干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Some 600 years ago, Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote a theory of history in which he suggested a cyclical model of state formation and dissolution linked to ’asabiyah, translated as "group feeling." ’Asabiyah is born out of shared desert hardship among the mobile bedouin, kinship relations, and catalyzed by charismatic leadership. Ibn Khaldun’s theory emphasizes social relations over a material economic base rooted in environmental conditions and has been largely ignored by anthropology. This theory provides an appropriate model for the emergence of Arabian complex societies in the first millennium BC, an outcome little influenced by the social dynamics of state formation in surrounding regions like Egypt and Mesopotamia. Traditional materialist models of the development of highly complex societies rely on material sources of power and authority. These models anticipate an amplification of elites’ network alliances through wealth exchanges (supported by surplus production) or competitive appropriation and redistribution of surplus. In the southern Arabian highlands, archaeological data provide little support for these models but instead suggest that the emergence of Arabian kingdoms is best explained as the appropriation of local institutions of social constitution by charismatic leaders to federalize social identities while transforming kinship relations into patron-client classes.