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Chapter Summary
While cultural anthropologists recognize that all cultures are fluid, and thus are interested in how cultures change over time, they critique social evolutionary approaches that tend to ethnocentrically position certain societies (and historically Western societies) at the apex of an evolutionary ladder of progress.
Among other things, political anthropology is interested in how power operates in different types of societies. Anthropologists have demonstrated that power is exercised by both coercive and persuasive means. They have been influenced by the work of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault. Gramsci argued that coercion alone is rarely sufficient to control a population. In many societies, power takes the form of hegemony. Rulers always face the risk that those they dominate may create counterhegemonic accounts of their experience of being dominated, acquire a following, and unseat their rulers. Foucault’s concept of governmentality addresses practices developed in Western nation-states in the nineteenth century that aimed to create and sustain peaceful and prosperous social life by exercising biopower over persons who could be counted, whose physical attributes could be measured statistically, and whose sexual and reproductive behaviours could be shaped by the exercise of state power.
In stateless societies, social obligations can restrict individuals from pursuing their own self-interest to the detriment of the group. Individuals cannot be coerced but must be persuaded to co-operate. Individuals use the constraints and opportunities for action open to them, however limited they may be. They are not free agents, but they are empowered to resist conforming to another’s wishes. The flows unleashed by globalization have affected how identities are constructed by migrants and citizens, even as formal and substantive citizenship push more flexible approaches to belonging.
Learning Objectives
In this chapter, the student should learn to do the following:
- discuss the main goals of political anthropology;
- understand and describe how power operates in state versus non-state societies;
- discuss the differences between Gramsci and Foucault’s notions of power;
- understand the impacts of nation-states, globalization, and trans-border identities on citizenship and belonging;
- outline how biopower operates in many modern, state-level societies;
- define the concept of ideology.