Power and Its Disguises

Anthropological Perspectives on Politics

John Gledhill

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2000
• eBook ISBN: 9781783718627
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores both the complexities of local situations and the power relations that shape the global order. He shows how historically informed anthropological perspectives can contribute to debates about democratisation by incorporating a 'view from below' and revealing forces that shape power relations behind the formal facade of state institutions. Examples are drawn from Brazil, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia, India, Mexico, Peru, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Sri Lanka, amongst others.

1 LOCATING THE POLITICAL: A POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY FOR TODAY

We actually know a great deal about power, but have been timid in building upon what we know.

(Wolf 1990: 586)

Half a century ago, the subject matter and relevance of political anthropology still seemed relatively easy to define. Under Western colonial regimes, one of the most valuable kinds of knowledge which anthropologists could offer to produce was that relating to indigenous systems of law and government. Most colonial governments had opted for systems of indirect rule. Colonial authority was to be mediated through indigenous leaders and the rule of Western law was to legitimate itself through a degree of accommodation to local ‘customs’.

In the last analysis, however, the laws and authority of the colonizers were pre-eminent. Anthropologists in the twentieth century found themselves in the same position as clerics in the Spanish-American Empire at the dawn of European global expansion. The authorities were interested in witchcraft accusations and blood feuds with a view to stamping out what was not acceptable to European ‘civilization’. Yet there were some areas of indigenous practice, such as customary law on property rights, which colonial regimes sought to manipulate for their own ends, and might even codify as law recognized by the colonial state. This bureaucratic restructuring of indigenous ‘traditions’ and social organization was generally carried out within a framework of European preconceptions, giving anthropologists an opportunity to offer their services in the cause of making colonial administration work.

A particularly intractable problem for the colonial regimes was that of finding persons who could play the role of authority figures in areas where state-less or ‘acephalous’ societies predominated. Much of the classical writing of British political anthropology was devoted to showing that the chiefs the colonial authorities recognized in the ‘segmentary’ societies of Africa did not possess real authority over their people. The classic case is the Nuer, a pastoral people in the southern Sudan, studied by E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1940, 1987). Evans-Pritchard argued that the Nuer political system was an ‘ordered anarchy’ based on the principle of ‘segmentary opposition’. The population was organized into clans and lineages based on male lines of descent from founding ancestors. Local groups formed ‘segments’ of larger, more inclusive, kin-groups defined in terms of descent. Nuer social and political structure could thus be represented as a hierarchy of nested lineage segments of differing scale: the ‘clan’, the biggest group, segments into ‘maximal lineages’ founded by brothers, each maximal lineage segments in turn into different ‘major’ lineages, and the segmentation process continues through levels of ‘minor’ and ‘minimal’ lineages. Evans-Pritchard saw this structure of lineage segmentation as a consequence of the political principles that operated in Nuerland. Obligations to aid others in fighting were expressed in terms of kinship. Groups which were opposed at one level of segmentation, that of minor lineages, for example, would join together in a conflict which opposed the higher segmentary unit to which they all belonged to another unit of the same structural level, such as a major lineage. This principle of ‘fission and fusion’ also provided the Nuer with a principle of unity in conflicts with other ‘tribes’.

Evans-Pritchard described Nuer politics as ‘ordered anarchy’, since even villages had no single recognized authority figures. There was an indigenous figure called the ‘leopard-skin chief’, but he was merely a ritual mediator in disputes, lacking any power to summon the parties to jurisdiction or impose settlements, let alone a wider political role. People seldom achieved redress without threatening force. Nuer society did not, therefore, possess the kind of leaders who could act as agents of ‘indirect rule’. If the colonial authorities mistook ritual mediators for genuine political authority figures, such agents might provoke resentment when they tried to act, as representatives of an imposed alien power whose ideas of justice conflicted sharply with indigenous ideas.¹

The classical British texts on political anthropology of the 1940s and 1950s thus offered a commentary on the tensions that colonial rule produced and on the reasons why it might be resented, but tended to take colonial domination itself for granted. Nevertheless, in a magisterial survey of anthropological perspectives on politics, Joan Vincent has argued that it is ‘historically inaccurate to regard the discipline simply as a form of colonial ideology’ (Vincent 1990: 2). She bases her case on several different arguments.

