506714

research-article2013
PTX42210.1177/0090591713506714Political TheoryFerguson

Article
Political Theory
2014, Vol. 42(2) 167­–187
What Was Politics to © 2013 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591713506714
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Kennan Ferguson1

Abstract
What does it mean that humans were not the only hominin? Or, more
importantly, what does it mean that other hominins held cultural, biological,
and perhaps even linguistic equivalence to human beings? Drawing on
mitochondrial DNA analyses, theories of deep history, and attention to the
inhuman, this essay argues that such equivalence entails not only the reality of
human/nonhuman genetic compatibility but the existence of politics in places
and times without humans. Such a politics of non-humans would entail political
and social forms playing a central role in the development of humanity. If
politico-social experiences in the prehuman and non-human hominin
communities actually affected behavior and practices, then the development
of humanity is an effect of politics rather than a precondition for it.

Keywords
Denisovan, DNA, Neanderthal, deep history, politics, inhuman

Is all politics anthropolitics? In a Kantian world, the answer seems to be

“yes”: if man proves the measure of all things, then only human beings par-
ticipate in the political. In Kant’s rendition, his “Copernican revolution” in
thought emerged from the recognition that “we can know a priori of things
only what we ourselves put into them,” that human cognition serves as the
necessary precondition for truth and consequence.1

1University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Corresponding Author:
Kennan Ferguson, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Bolton Hall 620, Box 413, Milwaukee,
WI 53201, USA.
Email: kennan@uwm.edu
168 Political Theory 42(2)

But Kant spoke too soon. His focus on the relationship between the phe-
nomenal and the noumenal, his insistence that epistemology escape Humean
empiricism, his recognition of the opacity of things in themselves, and his
connection of practical reason to the shared nature of all humans: all blinded
him to the depths of the connections between the human and that outside of
humanity. And in our post-Kantian world, we follow Kant in innumerable
ways, presuming that the limits of humanity also comprise the limits of
knowledge, politics, and meaning. (This presumption’s main dissenters turn
to theology, arguing that God provides all of the above and infinitely more.)
In fact, Kant even misrepresents Copernicus. To take seriously the idea of
the actual Copernican revolution means recognizing not the centrality of
humanity in thought but humanity’s unimportance. Copernicus, after all, dis-
placed the earth from the presumed center of the universe, showing how earth
actually revolved around other bodies. Similarly, a conceptual Copernican
revolution, as Quentin Meillassoux has argued, would dislocate human being
and human experience from the essence of thought and epistemology.2 A true
theoretical revolution of this sort would need to recognize inhumanity’s
capacities as independent from the human.
To take inhumanity seriously as a political locus parallels some political
and social theorists’ recent work on human relations with the nonhuman. Jane
Bennett, Bruno Latour, and Timothy Morton are among the most well known
of those recognizing that understanding human beings and “their” systems
proves impossible without careful and sustained attention to the things and
environments around them. When Bennett argues that politics consists of
electricity as well as humans, she demands attention to the various and unpre-
dictable components of electrical transmission and production: oil, power
plants, weather, steel, technology, tree branches, plastic sockets.3 When
Latour argues that the worms in the biozone between a rainforest and an agri-
cultural region form political behaviors, he deprivileges human intention and
action as the sole locale of politics.4 When Timothy Morton turns to coexis-
tence as strangeness, he examines the microbes and viruses and parasites
which make up the mesh we call humanity.5
Bennett’s and Latour’s and Morton’s work asserts that objects (also known
as things) and other beings (also known as animals, or plants) participate in
politics; they explore some of the potential of thinking about politics as com-
plex relational undertakings between humans and non-humans. Kant would
hardly recognize their version of the Copernican revolution.
Yet they still remain in a recognizably human realm: each insists upon
the connection between humans and non-humans, but none reach into the
milieu of the fully inhuman. Politics, for these authors, exists in the inter-
stices between inhumanity and the human.6 Following on these insights,
Ferguson 169

I ask, instead: can politics exist in fully inhuman realms? That is, can non-
humans practice and engage in politics, without human involvement?
The answer to these questions can be found in prehistoric, non-human
time: that of the non-human hominin. Before explaining precisely who these
hominins were—primarily Denisovans and Neanderthals—it is important to
identify the iterations and limitations of these questions. The turn to non-
human or pre-human hominins is not an excursion into human epigenesis nor
into the prehistorical creation of civilization.7 Where humans ultimately
came from (exemplified in the never-ceasing search for the “missing link”)
usually serves either to naturalize domination or to delineate the differences
between humanity and its predecessors; similarly, the attempt to fix and
describe the emergence of human civilization has proven an enduring trope
which justifies and legitimates political power. This exploration into the pos-
sibility of a politics of non-humanity intends neither to form a natural and
unchanging foundation for politics nor to identify finally the particularities
which make humans unique.
Carefully considering hominan life—its unknown aspects (which com-
prise just about everything), its few known aspects, and most importantly its
surmisable aspects, which arise from the scientifically presumptive fact of
Denisovan and Neanderthal genetic compatibility with humans—can lead to
questioning the centrality of humanity. The genetics of hominins demand of
us a recognition of other beings with similar intellects, social abilities, and
relational capacities as humans. Ultimately, this raises a question hinted at by
Latour, Bennett, and other theorists of thing-networks: the existence of poli-
tics devoid of humans. Was there ever a non-human politics? If so, the
Kantian Copernican revolution can be superseded by a truly Copernican one:
even the world of social science escapes the bounds of humanity. We humans
could be considered only one kind of political creature among many, extinct
and living.
This possibility also leads to a second, provisional entailment, with which
this essay closes. If non-humans can be said to have had politics, then politi-
cal and social forms may well have played a central role in the development
of humanity. If politico-social experiences in the prehuman and non-human
hominin communities actually affected behavior and practices, then the
development of humanity may well be an effect of politics rather than a pre-
condition for it. Man may be a political animal, as Aristotle held, but an ani-
mal formed by politics as well as one which engages in it.8 We humans, in
other words, do not have politics; politics has us.
The implications of these conclusions—however conceptual and
provisional—prove manifold and to some extent open-ended. First, if politics
does exceed the human and we are thus a consequence of politics (viz., a set
170 Political Theory 42(2)

