Political anthropology
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Political anthropology is the comparative study of politics in a broad range of historical, social, and cultural settings.[1]
History of political anthropology
Origins
Political anthropology has its roots in the 19th century. At that time, thinkers such as
Among the principal architects of modern social science are French sociologist Emile Durkheim, German sociologist, jurist, and political economist Max Weber, and German political philosopher, journalist, and economist Karl Marx.[3][4]
Political anthropology's contemporary literature can be traced to the 1940 publication
Several authors reacted to this early work. In his work Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) Edmund Leach argued that it was necessary to understand how societies changed through time rather than remaining static and in equilibrium. A special version of conflict oriented political anthropology was developed in the so-called 'Manchester school', started by Max Gluckman. Gluckman focused on social process and an analysis of structures and systems based on their relative stability. In his view, conflict maintained the stability of political systems through the establishment and re-establishment of crosscutting ties among social actors. Gluckman even suggested that a certain degree of conflict was necessary to uphold society, and that conflict was constitutive of social and political order.
By the 1960s this transition work developed into a full-fledged subdiscipline which was canonized in volumes such as Political Anthropology (1966) edited by Victor Turner and Marc Swartz. By the late 1960s, political anthropology was a flourishing subfield: in 1969 there were two hundred anthropologists listing the subdiscipline as one of their areas of interests, and a quarter of all British anthropologists listed politics as a topic that they studied.[7]
Political anthropology developed in a very different way in the United States. There, authors such as Morton Fried, Elman Service, and Eleanor Leacock took a Marxist approach and sought to understand the origins and development of inequality in human society. Marx and Engels had drawn on the ethnographic work of Morgan, and these authors now extended that tradition. In particular, they were interested in the evolution of social systems over time.
From the 1960s a 'process approach' developed, stressing the role of agents (Bailey 1969; Barth 1969). It was a meaningful development as anthropologists started to work in situations where the colonial system was dismantling. The focus on conflict and social reproduction was carried over into Marxist approaches that came to dominate French political anthropology from the 1960s. Pierre Bourdieu's work on the Kabyle (1977) was strongly inspired by this development, and his early work was a marriage between French post-structuralism, Marxism and process approach.
Interest in anthropology grew in the 1970s. A session on anthropology was organized at the Ninth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in 1973, the proceedings of which were eventually published in 1979 as Political Anthropology: The State of the Art. A newsletter was created shortly thereafter, which developed over time into the journal PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.
Anthropology concerned with states and their institutions
While for a whole century (1860 to 1960 roughly) political anthropology developed as a discipline concerned primarily with politics in stateless societies,[8] a new development started from the 1960s, and is still unfolding: anthropologists started increasingly to study more "complex" social settings in which the presence of states, bureaucracies and markets entered both ethnographic[9] accounts and analysis of local phenomena. This was not the result of a sudden development or any sudden "discovery" of contextuality. From the 1950s anthropologists who studied peasant societies in Latin America and Asia, had increasingly started to incorporate their local setting (the village) into its larger context, as in Redfield's famous distinction between 'small' and 'big' traditions (Redfield 1941). The 1970s also witnessed the emergence of Europe as a category of anthropological investigation. Boissevain's essay, "towards an anthropology of Europe" (Boissevain and Friedl 1975) was perhaps the first systematic attempt to launch a comparative study of cultural forms in Europe; an anthropology not only carried out in Europe, but an anthropology of Europe.
The turn toward the study of complex society made anthropology inherently more political. First, it was no longer possible to carry out fieldwork in say, Spain, Algeria or India without taking into account the way in which all aspects of local society were tied to state and market. It is true that early ethnographies in Europe had sometimes done just that: carried out fieldwork in villages of Southern Europe, as if they were isolated units or 'islands'. However, from the 1970s that tendency was openly criticised, and Jeremy Boissevain (Boissevain and Friedl 1975) said it most clearly: anthropologists had "tribalised Europe" and if they wanted to produce relevant ethnography they could no longer afford to do so. Contrary to what is often heard from colleagues in the political and social sciences, anthropologists have for nearly half a century been very careful to link their ethnographic focus to wider social, economic and political structures. This does not mean to abandon an ethnographic focus on very local phenomena, the care for detail.
In a more direct way, the turn towards complex society also signified that political themes increasingly were taken up as the main focus of study, and at two main levels. First of all, anthropologists continued to study
From the 1980s a heavy focus on ethnicity and nationalism developed. 'Identity' and 'identity politics[11]' soon became defining themes of the discipline, partially replacing earlier focus on kinship and social organization. This made anthropology even more obviously political. Nationalism is to some extent simply state-produced culture, and to be studied as such. And ethnicity is to some extent simply the political organization of cultural difference (Barth 1969). Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism discusses why nationalism came into being. He sees the invention of the printing press as the main spark, enabling shared national emotions, characteristics, events and history to be imagined through common readership of newspapers.
The interest in cultural/political identity construction also went beyond the nation-state dimension. By now, several ethnographies have been carried out in the international organizations (like the EU) studying the fonctionnaires as a cultural group with special codes of conduct, dressing, interaction etc. (Abélès, 1992; Wright, 1994; Bellier, 1995; Zabusky, 1995; MacDonald, 1996; Rhodes, 't Hart, and Noordegraaf, 2007). Increasingly, anthropological fieldwork is today carried out inside bureaucratic structures or in companies. And bureaucracy can in fact only be studied by living in it – it is far from the rational system we and the practitioners like to think, as Weber himself had indeed pointed out long ago (Herzfeld 1992[12]).
