Political anthropology: concept, methods, goals, objectives and foundations of development

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:42

Political anthropology is one of the branches of anthropological science. What is she like? Classical biological and political anthropology should be considered narrower areas of study of anthropological science, which can be represented as a body of scientific knowledge concerning the nature of man and his activities. First of all, within the framework of this science, social and cultural anthropology are considered. The formation of the first of them took place in the XIX century. The first chair to study it appeared in 1980 at the University of Liverpool. Its founder was J. Fraser.

History of Science

The philosophical anthropology of the 18th-19th centuries, which included various concepts, served as the basis of modern anthropological science. In the course of the process of accumulation of information, the differentiation of the field of knowledge took place. There was a separation of various sciences: political economy, sociology, psychology, history,philology, etc. In parallel with this, there was a further formation of anthropology, which studied peoples who were not part of the civilized world.

Today anthropology is divided into two sections and consists of physical and cultural. In the first case, we are talking about the study of the physical structure of man and his origin. In the second, the culture of various peoples is studied within the framework of a whole complex of disciplines.

Development of a new section

The credit for developing the theoretical foundations of political anthropology belongs to the outstanding American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881). His books The League of the Walked Saune or Iroquois (1851; Russian translation 1983) and Ancient Society (1877; Russian translation 1934) deal with the forms of social organization of prehistoric societies. His ideas became the basis for the work of Friedrich Engels (1820-1895 years of life) "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" (1884). It is to this period that the beginning of the history of political anthropology belongs.

In the middle of the XX century. the formation of a new trend associated with the narrowing of the object of research began: the process of accumulating knowledge led scientists to become engaged in a more in-depth study of certain aspects of culture, such as technology, social organization, family and marriage relations, beliefs, etc.

At the same time, the expansion of the temporal boundaries of research has become relevant. There was also a need for closerrelations with related sciences, such as economics, demography, sociology, etc. As a result, new sections of cultural anthropology began to appear, in particular, a special discipline associated with political sciences was formed, called political anthropology.

Concept

The field of political anthropology covers the analysis of power, leadership and their influence in all social, cultural, symbolic, ritual and political aspects. It includes consideration of both state and non-state societies - forms of power and domination, the dynamics of political identity, social and political violence, nationalism, ethnicity, colonialism, war and peace, and ways of political reconciliation and peacebuilding.

As one of the research goals of political anthropology, the study of the mechanisms of power and institutions of control in the pre-state and traditional societies that had survived by that time was made. According to some experts, the interest in studying such institutions necessitated the justification of the management of the colonies, which was carried out by the European powers.

It can be said that the object of political anthropology is a “political man”, who is also the subject of political creativity. Also, this discipline considers its capabilities, boundaries, specifics of the impact on the social and spiritual environment of society.

Political anthropology also studies how a comparative study of political organization is carried outsociety.

The study of this scientific discipline provides a rich empirical and theoretical basis for further international developments in the field of political disciplines, humanitarian work, international, state and local government, international diplomacy, and transnational human rights work.

Methodology

When considering the methods of political anthropology, the greatest importance is attached to observation, questioning, extracting information from various categories of sources, which include published materials, archival documents, reports of researchers in various scientific fields, etc.

The basis of observation is direct visual fixation of phenomena that are of interest to the researcher. This type of observation is called simple. Its accuracy is affected by the duration of the field study. Ideally, it should last a little over one calendar year, due to the need to adapt to the environment, which takes about two to three months.

Another kind is called included observation. In the course of its implementation, the researcher, through the method of deep immersion, is included in the studied culture, for a long time fixes everything related to its life.

Survey usually takes the form of an individual conversation. It can be carried out according to a predetermined plan, or it can take the form of a free dialogue. It can also be an interview or a questionnaire.

Anthropologists also use mass survey methods and ways tostatistical processing, characteristic of sociology and political sciences.

To obtain information from other categories of sources, additional methods must be used. In particular, the methods of source studies, a special discipline of historical science, are used to work with written documents.

The general methodology of anthropological research is based on functional, structural, comparative-historical and typological methods.