of political practices and negotiations), then the social sciences actually tran-
scend the limits of the human sciences and enter into the realm of the natural
sciences. Second, if the study of politics can be separated from the demands
of humanity, it becomes legitimate to study the politics of other kinds of
beings, not only in their connection to humans but on (and in) their own
terms. This could ideally lead to qualitative changes in political science,
including but not limited to reconceptualizations of animality beyond claims
of rights.9 Certainly, such approaches would seem more plausible. Third, it
should provoke methodological questions concerning the study of all kinds
of social behavior. What does the addition of biological and anthropological
evidence do for the study of politics? If it avoids determinism—and the con-
ceptual and scientific provisionality of these claims should undermine that
effect—then it could at least encourage an interdisciplinarity of method:
empirical evidence can and should arise from a wider diversity of sources.
Consequences of such an approach, such as taking seriously debate and evi-
dence from the physical sciences without the concomitant need to imitate all
of their methods and forms, will necessitate a turn by political philosophy
from forms of pure logicism toward the world around us.

Deep History
Much depends upon the particular definition of humanity, which has a con-
siderable degree of variability in archeological history. The line between the
varieties of precursors to humanity and homo sapiens itself remains blurry.
The complexity and distribution of the group itself—what evolutionary lit-
erature calls “speciation”—can never be fully disentangled from its history,
as shown by the continued debates over whether dogs are the same species as
wolves or about the historical divergence of horses and donkeys. For the
purposes of this essay, the term “human” will apply to the group of hominins
which likely fully speciated in sub-Saharan Africa around 200,000 years ago,
a group related to but distinct from the other human-like species discussed
below.10
This distinction depends upon a few scientific detours through recent
physical archeology, bioarcheology, and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) dis-
coveries. The genus homo, which appeared on the African continent approxi-
mately 2 million years ago (MYA), split into a wide variety of hominan.11
Most of these became extinct fairly quickly, at least in biological time. Many
of one branch, scientifically termed homo erectus, survived until relatively
recently, approximately seventy thousand years ago (70 KYA). The other
branch, which includes the ancestors of modern humans, has generally
referred to as homo, even though this branch contains a wide variety of
Ferguson 171

hominins, such as homo heidelbergensis, a probable precursor to modern

humans. Modern humans emerged only in the past 200 thousand years.
Recent decades have brought startling discoveries about genetic types of
homo alive at the same time as modern humans. The non-human hominins
known as Neanderthals, named after the valley in North-Rhine Westphalia in
which the first specimen was found, remain the best known, even though in
the popular imagination they are assumed to be prehuman, yet ancestral,
“cavemen.” In 2010, a group of researchers announced the discovery in
southern Siberia of another branch of non-human hominin, which they named
“Denisovan” after the cave in the Altai mountains in which it was found.12
More controversially, some archaeologists contend that Homo floresiensis, a
diminutive hominin (nicknamed “the hobbit”) whose remains have been
found on the Flores island in Indonesia, also makes up a separate species,
though others argue floresiensis is merely a genetically disordered or poorly
nourished sapiens.13
In recent years, researchers have determined the dates associated with
these hominins’ eras primarily in one of two ways: through radiological car-
bon dating and through mtDNA analysis. Carbon dating remains the exclu-
sive technology for the more ancient homo species, as the DNA in bone
samples has deteriorated in non-fossilized samples (and of course no DNA
remains in fossils). Further, mtDNA analysis examines the genetic makeup of
extant remnants (such as teeth and bone fragments) and builds evolutionary
comparisons through the emergence, disappearance, and other traceable
changes between individuals, subspecies, and species. The carbon-dating
studies have proven somewhat less reliable than mtDNA analysis of animals
more distant from us in the evolutionary river, since it often relies on physical
proximity, as when artifacts are discovered buried or fossilized near certain
rock strata. Genetic approaches have potential flaws as well, because of the
possibility that Denisovan or Neanderthal samples may have become con-
taminated from interactions with humans (e.g., handling), either in prehistory
or contemporary times. But for the imaginative and theoretical purposes of
this argument, their legitimacy will be presumed.
Neanderthals existed simultaneously with humans, from 230 to 30 KYA.
Their ancestral divergence from the homo branch is estimated at 500 KYA.14
Scholars argue that Neanderthals utilized tools not only for food preparation
but also for hunting. Their diet included ecologically high-status meats (e.g.,
more flesh than marrow); their nearest meat-eating non-hominin competition
such as lions or hyenas relied more on scavenging and small animals.15
Neanderthals, in other words, competed with humans, both geographically,
as humans spread from the African continent, and dietetically, as both hom-
inins fed on the same kinds of animals and used similar tools, including
172 Political Theory 42(2)

Figure 1. An evolutionary tree of homo species from 2 million years ago (bottom)
to the present, with focus on the evolutionary complexity of homo sapiens.
Source: Created by Chris Stringer; used with permission.17

micropoints and microliths.16 (For a visual representation of this and the fol-
lowing timelines, see Figure 1.)
Denisovans were more closely related to Neanderthals than to humans,
but not dramatically. Their trajectory likely split from the Neanderthal line
during the late Pleistocene, and as a result Neanderthals were the predomi-
nant non-human hominin in Western Eurasia while Denisovans migrated to
the East.18 Because the species is so recently discovered, how long they
remained in Asia remains unclear, though many researchers believe that they
never dispersed widely.19 (Whatever floresiensis were, they were still present
on Flores as recently as 17 KYA.)
As humans moved beyond the African continent, they certainly interacted
with these other hominins. Most interesting and most pertinent are the results
of this overlap between humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. As men-
tioned above, it is likely that tools were shared or learned between the spe-
cies. So, too, was artwork, particularly body decorations: both Neanderthals
and Denisovans show evidence of jewelry.20 (Of course, it is uncertain
whether the humans influenced them or vice versa.)
Ferguson 173

