Political anthropology has proved to be a late and comparatively short-lived subfield specialization within social and cultural anthropology. Between 1940 and the mid-1960s a generation of political anthropologists was exceptionally cohesive, establishing a canon and setting out a programme for the subfield. But, apart from that short period, anthropology’s definition of politics and its political content has invariably been so broadly defined that politics may be found everywhere, underlying almost all the discipline’s concerns during its nearly one-hundred-year professional history. In 1950, political scientist David Easton criticized political anthropologists for viewing politics simply as a matter of power relationships and inequality; today anthropology’s sensitivity to the pervasiveness of power and the political is considered one of its strengths.
The objective world fashions political anthropology as much as anthropology constructs and reconstructs the world in which its practitioners find themselves (Vincent 1990). The anthropology of politics can be narrated in terms of an intellectual history framed first by British cultural hegemony over an anglophone imperial world and then by United States cultural hegemony over a world-system dominated by Cold War concerns. A critical turning point in the subdiscipline came with the decline of empire and American defeat in the war in Vietnam. These two events marked, for many scholars, a shift from modernity to postmodernity.
Three phases may be recognized in anthropology’s relationship with politics. In the first formative era (1879-1939) anthropologists studied politics almost incidentally to their other interests, and we can speak only of ‘the anthropology of politics’. In the second phase (194066) political anthropology developed a body of systematically structured knowledge and a self-conscious discourse. The third phase began in the mid-1960s when all such disciplinary specialization came under severe challenge.
As new paradigms challenged the earlier dominating, coercive systems of knowledge, political anthropology was first decentred and then deconstructed. The political turn taken by geography, social history, literary criticism and, above all, feminism, revitalized anthropology’s concern with power and powerlessness. The writing of non-Western scholars in these fields was particularly influential. Anthropologists concerned with things political began to read "Edward Said as keenly as they read "Evans-Pritchard, and found the work of Homi Bhabha as challenging as that of "Victor Turner.
A recognition that anthropologists must review critically their own intellectual equipment and the politics of its production led to a renewed interest in the material and intellectual history of the texts that constituted political anthropology as a subfield.
The evolution of political society
The first professional studies of political organization were carried out among Native American peoples by the Smithsonian Institution’s "Bureau of American Ethnology, established in 1879. By this time the reservation system was in place and questions of law and order, as well as problems of Indian development, were high on the agenda of the US government. Bureau publications provided three kinds of political ethnography: (1) somewhat idealized reconstructions of pre-reservation political society; (2) reports of observed tribal organization and legal practice; and (3) documentary accounts of government— Indian treaty relations. Herbert and Lewis Henry Morgan provided the conceptual underpinning for many Bureau studies; long periods of field research provided the ethnographic substance. Exceptional for its narrative method was James Mooney’s account of the ghost dance movement and its suppression by the United States military in 1890.
Morgan’s The League of the Ho-de-ne-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851) has been pronounced the first political ethnography. In delineating the political organization of the Iroquois confederacy in relation to its social, ritual and economic aspects this work established a form that later became standard. It was, however, Morgan’s later volume Ancient Society (1877) that established evolutionary theory as the bedrock of political studies. His title reflected Morgan’s affinity for the work of Sir Henry Maine, whose Ancient Law was published in 1861. Yet their approaches to political evolution differed quite markedly. Maine was concerned with the evolution of law and his studies of classical Roman law and village communities East and West were designed in accordance with philological rather than sociological methods. His research was imbued with a concern for controlled comparison and transformations rather than with organic societal evolution. Morgan, on the other hand, followed Montesquieu in projecting the evolution of societies through the three stages of savagery, barbarism and civilization. He envisaged progress from clan organization to the establishment of political society on the basis of territory and property.
An interest in the evolution of civilization and the state continues within European and American anthropology to this day, often closely linked with archaeology and museum research. The terminology of savagery, barbarism, and civilization has given way to that of egalitarian tribes, ranked and stratified societies, providing a neo-evolutionist taxonomy which is pervasive in American college textbooks. Among British and French scholars evolutionary terminology was replaced by a binary recognition of primitive (or simple, small-scale) and advanced (or complex) societies.
