The Rise (and Demise) of the State in the Near East: Week 11. Demise of the state

This course has been, or at least I have wished it to be, not so much about the state itself, but more about what Bartelson calls "the phenomenon of statism" especially and specifically in the field of Near Eastern Studies. Statism, i.e. prioritizing the states, official ideologies, state formation and macro-models of state-dominated and evolutionary pasts, have long contaminated the study of the ancient world, and one wants to know why. This obviously involves looking at the producers of this scholarship from a state-critical standpoint, at the producers of "bureacuratic thinking" about the state that have created an utterly false impression that states and state formation were the most important things to study about the ancient past. As Bartelson nicely argues state itself constitutes a major obstacle in resolving it as a historical (and contemporary) problem, and I second him by saying that, in our case, this is mostly because the traditional, canonical, normative scholarship on the ancient Near Eastern world have set the stage for us through a statist discourse, colonizing the field of disciplinary knowledge by disseminating statist official ideologies and legitimating the state itself. This colonization of disciplinary knowledge is what I wanted to get at. How much we have been successful is debatable (this Thursday).