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Brian Hayden. The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 410pp., 64 illustr., hbk, ISBN 978-1-10-857207-1)
The Power of Ritual in Prehistory focuses on sodalities known as ‘secret societies’ through time and space. Hayden introduces this phenomenon by starting with a series of quotations by different ethnographers and anthropologists, who stressed the difficulties in obtaining first-hand information on the nature of such societies and their associated rituals. Access to such secrets was reserved for initiates and/or full members within the secret societies. But how are these sodalities to be understood? This question has vexed many ethnographers and archaeologists over the years, and many attempts have been put forth in order to frame and define secret societies (e.g. Boas, 1897; Wedgewood, 1930). What distinguishes Hayden's present effort from works by others is that he is an archaeologist with a deep understanding of material culture and, consequently, the ability to analyse ethnographic data using new lenses. Through his previous work, Hayden had developed a solid theoretical framework to approach the causes and connections between ritual and power structures and the rise of social complexity, with special reference to his ‘aggrandizer model’ (Hayden, 1995). However, in the present work, Hayden further develops his earlier ideas on the emergence of social inequality by connecting these notions to a substantial discussion on secret societies. Hayden's main thesis is that this form of social organization, through time and space, played an important role in the acquisition of political power, the evolution of social complexity, and social inequality. In this book, Hayden explores such overarching questions such as: How can secret societies be identified archaeologically, and at what locations do they occur in the landscape; what structures, monuments, paraphernalia, and images could in general be related to secret societies? (pp. 5–7)
Hayden argues, quite convincingly, that archaeologists and anthropologists can benefit from learning more about secret societies, in terms of lower, middle, and upper range theory. Secret societies are associated with ‘the first institutional manifestation of ritual organization linked to political power’ (pp. 5–7). In this book, Hayden examines secret societies occurring in complex transegalitarian or chiefdom level societies; these sodalities transcended kinship by forming ‘fictive’ supra-kinship organizations along with extensive networks...