Firstly, Vincent contends that early anthropological voices often offered trenchant critiques of the consequences of European domination. In the 1880s, before anthropology departments became established in American universities, fieldworkers of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution were not merely documenting the sufferings of Native Americans and producing the first academic monographs on the ‘resistance movements of the oppressed’, but entering into political confrontations with the federal bureaucracy (ibid.: 52–5).

Secondly, in Britain, the first ethnographic surveys funded by the British Association in the 1890s were not conducted on ‘exotic’ societies but on English and Irish rural communities, and were motivated by concern about the potential social and political consequences of industrialization and mass urbanization. The Edwardian pioneers of fieldwork-based anthropology in the British colonies, notably W.H.R. Rivers, failed to convince the Colonial Office of the value of funding a professional anthropology which might improve the government of subject peoples (ibid.: 119–21). Between 1900 and 1920, the Royal Anthropological Institute approached the government formally on several occasions, but the official response towards anthropology remained one of suspicion, compounded by the class prejudices of Colonial Office. The first professional anthropologists generally came from non-establishment social backgrounds (ibid.: 117). It was private foundations associated with the global expansion of American capitalism that showed the greatest interest in funding anthropology. Rockefeller money not only supported the development of American anthropology within the USA’s growing international sphere of interest, but much of the classic fieldwork of British anthropologists in the 1920s and 1930s (ibid.: 154).

Nevertheless, as Vincent herself shows, the critical strands of an anthropological approach to politics were not those that became hegemonic in the discipline in the period after 1940. This was the date when the British structural-functionalists established ‘political anthropology’ as a formalized sub-field. Their anti-historical functionalist theory created a breach between the American and British traditions which was not fully closed until the 1960s, when new approaches to political anthropology associated with the Manchester School, discussed in Chapter 6, became the mainstream on both sides of the Atlantic (ibid.: 283). Anthropologists working in colonial countries were seldom ‘agents of colonialism’ in a direct sense. Wendy James summed up their dilemma as that of ‘reluctant imperialists’ (James 1973). Yet most of the profession did display ‘willingness to serve’. More significantly, the analyses of mainstream academic anthropology, in both Britain and the United States, proved incapable of confronting the fact that its object of study was a world structured by Western colonial expansion and capitalist imperialism in a systematic way. As I stress throughout this book, it remains necessary to strive for the decolonization of anthropology today. The problem is not simply the relationship between the development of anthropology and formal colonial rule, but the historical legacies of Western domination, the continuing global hegemony of the Northern powers, and contemporary manifestations of racial and neocolonial domination in the social and political life of metropolitan countries.

Anthropologists whose own politics were generally rather conservative (Worsley 1992) could make a valuable contribution to showing how indigenous notions of authority and justice might conflict with Western notions during the era of formal colonial rule. Their approach was, however, clouded by the assumption that the West and its way of doing things represented the future for all humanity. Political anthropology became an analysis of the tensions of transition. For a while it remained that, as the old colonies became new and independent nations, supposedly embarking on their own roads to a ‘modernity’ which was seldom subject to any profound scholarly reflection.

The political experience of these ‘new nations’ was, however, soon to cause Western anthropologists considerable anguish, and the kinds of theoretical paradigms and research agendas that seemed appropriate in the 1940s and 1950s gave way through the 1960s and 1970s to more critical perspectives. A new generation of Western-born anthropologists that had played no role in the colonial regimes felt free to denounce its predecessors. The professional advancement of anthropologists within the ex-colonial countries themselves turned on the heat. The main pressure for rethinking came, however, from a changing world.

