YORK.

People of the State of New

York

against

Guy Holt, Robert M. McBride

& Company and
Robert M. McBride

Brief for Defendants on Motion to Direct an

Acquittal.
The defendants have moved for a directed acquittal at the close of
the People’s case. The defendants did not dispute upon the trial the
facts which went to make up such case as the People had. That
case is that the defendants had in their possession, with intent to sell
(they are publishers) a book, “Jurgen”, by Mr. James Branch Cabell;
and it is contended that the book is lewd and obscene within Section
1141 of the Penal Law.
1—The Question presented is one of
law, which the Court should decide.
The rule here to be applied is that obtaining in all criminal cases. It
is the Court’s duty to direct an acquittal when the People’s case has
failed to show guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
People v. Gluck (188 N. Y. 167);
People v. Smith (84 Misc. 348);
Babcock v. People (15 Hun 347).
The indictment is for having in possession with intent to sell, a
book offending against Section 1141 of the Penal Law. Since the
defendants do not dispute the fact that they did have in their
possession the book with intent to sell it, the simple question is
whether this book violates the criminal law of this state as expressed
in the section of the Penal Law above noted.
While it is sometimes said that this question is one of fact, upon
which it is the function of a jury to pass, nevertheless it is clear that,
when the defendant raises the question whether the book, as a
matter of law, violates the statute, that question is one of law upon
which it is the duty of the court to pass.
People v. Brainard (192 App. Div. 816);
Halsey v. New York Society (234 N. Y. 1).
“It is true that whether the book offends against this
statute is ordinarily a question of fact for the jury in the
first place to determine. It is equally true that upon the
review of a conviction for having offended against this
provision, it is the duty of this court to examine the
publication and see whether the conviction can be
sustained under the facts proven. Upon an
examination of the book I am satisfied that neither
defendant has been guilty of the offense charged in the
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