Political Anthropology

1
Political Anthropology

• The Organization of Power

2
Political Organization

• The organizations and cultural processes that
  direct a societys collective actions
• All populations express political institutions,
  although they are more formally organized and
  obvious in some societies than they are in
  others. 
• The main operations of political organizations
  are

1. determining public policy
2. preventing and resolving conflict
3. maintaining order
4. managing the distribution of social resources
   among the several sectors of society (i.e.,
   determining who gets what, particularly with
   respect to wealth and power).

3
Power, Authority and Influence

• Power
• the ability to exercise ones will over others.

• Authority
• the socially approved use of power.

• Influence
• the ability to affect the behavior of others
  without coercion or holding an explicit
  leadership status or office

4
Political Anthropology
Culture and the Political Process

• How are power and social control
• organized?
• distributed?
• manifested?
• Created?
• How are group decisions made?
• How is social order enforced?
• How are conflicts dealt with?

Because of the embeddedness it is better to talk
of sociopolitical
5
Mechanisms of Control

• Internal (ideological)
• culturally instilled values
• expectation of supernatural harm or reward
• External (behavioral)
• informal
• ridicule and ostracism, gossip
• praise
• formal
• laws and rules
• institutionalized threat of force

6
Law and Conflict Resolution

• Formal and informal sanctions
• Conflict mediators
• Often older men
• Nuer leopard skin chief
• Ordeals
• Oaths supernatural source
• Oracles people or things that have
• prophetic abilities

Delphic Oracle, Greece
7
Compliance
the process by which leaders mobilize followers
and make their policies binding on their
followers actions
what motivates followers to follow them, even
under conditions that expose followers to great
risk

• Any leaders effectiveness at mobilizing support
  partly is the result of the political
  organization in which he/she acts.
• attitudes that followers have may be more
  important to getting things done than is the form
  of organization with which the leader is
  associated.

8
Compliance
according to comparative sociologist Amitai
Etzione there are three main mechanisms that
leaders use to gain compliance
1. Coercion

• the use, or threatened use, of physical force to
  gain compliance e.g., confinement, torture, and
  execution
• Systematic use of force ultimately requires
  construction of police stations, military
  installations, prisons, and so on, plus
  maintaining the personnel to staff them. Its
  expensive

2. Remuneration

• leaders provide a payoff in tangible benefits
  (e.g. income or property, personal security,
  social welfare support etc. ) to those who comply
  with their orders and policies.
• Remuneration implies punishing the disloyal
• by withholding or removing benefits.

9
3. Intellectual Commitment

• followers more or less spontaneously support a
  leaders because they are devoted to certain
  values and principles that the leader advocates.
• followers sometimes support leaders on principle

• The absence of force and payoff obviously puts
  attention on the power of shared culture to
  generate support.

10
Legitimacy
Max Weber believed that there were three
principal ways in which rule could be rendered
legitimate, or rightful, in the eyes of the
governed
1. Traditional Authority

• Rule is accepted by followers because it is
  believed to be the correct moral order, usually a
  moral order that has a deep historythe way
  things always have been.
• members are selected for office on the basis of
  loyalty, not job ability, they often have no
  expertise in their areas of bureaucratic
  responsibility

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2. Rational-legal Authority

• Authority established through rational legal
  means features has two key features
• the system of rule is created by laws that have
  popular support and
• leaders are selected and advanced on the basis of
  their ability to get the job doneby rational
  criteria.

• leaders are legitimate because they are elevated
  in accordance with law, and because they are
  experts

12

• 3. Charismatic Authority
• some leaders manage to obtain authority over a
  set of followers by opposing tradition and while
  operating outside the prevailing system of
  rulewithout a lawful office.
• Such persons are reformers who gain followings
  because followers believe that they are endowed
  with exceptional qualities or powers.
• Often, they are believed to have a special
  relationship with God, or some other powerful
  deity.

• However, some modern charismatic leaders appeal
  to secular values and acquire followers because
  of the followers belief that the leader is
  revealing errors in popular practices.
• charismatic authority is most important as a
  source of change and reform in authority systems
  that are legitimized in other ways,

13
Political organizations vary cross culturally
with respect to three main dimensions

1. the level of integration, or numbers of
   communities over which the political system has
   jurisdiction
2. the degree to which decisions that govern the
   groups actions are centralized and
3. the source of a leaders ability to direct the
   activities of others (i.e., whether that ability
   results from influence, authority, raw power, or
   some combination of those elements)

14
Degrees of Organizational Complexity

• Uncentralized
• Band
• Tribe
• Centralized
• Chiefdom
• State

In general, as the economy becomes more
productive, population size increases leading to
greater regulatory problems, which give rise to
more complex social relations and linkages
(greater social and political complexity).
1962, Elman Service
15
Bands the political organization of foraging
groups

• Rarely more than 30-40 people
• kin-based
• Flexible extended family units
• No formal political organization
• No socioeconomic stratification
• the political order (polity) is not a distinct
  institution, but is embedded in the overall
  social order.

