Political Anthropology Research Paper

Classic studies in political anthropology in the 1940s and 1950s concerned themselves with the maintenance of order and the regulation of force in societies apparently lacking the institutional forms of the modern state. In contrast, more recent studies in the anthropology of politics are as likely to be concerned with issues of citizenship and exclusion, democracy and nationalism, law and violence, but they coexist with a whole corpus of work which identifies and analyzes the workings of power in all social contexts. There are three overlapping ways in which anthropologists might tackle the definitional issue. One would be formal: political anthropology is the study of ‘political behavior,’ wherever and however encountered, which in turn may be defined in various ways—for example, in terms of the pursuit of power, of strategizing, or of instrumentality. A second way would be to concentrate instead on function: the political refers to institutions and practices which perform political functions—the maintenance of social order, the succession to positions of power and authority, the settlement of disputes. The third would be substantive and based on a recognition that ‘the political’ is not a universal category of experience, but is a product of a certain history: it emerged in Western Europe after the Reformation, alongside the modern idea of the state, and as part of a move towards recognizably modern forms of mass politics based on the institutions of representative democracy. Insofar as such a category now also exists across the spectrum of postcolonial and postsocialist states, political anthropology is the study of whatever it is people in those places believe politics to be.

These three approaches to the anthropology of politics are further complicated by the relationship between political anthropology and other disciplines concerned with the same topics. Both the formal and the functional versions of political anthropology have obvious affinities with political science and political sociology, but less apparent overlap with political philosophy and political theory. In the early days of political anthropology, there was a reaction against philosophical accounts of human political capacities, such as social contract theories of the state, which relied on evolutionary speculation about the primitive origins of contemporary political institutions. Political anthropology’s affinity for political science and hostility to political theory also stemmed from political theory’s tendency to combine and confuse the ideal and the actual, accounts of how things are with speculations on how they ought to be (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940, p. 4). However, in the latter half of the twentieth century, anthropological accounts of politics have become less confident about the reliance on observed behavior and the appeal to dispassionate science. In particular, since the 1970s, the influence of the work of Michel Foucault has focused attention on the alleged ubiquity of power, while opening the way for an empirical reexamination of the language and claims of liberal political philosophy. At the same time, the recognition that the anthropological science of ‘observed behavior’ was almost always a colonial science has shifted attention from the comparative study of politics to a reflexive concern with the political constraints that have shaped the emerging discipline of anthropology. This double concern—with the anthropology of politics and with the politics of anthropology—animates Vincent’s recent authoritative overview of the subject (Vincent 1990).

Translated into more conventional historical terms, there is a tale to be told of the rise, fall, and partial resurrection of political anthropology. Between the 1940s and 1960s the comparative study of political institutions became a central anthropological interest, especially for social anthropologists in the European tradition. From the early 1970s political anthropology swiftly fell out of fashion, before a number of political themes—power, nationalism, resistance, the state— returned to the anthropological agenda in the mid 1980s. Even so, many anthropologists who studied obviously political topics, but not in the style of 1960s political anthropology, were reluctant to identify themselves with the label of ‘political anthropologist.’

2. From Function To Process To Form

A comparison of three key works from the early years of political anthropology provides a better sense of the strengths and weaknesses of canonical political anthropology. In 1940 Edward Evans-Pritchard published his monograph on The Nuer, subtitled ‘A description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic people’ (Evans-Pritchard 1940). Evans-Pritchard had conducted his research among this group of people in the 1930s at the request of the colonial government. His book found the key to Nuer political order in the field of kinship, specifically in the structure of dominant lineages, and the systematic way in which segments of the population would unite in antagonism to structurally equivalent segments. The result was an extraordinarily neat and coherent account of the emergence of political order in the absence of a unitary ruler. Key issues in Evans-Pritchard’s account—such as the ordered exchange of violence in the institution of the feud, or the structure of so-called ‘segmentary lineage systems’—generated their own specialist literatures, and inevitable critiques, in the years that followed.

Fourteen years after Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer study, Edmund Leach published an analysis of highland Burma of comparable intellectual ambition (Leach 1954). Like Evans-Pritchard, Leach concentrated on a group of people on the further fringes of colonial power. As his title suggested, Leach was also concerned with the idea of the political system, or in this case systems, and, like Evans-Pritchard, he rooted parts of his analysis in the everyday structures of kinship and marriage. But Leach was also concerned to historicize his account, and to insert a dynamic element. Dissatisfied with the conservative assumptions of functionalist anthropology, Leach attempted to problematize the idea of a system in equilibrium, by showing how, over a relatively wide area and a relatively long period of time, the same people could oscillate between an egalitarian and a hierarchical political structure, each of which was inherently unstable and contained within itself the germ of its opposite.

