Political Anthropology: Paradigms and Power

249 Pages·2001·23.29 MB·English

by  Donald V Kurtz

POLITICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY
Power arzd Paradigms
Donald I% Kurtz
A Member of the Perseus Rooks Group
AI1 rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication Inay
be reproduced or traxrsmitted irt any form or by arry mearrs, electronic or mechaxricaf, includ-
ing plrotocapy recording, or any iirkormation storage and rethevat system, without: pen~~is-
simr in writii~gfro 111 the pt~blislrer.
Copyright 02 11111 by Weswiew Press, A Member of the f"erseus Books Gmup
Westview Press books are available at special discot~ntsf or bulk purchases in the United
States by corpuratirr~zsit~rs tilutior-ls, arrd ctther organizations. For more information, please
contact the Special Markets Depadment at The Perseus Books Gmup, 11 Cambridge Center,
Cambridge MA 02242, or call [phone],
Published irr 2001 irr the United States ctf America by Wetihiew Press, 5500 Central henue,
Boulder, Colorado 80301-2877, arrd in the Unitt%dK it-lgdom by Weshiew Press. 112 Hid's
Copse Road, Gumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ
Find us on the World Wide Web at w~~w.westviewpr~~~.co~~~
A CTP cakalctg record for this book is available from the Library of Congwss.
ISBN 0-81 33-38M-2 (pbk.); 0-131 33-3803-4 (Etc.)
The paper used in this pu"oXicatio~-lm eets tlre requirements ctf the American National
Standard fc~rP ermanence of Paper for Prir~tedL ibrary Materials 5339.48-19M.
To Lxz,
WITHOUT WHOSE LAUGHTER AT MU TITLES
MU LIFE WOULD BE INCOMPLETE,
YOU MAKE IT ALL WBRTHWNEELE.
Introduction
1 The Paradigms of Political Anthropology
2. Political Power
3 PoEtical kaders md Authorities
4 Successiasz to Political Status md Office and
the Legitimation of Political Authority
me
5 Structum3-Functiond Paradigm
6 'The Politics of Khship
7 The Processual Paradigm
8 The Paradigm of Polifical Economy 113
9 The Paradigm of Political Evolution: Neo-evolution and
Political, Organizat-ion 133
10 The Paradigm of Political Evolution: The Evolution of Politics 149
11 Anthropology and the Study of the State 169
12 The Postmodern Paradigm of Political Anthropology:
The Genre of Experimental Political Ethnography It39
R4ere~rces
Index
Marriage of Ego to matsilateral ar
patrilateral cross-cousins
Sister exchange
Bilateral cmss-cousin marriage of Ego, eitkr to
FaSi" ddipghter or to MoBro" daughter
Matrifakral cmss-cousin mwriage: Women flow from
lineage 111 to lkeage 1 in each generation
Fatrilateral cross-cousin marriage: Women Row to
the lineages involved in. alternating generations
Fatrilateral parallel cousin mrriage
Ramage (also a cognatic descent association,
or a conical clan)
A while back I talked to a colleague about this prr;>jectH, e was a genera-
tion younger than :I and specialized as an economic antbropolagist. Me
was surprised when I mentioned the different theoretical orientations
that have directed research into political anthropology historically. And Z
was su~risedw hen he commented that political ar.tl_hropologyh ad al-
ways appeared to him to be a dispersed field kvithout a theoretical center.
That has not been the case since the field was formally established in 1940
with the publication of Afrtcnt.1 P~liticalS ystems (Fortes and Evalts-
Pritchard 1940)"B ut to a younger scholar kvho came to the practice of an-
thropology after the 1970s, thcr field might appear to be dispersed because
since trhe mid-1970s the ml-hocfologics by which anthopologists study
poitical phenomena have emmated from different th.eorc?timlc enters.
Many political mtJnropologists of my generation recall with some nos-
talgia the adwent of the actor-oriented processud appach to political
phenomena in the mid-1960s. They consider the decade trntil the mid-
1970s to be the heyday of political anthropology and think that it subse-
quently lost its vigor. But ihe decade from approximately 1465 to 1975
was a heady period for cultural anthropology at large. hthropojogists
heatedly daatcd the importance of theoretical orientations, such as
ethnoscieztce, stmcrhralism, cuiturai evolMion, ar~dt -he p"i""q oh&-
stantive and formal economics, as well as the social signjificmce of hot-
ticket intertrsts, often faddish, such as the culkrre of poverty, the causes
and morality c.lf war, and whether human aggres"in is biologically or
culturally motivated. None of these concerlls, irrcludhg political anthra-
pology has survived with the same level of urgency that practitimers as-
signed to them during that time. But the field of politic& arthr~pologya s
a whole remahs alive and kvell, md political anthropologists continue to
expand into n wd irections, as they have since the inception of the field.
:In the 1Y40s artd I95Os, political anthrt;>pologys erved as a handmaiden
to the structural-functional orientation of British social anthropology
That unfortunate relation&$ was gradually superseded in the mid-1960s
by a processual approach concerned with the role of the political agent,
By the 1970s, that orientation was complemented by anthropological ap-
proaches to political. economy in social anthropology and to political eva-
lution in cultural anthropology and archaeologyFe ach of which was influ-
enced by Marxist theory. Today lfie role of the ageM in politicai processes
is behg recuperated in. a practice-theory approach to political phenom-
