Political anthropology
Encyclopedia
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.
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.
Form of government
A form of government, or form of state governance, refers to the set of political institutions by which a government of a state is organized. Synonyms include "regime type" and "system of government".-Empirical and conceptual problems:...
, looked at from the basis of the structure of societies. Political anthropologists include Pierre Clastres
Pierre Clastres
Pierre Clastres, , was a French anthropologist and ethnographer. He is best known for his fieldwork among the Guayaki in Paraguay and his theory on stateless societies.-Theories:...
, E. E. Evans-Pritchard
E. E. Evans-Pritchard
Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard was an English anthropologist who was instrumental in the development of social anthropology...
, Meyer Fortes
Meyer Fortes
Meyer Fortes was a South African-born anthropologist, best known for his work among the Tallensi and Ashanti in Ghana.Originally trained in psychology, Fortes employed the notion of the "person" into his structural-functional analyses of kinship, the family, and ancestor worship setting a standard...
, Georges Balandier
Georges Balandier
Georges Balandier is a French sociologist, anthropologist and ethnologist noted for his research in Sub-Saharan Africa...
, Fredrik Bailey, Jeremy Boissevain
Jeremy Boissevain
Jeremy Boissevain is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research .-Academic background:...
, Marc Abélès, Jocelyne Streiff-Fenart, Ted C. Lewellen
Ted C. Lewellen
Ted Lewelllen is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Richmond. He received his B.A. from Alaska Methodist University, his M.A. from New York University, and his Ph.D...
, Robert L. Carneiro
Robert L. Carneiro
Robert Leonard Carneiro is a prominent American anthropologist and curator of the American Museum of Natural History. Carneiro earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1957....
, 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
Structural functionalism
Structural functionalism is a broad perspective in sociology and anthropology which sets out to interpret society as a structure with interrelated parts. Functionalism addresses society as a whole in terms of the function of its constituent elements; namely norms, customs, traditions and institutions...
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
Talcott Parsons
Talcott Parsons was an American sociologist who served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1927 to 1973....
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
Max Gluckman
Max Gluckman was a South African and British social anthropologist.He grew up in South Africa, working later under the British Administration in Northern Rhodesia...
. 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
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...
’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.