The Paradigmatic Structure of the Warlord Myth: The Myth of the State

The analysis of the paradigmatic structure of a myth is Claude Levi- Strauss’s further development of Propp’s sequential analysis. In his other­wise eulogistic discussion of Propp’s work, Levi-Strauss makes one sharp judgment, which distinguishes his own approach from the former’s:

What has [Propp] lost on his way? Exactly, the content.

Levi-Strauss asserts that any syntagmatic structure is mirrored in posi­tive or negative, yet always stereotyped, connotations of syntagmatic terms, and that this paired structure reveals the paradigmatic structure. Such oppositions tend to be stable throughout a large variety of narrative forms and dramatis personae and to rely on stereotypes, which intuitively make sense to the audience. Levi-Strauss gives the example of the night owl symbolising the night and being contrasted with a pigeon that as a day-active animal symbolises the day and light. Examples from folk tales are the dark-haired and old witch, symbolising darkness, wickedness, and age, with the blonde-haired young girl, symbolising youth, innocence, and kindness.

In the case of the warlord myth the other of the pair, the mirror, is the myth of the Western state. Already the metaphor of warlord contains implicit meanings about the West and legitimate statehood. The paradig­matic myth of the state contrasts ‘good’ lords, i.e. rulers, with ‘wicked’ warlords, i.e. anarchic individuals. As the republican period of violent turmoil in China’s pre-communist era is the obligatory reference for the definition of the term ‘warlord’, it is almost by definition orientalist (and erroneous,² as the China historian Arthur Waldron has pointed out).

For example, Kimberley Marten explicitly defines warlords in opposi­tion to the state in her book Warlords: Strong-arm brokers in weak states:

“Warlords” are individuals who control small pieces of territory using a combination of force and patronage. [...] Warlords rule in defiance of genu­ine state sovereignty but through the complicity of state leaders. Warlords today flout and undermine state capacity and state institutions, and they do so by colluding with cost-conscious, corrupt, or frightened officials and bureaucrats. In other words, warlords are parasitic creatures of the state. (Marten 2012: 3)

Marten refers to Max Weber’s socio-historical elaboration of the con­cept of the state as a specific category of social organisation. However she reads Weber in a functionalist and deterministic way, so that what are heuristic concepts in Weber’s investigation of the emergence of the law-territory-authority triad in Germany’s middle ages become ontolog­ical facts of statehood. The ontology of states that Marten evokes is a very different one from Weber’s account. In Marten’s account, states are mythologised as ahistorical and acontextual, functionalist, and rationally necessary entities—hence, reflecting the mainstream ontology of the inter­national system of (mostly American) international relations scholarship and neglecting most of the major critiques addressed at these ontologies and epistemologies from critical, postcolonial, gender, or historical- sociological studies (including the critique Max Weber himself would for­mulate of such a misinterpretation of his work).

Marten’s book and articles on warlordism in Afghanistan are partic­ularly well constructed examples of the paired warlord-state mythology (Marten 2002, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012).

Fig. 7.4 Functions and sequences of the state myth as opposed to the warlord myth. Source: Author

Arab numbers for the warlord myth and Latin and Greek letters for the state myth) has its exact mirror image in the mythologisation of European state-formation.

From here on, it is possible to oppose the warlord functions to the state functions and to elaborate what Levi-Strauss called mythèmes (a neologism combining the words ‘myth’ and ‘theme’), the inside topics, so to say, of the myth. These mythèmes have to be contextualised in the cultural usages of the images and metaphors they evoke in order to understand the discourse (the meaning and morality of the tale) underlying the narrative (the dramatic development). As Levi-Strauss argues with the examples of the skate and the south wind, it is neither the dramatis personae per se nor the sequences that give meaning. It is the discourse constituted by the mythèmes. In his example, the skate and the south wind stand for some­thing and contextual analysis allows capturing what they stand for.