In Africa, both the economic and political visions of the modernization theorists of the optimistic post-war era seemed illusory by the late 1960s. The negative consequences of failure to achieve sustained economic development were reinforced by civil wars and the appearance of some particularly vicious regimes in a continent where even the best of governments seemed distant from liberal democratic ideals. On the economic front, some parts of Asia presented a brighter picture to Western liberal eyes, but those countries that advanced economically were not conspicuous for their progressive stances on human rights. The Indian sub-continent remained economically weak, and combined destructive patterns of inter-state violence with intra-state political conflict. The Indonesians followed up violent internal political repression with brutal colonial expansion. Latin America, which had already experienced more than a century of violence and political instability since independence, not only failed to translate impressive per capita economic growth rates into greater social justice for its impoverished masses, but experienced a wave of military regimes.

The combination of a generally unsatisfactory outlook on ‘development’ and a dismal report on ‘democratization’ favoured the rise of radical paradigms. At first, explanations couched in economic terms tended to win out, since inequalities within the global economy were manifest impediments to the universalization of prosperity. A substantial number of repressive regimes around the world owed their survival, and in some cases their very existence, to the intervention of imperialist powers. The dependency paradigm, initially associated with André Gunder Frank and a series of Latin American writers,² but subsequently diffused to other parts of the world, explained the politics of the periphery by arguing that the bourgeoisies of ‘underdeveloped’ countries were subservient to metropolitan interests, siphoning off their countries’ wealth in alliance with foreign capital. Given that analysis, the national state of the peripheral country is charged with maintaining the kind of social order needed to perpetuate dependent development.

Yet dependency theory proved as popular with democracy’s enemies as with its supposed friends. If a nation’s miseries depend solely on the unequal distribution of economic power on a world scale, and Third World bourgeoisies are in hock to foreign interests, then the colonels can leave the barracks to take over government in the name of a defence of national and popular interests against the imperialist enemy and its local bourgeois clients. Strong government and state-directed economic development becomes the anti-imperialist alternative to the treacherous machinations of civilian politicians tied to private vested interests. If things go badly, this is because the North is determined to continue exploiting the South. Dependency theory thus not merely proved weak at explaining variety in political responses to underdevelopment in scientific terms: it was sometimes coopted by the torturers.

Dependency theory and its more ‘academic’ successor, the world-systems theory pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein (1979), did, however, force ‘international relations’ onto the anthropological agenda. World-systems analysis stimulated lively debate about ways in which global processes were modified by ‘local’ historical variables to produce variety in the way particular regions of the periphery developed (Smith 1984). Marxist theories of imperialism also enjoyed a revival in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly among indigenous anthropologists whose intellectual formation was based on reading Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. It now became commonplace to argue that the end of formal colonial rule did not spell the end of ‘colonial’ relationships between North and South, the old politico-administrative form of colonialism simply having been replaced by new, and more insidious, neo-colonial relationships.

At the same time, however, an awakened anthropological interest in history provoked further exploration of the consequences of the colonial process itself and non-economic dimensions of Western domination. The ‘new nations’ of the period after the Second World War were formed by the colonial powers out of a frequently incongruous series of pre-colonial ‘societies’. Pre-colonial states and ‘statelets’ were amalgamated together into colonial territorial units along with sundry stateless agricultural and pastoral-nomadic groups on principles that made less sense once colonial rule ended, since it was the presence of the colonial power which had provided the territorial unit with political and social unity. Furthermore, the colonial powers had not been content simply to cast the mantle of their rule over peoples already living in the territories they colonized. Colonial capitalism also transplanted people from continent to continent, some as labourers and some to develop services that the locals were deemed incapable of providing. Thus, some of the new nations of Africa and the Pacific were left by their European colonizers with substantial Asian populations occupying advantageous social and economic positions, laying a basis for future conflict. Surveying Caribbean history, Sidney Mintz has observed that our current heightened awareness of mass migrations in an era of so-called ‘globalization’ is partly explicable by the fact that so much earlier population movement in the capitalist world economy involved non-White people moving within circuits that segregated them from the populations of North Atlantic countries, whereas today former colonial ‘others’ are an increasingly important presence in Northern countries themselves (Mintz 1998: 124).

