Political anthropology is the comparative study of politics in a broad range of historical, social, and cultural settings.
History of political anthropology
Origins
Political anthropology has its roots in the 19th century. At that time, thinkers such as Lewis H. Morgan and Sir Henry Maine tried to trace the evolution of human society from 'primitive' or 'savage' societies to more 'advanced' ones. These early approaches were ethnocentric, speculative, and often racist. Nevertheless, they laid the basis for political anthropology by undertaking a modern study inspired by modern science, especially the approaches espoused by Charles Darwin. In a move that would be influential for future anthropology, this early work focused on kinship as the key to understanding political organization, and emphasized the role of the 'gens' or lineage as an object of study.
Among the principal architects of modern social science are French sociologist Emile Durkheim, German sociologist, jurist, and political economist Max Weber, and German political philosopher, journalist, and economist Karl Marx.
Political anthropology's contemporary literature can be traced to the 1940 publication African Political Systems, edited by Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. They rejected the speculative historical reconstruction of earlier authors and argued that "a scientific study of political institutions must be inductive and comparative and aim solely at establishing and explaining the uniformities found among them and their interdependencies with other features of social organization". Their goal was taxonomy: to classify societies into a small number of discrete categories, and then compare them in order to make generalizations about them. The contributors of this book were influenced by Radcliffe-Brown and structural functionalism. As a result, they assumed that all societies were well-defined entities which sought to maintain their equilibrium and social order. Although the authors recognized that "Most of these societies have been conquered or have submitted to European rule from fear of invasion. They would not acquiesce in it if the threat of force were withdrawn; and this fact determines the part now played in their political life by European administration" the authors in the volume tended in practice to examine African political systems in terms of their own internal structures, and ignored the broader historical and political context of colonialism.
Several authors reacted to this early work. In his work Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) Edmund Leach argued that it was necessary to understand how societies changed through time rather than remaining static and in equilibrium. A special version of conflict oriented political anthropology was developed in the so-called 'Manchester school', started by Max Gluckman. Gluckman focused on social process and an analysis of structures and systems based on their relative stability. In his view, conflict maintained the stability of political systems through the establishment and re-establishment of crosscutting ties among social actors. Gluckman even suggested that a certain degree of conflict was necessary to uphold society, and that conflict was constitutive of social and political order.
By the 1960s this transition work developed into a full-fledged subdiscipline which was canonized in volumes such as Political Anthropology (1966) edited by Victor Turner and Marc Swartz. By the late 1960s, political anthropology was a flourishing subfield: in 1969 there were two hundred anthropologists listing the subdiscipline as one of their areas of interests, and a quarter of all British anthropologists listed politics as a topic that they studied.
Political anthropology developed in a very different way in the United States. There, authors such as Morton Fried, Elman Service, and Eleanor Leacock took a Marxist approach and sought to understand the origins and development of inequality in human society. Marx and Engels had drawn on the ethnographic work of Morgan, and these authors now extended that tradition. In particular, they were interested in the evolution of social systems over time.