Yet even these are not the most dramatic or important form of overlap. The
particularly startling aspect of contact between humans and Denisovans and
Neanderthal is genetic: humans interbred with each, and the genetic makeup
of these non-human hominins remains with many contemporary humans. In
the case of the Neanderthal, this sexual connection clearly emerged early in
the human diaspora. Africans (e.g., the San or the Yoruban peoples) have no
Neanderthal DNA, whereas Europeans, Asians, Americans, and South Pacific
peoples are made up of a “detectable but limited genetic contribution (1-4%)”
of Neanderthal ancestry.21 While this indicates a relatively short period of
spatial coexistence between Neanderthals and humans (as the genetic contri-
bution is fairly standard for all non-African humans), it also means that the
connections between them was far more intimate than has traditionally been
assumed.
Similarly, soon after the discovery of the Denisovan individual, mtDNA
analysis was not only used to identify it as a separate hominin but also to
determine that traces of Denisovan DNA exists in a specific group of
modern-day humans: certain Melanesian groups, specifically the inhabitants
of the Papuan Islands and Bougainville. Approximately 5% of these groups’
genomes descend directly from Denisovans.22 And, since these people are
also descended from the diaspora out of Africa, their total genomic inheri-
tance from non-human hominins is likely between 6.6 and 8.2 percent.23
Most humans, therefore, are not entirely human. And the compatibility
between human and non-human hominin is not merely a creative hypothesis
but has become a genetic presumption: not only were humans in contact with
Neanderthals and Denisovans, but their intercourse was more than cultural or
auditory. These were at times close relations (and likely at other times violent
relations, since these other hominins became extinct during times of com-
parative plenty). Only if one is willing to exclude all people of any non-
African descent from the category of “human” can one say that the skills and
abilities and cultures of the modern world are fully human.

The Politics of Exclusion

To recognize modern humans as participating in politics, therefore, also
means to recognize the nonhuman within us as participating as well. But the
actual participation of those parts of us that could be called “Denisovan” or
“Neanderthal” implies a more speculative idea of politics: the participation in
politics of actual Denisovans and Neanderthals. What makes us assume that
these hominins did not act politically? Why would we continue to deny the
category of the political to beings who clearly matched humans in many
capacities?
174 Political Theory 42(2)

The easiest and most common answer refuses political action to anyone
other than literate, abstractly organized, human communities. But this begs
the central question by circularly defining politics as the engagements of
power in which modern humans engage. And it implicitly continues a histori-
cal denial of political activity to those communities considered less than
modern, for example, non-European traditional communal organizations.
This common insistence—that the parameters of the political first be devel-
oped before granting legitimacy to other categories of action, and thus
excluding political organization other than that oriented around the modern
nation-state—is a tradition replete with racism, delegitimation of tribal com-
munities, and justifications of empire. The points of entry for what counts as
“politics” are legion and contradictory. Isolating and identifying them has
proven to be contested and perhaps impossible. And strangely, many of the
characteristics of political agency and interdependence appear not only in the
hominan record but also in a wide variety of non-human animal species.
The presumption of human exceptionalism is that humans possess a par-
ticular, special skill or ability that sets them apart from and above the rest of
the animal kingdom. It closely comports with the idea that politics must be
human. But the recent history of various exceptionalist claims has under-
mined their predictive capacities. Tool usage and artistic creation have
historically been the most widely used metrics to distinguish human tran-
scendence, and as a consequence have been the most devastatingly debunked.
Few would now argue that either is limited to human beings (or to our pro-
genitors). We now recognize tool usage amongst an immense variety of ani-
mals, including not only apes and monkeys but also rodents, birds, crabs, and
even insects.24 Nor does artistic ability qualify. Chimpanzee or elephant art-
istry points to one mode of artistic relation; capuchin sculpture to another.25
Another common exceptionalist argument, that of altricial infancy, also fails
to distinguish humanity. Dependency upon one’s parents from an early age
certainly requires a degree of abstraction, recognition, communication, and
power. A being cannot care for its infant unless it can distinguish it as an
individual, watch for its developmental stages, teach it useful versus danger-
ous behaviors, and cultivate its eventual independence. Such behaviors exist
in a wide variety of non-human animals; patriarchy and matriarchy may be
political, but they are not strictly human, nor is extensive childhood.
A fourth exceptionalist claim, common to discussions of politics and
power relations, is that only humans build hierarchies. But this proves a par-
ticularly surprising and falsifiable contention. Lions have hierarchies, as do
birds, even ants. Would we say that these animals are acting politically?
Certainly power inheres in such hierarchies: one only need watch one wolf
demonstrate subservience to another to recognize a complex mechanism of
Ferguson 175

