Rethinking Empire
Materiality, Metaphysics, and Imperial Politics
Edited by Tamara L. Bray and Lori Khatchadourian
This groundbreaking volume explores how dynamic interactions between human actors, material objects, and metaphysical beliefs shaped and sustained empires. From Han Chinese water management to Xiongnu drinking vessels, from Hittite royal imagery to Teotihuacan animal sacrifices, from Andean anti-imperial resistance to ritual rebirth in Travancore, the case studies reveal how materials and metaphysics intertwined to both enable and constrain imperial ambitions. The contributors examine how assemblages of artifacts, resources, animals, and landscapes actively shaped power relations across diverse imperial formations, while sometimes facilitating resistance to them. Moving beyond conventional political histories, the volume illuminates how things helped constitute imperial authority. In examining these material-political assemblages, the authors provide new theoretical frameworks for understanding empire-building as an emergent process involving both human and non-human actors, while raising crucial questions about archaeology’s ethical obligations in studying imperial power.
Contributors: Tamara L. Bray, Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver, Lori Khatchadourian, Bryan K. Miller, Deepthi Murali, Nawa Sugiyama, Darryl Wilkinson, Alice Yao
Virtual Book Talk:
Join SAR Press Director Tim Pauketat, editor Tamara Bray, and authors Darryl Wilkinson and Alice Yao for a discussion of the first SAR Press Open Access Publication, Rethinking Empire: Materiality, Metaphysics, and Imperial Politics.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Things in the Rearview Mirror
Tamara L. Bray
CHAPTER TWO
The Ways of Water in Han China: A Metaphysics for an Expansionary Empire
Alice Yao
CHAPTER THREE
Metaphysical and Political Anti-Imperialism: Anarchist Communities of the Eastern Andes during the Late Intermediate Period
Darryl Wilkinson
CHAPTER FOUR
Divine Multiplicity and Royal Singularity in Hittite Art as Imperial Strategy
Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver
CHAPTER FIVE
Golden Birth: Materiality, Legitimation, and Sacral Kingship in Proto-Colonial South India
Deepthi Murali
CHAPTER SIX
The Matter of Corporeal Animal Forms at Teotihuacan, Mexico
Nawa Sugiyama
CHAPTER SEVEN
Foreign Objects in Imperial Assemblages: Han Chinese Cups for Xiongnu Steppe Politics
Bryan K. Miller
CHAPTER EIGHT
Toward an Anti-Imperialist, New Materialist Archaeology of Empires
Lori Khatchadourian
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
- Archaeologies of Empire: Local Participants and Imperial Trajectories, Edited by Anna L. Boozer, Bleda S. Düring, and Bradley J. Parker, 2020
- The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Gil J. Stein, 2005
- Archaic State Interaction: The Eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age, edited by William A. Parkinson and Michael L. Galaty, 2010
- Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Melissa S. Murphy, 2011
- Imperial Formations, edited by Ann Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue, 2007
- Law & Empire in the Pacific: Fiji and Hawai'i, edited by Sally Engle Merry and Donald Brenneis, 2004