The Anthropology of Parliaments

Entanglements in Democratic Politics

Emma Crewe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350089594
• eBook ISBN: 9781000182316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Vergleichende Politikwissenschaften

The Anthropology of Parliaments offers a fresh, comparative approach to analysing parliaments and democratic politics, drawing together rare ethnographic work by anthropologists and politics scholars from around the world.

Crewe's insights deepen our understanding of the complexity of political institutions. She reveals how elected politicians navigate relationships by forging alliances and thwarting opponents; how parliamentary buildings are constructed as sites of work, debate and the nation in miniature; and how politicians and officials engage with hierarchies, continuity and change. This book also proposes how to study parliaments through an anthropological lens while in conversation with other disciplines. The dive into ethnographies from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Region demolishes hackneyed geo-political categories and culminates in a new comparative theory about the contradictions in everyday political work.

This important book will be of interest to anyone studying parliaments but especially those in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology; politics, legal and development studies; and international relations.

1

Introducing parliaments and anthropology

DOI: 10.4324/9781003084488-1

In the state opening of the 1908 Ottoman Parliament in Istanbul, seen on the cover of this book, the representatives are uniformly male, formal, and clothed in black. Globally our political institutions remain blighted by male dominance. But if you consider the various constituencies these politicians represent, you might also see this as a vast and diverse empire on show. In contrast to European colonial nations, it is claimed that all Ottoman subjects were citizens with the same political rights and were represented in the Parliament (Türesay 2013). These Ottoman Members of Parliament discussed Westminster in a debate during the following year, and were disinclined to emulate it:

Abdülaziz Mecdi Efendi (Karesi): Do the parliamentary system and equality reign supreme in England?

Kozmidi Efendi (Istanbul): I’m not referring to England here. I am an Ottoman, was born an Ottoman, and was brought up an Ottoman. Anything else simply doesn’t concern me.

Abdülaziz Mecdi Efendi (Karesi): The parliamentary system in England is 225 years old. And there’s not a single Indian member of Parliament.

Kozmidi Efendi (Istanbul): You don’t seem to understand England very well. India is a colony.

(ibid)

A few years earlier the Westminster Parliament had had a solitary Indian MP, Dadabhai Naoroji, the Honourable Member for Finsbury Central. Born into a poor Parsi family in Bombay, he was a fierce critic of British colonialism and its economic rapacity. With justice: he concluded that a quarter of India’s revenues were being appropriated by the UK. A founder member of the Indian National Congress in 1885, he decided‘it is in Parliament (London) that our chief battle has to be fought’. Incredibly, he won his seat in 1892, effectively one man representing the interests of the whole Indian subcontinent in the UK Parliament: 287 million people. Towards the end of his term he asked in the House of Commons:

suppose this House was cleared of Englishmen and filled with foreigners, or perhaps shut up altogether, all power and plans in their hands, eating and carrying away much of the wealth of this country year after year, in short Britain reduced to the present condition and system of government of India, would the Britons submit to it a single day if they could help it?¹

If you look at who sits in parliaments, much is revealed about a nation. And yet, although social anthropologists have been studying politicians and other leaders, since around the time Dadbhai Naoroji won his seat, they have rarely ventured into parliaments. The study of politicians requires an understanding of the highly skilled work involved in doing politics. It is an arena of power, a jostling for public recognition and an encounter with difference. It involves struggling with friends and foes to realise aspirations, share resources, discipline people or thwart opponents’ goals. It happens informally in families, communities, organisations, in the street, and formally within institutions across and between nations. Of those institutions, it is parliaments – politicians’ workplaces – that tend to be the most ritualised, exposed and complex political spaces within a governance world, although courts are serious competitors. It is a place where hierarchies, power, conflict, rituals, rules, are always found alongside loyalty and disobedience.

Although it is work, politics is also entangled with people’s social, cultural and emotional life so it can be intoxicating, addictive, unsettling or, at times, deadly dull. These entanglements make it difficult to write about. If you focus on only individuals doing politics (politicians, for example) and the institutions that allow them to organise themselves (political parties or parliaments) and the outputs they produce (acts, budgets, regulations, policies, reports) but fail to look at processes – the relationships, communication and emotions that keep their show on the road – then you can only ever achieve an impoverished analysis. To understand parliaments, you have to look at the complex range of connections, networks and exclusions they form across nations.

