Kinship, Authority, and Action in Nomadic Empires: The Case of the Khazars

Nomadic empires throughout history grew into polities of immense proportions and power. They created a mobile gravitational pull that attracted diverse people, resources, and ideas and reoriented the world geopolitics around their own nomadic concerns. But what were those forces and strategies that ensured successful unity, rule, and expansion of nomadic empires, and the lack of which made them fall? Conventional historical approaches to these questions suffer from the predicament of Eurocentrism and do not account for cultural differences of highly mobile societies who possessed their particular worldviews and cultural strategies and values of relatedness, trust, sovereignty, rule, and political action. Moreover, conventional historical approaches to nomadic empires disregard variations in the representational value of many of these processes. Hence, there are difficulties associated with locating nomadic polities and interpreting their imperial actions especially in the contexts of mobility, organization, and representational modalities of power. I use the case of the nomadic Khazar Empire to explore the concepts and strategies of kinship politics; the sources of political authority and sovereignty; and the paradigms of political action among the imperial nomads. A particular type of self-scaling kinship organization was used as a mechanism for political incorporation, expansion, loyalty and trust, and allowed those nomadic empires to expand, contract, manage tribal allegiances, and maintain nested sovereignties among their subject groups. These abilities were closely associated with the nomadic political authority and social obligation extant among the pastoral communities and their rulers. The ability of the nomadic ruler to mobilize for action (raids, trade, diplomatic and ritual exchange) was perceived as the greatest value in keeping the empire running. In nomadic court rituals, imperial agency and cultural paradigms of political action were manifested through representational modalities of power and “inverse values” that stood in contrast to those known from the sedentary states.