Chapter 8 Summary

Introduction

Anthropology looks at political systems more broadly than popular conceptions of politics, way beyond Western democracy to every form of political organization that’s ever been tried. As a result, the “political headlines” of an anthropology text are quite different from those of an American newspaper.

To encompass these “headlines,” anthropologists define politics as those relationships and processes of cooperation, conflict, and power that are fundamental aspects of human life.

We can’t understand diverse expressions of power if we focus exclusively on the formal political institutions of states. Cooperation, conflict, and power are rooted in people’s everyday social interactions, belief systems, and cultural practices.
This chapter focuses on the question, How is power acquired and transmitted in a society? To address this focal question, the chapter is organized around the following problems:

Does every society have a government?
What is political power?
Why do some societies seem more violent than others?
How do people avoid aggression, brutality, and war?

For anthropologists, politics is not simply formal state institutions but how people manage their everyday social relations through persuasion, force, violence, and control over resources.

Does Every Society Have a Government?

Some societies, including ours, have centralized political authority in the form of a government: a separate legal and constitutional domain that is the source of law, order, and legitimate force.
Others, such as the !Kung San (Ju/’hoansi) Kalahari hunter–gatherers, have historically lived in egalitarian bands of fifteen to twenty people and are an acephalous society: a society without a governing head, generally with no hierarchical leadership.
Prior to changes instituted by the Namibian and South African governments, the !Kung did not recognize a separate political sphere; decisions were made by group consensus. Food sharing was the major organizational principle, and failure to share could result in shaming, ostracism, or banishment (Figure 8.2).
These informal social controls regulated !Kung behavior without a need for laws: a set of rules established by some formal authority.
The idea of “politics” as contemporary Westerners tend to think of it emerged during the Enlightenment (1650–1800). Contrary to the image presented by the !Kung, Enlightenment intellectuals had a dismal view of human nature. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) famously called life without formal political control “nasty, brutish, and short.” John Locke (1632–1704) argued that chaos is avoidable with a “social contract” that recognizes individual rights, still a central tenet of many societies.
There are many positive aspects of Enlightenment “social contracts.” Perhaps the most negative was the assumption that similar forms of government should be forced on the peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific via colonialism.

During the early twentieth century, Britain’s global empire spurred the rise of British anthropology. Colonial authorities relied on anthropologists to explain local forms of governance or, seemingly, the lack thereof. This colonial “problem” presented anthropologists with opportunities to study the maintenance of order in societies without formal governments and political leaders (Figure 10.2).

Colonial studies produced structural-functionalism: an anthropological theory that the different structures or institutions of a society (religion, politics, kinship, etc.) function to maintain social order and equilibrium.

In addition to ties of kinship, many pastoralist societies (e.g., the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania) divide men from different families into age-grades: groupings of age-mates, who are initiated into adulthood together.
Beliefs in witchcraft can promote order. For example, throughout sub-Saharan Africa, people who do not adhere to cultural norms are liable to be accused of witchcraft or sorcery and punished.

Structural-functionalists argued that belief in witchcraft, and the fear it provoked, operated as a rudimentary criminal justice system—all without formal laws.
In the 1940s and 1950s, American anthropologists called neo-evolutionists sought to classify political systems. Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service (1960) developed a sociopolitical typology of bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states.
Bands and tribes are non-centralized political systems, in which power and control over resources are dispersed among members of society. Chiefdoms and states are centralized political systems, where a few individuals and institutions hold power and control over resources.

Band: a small, nomadic, and self-sufficient group of anywhere between 25 and 150 individuals with face-to-face social relationships, usually egalitarian.
Tribe: a type of pastoralist or horticulturist society with populations usually numbering in the hundreds or thousands in which leadership is more stable than that of a band but usually egalitarian, with social relations based on reciprocal exchange.
Chiefdom: a political system with a hereditary leader who holds central authority, typically supported by a class of high-ranking elites, informal laws, and a simple judicial system, often numbering in the tens of thousands with the beginnings of intensive agriculture and some specialization.
State: the most complex form of political organization, associated with societies that have intensive agriculture, high levels of social stratification, and centralized authority.