inter-individual relationship. Such a pack clearly has a mode of collective

decision making, as well as precisely developed social relations within and
between packs.
These examples make clear the difficulty in delineating the precise begin-
nings of politics and who participates in it. So a formalization of terminology
will be of little help here: unless defined in ways specifically meant to apply
only to modern human beings, politics either dramatically excludes many
people engaged in political activity or includes a broad range of non-human
actors. (Many have defined politics as something like “the human negotiation
over power,” which forecloses the very questions raised by the existence of
Denisovans by defining politics in strictly human terms.26) The demand to
delineate “politics” clearly and concisely, once and for all, itself engages in
political foreclosure.
Other ways to eliminate the possibility that non-human hominins partici-
pated in politics also testify to this difficulty. Some argue that early humans
could not have developed societal or cultural forms, because of hunter-
gatherers’ intrinsic lack of unencumbered time. But this argument fails
empirically: as Marshall Sahlins showed long ago, even modern hunter-gath-
erer tribes lived in relative affluence, spending a minority of their time in
subsistence accumulation.27 Often they devoted, or devote, an equal amount
of time to cultural activities. When they expend effort to gather abstracted
value rather than immediate needs, that value is often expended in symbolic
(and pragmatically “wasteful”) social ways.28 “The neolithic saw no particu-
lar improvement over the paleolithic in the amount of time required per cap-
ita for the production of subsistence”; Sahlins concludes, “probably, with the
advent of agriculture, people had to work harder.”29
Little evidence (beyond our contemporary presumptions) exists that only
humans have engaged in politics over the past millennia. Only Whig histori-
cism—privileging the contemporary lives and methods as inherently superior
to those in the past—explains the idea that Paleolithic humans and hominins
could not have engaged in politics. Many archeologists engage in such his-
tory: they implicitly consider the past as prelude, narrating backwards and
retrofitting prehistorics with contemporary suppositions. For example,
Pamela Geller identifies a broad range of gender assumptions folded into the
history of the bioarcheological fields, not only in the physical archeology of
culture (i.e., burial) but also in osteology and DNA genotyping.30 Conceptions
of practices, such as who hunts and who gathers, are too often merely assumed
rather than researched. As a consequence, systematic presumptions crowd
out evidence, even when the archeological record demonstrates a wide range
of cultural complexity. If prehistorical humans had hierarchy, power, war,
abstraction, tools, society, and even art, how can we deny them politics? And
176 Political Theory 42(2)

if they had each of these things, why do we presume that their differently
speciated kin lacked them as well?

Hierarchy and Horizontality

Such inquisitions may mean little to most political scientists, for whom the
state-form serves as the necessary precondition of politics. That is, they pre-
sume that politics happens only in relations between formalized political
actors (nation-states, empires, cities, citizens) and remains contained by those
categories. Excluding other interpersonal or interinstitutional relations from
the political, they explicitly or implicitly argue that these are more correctly
conceived of as social, economic, or cultural relationships. Under this metric,
families, clans, and even non-literate peoples fail to achieve political rela-
tionships, as they lack the sufficient symbolic and abstract abilities that
undergird the proper use of politics. In such a view, politics takes place only
in institutions, in which power can be abstract, depersonalized, and fungible.
All else is social.31
“Political problems are not domestic problems,” Elman Service summa-
rized, as “true authority rests on hierarchy.”32 For Service and others who
wish to thus differentiate the political from the domestic, the ability to engage
in politics constitutes one important marker in a people’s development from
savagery to civilization: this, above all, positions the state of nature so cen-
trally for Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau. In their respective ways, all three
theorists held that in the uncivilized Americas nature ruled and politics had
yet to take root. Defining politics as strictly institutional and hierarchical
makes it an achievement based on the division of culture and nature, of the
mythical past and the enlightened present.
Compare such a vertical and hierarchical theory of politics to a different
tradition: the horizontal and organic theories. Those who embrace this latter
perspective see politics as permeating people’s lives, found wherever power
deploys. Such a perspective recognizes politics “all the way down,” consti-
tuting the most intimate, as well as the most abstract, of relationships. In such
a reading, all groups of people engage in politics: families, tribes, friends, and
rivals, as much as judges and kings. The lines between state and society, the
rule of law and the cake of custom, and the domestic and the public, so vital
to the functioning of the hierarchical understanding, cannot be so neatly
drawn.
To what, then do adherents of this quotidian approach attend? They exam-
ine the imbrications of each individual in otherness, noting how presump-
tions about propriety intersect with law, or of racism with political history, or
of absolutism with patriarchy. They thus pay attention to ordinary activities:
Ferguson 177

how practices of exclusion and belonging operate, where delegitimation

occurs, who defines the proper subject of politics.33 Indeed, at their most
dramatic, such theories argue that politics pervades, or even determines, the
very identity or subjectivity of the individual. (Though this insight emerges
from the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, it has spread to a wide variety of histori-
cal and theoretical approaches.)
Feminist theory, for example, crucially depends on the quotidian outlook
to identify the conflation of social gender concepts with political action
(which explains why those committed to the hierarchical so often reject polit-
ical feminism as a category mistake). Queer political theory similarly notes
how aspects of identity, normativity, and desire emerge from conceptions of
sexuality that depend far more on cultural, theological, and even biological
presumptions than on state power, though of course law and governance
overlap and commingle with these. Approaches of political philosophy that
take seriously society, interpersonal relationships, theology, psychology, and
even economics side with the horizontal camp over the hierarchical one, con-
sidering political behaviors that are not reducible to state power.
To engage in lateral theorizing also means to reject the externalities of
politics: the prepolitical, the uncivilized, the personal, the epiphenomenal.
These conceptions prove central to the hierarchical view, in that they mark
the limits of the political, the spaces where politics do not belong. The state
of nature, one of the most widely utilized of these externalities, was used by
the above contract theorists specifically to identify what power is: since their
renditions deny politics in the state of nature, politics emerges as an antithesis
of a prepolitical state, for good or ill. And the fact that each of their assump-
tions and arguments about where the state of nature existed (in the uncivilized
Americas, in their common trope) were entirely untrue has not significantly
undermined our presumptions that some people, somewhere, have lived out-
side of politics.
In contrast to these early modern classificatory schemes, which ostensibly
clarify how power operates by placing it in uncivilized bodies and geogra-
phies, Pierre Clastres noted that operations of power were already present in
a wide variety of contexts. The classifications that depend upon a prepolitical
time or place, Clastres argued in Society Against the State, utilize a “model to
which political power is referred and the unit by which it is measured are
constituted in advance by the idea Western civilization has shaped and devel-
oped.”34 That such people do not have gunpowder means that they also must
not have politics. Thus such classificationists continue a conquistador mind-
set which denied that chiefs had political power, that tribes had normative
law, and that spiritual events had priests.35 Simply put, conceptually placing
such people outside of politics is itself an imperial project.
178 Political Theory 42(2)