My purpose in this book is to summarise what anthropologists have written about parliaments so far and provoke questions for future research, both for those already studying parliaments as well as those who might be tempted, enticing new anthropologists (and ethnographically inclined scholars from other disciplines) into these absorbing fieldwork sites, to continue with what previous anthropologists have already shown: that anthropology can be useful to the study of parliaments. I make no claim to be comprehensive, holistic or systematic about explaining parliaments in this book and my own fieldwork site of Westminster gets more of my attention than others. I can do no more than offer some anthropological brush-strokes about what parliaments are, what people say about them and do in them, continually asking who, what, where, when, how and why, always worrying about what I/we don’t know. I hope this approach to the study of parliament offers a tapestry – a weaving of ideas about past, present and future, both broad patterns and depth through detail, narratives with plots and characters, and both context-specific and generalisable theories. I aim to offer insight into both parliaments and anthropology at the same time.

A map of this book

This book is primarily written for researchers and students, especially those who already study parliaments or might do so in the future. If interested in researching parliaments ethnographically, then this is the book for you. You are most likely to be an anthropologist, as I am, or from a discipline that already dominates the study of parliament (history, political science, gender studies, public administration and legal studies). But you may be trained in a discipline that has mostly stayed away but would enrich our understanding (psychology, organisational studies, theatre studies, linguistics …). I have distilled what has been written so far about parliaments through an anthropological lens so that you have an introduction to these exotic and unfamiliar institutions. For these disciplines, I’m explaining my version of anthropology and aiming to offer novel insights into institutions that you may not have considered from an entangled socio-political and cultural angle. It may interest teachers and students of politics and maybe a few with a keen interest in following politicians as an utterly compelling intellectual spectator sport.

To watch your own democracy, or better still to participate in it, requires knowledge of the arena at the centre and anthropology sheds light on parliaments through a particular and illuminating filter. Take the Westminster Parliament, as I have done in this book a great deal (because it is the one I know best): anthropology has helped me to wrestle with a series of questions and puzzles about gender, whipping, emotion, ritual, conflict and political work left unsolved by political science.

To find your way around this book, it might help if I explain its narrative structure. Each chapter can be read on its own, offering a way to inquire into a specific theme, while overall I am making an argument about how to study political organisations through an anthropological lens. I will explain this general argument first before I introduce you to each chapter. After a brief introduction to parliaments, anthropology and how I came to be doing anthropological research on parliaments, I present this book in three parts. The first is about how politics is entangled in sociality, the second grapples with culture and the third is about power and knowledge. The first part relies on a partly conventional way of understanding politicians’ work as processes of campaigning, representation and scrutiny of government, in the hope that this way of conceiving of it will be recognisable to everyone. But I question the idea of MPs’ work as divisible into roles. Typologies classifying MPs into these‘roles’ miss the entanglements between them, the difference between claims they make and what happens in practice, and diversity among MPs. My conclusion on summarising these strands of politicians’ work is to note the overlaps, contradictions, conflicting pressures and endless shapeshifting they have to do to adjust to multitudes of audiences.

So, Part I leaves me with this empirical question: if the work of MPs creates this confusing mess of pressures and expectations, which they have no choice but to respond to in democracies, then what are the continuities and breaks across the various encounters and sites? In Part II I offer a systematic way to study how MPs work by looking at the performance of rhythms through time and space, the riffs of meaning and how riffs and rhythms are organised by and through rituals, both in parliament and outside. This could be a way of considering the differences between MPs but also the patterns of interaction through speeches, debates, documents, meetings, conferences, ‘surgeries’, digital channels and so on. To understand both the individuals and groups, we need to research the relationships between them and consider what formal structures influence these (e.g., political parties) as well as informal sedimented hierarchies (e.g., gendered inequality in conversation with class, age, race …). Part II still fails to resolve this further problem: how do we develop a sense of proportion to make sense of all this interaction? What is significant and what is trivial and who decides?

In Part III I write about significance. Much that I have written about politicians’ work in Parts I and II is true of people working in any organisation and certainly those aspiring to do public good. We are all shapeshifters if we go out into the world of work. In Part III I turn to what is specific to politicians and other leaders. Whether navigating friendship and enmity, or engaging in continual power struggles, politicians are doing what we all do but in magnified ways. It is this magnification that makes them unique, or at least unusual. Politicians are more exposed, have more capacity for impact and are connected to huge numbers, so their entangled political work is like the work done by the rest of us but with the dial turned up. I end up explaining how I have come to these conclusions, building on the research of other anthropologists. Researchers and politicians can learn from each other’s craft: to do good research you have to be politically savvy; to be an effective politician you’d be wise to learn – that is, do research in the broadest sense of the word – with intensity. The starting point for both, if wise, is to acknowledge their ignorance and assume a position of uncertainty.

