CIVILIZATION, HIERARCHY, AND POLITICAL-ECONOMIC INEQUALITY

This article puts Dumont's 'hierarchy' into the context of Marcel Mauss's conception of civilization as a correction to Dumont's ahistorical and structuralist approach. First, it introduces and elaborates Mauss's 'civilization' into a descriptive and analytic concept. It then proposes a loosened conception of different hierarchies of encompassment and ideology. What follows as extended examples is a selection of long processes of transformation of the hierarchical structure of civilization in China. The article concludes by broaching the big historical questions that anthropology should be asking about hierarchies, that is, how they are formed and transformed.