Clastres followed other anthropologists such as Max Gluckman, who was

arguing in the 1960s that what he termed “tribal societies” possessed and
utilized both politics and law. Approaches to settling disorders, redistributing
property, adjudicating violence, negotiating leadership, and regularizing
trade appear throughout cultures, though in radically different forms and con-
texts.36 Clastres also drew upon Marshall Sahlins, who had recently argued
that the division between societies of affluence (presumed to be the contem-
porary world) and societies of scarcity (equally presumed to be paleolithic
humans and the remaining subsistence tribes) should in fact be reversed.
People in the “market-industrial” world have often starved to death, and even
more often spent their entire days working, Sahlins noted, while those in
“subsistence” societies spent much if not most of their days in leisure, with a
varied diet and complex social relations.37
Such approaches, Clastres pointed out, attempt to understand societies on
their own terms rather than as intrinsically deficient in some vital aspect. A
society without a state might not be aspiring to statehood; only from a nation-
state perspective do these societies “seem incomplete; they are not true soci-
eties, . . . their existence continues to suffer the painful experience of a lack.”38
This lack, strangely, takes one of two oppositional forms in the Western
imaginary: either of the absolute anarchism of the tribe or of the uncondi-
tional power of the chief.39 Both are seen as emblematic of the uncivilized,
even though they are incompatible and depend entirely on different social
power distributions.
James C. Scott has recently taken Clastres’s thesis as an overtly politi-
cal argument. Scott contends that the residents of Zomia, the mountainous
region of central Asia, actively balk at becoming parts of any state, strongly
preferring to live in traditional, anti-state forms of political life.40 For
Scott, the broad range of peripatetic mountain life serves as a form of
resistance: by not requiring complex economies, money, militaries, fixed
agriculture, and even literacy, they can resist the demands states make
upon citizens. “Virtually everything about these people’s livelihoods,
social organization, ideologies, and (more controversially) even their
largely oral cultures, can be read as strategic positionings to keep the state
at arm’s length.”41
Scott’s human beings resist state power, often if not always in reference to
it.42 That is, their strategies react to forms of state power rather than creating
themselves on their own terms. But Scott certainly recognized these villages
and tribes as engaging in political actions, even as they operate outside of
state legitimation systems. Like Clastres, Gluckman, and Sahlins, Scott
argues for a democratic understanding of political action, one that could trace
itself back to the dawn of humanity and, potentially, beyond.
Ferguson 179

Dear Enemies
Three important points, so far. The first, that politics and other social sciences
presume humanity, has been so widely accepted that to question it, as these
examples do, proves both dramatic and almost unthinkable. The second, that
Denisovan and Neanderthal hominins can be so closely linked to human
beings as to be genetically part of who we consider humans, shows the insuf-
ficiency of the exaggerated distances we assume in capacities, art, culture,
and possibly even language between humans and (at least two groups of)
non-humans. The third, that politics can and does exist outside of the form of
the state, at least for theorists more horizontally than hierarchically inclined,
can be the most coherently contested. Those who philosophically reject the
possibility of non-state politics, who hold that politics can only exist in the
modern nation-state system, can thus easily ignore the awkwardness caused
by non-human hominins.
But for those with a more generous conception of the political, one that
would include pre-European contact Amerindians, traditional tribal patterns
in Africa, and informal networks of power relations in the South Pacific, the
likely ability of Denisovans and Neanderthals to engage in similar political
processes casts doubt on the uniqueness of human society. What was politics
to the Denisovans? To ask the question destabilizes humanity’s purported
necessity within the social world.
In Michael Mann’s attempt to tell the history of all power, he suggested
that society emerged when human beings became a separate species.43 But
seeing humans as the sole source of social power, he notes, results in an
inability to theorize power other than through Neolithic settlements. As a
result, families, bands, and tribes cannot be discussed; only when settlements
form around agricultural practices, he argued, do human beings began to
develop the social complexities that make study possible. “They did not sta-
bly institutionalize power relations; they did not know classes, states, or even
elites”; thus “in the true beginnings there was neither power nor history.”44
While Mann is generous in his attribution, he is not generous enough: he
leaves no place for Neanderthal politics or Denisovan power.
Such a lack of imagination circumscribes most thinking about humanity
and power. In the 1980s, during the heyday of sociobiology, the political
scientist Glendon Shubert began a conversation with various primatologists,
asking if monkeys or apes should be seen as acting politically.45 Against the
popularizing primatology of Shirley Strum, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, and Hans de
Waal (de Waal had published the provocatively-titled Chimpanzee Politics:
Power and Sex among Apes), Shubert attempted to shore up a defense of poli-
tics as explicitly human.46 Shubert promoted no new presumptions: that
180 Political Theory 42(2)

humans have a monopoly on power relations underpins not only most philo-
sophical traditions but the social or human sciences. What makes his work
historically noteworthy, as well as conceptually peculiar, are the modes of
argumentation he uses against these primatologists. Granting that apes in par-
ticular have social relations, as seems undeniable from the fieldwork of his
time, Shubert argued that true politics can only emerge when its participants
are unrelated; ties of consanguinity place social relations in the realm of the
family rather than of the political.
Shubert thus defined politics as dealing with “the sociopsychological pro-
cesses of human individuals and groups seeking to influence or control others
who are not closely related to them in regard to any question about which
humans are, or might become, interested.”47 As this awkwardly phrased (and
potentially all-encompassing) delineation testifies, Schubert has no clear
method to determine which issues, events, or conflicts meet the criteria of
“politics” other than the lack of close kinship. His definition thus muddies
what he means to clarify, bringing into politics causes and intentions that he
ultimately wishes to exclude. He also presupposes the conclusion he intends
to prove. In an argument meant to determine that apes and monkeys have no
politics, he begs the question of humanity by introducing people in his defini-
tion of politics.
Glendon Shubert is not alone in this conceptual confusion: his essay exem-
plifies a common philosophical preconceptualization. This assumption pre-
sumes that politics must be limited to human beings; the necessity of defining
other kinds of beings (other species, thinking machines, or even bare matter)
as outside the space of politics results in logics whose circularity proves invis-
ible to those developing them. This confusion has long underpinned argu-
ments for racial superiority and colonial power, and—importantly—continues
to do so today. In order to prove that monkeys do not engage in politics,
Schubert readily denies political agency to vast numbers of historical and con-
temporaneous peoples. He goes so far as to overtly and consciously exclude
the Kalahari San from the political realm. In recognizing that such a people
traditionally live in family and clan groupings, he states that they exist as apo-
litical peoples.48
It is not my purpose here to join de Waal in presenting an argument for
simian politics (though its existence would be sufficient to prove that a purely
non-human politics can exist). It is, instead, to note how the arguments of the
hierarchists, which Schubert’s exemplify, smuggle multiple requirements
into their definitions of politics. These requirements not only exclude those
beings they intend to exclude but often bar large swaths of humanity as well.
Instead of questioning why social practices and philosophies so often limit
qualifications to certain groups, they intend to reify the boundaries of those
arbitrary and politically pernicious exclusions.
Ferguson 181