Development of science

Political anthropology turned out to be a relatively late trend in social and cultural anthropology. Between 1940 and the mid-1960s, a generation of specialists in this field was exceptionally united in creating a canon and setting out a program for this science. But apart from this short period, the definition of politics and its content in anthropology has consistently been so widespread that politics can be found everywhere, it has been at the basis of almost all the problems of the discipline during its almost century of history. In 1950, political scientist David Easton criticized political anthropologists for viewing politics simply as a matter of power relations and inequality. Today, anthropology's receptivity to the ubiquity of power and statehood is considered one of its strengths.

The objective world motivates political anthropology just as it builds and reconstructs the world in which its followers find themselves. An anthropology of politics can be thought of in terms of an intellectual history created in the first placeBritish cultural hegemony in the English-speaking imperial world, and then the cultural hegemony of the United States over a world system dominated by Cold War issues. The critical turning point in this discipline was the decline of the empire and the defeat of the Americans in the Vietnam War. These two events meant for many scientists the transition to postmodernism.

Policy linkages and milestones

Three aspects can be recognized in the relationship between anthropology and politics. In the first formative era (1879-1939), specialists studied politics almost by accident among their other interests. In this case, one can only speak of an "anthropology of politics". In the second phase (1940-1966), political anthropology developed a system of structured knowledge and self-aware discourse. The third stage began in the mid-1960s, when all such disciplinary specialization was in serious trouble.

As new paradigms challenged earlier dominant coercive knowledge systems, political anthropology was first decentralized and then deconstructed. The political turn associated with geography, social history, literary criticism and, above all, feminism, revived anthropology's preoccupation with power and powerlessness. The work of non-Western scientists in these areas was especially notable. Politicians began to read Edward Said with the same interest they read Evans-Pritchard and found Homi-Bhabha's work as difficult as Victor Turner's.

Renewed interestto the material and intellectual history of the texts that political anthropology studies.

Systems Theory (1940-53)

The discipline got its real boost when British "structural functionalism" collided with large African centralized states. They were more like the monarchies and republics of Europe than the small communities or aboriginal societies that political anthropologists are accustomed to.

The major work of this era, African Political Systems (1940), was a collection of eight essays edited by Meyer Fortes and E. Evans-Pritchard, whose structural analyzes have become classics in the field. This topic has been sharply criticized by several Africanists and many American anthropologists for being unnecessarily limited in scope, ignoring history by emphasizing primitiveness, serving colonial administration, neglecting other social sciences, and being critical of political science without delay. Structural functionalism in the development of political anthropology provided it with a model for the comparative study of political systems. Some of his concepts have even been applied, albeit critically, to the New Guinea highlands in Melanesia. For a short time, this served as an alternative to the historically oriented political and economic approach to the analysis of Native American organization.

Structural-functional approach based on the constitutional method, focused on political institutions, rights, duties and rules. Few orthere was no attention at all to individual initiatives, strategies, processes, power struggles, or political change. Political Systems by Edmund Leach (1954) presented an internal critique of the systems paradigm, suggesting instead the existence of political alternatives with changes occurring in the decision-making process of individuals and groups. Crucially, Leach suggested that people's choices are the result of a conscious or unconscious desire for power. The Lich considered it a universal human trait.

Theory of processes and actions (1954-66)

Much in response to the other social sciences, when they began to conduct fieldwork in the newly independent third world countries, it became the task of political anthropology to create its own developments. Rejecting constitutional reconstruction and the earlier typological trend, anthropologists began to study interstate, complementary, and parallel political structures and their relation to official power. Ethnicity and elite politics in the new countries encouraged an emphasis on social movements, leadership and competition. Historically immersed in the field of rapid institutional change, the experts have built their policy analysis around contradictions, competition and conflict.

Among the major concepts of modern political anthropology, the theory of action (later called the theory of practice) has provided the dominant paradigm of science. Political ethnographers such as Bailey and Boisseyen studied individual subjects, strategies, and processdecision making in political arenas. Similar paradigms such as transactionism, game theory, and symbolic interactionism have also embraced politics. A new spatial and process vocabulary began to replace the vocabulary of systems: field, context, arena, threshold, phase, and motion became keywords. In the collection of papers Political Anthropology (1966), for which Victor Turner wrote a foreword, politics was defined as the processes associated with the definition and implementation of public goals, as well as with the achievement and use.

