Typological Conceits: The Archaic City

Bhaktapur, as we will see in chapter 4, is an exceedingly densely populated community containing a very large number of people (in the comparative scale of premodern communities), whose life in relation to that community is highly and complexly integrated. Their community life is such—to paraphrase a synthesizing definition of the "city" in archaelogical perspective (Redman 1978, 216)—that their identity derives from their aggregation, an aggregation that is formally and impersonally organized, that the economy of the community comprises many nonagricultural activities and provides "a diversity of central services both for its inhabitants and for the smaller communities in the surrounding area."^[4] This makes Bhaktapur a "city" by such criteria, but what kind of city?

In a fundamental paper on "the part played by cities in the development, decline, or transformation of culture," Robert Redfield and Milton Singer (1954) attempted a classification of types of city in historical perspective. For our purposes their types can be divided into two different sets. The first is a group of types in which cultural heterogeneity and secularity are of central importance. These are cities, in their words, where (Redfield and Singer 1954, 57):

one or both of the following things are true: (1) the prevailing relationships of people and the prevailing common understandings have to do with the technical not the moral order, with administrative regulation, business and technical convenience; (2) these cities are populated by people of diverse cultural origins removed from the indigenous seats of their cultures. They are cities in which new states of mind, following from these characteristics, are developed and become prominent. The new states of mind are indifferent to or inconsistent with, or supersede or overcome, states of mind associated with local cultures and ancient civilization. The intellectuals of these . . . cities, if any, are intelligentsia rather than literati.^[5]

In contrast, there are kinds of cities that they term "administrative-cultural" "which carry forward, develop, elaborate a long-established

local culture or civilization. These are cities that convert the folk culture into its civilized dimension" (ibid., 57). These are the cities of the literati. They also call this kind of city "the city of orthogenetic transformation," and "the city of the moral order," in contrast to the "city of heterogenetic transformation and technical order." They claim that the first cities in early civilizations were cities of orthogenetic transformation where local culture was carried forward rather than broken down to be replaced by new means of relation and integration, familiar to us in Western urban history.

In an analysis of such early cities, Paul Wheatley (1971, 225f.) argued for the centrality of "symbolism" in their structure and function:

Whenever, in any of the seven regions of primary urban generation, we trace back the characteristic urban form m its beginnings we arrive not at a settlement that is dominated by commercial relations, a primordial market, or at one that is focused on a citadel, an archetypical fortress, but rather at a ceremonial complex. . . . The predominantly religious focus to the schedule of social activities associated with them leaves no room to doubt that we are dealing primarily with centers of ritual and ceremonial. Naturally this does not imply that the ceremonial centers did not exercise secular functions as well, but rather that these were subsumed into an all-pervading religious context. . . . Operationally [these centers] were instruments for the creation of political, social, economic, and sacred space, at the same time as they were symbols of cosmic, social, and moral order. Under the religious authority of organized priesthoods and divine monarchs, they elaborated the redistributive aspects of the economy to a position of institutionalized regional dominance, functioned as nodes m a web of administered . . . trade, served as foci of craft specialization, and promoted the development of the exact and predictive sciences.

Bhaktapur is not an ancient city in terms of historical continuity, but its organization reflects many of the same principles that have been ascribed to otherwise differing ancient cities as members of a certain type of urban community. As a member in some respects of such a class it may well suggest, mutatis mutandis , something of what they might have been, and may be thought of as an archaic city.