In the early twentieth century, evolutionary schemata were used to order the mass of ethnographic data that was being ‘collected’ among so-called simpler peoples around the globe. Ethnologists, missionaries, travellers and administrators had responded avidly ever since the first issue of .Notes and Queries on Anthropology was published in 1874.
The most ambitious use of evolutionary schemata was made by L.T. Hobhouse, G.C. Wheeler and M. Ginsberg in their The Material Culture and Social Institutions of the Simpler Peoples (1915). Here the four-stage theory of the eighteenth-century Scottish political economists provided for a more detailed classification than the three-stage projection of Morgan. The authors (two sociologists and an anthropologist) attempted to correlate statistically government, economics, justice, war and social structure among some 600 of the world’s peoples. Several features of this work became standard in political anthropology as it developed: (1) the sociological comparative method; which required (2) closed units of analysis (in the form of ‘societies’ or ‘tribes’); and encouraged (3) tendencies towards "primitivism (and less attention being paid to ‘ancient’ societies or civilizations such as that of Islam); (4) Material cultural differences between hunters and gatherers, pastoralists and "agriculturalists (subdivided into higher and lower where necessary) provided the economic base on which other social, political and religious domains rested. Functionalist holism (i.e. a conceptualization of homogeneous, integrated societies) thus embedded political institutions within closed analytical units.
The anthropology of politics in colonial settings
At the end of the nineteenth century most anthropologists carried out field research in imperial and quasi-imperial settings. Europeans consolidated their colonial territories throughout Africa, the Middle East and Oceania. The United States acquired territory from a defeated imperial Spain in the Caribbean, Hawaii and the Philippines and also began to evince interest in China, West Africa and Latin America. Their national and transnational connections provided anthropology with its fieldwork settings as the twentieth century progressed, yet few ethnographies explicitly took colonialism into account. Later the construction of the colonial ‘other’ entered political anthropology, first in the work of North African writers on the colonial experience and then more generally in critiques of anthropology and imperialism.
Roy Franklin Barton’s multifaceted monographs on Ifugao law, society, economy and religion, published between 1919 and 1930, reflect the modern ethnographer’s goal of providing a rounded description of the way of life of a ‘native’ people at a particular moment in time. For many, a distinction between society and politics was meaningless. Barton’s work was distinctive in that he saw the Ifugao, a mountain people among whom he worked in the northern Philippines, as interacting individuals. Barton wrote Ifugao Law (1919) at the request of the American government. Its categorization of law was orthodox (looking like something out of a law school textbook) but his long residence in the village of Kiangan and his familiarity with his Ifugao neighbours render his case materials a rich source of political ethnography. Barton’s classic monograph was a pioneer study in the anthropology of law, but a shift within functional anthropology towards the study of social control rather than law led to it being unjustly neglected. Yet, for those who consider Malinowski’s landmark Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926) ‘one of the reddest herrings ever dragged into the working of orderly jurisprudence’, as Paul Bohannan put it, or for those who like a little sex and a lot of economics in their ethnographies, Barton is one of the most grounded practitioners in the business of political anthropology.
He was also a somewhat atypical American. At this time most work in the anthropology of politics was being done by the students of Franz Boas among Native North Americans either on reservations or, in the western states, in small clusters of habitation scattered among Euro-American settlers. Political reconstructions of tribal organization continued to be the order of the day along with studies of diffusion and classification. By the 1920s a peculiarly American social science had emerged within the academy which divided those who traced continuities with European history from those who argued that it was unlikely that American society would develop along European lines. The presence of Native Americans and the role of the frontier supported notions of what came to be called ‘American exceptionalism’. The divide was reflected within anthropology between those who specialized in describing particular tribal polities (such as the Crow, Hidatsa, Zuni and so on, each with its own university-based anthropologist) and those who retained a larger vision of Native Americans as conquered peoples, examining their place within a larger historical scheme of things.