Not surprisingly, there has been much debate about whether all human societies can be accurately categorized with a simple four-type system. Two major problems with the typology are that many cases blur the boundaries between types and that the typology tends to downplay historical change except in a broad evolutionary sense.

What Is Political Power?

Beginning in the 1960s, anthropological emphasis shifted from typology (ordering societies) to exploring how individuals acquire and use power within societies. As used in anthropology, power is the ability to make people think or act in certain ways, through a range of techniques from physical force to persuasion. Power comes in many forms.
Political power: the processes by which people create, compete, and use power to attain goals that are presumed to be for the good of a community.

For political power to be legitimate, it must be based on a culturally recognized source: deities, ancestors, hereditary transfer, legal inheritance, or elected office. It can emerge from a dependent source (given by other social actors: granted, delegates, or allocated). Power may also be drawn from material resources, human resources, symbolic resources, or ideological resources.

The many processes involved in wielding power are addressed by action theory: a theory that follows the daily activities and decision-making processes of individual political leaders, emphasizing that politics is a dynamic and competitive field of social relations in which people are constantly managing their ability to exercise power over others.

Within politics, there are normative and pragmatic rules. For example, in the United States, normative political rules require a candidate to, at least, maintain the appearance of honesty. But this conflicts with the pragmatic rules required to actually win elections and govern.

Action theory focused on the self-aggrandizing behaviors and power of individual actors. By the 1980s and 1990s, cultural anthropologists recognized the additional need to investigate structural power: power that not only operates within settings but also organizes and orchestrates the settings in which social and individual actions take place.

David Horn (1994) used the concept of structural power to trace a rise in Italian acceptance of state intervention in healthcare decisions and management of the body.

Gender plays a role in political power. In some societies, women exercise leadership and political power. In others, women have very little formally recognized power but are able to assert various types of informal power to shape events.

For example, in Papua New Guinea, an abused or shamed woman’s act of “revenge suicide” shifts the burden of shame to her abuser and can even motivate the victim’s relatives to seek violent revenge.
It may be difficult for Westerners to view suicide as an expression of power, but, again, power comes in many culturally specific forms.

The exercise of political power differs between state and non-state societies. In non-state societies, leadership, if any, tends to be temporary, informal, and based on personal attributes (rather than heredity or rank).

For example, the power of an Amazon headman (“a first among equals”) is based on personal charisma and persuasiveness. Such leaders, sometimes called Big Men, cannot transfer their status and power through inheritance when they die.
In contrast, power in states and chiefdoms is controlled by officials and hierarchical institutions. Formalized laws determine who may hold office, for how long, and the power that may be legitimately wielded by an official.

Today, all of the world’s territory is under the control of nation-states: independent states recognized by other states, composed of people who share a single national identity. Of those contemporary societies classified as bands, tribes, or chiefdoms, most exist within the geographic borders of a state.

In other words, membership in a nation-state is not always voluntary, and nation-states use many techniques of social control and coercive force to maintain power. Many of the world’s peoples live in nation-states formed by conquest and colonialism.
People have long understood the trade-offs of living within nation-states. Consider the case of Zomia, a vast region in mountainous southern Asia, where diverse peoples have lived more or less autonomously of the politically, socially, and economically powerful valley societies.
The same political mechanisms that operate in non-state societies can also operate in state settings. For example, though the Cameroonian government officially rejects witchcraft, politicians embrace the idea that they draw on occult powers because it enhances their power among communities where sorcery is still important.
Anthropologist Maxwell Owusu has spent decades researching political power in the aftermath of colonialism and shows how leaders of nation-states can co-opt local political actors to extend their control. See “Anthropologist as Problem Solver: Maxwell Owusu and Democracy in Ghana”

Why Do Some Societies Seem More Violent than Others?

By the 1960s, many cultural anthropologists who were working in postcolonial settings observed the breakdown of social order and subsequent rise in violent conflict. They sought to understand why some societies experience more violence than others and what can be done to prevent it.

In the process, anthropologists have learned that violence, like any form of power, is rooted in cultural processes and meanings.