ena. And, although this shift has not yet been achowledged by many
postmorfer1.r ar~thropologistsa re taking political anthropology il.1 still
other ctirectioms, despite naive threl?ls by radical post-modem mthropola-
gists to dCcmstruct anthropology as a social science. Each of these orien-
tations in o11e way or amther is implicakd in the co~~creamr~ frhropologists
have with the "'state," "stead of lachg a theoretical center, political an-
thropology, if anytlning, suffers from too many theoretical, sources. But
they are not mutualfy exclusive, and together they co~plyw ith the
breadth and depth that the anthropological perspective brings ta the
sbdy of the human condition, which is its best conceit,
As is ihe case in most other anthropology suhfields, politicai anthropol-
o@ts study and anitlyze political phenomena in all the k i d o f hurnan
societies of which we have my record and from the earliest prehistoric
formation of these societies to the present. This scope may sound auda-
cious, but that is what the anthropological enterprise is all about, and
what makes it at once exciting and frustrating. One can never bow all
there is to knw, even within the narrow specialties, such as; poliSical an-
thropology, by which we in, our guise as scholars identif.y ourselves.. T%e
earned conceit that anthropologists bring to the study of political phe-
nomena is obwious if we compare ihe anthropological apgmach to potiti-
cal phenomena to that of other social sciences. l%ese approaches cm be
identified as mz'?zinzalista nd maxl'rrzalist (Balandier 1970).
Political scjentists and socidogists, for exampIc, hitve a mi~.rima:ii&
view of pojitical phenomena. To mast of them, especially political. scien-
tists, government and political phenoxnena transpire and exist within for-
mal politicai institutions, ahost all of which arc. associated with modern
state formations. mat the government of a political cornmuniv might ex-
ist in other nonpolitical hstibtions is largely alien to their think@. Yet
that is exactly what political anthropologists cor.rfrc,r.rted and had to sort
out.
Anthropologists developed a maximalist approach to study political
phenomenir because they discovered that in the industrial, precapital-
ist, non-Western societies that provided their =search subjects, priactices
and structures of government and other political practices often tran-
spired in unlilcely conkxts, such as witchcraft and sorcery, a din curious
institutional settlxlgs, such as kinship associations, age sets, secret soci-
eties, and among shamms. Simply put, not all the kinds of sockties for
which anthropologists have writtm ethnographies, svch as mmadic
hunters md gaherers md some horticultural md pastoral peoples, have
formal political institutims. But evev humarm suciety, regardless how h-
stihntionafly simple, hits some fom of political orga-rization and leader-
ship, &spite early, rommticized ideas to the contrary (Radcliffe-Brow
7922; MacLeod 1931; Rcdfield 1.956; Murdock 4957; Sharp 1.958). The dif-
fere~"tatp proaches that anthropo:iogists use to understand poliiicai phe-
nomena are responses to the variety and complexity of the humm politi-
cal condition that is either largely unknown or of little interest to political
scie~~tisatrs-r d political sociologists.
Just as X have written above, h day-to-day discourse political mthropol-
ogists (and others) commonly refer to the "orientations'kr "approaches"'
by which they study p""litiwbhenomer.la. Each of the approaches by
which mthropologists try to mderstmd md explalirr political phenomena
is characteriwd by a compatible body of theory, concepts, and strateees
that direct their research. Yet it is more accurate to thh-rk of each of these
research constellations as a paradigm that provides its dedicated practition-
ers with the scientific tools to hvestigate a d- plain political phenomena
&rough normal scientffic practices (Kuhrli 1970). The pmdigmt; through
which political amthrapologists have pursued their =search agendas are
the focus of this work.
Ihe tlteo~ticais ubject matkr of polirical anthropology is represented
by five paradigms: structural-functionalism, process, political. economy,
political evolution, and poshnodemism. Wstorically, different paradigms
have dominated the anthropological study of politics at differex-rt times.
%dayr many of the halfmark ideas of earlier paradigms, such as struc-
tural-finnctimalism and process, am included, without acknowledgment
in more recent paradigms, such as the po"modern, because they have
been absorbed into anthropological thought and discourse, but kvithout:
the specific emphasis given to them previously h this way, the major md
importat-rtc ontributions of each paradip rmain alive and wll and pro-
vide a holistic view to political phenomena tmlike that in. my other social
scimce,
This hook differs from others that claim to introduce political ar~thro-
s agaixlst the traditional mode of anthropological presen-
tation. In the traditional practice of writing about anthropolog>i theortrti-
cai statments, often brief, are buttressed by copious amounts of
etbographic data. X emphsize theory over data because I afn, of the con-
vjction that palitical anthropology is fundamentally about the ideas, theo-
ries, and cmegts that direct research on politicral pbnomena.
Ethographic data are the means by which mthrapologists present and