16
Bands

• How are group decisions made?
• adult consensus
• informal leaders
• egalitarian
• How is social order enforced?
• ridicule and ostracism
• How are conflicts dealt with?
• negotiation/mediation
• mobility

17
Tribes

• Multiple autonomous small communities that share
  common identity
• Usually pastoralists or Horticulturalists
• Several hundred to thousands of people
• No formal political organization
• Little socioeconomic stratification

18
Tribes

• How are group decisions made?
• Consensus among descent groups
• How are social norms enforced?
• ridicule and ostracism
• How are conflicts dealt with?
• negotiation/mediation
• semi-official mediation

19
Tribes The Village Head

• achieved position comes with very limited
  authority.
• He cannot force or coerce people to do things.
• He can only persuade, harangue, and try to
  influence people to do things.
• acts as a mediator in disputes, but has no
  authority to back his decision or impose
  punishments.
• The village head must lead in generosity.
• He must be more generous, which means he must
  cultivate more land.
• He hosts feasts for other villages.

modern-day Iroquois, New York
20
Tribes Big Man

• Big Man -like a village head, except that his
  authority is regional in that he may have
  influence over more than one village
• wisdom
• wealth
• generosity
• charisma.
• unofficial prestige status
• The benefit is greater influence and community
  standing.

Nuer, Sudan
21
Pantribal Sodalities and Age Grades

• Sodalities are non-kin-based organizations that
  may generate cross-societal linkages.
• often based on common age or gender.
• Some sodalities are confined to a single village.
• Some sodalities span several villages these are
  called pantribal sodalities. they can mobilize a
  large number of men for raids.

22
Age Sets

• sodalities that include all of the men or women
  born during a certain time
• Similar to a cohort of class of students
• Members of an age set progress through a series
  of age grades together (e.g., initiated youth,
  warrior, adult, elder, (freshmen, sophomore,
  junior, senior, graduate).
• Sodalities create nonkin linkages between people
  based on age, gender, and ritual and create a
  sense of ethnic identity and belonging to the
  same cultural tradition

23
Chiefdoms

• Agriculturalists or pastoralists
• Multiple communities that share common identity
  and tribute system
• Thousands to many thousands of people
• Centralized political organization based on
  hierarchical lineage system
• a political unit of permanently allied tribes and
  villages under one recognized leader with
  authority
• Significant socioeconomic stratification based on
  lineage

Old Chief of the Arawa Tribe, Rotorua, New
Zealand.
24
Chiefdoms

• How are group decisions made?
• Chief and advisors
• How is social order enforced?
• ridicule and ostracism
• official order
• use of force
• How are conflicts dealt with?
• negotiation/mediation
• centralized arbitration

25
Chiefdoms

• Small hierarchical bureaucracy
• Tribute - tax paid to chief to be redistributed
  according to community needs
• Chiefs Leaders own, manage, and control basic
  factors of the economy and have special access to
  
• crops
• labor
• cash
• goods.

Grand chief Matthew Coon Come
26
Chiefdoms

• Formalized leadership functions
• Unrelated to personal qualities
• Rules of succession (primogeniture)
• Office is permanent - it outlasts the individuals
  who occupy them
• Loyalty, status, coercion but not too much

Zulu Chief
27
States

• Agriculturalists
• Multiple cities that share tax and administrative
  infrastructure system
• Tens of thousands to billions of people
• Centralized political organization possessing
  coercive power
• Social stratification is a key distinguishing
  feature.
• the rule of states is divorced from kinship
  there is no pretense that the rulers constituents
  are kin

Calcutta
28
States

• How are group decisions made?
• rulers decide on behalf of populous
• How is social order enforced?
• official enforcement
• threat or use of sanctions
• How are conflicts dealt with?
• negotiation/mediation
• centralized arbitration

Angkor
29
States

• Status
• not necessarily kin-based
• class-based
• Codification of laws
• More formalized in industrial societies
• Courts adjudicate and mediate Officials
• Monopoly on use of force
• Police force

• Hammurabis Code (1750 BC)

30
States

• Nearly all populations nowadays are governed by
  states to one degree of control or another
  degree.
• However, where states have a poor tax base, or
  are weakened by internal disunity, their
  authority is not likely to be binding at local
  levels or in remote regions.
• Thus, many traditional, non-state kinds of
  political organizations have not been drawn
  firmly under state control, and the lives of
  citizens in these areas are often affected more
  by historical political organizations than they
  are by the state itself.

31
The Tausug
Tausug, which means "people of the current", is a
Philippine ethnic group which lives in the
northern part of Sulu province. Farming, fishing
and trading are their major economic activities
32
The Tausug

• The Tausug have a tenuous relationship with the
  central government of the Republic of the
  Philippines.
• Legally the Tausug are integrated into the state
  bureaucracy. They elect local leaders, send
  representatives to congress etc.
• But in practice the national Philippine state is
  too powerless in its southern provinces to govern
  them effectively
• group actions continue to be mainly organized by
  informal, traditional organizations and leaders.

33
The Tausug

• Most of their political operations carried
  through the ordinary, multi-use institutions of
  social life e.g., kinship groups, age sets,
  religious associations, and so on