"Cooperation and Collective Action in State-Building: an Anthropological Perspective"

From my comparative study, I demonstrated that premodern states exhibited a wide range of variation from highly autocratic to strongly collective, the latter based on policies analogous to those of the European Enlightenment and its notions of democratic political modernity. In my presentation I emphasize the nature of change in two cultural domains, artistic production and ritual, that accompanied phases of transition from autocratic to more collective forms of governance.