My argument about the nature of politicians’ work as entangled, shapeshifting and magnified is built up chapter by chapter. In Chapter 2 I begin by summarising the anthropological work on elections. When you stand for election you don’t know whether you or your party will be in government, so you have to make hypothetical promises. It is anxiety making, intoxicating and highly addictive for those standing. Voters don’t necessarily need to agree wholeheartedly with their representative; they vote for a candidate or party that is intelligible, recognisable and (in some cases and in some ways) trustworthy. The loyalty crafted in relationships in the run up to these events often proves important in doing politics once they are in parliament.

I discuss another even more complicated kind of voting within parliaments. When verbal battles over policy, law and government are fought by political parties, their members have to decide whether or not to support their own side, which they usually do. But rebellions mean that the government party, which nearly always has a majority, can’t always assume victory, with a few exceptions, for example, in Bangladesh where it is illegal to vote against your party. In the UK rebellions against your own party have been increasing for over half a century (Cowley 2005), revealing much about political but also cultural change both inside and outside parliament. A recurrent theme of this is the connection between parliament and the rest of society; it is a microcosm of wider society – because within it are representatives of (nearly) all people in a nation – so unsurprisingly politics in parliament reveals change that is happening elsewhere because it unfolds within MPs’ domains in amplified forms.

In Chapter 3 I write about another area of political work that has exercised scholars for as long as they have studied democracy: representation. Rather than taking the representation by elected politicians as a literal process of championing the interests of the electorate, I write about different understandings of this claim – for example, by politicians, feminists and constituents in different countries. We can’t fathom this process until we take a far closer look at what interactions and results this claim produces in different places. Scrutiny is the focus of Chapter 4. For democracy to work, law-making, policy development and administration of the state have to be scrutinised by politicians, the media, civil society, academics, even the Twitterati. While legal scholars look at what happens to swathes of documents to assess the quality of this scrutiny, I followed 250 words as they travelled through parliament and were pored over, debated and revised. The role of civil society is easily overlooked in these processes because its appearance in the legal and parliamentary texts is more marginal than it is in the reality of face-to-face and mediated encounters. ‘Evidence’ is idealised, and seen as especially pure and efficacious if scientific or legal, whereas I argue it is its entanglement with politics that creates and sustains democratic processes. To deny the politics in evidence is anti-democratic.

Chapters 5, 6 and 7 bring culture into the entanglements. Under the influence of Lefebvre and Mead, I am pulling at my own long-standing bias towards mind and history to write about bodies and geography in the rhythms of parliamentary work in Chapter 5. How do MPs navigate time and space – as individuals and groups – and what are the patterns of continuity as opposed to the breakdowns in these rhythms? More familiar to the study of parliaments, in Chapter 6 I consider the riffs of meaning to make sense of the content of political ideas and how they influence what MPs think, say and do. I take up Barth’s distinction between different types of knowledge – ideas about the world or ideology, communication (such as political rhetoric), and transmission through social relations (2002). I relate an example of advocacy to explore the social relations involved, a story about how a network in rural England influenced a district council to turn down a planning application. Through rhythms and riffs, it becomes possible to see one way of systematically studying how political work happens between politicians and those they interact with.

Since politicians are connected to every person in a nation (at least symbolically), if you amass information about their political rhythms and riffs – including who they help and who they neglect – then how can you judge what to focus on? How do you know what is politically significant? In Chapter 7 I address this question by arguing that rituals and symbols reveal the struggles for status and power, the contests over meaning, and the intensity of the stake in decision-making. Observing the formality of rituals, and the emotional reaction to symbolism, tells you when something important is going on.

My final question for Part III is this: what matters to people and how do you tell? Politics happens when emotion becomes magnified within social relationships, especially at moments of negotiation, and although we are all involved in politics, for politicians the intensity tends to be greater. Politicians do politics with the dial turned up. Why is this? Because you can’t do politics without developing conflicts and alliances – walking between friends and foes – which inevitably leads people into power struggles. Power is negotiated with the influence of ghosts from the past, and aspirations about the future, so it is always relational in both a social sense but also a temporal one. The more politicians turn up the social dial of democratic engagement – listening to constituents, lobbyists, journalists, each other – the more they have to deal with contradictions, exposure and risk. This sounds beneficial but then leads to a turning up of the second dial too – one of poli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introducing parliaments and anthropology
• PART I: The sociality of parliaments
• PART II: The cultures of parliaments
• PART III: Politics with the dial turned up
• References
• Index