Bondarenko D.M. "Post-Colonial Nations in the Historical and Cultural Context".

In the present monograph, its author makes an attempt to fit nation-building in post-colonial countries of Asia and Africa into the world historical and cultural process. In the context of this process, the nature of the nation and its future in the Afro-Asian and global scales are discussed.

Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy: Alternativity in Cultural History: Heterarchy and Homoarchy as Evolutionary Trajectories.

– Moscow, 2007, Center for Civilizational and Regional Studies of the RAS. – 196p. This paper outlines how variable success at transmitting environmental
and other cultural knowledge from generation to generation influences governmental forms (Crumley 1993, 1994, 1995, 2000, 2001). Heterarchy is introduced in the context of complexity research, followed by a closer look at the characteristics of hierarchical and heterarchical authority structures. This is followed by a brief introduction to the later European Iron Age; the relationships among environmental knowledge, polity structure, and societal values; and finally the role of surprise in state societies.

Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy: A Principle of Culture's Organization. The 13th – 19th Centuries Benin Kingdom As a Non-State Supercomplex Society.

– Moscow, 2006, Editorial URSS. – 184 p. Until quite recently, cultural evolution has commonly been regarded as the permanent teleological move to a greater level of hierarchy, crowned by state formation. However, recent research, particularly those based upon the principle of heterarchy – “... the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked or when they possess the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways” (Crumley 1995: 3) changes the usual picture dramatically. The opposite of heterarchy, then, would be a condition in society in which relationships in most contexts are ordered mainly according to one principal hierarchical relationship. This organizational principle may be called “homoarchy”.

The “CIVILIZATIONAL DIMENSION” Series Nomadic Pathways in Social Evolution

Editors of the Volume: Nikolay N. Kradin, Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Thomas J. Barfield – Moscow, 2003, 180 p. The book is written by anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists specializing in nomadic studies. All the chapters presented here discuss various aspects of one significant problem: how could small nomadic peoples at the outskirts of agricultural civilizations subjugate vast territories between the Mediterranean and the Pacific? What was the impetus that set in motion the overwhelming forces of the nomads which made tremble the royal courts of Europe and Asia? Was it an outcome of any predictable historical process or a result of a chain of random events? A wide sample of nomadic peoples is discussed, mainly on the basis of new data.

The “CIVILIZATIONAL DIMENSION” Series Civilizational Models of Politogenesis

Editors of the Volume: Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Andrey V. Korotayev – Moscow, 2000, 318 p. The volume represents an attempt of a complex study of the politogenetic processes in their regional and temporary variety. The authors hope that their survey can and should also promote a better understanding of the general tendencies and mechanisms of cultural and sociopolitical evolution, of the interrelation and interaction of cultural, social, and political formats in the human society. The authors believe that the use of principles and methods of the civilizational approach in politogenetic studies, on the one hand, and the inclusion of the politogenesis into the problem area of civilizations studies, on the other hand, creates the effect of novelty in terms of both anthropology and civilizations studies, enriches their scientific toolkit and expands heuristic limits.