Nailing my theses to the internet, part 1 of 2

Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of the church to mark the public expression of his ideas. I believe that scholars should similarly make their fundamental principles public. My book, Urban Life in the Distant Past, is built on a foundation of five “theses,” or fundamental principles. These describe the major outlines of my theoretical and comparative approach to premodern cities. In this post, taken from chapter 1, I describe the first three of my theses; the other two will be in my next post. This is the modern version of nailing one’s thesis to the wall (a custom that survives in Swedish universities, where they still must nail completed thesis to the wall!).

 

(1) Definitions are tools; one’s definition of city or urban depends on one’s goals and questions.

 

Scholars of cities today spend little time agonizing over how one defines the terms city and urban. In fact, they typically use the term “definition” to refer to operationalization: the measures that capture the phenomena scholars want to study. Premodern cities exhibit far more variability than modern cities in the size, form, functions, and activities; in addition, their political and economic contexts are more varied. For example, virtually all cities today exist within nation-states. But premodern cities could be part of a chiefdom, a city-state, an empire, or a weak state (Chapter 4). Cities today are embedded in a globalized, capitalist world system, whereas premodern cities could be part of a command economy, a small-scale commercial economy, or a far-flung globalized early commercial economy (Chapter 5). Because of this variability, the ways premodern cities may be defined also vary greatly. There is no “best” definition of city or urban (Smith 2020). This principle is often neglected by scholars of ancient cities, who may agonize over the “correct” definition of urban, or how to document and study the essence of cities and urbanism, which leads to my next principle.

 

            (2)  Do not reify the concepts of city or urban.

 

Cities and urbanism—particularly in the premodern domain—are not real things. Settlements, on the other hand, are real. They exist in this world. Archaeologists excavate their remains, and it is usually obvious whether a given site was a place where people resided. “City” and “urban,” on the other hand, are categories or concepts that we apply to some settlements, when it suits our goals. If we have different goals, we may use different definitions. In the language of philosopher John Searle (1995), 

John Searle

settlements are brute facts, while cities are institutional facts. One of Searle’s examples is money. The fact that a piece of paper in my wallet has value and can be exchanged for goods and services is an institutional fact. It depends on the existence of institutions and beliefs that allow particular kinds of pieces of paper to be used to purchase things. But the physical properties of this same dollar bill—its ability to be folded or rolled up, or burned, or marked with a pen—are brute facts. They do not depend on an institutional framework or common beliefs within a community of people. There is no “brute fact” of “citiness” or “urbanity” as intrinsic attributes of a settlement, something waiting to be discovered; these are institutional facts that only make sense from a given perspective, with a given definition. The consequence of this principle is the following:

 

(3) The settlement should be the primary unit of analysis, not the city. We should acknowledge that some “urban” attributes and practices apply to non-urban settlements.

 

If settlements are “brute facts,” then it makes sense to use them as a basic unit of analysis. When our research shows that a given settlement was large and complex, or served as a hub in a regional economy, then we may want to classify it as an urban settlement; in Searle’s framework, this is an institutional judgment. The fact that some key features of cities also characterize smaller, non-urban, settlements is a further warning about the dangers of reifying the concept urban. Settlement scaling research shows that key quantitative outcomes of social interactions in settlements characterize both urban and non-urban settlement systems (Ortman and Coffey 2017); see Chapter 3. Similarly, comparative work on neighborhoods shows that this urban social-spatial unit is also found in non-urban settlements (Smith et al. 2015; Tuzin 2001); see Chapter 7. These findings suggest that we can proceed with analyzing settlements without agonizing over definitions or worries about whether or not they are urban.[1]

            See the next post, Part 2, for the rest of my theses.

Swedish theses nailed to the wall

REFERENCES

Ortman, Scott G. and Grant D. Coffey

2017    Settlement Scaling in Middle-Range Societies. American Antiquity 82 (4): 662-682.

Searle, John R.

1995    The Construction of Social Reality. Free Press, New York.

Smith, Michael E.

2020    Definitions and Comparisons in Urban Archaeology. Journal of Urban Archaeology 1: 15-30.

Smith, Michael E., Ashley Engquist, Cinthia Carvajal, Katrina Johnston, Amanda Young, Monica Algara, Yui Kuznetsov, and Bridgette Gilliland

2015    Neighborhood Formation in Semi-Urban Settlements. Journal of Urbanism 8 (2): 173-198.

Tuzin, Donald

2001    Social Complexity in the Making: A Case Study Among the Arapesh of New Guinea. Routledge, New York.

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[1] Perhaps ironically, this caveat has not stopped archaeologists—including me—from arguing about definitions of city and urban; see discussion below.