The same concern with the dynamic working through of internal contradictions could be found in Victor Turner’s (1957) analysis of village micropolitics in what was then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Eschewing the more geographically and historically ambitious vision of Evans-Pritchard and Leach, Turner concentrated on the meticulous analysis of specific cases of conflict within a specific village. Pattern and form were to be found not so much in a social structure, apparently frozen in time, but in the orderly sequence of events within what Turner described as his ‘social dramas,’ while the shared symbols in village ritual bound people together, even as political conflict drove them apart.

The studies of Evans-Pritchard, Leach, and Turner assumed canonical status in the emerging subdiscipline of political anthropology, and together they can give a fairly good idea of what kind of work political anthropologists of the 1950s and 1960s might be expected to do. First, and most obviously, political anthropologists were relatively unconcerned with the political institutions of the modern nation state, and, although all three authors were working within the political structures of late colonialism, European rule was not a central concern of their work. Their empirical focus was on relationships of kinship, marriage, and residence, and their intellectual goal was to locate the principles of local order in the details of everyday conflict and show the structural consequences of those principles as they applied across a wider social field. Yet, as we move from one author to the next, two related changes emerge, and one unresolved dilemma is left hanging. The two changes were the shift—evident in the contrast between Evans-Pritchard and Leach, and further developed in Turner’s work—from a concern with structure to a concern with process; and the parallel move from relatively large-scale models of social structure to what Turner described as ‘diachronic micro-sociology’ (1957, p. 328). The unresolved dilemma concerned the cultural content of politics.

The 1960s were the subdisciplinary heyday of political anthropology, and many of the edited collections and monographs of this period celebrate this shift towards a processual view of politics, and evince a growing concern with the microstudy of political behavior (cf. Swartz et al. 1966, Bailey 1969). In the terms set out at the start of this research paper, if political anthropology had started out as the study of political functions in societies apparently lacking modern political institutions, it gradually became the formal study of political behavior in all kinds of society. But the formal definition often rested on a hostility to the cultural meaning of politics. In African Political Systems, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard had insisted on the need to ignore culture for comparative purposes: ‘A comparative study of political systems has to be on an abstract plane where social processes are stripped of their cultural idiom and are reduced to functional terms’ (1940, p. 3). In Political Systems of Highland Burma, cultural differences became mere tokens in the political games analyzed by Leach (1954, pp. 16–17). Yet this antagonism to the cultural meaning of politics was never simple and complete: Turner concludes Schism and Continuity with a recognition of the binding force of ritual and symbols—paradoxically, a point also acknowledged by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1940, pp. 16–22)—and the promise, richly fulfilled in his subsequent work, of more analysis in the future of ‘the cultural aspects of Ndembu ritual’ (1957, p. 331).

3. After Formalism: Domination, Resistance, And The Nation

The emphasis on formal models of political behavior owed much to the prevailing positivism of political science, especially North American political science, but was increasingly out of joint with the anthropological zeitgeist. The 1960s and 1970s saw a major shift away from the formal, typologizing type of work found in political anthropology, and towards the more humanistic style once characterized by Evans-Pritchard as the ‘translation of culture.’ In Europe, this shift was given theoretical impetus by Levi-Strauss’ structuralism, which directed attention to the study of myth and ritual; in North America, the same role was played by the cultural analyses of Clifford Geertz and David Schneider, with their roots in Parsonian theory, and their concern with culture as a system of symbols and meanings. By the early 1970s, a leading political anthropologist described an intellectual landscape unhelpfully divided between those he characterized as the ‘thought structuralists’ and those interested in power relations (Cohen 1974). The task, ever since, has been to attempt some sort of rapprochement between anthropology’s symbolic wing, concerned with the explication of cultural meaning, but often at the expense of any concern with social context and social process, and its political specialists, who had been increasingly identified with a rather narrow and culturally arid formalism.