Eager to divest themselves of a colonial empire that no longer seemed economically beneficial after the Second World War, and unable to find politically feasible ways of resolving the contradictions they had created, the British must bear a heavy responsibility for the course of events in various parts of Africa and in the Indian sub-continent since independence. There is, however, a more general principle at issue here than the particular messes created by the extended process of decolonization, to which all the colonial powers made a contribution – including the United States. The contemporary configuration of the world into political units, nations, peoples and religious communities results from a global process of carving out empires and spheres of influence through direct military interventions and indirect political meddling in the ‘internal’ conflicts of states that achieved or conserved political independence from the great powers in the nineteenth century.

Developments in regions which retained political independence, such as the Russian Empire, the Ottoman world and China, were also reshaped by the carving up of the world into colonial territories and the global commercial expansion of the industrial powers of north-west Europe and the United States. The ‘non-bourgeois’ elites of Japan and Russia sought to promote economic modernization to underpin their geopolitical position in a world of rifles, heavy artillery and battleships. Western expansion did not produce cultural homogenization, much less a universal tendency towards bourgeois society and liberal democracy as envisaged by the optimistic social theorists of nineteenth-century Europe. It did, however, transform the nature of social and political life in ways which are as recognizable in the case of ‘Islamic fundamentalist’ Iran as they are in countries on the immediate frontiers of Western Europe.

Anthropology’s distinctive contribution to the social sciences is often defined in terms of its favoured methodology, the direct study of human life ‘on the ground’ through ethnographic fieldwork. Anthropologists live for an extended period with the people they study, observing the details of their behaviour as it happens and conducting an extended dialogue with them about their beliefs and practices. The fieldwork method is not, however, peculiar to anthropology, and I would prefer to stress the importance of anthropology’s theoretical contribution as a social science that attempts to examine social realities in a cross-cultural frame of reference. In striving to transcend a view of the world based solely on the premises of European culture and history, anthropologists are also encouraged to look beneath the world of taken-for-granted assumptions in social life in general. This should help us pursue critical analyses of ideologies and power relations in all societies, including those of the West.

In my view, a political anthropology adequate to the world of the late twentieth century must seek to relate the local to the global, but in a more radical way than has been attempted in the past. A crucial question is anthropology’s relationship to history (Wolf 1990). One problem is that the sub-field of political anthropology has failed to reflect adequately on what is peculiar to the political life and systems of Western societies in world-historical terms. Progress has been made in strengthening historical perspectives that explore how the present state of the world is the product of social processes of global scale, impacting differentially on regions with specific local social characteristics, through different agents of global change, such as particular types of capitalist enterprise or colonial regimes. Yet anthropology has continued to talk about local ‘societies’ and ‘cultures’ in a world where the politics of the former Yugoslavia are influenced by the politics of Serbs living in North America, and the politics of the Indian sub-continent or the Middle East erupt onto European streets.

Furthermore, what we often take as the ‘core’ of political life in ‘democratic’ regimes, going out and voting, seems to be an increasingly unpopular activity in the country which now claims to guarantee all our freedoms, the United States. The whole of the Western world seems to be experiencing a notable public disillusion with institutional political life and the role of professional politicians. The world to the east of Western Europe seems to manifest a greater enthusiasm for nationalism than democracy. How are we to understand such processes without asking more profound questions about what states, nations and democracy mean in Western terms and how these Western forms emerged historically?

Ethnographic research methods remain essential for investigating the dyna...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• 1. Locating the political: a political anthropology for today
• 2. The origins and limits of coercive power: the anthropology of stateless societies
• 3. From hierarchy to surveillance: the politics of agrarian civilizations and the rise of the Western national state
• 4. The political anthropology of colonialism: a study of domination and resistance
• 5. Post-colonial states: legacies of history and pressures of modernity
• 6. From macro-structure to micro-process: anthropological analysis of political practice
• 7. Political process and ‘global disorder’: perspectives on contemporary conflict and violence
• 8. Society against the modern state? The politics of social movements
• 9. Anthropology and politics: commitment, responsibility and the academy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index