The work of William Christie MacLeod falls into the latter category. His book The American Indian Frontier (1928) was not well received by the social science-oriented anthropologists of the time in either Britain or the United States. A study of encounters between Native Americans and Europeans and their respective political and economic interests, it was subsequently taken up in the 1950s when political anthropology in the United States again took on a historical stance.
In general, throughout the colonial and quasi-colonial period, practical differences in surveillance, control and the administration of ‘native’ peoples, as well as their very different histories encouraged marked regionalization in anthropology and the adoption of particularistic frameworks for political analysis. Thus one found a selective focus on Big Men in New Guinea, lineages and descent in Africa and war in North America, for example, in spite of the fact that Big Men, lineages and war could be said to be found in all three places.
The ‘clash of cultures’
The interests of capital were not invariably aligned alongside those of empire. Political change and potential trouble spots were matters of concern to business interests overseas. On both sides of the Atlantic, the anthropology of politics followed the money trail. The Social Science Research Council funded Robert Redfield’s fieldwork in Tepoztlan in Mexico, for example, and the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored the study of culture-contact by Malinowski’s students in Africa.
Funding agencies and scholars alike must have been somewhat disappointed with the results. Although Mexico had been colonized by Spain, and although Bolsheviks fought in the streets of Tepoztlan while Redfield was there, he returned with a paradigm for the study of timeless folk societies. His critics introduced feudalism, peasantry and rural proletarians into anthropology. The culture-contact studies proved almost equally fruitless for the development of political anthropology. An exception was Monica Hunter’s fine Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (1936) but, like MacLeod’s earlier historical narrative of contact situations in North America, this too was not well received within the academy.
No paradigm held more potential for the study of political change than that of culture-contact, but so engrained were the synchronic and holistic principles of functional analysis that methodology dominated the discourse rather than political relations and political change. Its timing was unfortunate, too. After the war (1939—45) a rather different, more orthodox, political anthropology emerged to capture the field. This focused not on political contact and change but on the structure of government and the systemic nature of political organization.
Systems theory in political anthropology (1940-53)
The real impetus to political anthropology came when British "structural-functionalism confronted large African centralized states, functioning as units of "indirect rule. These were more akin to the monarchies and republics of Europe than the small-scale communities or "aboriginal societies to which political anthropologists had become accustomed. Structural-functionalists operated with a classically simple dichotomy between states and stateless (or "acephalous) societies, with an absent-minded nod towards "bands.
The major work of this era, African Political Systems (1940), was a collection of eight essays edited by Meyer Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard whose own structural analyses of the Tallensi and Nuer became classics in the field. The topic was sharply criticized by a few Africanists and many American anthropologists for being unnecessarily limited in scope, obsessed with lineage systems and kinship polities, neglecting history, stressing the primitive at the expense of the complex, serving colonial administration, neglecting forebears, neglecting other social sciences and being gratuitously critical of political science. Structural-functionalism provided anthropology with a model for the comparative study of political systems, some of its concepts even being applied, albeit critically, to newly pacified highland New Guinea peoples in Melanesia. Momentarily it provided an alternative to the historically oriented political economy approach to the analysis of Native American political organization. For the next two decades in African political ethnography, the taxonomy of African Political Systems was elaborated to include village councils, age grades, secret societies and the like.
Structural-functionalism’s constitutional approach focused on political institutions, offices, rights, duties and rules. Little or no attention was paid to individual initiatives, strategies, processes, struggles for power or political change. "Edmund Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) provided an internal critique of the systems paradigm, offering in its place the existence of political alternatives with change coming about through individual and group decision-making. Crucially, Leach suggested that individuals’ choices are the result of conscious or unconscious power-seeking. Leach took this to be a universal human trait.