First, what exactly is violence? Violence is the use of force to harm someone or something. This is a simple working definition, and violence may mean very different things to different people. Culture shapes what people consider “legitimate” violence and how, why, and when they use it as a form of power relations.

Anthropologists challenge the Hobbesian view that human violence is natural. First, both violence and nonviolence are learned in particular cultural contexts. Second, violence is not primal, arbitrary, or chaotic. It tends to follow cultural patterns, rules, and ethics.

Violence is articulated in specific cultural and historical contexts.

Napoleon Chagnon (1968) published a famous ethnography of the Yanomamo of Brazil called The Fierce People, in which he documents Yanomamo aggressiveness and violence. Other anthropologists think this emphasis on fierceness overshadows the more peaceful attributes of Yanomamo culture.
A cultural ideal of nonviolence pervades most aspects of Semai life. On the surface, these egalitarian Malaysian farmers might appear to be “nonfierce people.” However, in times of warfare, Semai males have been recruited for military service and, contrary to their pacifist enculturation, engaged in acts of violence.
The most important point illustrated by these examples is that violence and nonviolence are not absolute or static conditions but a result of cultural, social, and historical conditions. The potential for violence and nonviolence exists within all cultural groups.

So violent conflict is not the natural condition of humans. But is violence on the rise in the contemporary world? Many news reports assume it is and routinely discuss “inexplicable” or “senseless” spasms of violence between tribal, religious, or ethnic groups.

Anthropologists have clearly demonstrated that (i) interethnic violence is not an inevitable product of human nature and (ii) violence is not senseless but a highly meaningful and even calculated political strategy.
For example, the Bosnian civil war included acts of horrifying brutality and interethnic cooperation. This reality undermines any simplistic narrative of seething tribalism. Conflict between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims was not inevitable. In the case of Bosnia, it was manufactured to serve the political and ideological interests of political leaders.
When people refer to violent acts as meaningless and barbaric, they interpret violence as an emotional response without rational purpose. In truth, violence is often used as a strategic political tool. For example, the almost unbelievable cruelty of Revolutionary United Front soldiers in Sierra Leone was systematically calculated to prevent defections, stop local harvests, and instill fear. Such objectives may be morally reprehensible but they are not “meaningless.”

How Do People Avoid Aggression, Brutality, and War?

Let’s begin with a basic question: What do people fight about? Disputes may arise over many things: political power, material goods, property, decision-making, social relations, etc.
North Americans are culturally primed to view disputes (and sporting events) in terms of winners and losers. In other cultures the emphasis is on repairing strained relationships or maintaining social harmony.

Cricket matches among Trobriand Islanders are a classic example. For them, the goal of the game is to end with a tie. The match is not about winning or losing but, rather, lessening tensions between villages. A tie allows both teams to assert that they played the better game.

People manage disputes using informal and formal means. Informal techniques include avoidance, competition, ritual, and play. Formal techniques involve institutions or specialists: adjudication, negotiation, and mediation.

Adjudication: the legal process by which an individual or council with socially recognized authority intervenes in a dispute and unilaterally makes a decision.

Example: the moot court among the Kpelle of Liberia

Negotiation: a form of dispute management in which the parties themselves reach a decision jointly.

Example: Tanzanian land and water rights negotiations

Mediation: entails a third party who intervenes in a dispute to help the parties reach an agreement and restore harmony.

Example: the native Hawaiian mediation called ho’oponopono or “setting to right”

Is harmony always the best result? It’s easy to romanticize the ideal of harmony, but this too is a cultural ideology.

One harmony-based form of conflict resolution adopted in the West beginning in the 1970s is alternative dispute management. Many anthropologists welcome this development. Some, like Laura Nader (1990), counter that many disputants prefer fairness, justice, and rule of law to harmony. In some cases, conflict may be the only feasible way to promote change for the greater good.
There is not necessarily a “best way” to solve a dispute. If there were, there would be no more disputes!

Conclusion

Politics is about relationships of cooperation, conflict, and power that exist in any community and at all levels of social life, from the interpersonal and community levels to the national and transnational.