This is an old post and is probably extremely cringe. Please understand that I have moved on from these ideas. Still, it may contain some nuggets that point to some continuity in my thinking over the years, which is why I decided to post it here.
Re-evaluating Heterarchy and Peer-Polity Interaction
One of the major criticisms made by my thesis committee was on my suggestion that peer-polity interaction be more readily adopted as a framework to base future network analysis studies upon. Although now I am beginning to realize my error, I think that this stems from my misunderstanding of what peer-polity interaction really was meant to address — the scaling up of polities into “fully fledged” city states (although I must read more to verify this and gain a more complete understanding — Renfrew, Ma, Schortman, Snodgrass, etc). The value that I saw (and still see) with peer-polity interaction is regarding the focus on relationships among unranked entities on the same plane, which have the potential to be ranked given the unevenness of relationships among them. This notion is probably better evoked by heterarchy, as defined by Crumley (and by Schortman who raises similar points more explicitly regarding PPI as well). But is peer-polity interaction an instance of heterarchical thought? It does emphasize the tenets of heterarchy, but perhaps with a certain more focused aim in mind. However I must find out what this aim truly is through more focused reading of the aforementioned sources, among others. Schortman seems to be key for understanding the relationship between heterarchy and PPI.
So I think that I can adequately re-focus chapter 2 (or was it 3?), which currently attempts to highlight comparative approaches and ppi specifically, to discussion more focused on heterarchy more broadly. Specifically, its potential use for the analysis of distributed systems is quite pertinent.