Practices of boundary reinforcement determined the abilities of humans

and other hominins to participate in politics in the first place. Animals of
many species have long been recognized to organize their social behavior in
terms of boundaries and proximities: in-group members, strangers, and
neighbors all play different roles in group identification and behavior. Most
territorial animals exhibit dramatically different responses to invaders who
are already neighbors than they do to strangers.49
This “dear enemy” phenomenon indicates the large-scale social relation-
ships stretching outside immediate kinship groups. Complexly social ani-
mals, including birds, may react differently according to contextualized and
historicized relationships, which strongly implies the possibilities of long-
range social effects and connections.50 This recognition has pushed some
aspects of zoology and biology into theorizing non-kin social spaces. Some
theorists, for example, have hypothesized that sharing defenses with one’s
neighbors (at least within a stable neighborhood network) results in altruistic
return defense; abstract “defensive coalitions” can be genetically selected
for.51 Increased safety in cooperation and numbers can be built on interspe-
cies abilities to abstractly recognize outsiders as different kinds of threats
than local and expected threats.
How complex can non-hominin interactions become? A definitive answer
proves impossible. Can one make sense of the complex vocalizations of large
groups of dolphins, or quantify the distances between differing yet overlap-
ping pods? Dolphins can develop social relationships with individuals they
rarely meet (or have never met), described as third-level alliance formations.
They also seem not only to be able to identify themselves with certain whis-
tling patterns but also occasionally to use another’s identifier in communica-
tion with still another dolphin.52
As with simians, this example leaves aside the question of whether an
odontocyte politics is possible. Instead, it points both to the impossibility of
limiting social behavior to humans, and to the various means by which com-
plex social relationships—such as alliances, social competition, and technical
knowledge—exist in a wide variety of complex mammalian relationships.53
It helps show how large brain size and coalitional social relationships develop
in relationship to on another.
Thus, the likelihood that Denisovans and Neanderthals engaged in what a
horizontally minded theorist would term “politics,” both among themselves
and in the process of diverging from and later clashing with human beings.
The generative presumptions of humanity and politics may be reversible:
perhaps engaging in politics (defined broadly) helped determine what human-
ity became. That is, what humans ultimately became may be a result of poli-
tics rather than their cause; unlike literacy, which was developed by some
182 Political Theory 42(2)

group of humans, somewhere, and increasingly spread to others, politics

formed where and how humans started out.
Why, for example, did language develop? The traditional prehistoric
model assumes that humans developed language as they moved from a
Paleolithic to a Neolithic lifestyle and needed to communicate over larger
communities. This rendition implicitly extrapolates from the development
and spread of literacy: language is considered a skill that humans develop.
First there are people, then they develop a skill, then it spreads through the
human population.
But what if the sociopolitical aspects of hominin experience helped drive
the evolutionary development of brain capacities? In that case, the need for a
more complex language arose from the need for more sophisticated power
relations, and politics drives evolutionary processes into a human form.54 The
resultant speciation likely cannot be reduced to external, non-hominin envi-
ronments.55 Competition within and between hominin groups has proven par-
ticularly violent and consequential. Not only has warfare been a central
aspect of human life for millennia but for how many other species have all
their nearest relatives gone extinct? So a glottogonist perspective implies that
language (perhaps even one urlanguage) developed in consonance with
humanity, shaping biological processes and being shaped by them in return.56
In this outline, the human brain is a consequence of political activity, not
its cause. Society as an evolutionary mechanism puts politics outside of (and
previous to) humanity.57 “Social cleverness, especially through success in
competition achieved by cooperation,” as Richard D. Alexander has argued,
“would select more potently for increased social intelligence . . . than a
within-species co-evolutionary arms race in which success depended on
effectiveness in social competition.”58 Such a conception historicises social
relations beyond the boundaries of the human, the hominin, and even the
prehuman. Social relationships, and the social sciences which study them,
should no longer presume humanity’s centrality to their study. Instead, they
should expand their range to a host of inhuman and prehuman interactions.
Our external socializations, our predecessory inhumanity, our prehuman poli-
tics: contra Kant, we could never have been human without them.
These presumptions would also biologize humanity, as they would encour-
age a recognition of the chemical, biological, and physical dynamics inherent
to social relations. But this should not result in forms of reductive scientiv-
ism: that of positivism, or the idea that bodies or DNA can determine a causal
mechanism explaining complex social behaviors. Such an approach leads to
causative determinism and its offshoots of genetic predestinationism, socio-
biology, and behaviorism. Instead, it could lead to an understanding of
physical, scientific processes as compositely interrelated, reinscribing and
reinflecting cause and effect along divergent and complex lines of power and
Ferguson 183

association.59 It could also result in the recognition that the biological does
not ground or foundationalize human behavior, but rather interacts with and
is in turn affected by social practices. If biological identity could be a conse-
quence of social behavior, this blurs the clear dividing line between physical
and social science.
Politics has always made us who we are, whomever we have been.
Whereas Latour, Bennett, and Morton’s projects politicize the imbrications
between humans and the non-human world, thus bringing non-human ani-
mals and things into the realm of the social, the possibility of hominin politics
points to another way of conceptualizing the relationship between humans
and environment. Hominan politics implies a deep biological tie between the
human experience and the non-human world: a connection of life and matter
and politics and being, one that exceeds the boundaries of humanity.

