Political anthropology

Political anthropology concerns the structure of political systems, looked at from the basis of the structure of societies. Political anthropologists include Pierre Clastres, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, Georges Balandier, Fredrik Bailey, Jeremy Boissevain, Marc Abélès, Jocelyne Streiff-Fenart, Ted C. Lewellen, Robert L. Carneiro, John Borneman and Joan Vincent.

Political anthropology developed as a recognizable, well-defined branch of anthropology only in the 1940s and 1950s, as it became a main focus of the British functionalist schools, heavily inspired by Radcliffe-Brown, and openly reacting against evolutionism and historicism. The approach was empirical, with the main bulk of work carried out in colonial Africa. The British structural-functionalist school was institutionalised with African Political Systems, edited by Fortes and Evans Pritchard (1940). A similar degree of institutionalization of a distinctive political anthropology never took place in post-war America, partly due to the Parsonian view of the sciences which relegated anthropology to the sphere of culture and symbolism.

The very strong stress on social equilibrium, which was so evident in Evans-Pritchard’s approach, was quickly questioned in a series of works that focused more on conflict and change (Leach 1954). These works attempted to show how individuals acted within political structures, and that changes took place both due to internal and external pressures. Contradictions and conflict came to the fore. 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.

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.

From stateless anthropology to an anthropology in and of the state

While for a whole century (1860 to 1960 roughly) political anthropology developed as a discipline concerned primarily with politics in stateless societies, 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 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, Greece, Italy, Mexico, 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, of course, 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 political organization and political phenomena that lay outside the state-regulated sphere (as in patron-client relations or tribal political organization). Second of all, anthropologists slowly started to develop a disciplinary concern with states and their institutions (and of course on the relationship between formal and informal political institutions). An anthropology of the state developed, and it is a most thriving field today. Geertz’ comparative work on the Bali state is an early, famous example. There is today a rich canon of anthropological studies of the state (see for example Abeles 1990).

From the 1980s a heavy focus on ethnicity and nationalism developed. ‘Identity’ and ‘identity politics’ soon became defining themes of the discipline, partially replacing earlier focus on kinship and social organization. This of course 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).

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).

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 Development anthropology or the anthropology of development, which over the last decades has established as one of the discipline’s largest subfields. Political actors like states, governmental institutions, NGOs, International Organizations or business corporations are here the primary subjects of analysis. In their ethnographic work anthropologists have cast a critical eye on discourses and practices produced by institutional agents of development in their encounter with ‘local culture’ (see for example Ferguson 1994). Development anthropology is tied to global political economy and economic anthropology as it concerns the management and redistribution of both ideational and real resources (see for example Hart 1982). In this vein, Escobar (1995) famously argued that international development largely helped to reproduce the former colonial power structures.

Many other themes have over the last two decades been opened up which, taken together, are making anthropology increasingly political: post-colonialism, post-communism, gender, multiculturalism, migration, not to forget the umbrella term of globalization. It thus makes sense to say that while anthropology was always to some extent about politics, this is even more evidently the case today.

See also

• Political sociology

References

• Journal of International Political Anthropology

• Abélès, Marc (1990) Anthropologie de l'État, París: Armand Colin.

• Abélès, Marc (1992) La vie quotidienne au Parlement européen, París: Hachette.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.