The concern with political institutions has also fostered a focus on institutionally driven political agency. There is now an anthropology of policy making (Shore and Wright 1997). This focus has been most evident in
Many other themes have over the last two decades been opened up which, taken together, are making anthropology increasingly political:
Notable political anthropologists
Some notable political anthropologists include:
- Marc Abélès
- F. G. Bailey
- Georges Balandier
- Jeremy Boissevain
- John Borneman
- Robert L. Carneiro
- Pierre Clastres
- E. E. Evans-Pritchard
- Meyer Fortes
- David Graeber
- Ted C. Lewellen
- Carolyn Nordstrom
- James C. Scott
- Audra Simpson
- Joan Vincent
See also
Notes
- ^ International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015
- ISBN 9780897890281.
- ^ Calhoun (2002), p. 107
- ^ Kim, Sung Ho (2007). "Max Weber". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (24 August 2007 entry) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/ (Retrieved 17 February 2010)
- ^ Fortes, Meyer (1940). African Political Systems. London: Keegan Paul International. p. 4.
- ^ Fortes (1940). p. 15.
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(help) - ^ Vincent, Joan (1990). Anthropology and Politics. p. 313.
- ^ "Stateless Society | Encyclopedia.com". www.encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2022-10-14.
- ^ "ethnography | Definition, Types, Examples, & Facts | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 2022-10-14.
- ^ "Political Phenomenon - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics". www.sciencedirect.com. Retrieved 2022-10-14.
- ^ "Definition of IDENTITY POLITICS". www.merriam-webster.com. Retrieved 2022-10-14.
- ^ Herzfeld is also one of the few anthropologists who has analysed political elections. This is still a relatively neglected field of enquiry, despite the evident fact that it is exactly during election campaigns that alliances and local strategies of power come to the fore (see for example Spencer 2007).
References
- Journal of International Political Anthropology
- Abélès, Marc (1990) Anthropologie de l'État, Paris: Armand Colin.
- Abélès, Marc (1992) La vie quotidienne au Parlement européen, Paris: Hachette.
- Abélès, Marc (2010) "State" in Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer (eds.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, 2nd. ed., London and New York: Routledge, pp. 666–670. ISBN 978-0-415-40978-0
- Alvarez, Robert R. (1995) "The Mexican-US Border: The Making of an Anthropology of Borderlands", Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 447–70.
- Bailey, Frederick G. (1969) Strategems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics, New York: Schocken Books, Inc.
- Barth, Fredrik (1959) Political Leadership among the Swat Pathans, London: Athlone Press.
- Bellier, Irene (1995). "Moralité, langues et pouvoirs dans les institutions européennes", Social Anthropology, 3 (3): 235–250.
- Boissevain, Jeremy and John Friedl (1975) Beyond the Community: Social Process in Europe, The Hague: University of Amsterdam.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Brachet, Julien and Scheele, Judith. (2019) The Value of Disorder : Autonomy, Prosperity, and Plunder in the Chadian Sahara, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Donnan, Hastings and Thomas M. Wilson (eds.) (1994) Border Approaches: Anthropological Perspectives on Frontiers, Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
- Donnan, Hasting and Thomas M. Wilson (1999) Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State, Oxford: Berg.
- Donnan, Hasting and Thomas M. Wilson (eds.) (2003) "European States at Their Borderlands", Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology, Special Issue, 41 (3).
- Escobar, Arturo (1995) Encountering Development, the making and unmaking of the Third World, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Ferguson, James (1994) The Antipolitics Machine: "Development". Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Fortes, Meyer and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.) (1940) African Political Systems, Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
- Hart, Keith (1982) The Political Economy of West African Agriculture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Herzfeld, Michael (1992). The Social Production of Indifference. Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
- Horvath, A. & B. Thomassen (2008) 'Mimetic errors in liminal schismogenesis: on the political anthropology of the trickster', International Political Anthropology 1, 1: 3 – 24.
- Leach, Edmund (1954) Political Systems of Highland Burma. A Study of Kachin Social Structure, London, LSE and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- McDonald, Maryon (1996). "Unity and Diversity: Some tensions in the construction of Europe", in: Social Anthropology 4-1: 47–60.
- Redfield, Robert (1941) The Folk Culture of Yucutan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Rhodes, Rod, A.W Paul 't Hart and Mirko Noordegraaf (eds.) (2002) Observing Government Elites, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
- Sharma, Aradhana and Akhil Gupta (eds.) (2006) The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-1468-4
- Shore, Chris and Susan Wright (eds.) (1997) Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power, London, Routledge.
- Spencer, Jonathan (2007) Anthropology, Politics, and the State. Democracy and Violence in South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Thomassen, Bjørn (1996) "Border Studies in Europe: Symbolic and Political Boundaries, Anthropological Perspectives", Europaea. Journal of the Europeanists, 2 (1): 37–48.
- Vereni, Pietro (1996) "Boundaries, Frontiers, Persons, Individuals: Questioning 'Identity' at National Borders", Europaea, 2 (1): 77–89.
- Wright, Susan (ed.) (1994) The Anthropology of Organizations, London: Routledge.
- Zabusky, Stacia E. (1995) Launching Europe. An Ethnography of European Cooperation in Space Science, Princeton: Princeton University Press.