Acknowledgments
My appreciation to the non-missing link between two editors of Political Theory, Mary
Dietz and Jane Bennett, whose careful readings and insightful suggestions (along with
those two anonymous reviewers) helped clarify and strengthen this essay. I am also
grateful to Patchen Markell, Samantha Frost, Carolyn Eichner, Steven Klein, Kam
Shapiro, Ivan Ascher, and the participants in discussions on this topic at the political
science departments at the University of Chicago and the University of Hawai‘i.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.

Notes
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Preface to 2nd edition, (B)xvii. See also Pierre
Kerszberg “Two Senses of Kant’s Copernican Revolution,” Kant-Studien 80,
nos. 1–4 (1989): 63–80.
2. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
(London: Continuum, 2008).
3. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2009).
4. Bruno Latour, “When Things Strike Back: A Possible Contribution of ‘Science
Studies’ to the Social Sciences,” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 1 (2000):
107–12.
184 Political Theory 42(2)

5. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 2010).
6. The philosophical genre that takes inhumanity most seriously—the science fic-
tion of other worlds, other beings—also finds itself marginalized as a philosophi-
cal form.
7. See, for examples of these approaches, Elman R. Service, Origins of the State
and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution (New York: Norton, 1975);
Morton H. Fried, The Evolution of Political Society (New York: Random House,
1967); William T. Sanders and Barbara J. Price, Mesoamerica: The Evolution of
a Civilization (New York: Random House, 1968); and, for a Marxist version that
sees civilization as an Asian invention, Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A
Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).
8. As R. G. Mulgan points out, Aristotle may have meant precisely that, emphasiz-
ing man’s animal nature through his choice of the term “zôon.” R. G. Mulgan,
“Aristotle’s Doctrine That Man Is a Political Animal,” Hermes 102, no. 3 (1974):
438–45.
9. E.g., Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
10. For examples of this use, as well as evidence for divergence times supporting
equatorial Africa as the origin of humans, see Sarah A. Tishkoff et al., “The
Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans,” Science 324
(2009): 1035–44; Krishna R. Veeramah et al., “An Early Divergence of KhoeSan
Ancestors from Those of Other Modern Humans Is Supported by an ABC-Based
Analysis of Autosomal Resequencing Data,” Molecular Biology and Evolution
26 (2012): 617–30; and Joseph Lachance et al., “Evolutionary History and
Adaptation from High-Coverage Whole-Genome Sequences of Diverse African
Hunter-Gatherers,” Cell 150 (2012): 1–13.
11. A linguistic clarification, here: the word hominin refers to all the species that
split off from the great apes, whereas hominan refers only to those of the genus
homo. For example, Neanderthals and humans are both hominin and hominan,
but the famous skeleton known as Lucy (a member of the Australopithecus afa-
rensis) is a hominin but not a hominan.
12. Johannes Krause, Qiaomei Fu, Jefferey M. Good, Bence Viola, Michael
V. Shunkov, Anatoli P. Derevianko, and Svante Pääbo, “The Complete
Mitochondrial DNA Genome of an Unknown Hominin from Southern Siberia,”
Nature 464, no. 8 (2010): 894–97.
13. For an overview of the Homo floresiensis debate, see Leslie C. Aiello, “Five
years of Homo floresiensis,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 142,
no. 2 (2010): 167–79. See also John W. H. Trueman, “A New Cladistic Analysis
of Homo Floresiensis,” Journal of Human Evolution 9, no. 2 (2010): 223–30.
14. Richard E. Green et al., “Analysis of One Million Base Paris of Neanderthal
DNA,” Nature 444, no. 16 (2006), 330–36.
15. Hervé Bocherens et al., “Isotopic Evidence for Diet and Subsistence Pattern
of the Saint-Césair I Neanderthal: Review and Use of a Multi-Source Mixing
Model,” Journal of Human Evolution 49, no. 1 (2005): 71–87.
Ferguson 185

16. Bruce L. Hardy et al., “Stone Tool Function at the Paleolithic Sites of Starosele
and Buran Kaya III, Crimea: Behavioral Implications,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 98, no. 19 (2001): 10972–77.
17. This graphical representation originally appeared in Chris Stringer, Lone
Survivors: How We Came To Be the Only Humans on Earth (New York: Times
Books, 2012), 271.
18. In the words of the mtDNA analysts, “these results show that on the Eurasian
mainland there existed at least two forms of archaic hominins in the Upper
Pleistocene: a western Eurasian form with morphological features that are com-
monly used to define them as Neanderthals, and an eastern form to which the
Denisova individuals belong.” David Reich et al., “Genetic History of an Archaic
Hominin Group from Denisova Cave in Siberia,” Nature 468 (2010): 1053–60,
quotation on 1059.
19. Matthias Meyer, “A High-Coverage Genome Sequence from an Archaic
Denisovan Individual,” Science 338, no. 6104 (2012): 222–26.
20. J. J. Hublin et al., “A Late Neanderthal Associated with Upper Paleolithic
Artefacts,” Nature 381 (1996), 224–26.
21. Ron Pinhasi et al., “Revised Age of Late Neanderthal Occupation and the End of
the Middle Paleolithic in the Northern Caucasus,” Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 108, no. 21 (2011): 8611–16.
22. Reich et al., “Genetic History,” 1057.
23. Ibid.
24. See, e.g., Robert W. Shumaker, Kristina R. Walkup, Benjamin B. Beck, and
Gordon M. Burghardt, Animal Tool Behavior: The Use and Manufacture of Tools
by Animals, 2nd edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
25. Sarah T. Boysen, Gary G. Berntson, and James Prentice, “Simian Scribbles:
A Reappraisal of Drawing in the Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes),” Journal of
Comparative Psychology 101, no. 1 (1987): 82–89; Gregory Charles Westergaard,
“What Capuchin Monkeys Can Tell Us about the Origins of Hominid Material
Culture,” Journal of Material Culture 3, no. 1 (1998), 5–19.
26. See, e.g., W. J. Ashley’s What Is Political Science? (Toronto: Rowsell and
Hutchison, 1888), 6; David Easton, The Political System: An Inquiry into the
State of Political Science (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 222.
27. Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, Inc., 1972).
28. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic
Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Norton, 2000); also see Georges
Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, trans Robert Hurley (New York: Zone
Books, 1991).
29. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 35.
30. Pamela L. Geller, “Conceiving Sex: Fomenting a Feminist Bioarcheology,”
Journal of Social Archeology 8, no. 1 (2008): 115–38.
31. Hannah Arendt’s division of the political from the social proves exemplary, here.
See her On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965).
32. Elman R. Service, Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural
Evolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 49, 53.
186 Political Theory 42(2)