One area of convergence that emerged in the 1980s was in the anthropology of power and resistance. This represented a development of themes that had first emerged in the feminist and Marxist work of the 1970s. To what extent are marginal or oppressed people—women, the poor—mystified by the ideological representation of their own position? Is culture a source of such mystification, or is it a resource for resistance? Is culture internally homogeneous or, as the slogan of the times put it, is it ‘always contested’? Theoretical answers to these questions were found in a range of new sources—Marxist and post-Marxist theorists of culture like Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, and Stuart Hall; feminists like Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; the radical South Asian historians of the Subaltern Studies group; and, perhaps above all, Michel Foucault. Empirically, instances of resistance might be found in everything from changing domestic consumption patterns, to agricultural workers’ self-conscious footdragging, to participation in new religious movements. From a considerable distance, it might be possible to discern a strong continuity with the 1960s analysis of local micropolitics, but the antipositivism and self-conscious poststructuralism of many writers on resistance left them reluctant to acknowledge too strong a kinship with the political anthropology of a previous generation.

A second area of convergence between anthropology’s symbolic and political tendencies was in the study of nationalism. The wave of decolonization in the decades after World War II provided anthropology with an obvious area of research. But despite interesting attempts at interdisciplinary enquiry, such as Chicago’s Committee for the Study of New Nations, the anthropology of nationalism failed to take off in the 1950s and 1960s. The publication of a provocative essay by a highly ‘anthropological’ political scientist, Benedict Anderson’s (1983) Imagined Communities, put nationalism back on the anthropological agenda, and the emergence of ethnic and nationalist conflict in the years after the collapse of Soviet hegemony in Europe provided further impetus. However, while the new anthropology of nationalism has produced a great deal of important and imaginative empirical research, it has been somewhat less theoretically impressive. Some of the most impressive anthropological work has been on the experience of ethnic and nationalist violence, but this has been overwhelmingly studied from the point of view of the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of violence (e.g., Das 1990). The big political mystery of the twentieth century, mass mobilization in the name of the nation, remains as problematic for anthropology as for the other social sciences. In the face of the breakup of the Soviet empire and the war in former Yugoslavia, political anthropology’s key contribution in the 1960s—instrumental analyses of the politics of ethnicity—now looks dangerously reductionist. The major theoretical gain from the anthropology of nationalism has been a new attentiveness to the political history of anthropology’s central concept of ‘culture,’ and a reflexive awareness of anthropology’s potential complicity in nationalist interpretations of culture and cultural difference (Handler 1988).

4. Towards Complexity

Although the label ‘political anthropology’ still retains some of the stigma of 1960s formalism, the study of politics has returned to the center of sociocultural anthropology since the 1980s. There are two obvious and related reasons for this. One is an increased openness to interdisciplinary collaboration with historians, political scientists, and political theorists as anthropologists grapple with the spatial and temporal limitations of the ethnographic method. The other is a renewed critical interest in the received vocabulary of modern politics, obviously dense and complex ideas like ‘the nation’ and ‘the state,’ but also concepts of ‘citizenship,’ ‘civil society,’ and ‘democracy.’

Ethnographic enquiry itself has changed, opening up new potential issues for political anthropology. A study like James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine (1990) exemplifies what is now possible. Ferguson’s book is based on an ethnographic investigation of a large and unsuccessful development project in Lesotho. It involves at once a critical examination of the ‘development discourse’ that informs projects like these, and a description of the systematic ways in which potential political issues, like the sources and consequences of social inequality, are swept aside in the path of the project, while all the while the reach of state power is extended into the countryside. Theoretically, Ferguson’s work owes a great deal to Foucault’s critique of liberal complacency, but empirically it combines local ethnographic detail with broader understandings of the translocal processes and institutions that are so characteristic of the age of development.

In some ways, the new anthropology of the state represents a return to the founding suspicion of political philosophy in African Political Systems. In the Preface to that volume, Radcliffe-Brown had dismissed the idea of the state as ‘a fiction of the philosophers.’ In a series of provocative essays, Michael Taussig has raised the issue of the productive potential of this ‘fiction’: the—mostly symbolic—ways in which people are subjected to the ‘state effect’ (Taussig 1997). In a collection of critical studies of African politics, John and Jean Comaroff (1999) subject the notion of ‘civil society’ to a similar process of empirical scrutiny. Thomas Hansen’s (1999) study of Hindu nationalism, combines history, ethnography, and Lacanian theory, and locates the rise of politicized Hindu identity in the peculiar postcolonial trajectory of Indian democracy. These studies represent an especially interesting departure in the relationship between political anthropology and political theory. They focus on central concepts in liberal political philosophy but, rather than viewing that philosophy as a potentially universal and neutral idiom, treat it as one more folk theory of government, better viewed as an object of ethnographic enquiry than a source of wholesale explanation.

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