Process and action theory (1954-66)
Largely in response to other social sciences as they began to undertake field research in newly independent Third World nations, political anthropology set out to establish a distinctive agenda for itself. Rejecting constitutional reconstruction and the earlier typological trend, as well as political scientists’ characterization of their role as being restricted to delineating the traditional and the local, anthropologists began to study interstitial, supplementary and parallel political structures and their relation to formal power. The politics of ethnicity and of elites in new nations encouraged a focus on social movements, leadership and competition. Historically immersed in field situations of rapid institutional change, anthropologists constructed their political analyses around contradictions, competition and conflict.
Action theory (later called agency or practice theory) provided the subfield’s dominant paradigm. Political ethnographers, such as Bailey and Boissevain, studied individual actors, strategies and decision-making in political arenas. Related paradigms such as transactionalism, game theory, and symbolic interactionism also embraced politics. A new spatial and processual vocabulary began to replace the systems vocabulary: field, context, arena, threshold, phase and movement emerged as keywords. Critical to this paradigmatic shift was Victor Turner’s richly detailed ethnography of schism among the Ndembu of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and his hand in writing a long expository introduction to a challenging new set of essays, Political Anthropology (1966). In this volume, politics was defined as ‘the processes involved in determining and implementing public goals and in the differential achievement and use of power by the members of the group concerned with these goals’ (Swartz et al. 1966: 7).
Much of the impetus for the new political analysis drew on the work of Max Gluckman and his colleagues and students, first at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Central Africa and later at Manchester University. Among them were Africanists Barnes, Mitchell, and Epstein, Bailey (India) and Frankenberg (Britain). Bailey’s trilogy on Indian politics, published between 1957 and 1963 was a tour de force within the genre. His political ethnography followed the action from the village (Caste and the Economic Frontier, 1957) through the district level to national electoral politics.
Postmodernity, anthropology and politics
The modern social science era of political anthropology came to an end in the late 1960s when new concerns and new voices entered the discipline. By this time six paradigms had emerged and co-existed successfully within the subfield: neo-evolutionism, cultural historical theory, political economy, structuralism, action theory and processual theory.
In the context of Third World political struggles, decolonization and the recognition of new nations, a mounting critique of new forms of imperialism and neo-imperialism (sometimes called economic imperialism) confronted the subfield. The Vietnam War (1965—73) was the catalyst for Kathleen Gough, who spoke out (literally, in a radio broadcast from California) calling for the anthropological study of imperialism, revolutions and counter-revolutions. "Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) launched critical analysis of the problematic relationship of anthropology to British colonialism. "Pierre Bourdieu used the vast legacy of French colonial scholarship to examine descriptive accounts for systematic relations, seeing what was left out, reading the silences in more orthodox Algerian ethnography.
Political economy again came to the fore with one of its more radical forms, Marxism, gaining ground in the analysis of Third World politics. A new revisionist structural Marxism directed attention to political forms ranging from the household and lineage to the colonial and postcolonial worlds of uneven exchange, dependency and underdevelopment. Much of this analysis was contributed by scholars working in francophone North and West Africa but, given the range of its subject matter, the paradigm quickly spread.
It was not uncontested. Reaction stimulated another of anthropology’s recurrent moves towards history. Intellectual rapprochement with historiographic British Marxism, and particularly the work of E.P. Thompson, reinforced political anthropology’s engagement with agency and process. A parallel concern centred around peasant resistance, labour movements and crises in capitalism in Africa and Latin America (Cooper et al. 1993). Neglect of historical conditions, class and competing interests in what was called in this paradigm (following Wallerstein) the periphery of the modern world system drew some criticism. One of the most exciting trends was developed by historians of South Asia under the rubric ‘subaltern studies’. Historians along with anthropologists and literary critics began to dismantle the subcontinent’s imperial historiography in an attempt to recover the political activities of subordinated groups. The leading anthropological voice was that of "Bernard Cohn, whose studies of power relations in colonial India stimulated the anthropology of politics into further rethinking imperialism, nationalism, peasant insurgency, class and gender. The invention of tradition became a resonant theme as did the imposition of colonial rule and the transformation of the political economy. Historical explanations began to replace those of the sociologist and economist in the new anthropology of politics.
