This book is a study of secondary sources on medieval Catalonian history by an anthropologist. As such, it shows the relationship between historical events and theory in sociocultural anthropology pertaining to political economy, the formation of institutions of domination, peasants, agency and action. Historians may find it provocative, though it fits into a genre of social history that historians of that ilk may find more appealing. For anthropologists, it is also not a normal approach, as it uses historical and not ethnographic data, though fans of Eric Wolf will find the analysis familiar.
The main objective of the book is to show how the ways in which élites cherry picked among ancient laws to fabricate serfdom relate to theory in political economy, peasant studies and anthropology. Furthermore, with the rise of the state after the creation of serfdom, expansive war dominated the attention of élites to the detriment of peasants and society in general. That is, finances and élite efforts went into domination of foreign lands, not into developing a more equitable society within the Crown of Aragón. Thus, we are able to see that two kinds of domination were being constructed: internal and external, both of which were generated by élite action at the expense of the general population.
The means of internal domination, the fabrication of serfdom, was the use of Roman law by literate élites. The extension of domination by élites to foreign lands, the expansion of what the author calls the Extortionist State, was based on the culture of violence, male warriorhood and class-based ideas of the fixed and axiomatic nature of lordly domination. It was an era in which any credible prince attempted to expand his domains through warfare and the castle-lords encouraged this as it gave them access to more power, prestige and property.
Behind both domination and aggrandizement within the state and its expansion to foreign lands (imperialist expansion) lay the desire by aggrandizing élites for power, prestige and property. In the Time of Troubles (1020-1060) the castle-lords used the violence and the sword to force the peasants into serfdom; then, together with the Count of Barcelona, they scripted a “legal” version of serfdom using the literate skills of hired clerics and their knowledge of Roman law. Dr. Mendonsa relates this post-1060 process of fashioning a code of domination to the writings of Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent, who deals with a similar process in modern day America.
In Catalonia, these were agents doing the work of domination and Mendonsa relates the domination process to the theories of Giddens and Foucault, who see agency and power at work in society through élite action to create, alter or prop up dominating structure. According to Giddens, structuration is the social process of power application through time, the real workings of structure, the power of structure at work. For Foucault, agency within office has a transformative capacity, as actor power exists in the capacity of the mind to calculate using cultural capital. Benhabib and Arendt call this constructed power in office “narrative power” and “communicative action.” Moaddel notes that discourse is the method by which actors construct their strategies of action and “ideology is best conceptualized as a discourse consisting of a set of principles, concepts, symbols, and rituals used by actors to address problems in a particular historical episode.”
Culture is also at work. A major achievement of Bourdieu was to expand the concept of strategizing to include cultural symbolism and structure, that agents could put these into use. But Mendonsa’s view of agents is different from that of Bourdieu. His actors were “small-scale entrepreneurs, struggling to acquire without either much ability or opportunity to reflect on the conditions of their existence, or much understanding of their culture.” Mendonsa’s aggrandizing actors are aware of the culture around them, using it strategically, if not entirely perfectly. This is more like Sahlins’ actors, where “action is clearly seen as the product of the application of aspects of culture that can differ from one formation to another, or over time within the same formation.” Mendonsa goes on to relate ideas of agency, structure and action to the theories of Talcott Parsons and Anthony Giddens, Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas.
This theory is placed in the historical context of Medieval Catalonia. Mendonsa develops a perspective that brings agency and history together in what he calls poleconomic aggrandizement (political and economic pursuit of power, prestige and property) by key actors in society. In this pursuit they mold history, though not always progressively. Mendonsa is melding anthropology and history to show historians that anthropological theory helps in the understanding of history and to show anthropologists that history is a goldmine of data useful in providing examples of their theories.
