Henri J.M. Claessen; Constructing the early state; The rise of a research programme

Henri Claessen has devoted much of his scholarly career to the study of Early States. Although he has always been fond of travelogues and enter tained a romantic interest in other cultures (the word exotic occurs in many of his lectures and articles), he has not conducted anthropological fieldwork; his research has always been based entirely on literary sources. The purpose of his frequent travels abroad was not to visit peasants or local non-anthropologist elites but to participate in anthropological con ferences or to inspect archaeological sites. He remained an outsider to the cultures he studied, committed to the position that a culture should be described in etic terms, which he saw as the only feasible way to practise comparative anthropology and formulate generalizations. Comparativism is the most important methodological strain in Claessen's work. From his earliest research (Claessen 1970) to his most recent publications he has been comparing cultures, societies, and organ izations. This approach was handed down to him by his teacher, Andr? K?bben, at Amsterdam (see K?bben 1952). At first, he looked for differences and similarities simply in terms of 'aspects' (or rather 'traits'). Later, when he penetrated further into the intricacies of his data, he became more concerned with the complexity of the fabric of culture and the many interdependencies in the behavioural and cultural fields, and so his comparisons became gradually more sophisticated in theory and method (Claessen and Skalnik 1978, 1981), later developing into analyses of complex factors (Claessen and Van de Velde 1984) and complex behaviour (Claessen 1988c; Claessen, Van de Velde, and Smith 1985). The academic environment of the institute at Leiden may have provided a dialectical antithesis to his approach, with on the one side his structuralist colleagues, on the other side the historians, archaeologists and linguists in the Faculty of Arts who were to become his collaborators in the study of the Early State. They tended to be suspicious of world-wide comparisons and preferred to focus on ethnographic contexts and specific culture

Art · Emic and etic · Epistemology · Literature · Romance · Sociology · State (computer science · Anthropology · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Mathematics · Philosophy

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