Divine Payoff: Genealogies, Parasites, and the House of Marduk

Abstract

Overviews of social development in early southern Mesopotamia of the third to first millennium BCE, which prominently address the question of state formation, assume a trend toward ever-decreasing functionality of kinship attribution. The article attempts to justify in broad outlines, but by connecting one or the other finding, that this cannot be proven empirically and is theoretically implausible, considering that familiarity as a criterion of kinship was necessary to establish relationships of trust. This trust was the condition for the possibility of patronage and the imposition of power. The article investigates both by trying to find suitable social contexts in the early societies of this region by starting with cosmological designs. As actors of these mutual observations in the medium of power, the argumentation establishes the community and the Big Man, whose outsider position (but communal affiliation) it describes as parasitism. In terms of difference theory, the usual tendency to overlook the constitutive oscillation between communal participation and familial representation in these social systems by presupposing a concept of unity, such as a state, are thus shown to be misguided.