33. Thomas Dumm, A Politics of the Ordinary (New York: New York University
Press, 1999).
34. Pierre Clastres, Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology,
trans. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 16 (empha-
sis in original).
35. Ibid., 15.
36. Max Gluckman, Politics, Law, and Ritual in Tribal Society (Chicago: Aldine,
1965).
37. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics.
38. Clastres, Society against the State, 189 (emphasis in original).
39. Ibid., 29–30.
40. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland
Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
41. Ibid., x.
42. Scott misleadingly refers to these preferences as “anarchist,” reading anarchism
as simply oppositional to states (whereas, as he readily admits, many in these
societies are drawn to charismatic political and military leaders). But his point
remains: these are anti-state actors, meaningfully and consciously rejecting the
alleged sureties and safeties of statecraft.
43. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, A History of Power from
the Beginning to AD 1760 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 43–44.
44. Ibid., 34.
45. Glendon Shubert, “Primate Politics,” Biology and Social Life/Biologie et vie
sociale Social Science Information 25, no. 3 (1986): 647–80. See also his “The
Sociobiology of Human Behavior” in Sociobiology and Human Politics, ed.
Elliott White (New York: Heath-Lexington, 1981), 193–238; and “Evolutionary
Politics,” Western Political Quarterly 36 (1983): 175–93.
46. Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1982).
47. Shubert, “Primate Politics,” 664.
48. Shubert, “Primate Politics,” 668.
49. Philip K. Stoddard et al., “Strong Neighbor-Stranger Discrimination in Song
Sparrows,” Condor 92 (1990): 1051–56.
50. Judith Stenger Weeden and J. Bruce Falls, “Differential Responses of Male
Ovenbirds to Recorded Songs of Neighboring and More Distant Individuals,”
The Auk 76, no. 3 (1959): 343–51; also, Elizabeth A. H. Speirs and Lloyd S.
Davis, “Discrimination by Adélie Penguins, Pygoscelis Ddeliae, Between the
Loud Mutual Calls of Mates, Neighbours and Strangers,” Animal Behaviour 41,
no. 6 (1991): 937–44. For a critical analysis, see Ethan J. Temeles, “The Role
of Neighbours in Territorial Systems: When are they “Dear Enemies?” Animal
Behaviour 47, 339–350.
51. Thomas Getty, “Dear Enemies and the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Why should
Territorial Neighbors Form Defensive Coalitions?” American Zoologist, V 27
(1987), 327–336.
Ferguson 187

52. Richard C. Connor, “Dolphin Social Intelligence: Complex Alliance Relationship

in Bottlenose Dolphins and a Consideration of Selective Environments for
Extreme Brain Size Evolution in Mammals,” Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society B, V 362 (2007), 587–602; see also Richard C. Connor, Rachel
Smolker, and Lars Bejder, “Synchrony, Social Behaviour & Alliance Formation
in Indian Ocean Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops aduncus),” Animal Behavior 72
(2005): 1371–78.
53. Nicholas Humphrey, “The Social Function of Intellect,” in Growing Points
in Ethology, ed. P. P. G. Bateson and Robert A. Hinde (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1976), 303–17.
54. Edward H. Hagen and Peter Hammerstein, “Did Neanderthals and Other
Early Humans Sing? Seeking the Biological Roots of Music in the Territorial
Advertisements of Primates, Lions, Hyenas, and Wolves,” Musicæ Scientæ,
Special Issue 2009-2010, 291–320.
55. See, e.g., Marcel Otte, “The Origins of Language: Material Sources,” trans. Jean
Burrell, Diogenes 214 (2007): 49–59.
56. Quentin Atkinson stimulatingly argues that the complexity of sounds in human
languages map fairly cleanly onto human dispersal from Africa, with Sub-
Saharan African languages using a great diversity (e.g., in those that contain
clicks) and those at the furthest end of the human diaspora using relatively
few (the mere thirteen consonants in Hawaiian). See his “Phonemic Diversity
Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa,”
Science 332 (2011): 346–49.
57. Mark V. Flinn, David C. Geary, and Carol V. Warda, “Ecological Dominance,
Social Competition, and Coalitionary Arms Races: Why Humans Evolved
Extraordinary Intelligence,” Evolution and Human Behavior 26 (2005): 10–46.
58. Alexander, How did Humans Evolve? Reflections on the Uniquely Unique
Species, Museum of Zoology, Special Publication No. 1 (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan, 1990), 7.
59. This is the project of Isabelle Stengers, whose Cosmpolitics books attempt
to approach the political and the scientific with similar methods and scepti-
cisms. See Cosmopolitics I, trans. Roberto Bononno (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2010), and Cosmopolitics II, trans. Roberto Bononno
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011)

Author Biography
Kennan Ferguson teaches political theory at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
He is the author of All in the Family: On Community and Incommensurability, William
James: Politics in the Pluriverse, and The Politics of Judgment.