Postmodernism, anthropological science and politics

The modern era of the social science of political anthropology began in the late 1960s, with the advent of new disciplines. By this time, six paradigms had emerged and successfully coexisted: neo-evolutionism, cultural-historical theory, political economy, structuralism, action theory, and process theory. In the context of third world political struggles, decolonization and the recognition of new nations, a growing critique of new forms of imperialism and neo-imperialism (sometimes called economic imperialism) has become one of the trends of this science. The Vietnam War (1965-73) was the catalyst for Kathleen Goff, who called for an anthropological study of imperialism, revolutions and counter-revolutions. Talal Assad's work was the beginning of a critical analysis of anthropology's problematic relationship with British colonialism.

Political economy has once again come to the fore with one of its more radical forms, Marxism, gainingforce in the analysis of third world politics. The new revisionist structural Marxism turned its attention to political forms ranging from the household and kinship to colonial and post-colonial worlds of uneven exchange, dependency and underdevelopment. The neglect of historical conditions, class and competing interests in what has been called in this paradigm (after Wallerstein), on the fringes of the modern world system, has drawn some criticism. One of the most exciting trends has been developed by South Asian historians. These scholars, along with anthropologists and literary scholars, began to dismantle the subcontinent's imperial historiography in an attempt to reconstruct the political activities of subordinate groups. The leading anthropological voice was Bernard Kohn, whose studies of power relations in colonial India stimulated the anthropology of politics to further rethink imperialism, nationalism, peasant rebellion, class and gender.

Public policy, hegemony and resistance

Political anthropology has leaned more towards the study of past colonialisms, it has become difficult or unpleasant to do fieldwork in states where political insecurity, civil war, violence and terror have become commonplace. Studies of such situations did arise, and with them specific criticisms of state power and its abuses. Political anthropology manifested itself in localized and specific stories of resistance, contestation and responsibility. Micropolitical resistance to the state was revealedin "counter-hegemonic oral histories, folktales, truck cults, drum festivals". It became a key concept of the idea of resistance, elements of such opposition were romanticized and overused, so that they reflected the uncritical acceptance of the concepts of hegemony from Gramsci and Raymond Williams. Hegemony was placed on ethnographic exhibitions, found itself in memorable dates and monumentalism, conscientiously returning the concepts of property and material culture to political anthropology

The preoccupation with the mechanism of power and the relationship of power to knowledge (taken primarily from the writings of Michel Foucault) stopped the involution of the specialization of this science. Within the anthropology of politics, a new micropolitical paradigm emerged (Ferguson 1990) at the same time as global transdisciplinary movements, colony studies, other race studies, and feminist studies. All this has made familiar concepts such as power, history, culture, and class the focus of this science's problematics.

Literature

At different times and in different countries, many books have been published covering various aspects of this discipline. One of these works is the work of Ludwig Woltmann “Political Anthropology. A Study on the Influence of Evolutionary Theory on the Doctrine of the Political Development of Nations”, written over a hundred years ago. It first appeared in Russian in 1905. The author (1871-1907 years of life) is a famous German philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist. The book of L. Voltman "Political Anthropology" is one of the best classical works,which deals with racial theory. It still has not lost its relevance due to the important issues raised by the author.

Among modern domestic authors, one should single out the textbook by N. N. Kradin "Political Anthropology". The scientist is a famous Soviet and Russian archaeologist and anthropologist.

In his "Political Anthropology" N. N. Kradin presents a systematic presentation of the history of polyanthropological teachings, presents an analysis of the main modern schools and trends in this discipline. A study of the sociobiological and cultural foundations of power, forms of social stratification and mobility is also presented. Kradin's "Political Anthropology" also includes studies of the structure of power and the process of evolution of leadership that took place in various types of societies. The reasons for the emergence of the state, the ways of politogenesis, types and forms of statehood are also considered.

Another interesting work was written by Andrey Savelyev and is called “The Image of the Enemy. Rasology and political anthropology . The book collects various data and ideas considered by such sciences as physical anthropology, racial science, history, political science, and philosophy. The author tries to use various methodological means to present the causes of enmity between people.

The article presented the methods, goals, objectives and foundations of the development of political anthropology, as well as the definition of the term and description of the main concepts of this discipline.