The relative salience of global and local politics divided political economy from interpretive theory. The former was characterized as Eurocentric, the latter as apolitical; practitioners of both denied these charges. "Eric Wolf s Europe and the People without History (1982) became the key text of global, historical political economy; Geertz’s Local Knowledge (1983) asserted theinterpretive paradigm with a particularly strong (and long) topic on fact and law in comparative perspective. An attempt was made to rein-troduce practice theory but a trend towards history in both camps rendered this reversion to social science methodology a non-starter.
State politics, hegemony and resistance
Political anthropology inclined more towards the study of past colonialisms the more it became difficult or unpleasant to do field research in states where political insecurity, civil war, violence and terror had become commonplace. Studies of such situations did indeed appear along with specific critiques of state power and its abuse, but political anthropologists more generally contributed localized and particularistic tales of resistance and accommodation, challenge and riposte. Micro-political resistance to the state has been discerned in "counter-hegemonic oral histories, folk tales, cargo cults, drum festivals, and women’s illnesses, to name just a few ethnographic case studies. Resistance became a key concept, even to the extent of being romanticized and overused, a reflection, perhaps, of an uncritical adoption of notions of hegemony from Gramsci and Raymond Williams. Hegemony has been ethno-graphically located in exhibitions, commemorations and monumentalism, felicitously bringing property notions and material culture back into political anthropology. Anthropological play with the notion of hegemony succeeded its longstanding concern with order (derived from Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown) since it captures what is, in effect, the struggle for order.
Critique
A distinguishing hallmark of postmodernity is critique, and a major critical thrust in postmodern anthropology was directed towards re-examining its intellectual equipment. Political anthropology was not slow to point out the effects of its virtual obliteration of imperialism and colonialism as critical sites of ethnographic investigation. Time and space, which once provided introductory settings and closing frames in political ethnographies, were ‘re-viewed’ by postmodernists as constructed, controlled, and transformed features of political design. Edward Said’s discussion of Orientalism heightened anthropology’s established concern with the politics and ethics of representation, particularly the representation of subordinated peoples. Anthropologists received his work critically, making the point that neither the discourses of Western imperialism nor the voices of subject peoples were as monolithic, localized, and unchanging as he suggested.
The literary turn in anthropology that attention to Said’s thesis reflected had several positive repercussions. It introduced into the subfield a ‘poetics and politics trope’ that succeeded in combining interpretive anthropology and political economy. Controlled comparative studies of Fiji—Samoa—Hawaii, for example, inspired by Marshall Sahlins’s work but moving critically beyond it, showed how ‘symbolic capital’, for example, might be a mechanism of state power and authority or a mechanism of insubordination and irredentism.
Praxis, history and political economy were interpellated to determine whether at any one time in any one place the political agenda of the nation was being enriched or undermined. The poetics and politics trope thus opened up a new analytic space for a political anthropology of symbolic action (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993).
Conclusion
A concern with the mechanics of power and the relation of power to knowledge (derived primarily from the writings of Michel Foucault) halted the involution of disciplinary and subfield specialization in its tracks. Within the anthropology of politics, a new post-Foucauldian micro-political paradigm emerged (Ferguson 1990) at the same time as global transdisciplinary movements, subaltern studies, Black studies, and feminist studies — made familiar concepts such as power, history, culture and class problematic.
The political context in which fieldwork is done, the politics involved in constructing and reproducing political anthropology’s canon, and critical assessments of the political agendas of the discipline all feature on the postmodern agenda. Foucault’s connections between disciplines, knowledge and relations of authority, along with counter-Foucauldian treatises, mark the return of politics to the heartland of intellectual debate. After a century in which the concepts of society and culture have predominated even within the subfield of political anthropology, this is a change indeed.
