Political anthropology emerged through intellectual engagements between the disciplines of political science and anthropology. Political scientists working in this area first developed the field through an engagement with Clifford Geertz’s interpretative approach to the study of culture. Drawing on interpretive methods, political anthropologists have developed new understandings of political behavior, producing a wide range of scholarship that has contributed to a rethinking of central paradigms in political science, including the politics of identity, social movements, political and economic transitions, and the state.
Geertz And The Study Of Culture
Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) is a foundational work that shaped the emergence of the field of political anthropology in the discipline of political science. Within the discipline of anthropology, political anthropology has a much longer intellectual history. However, political scientists have shaped the field of political anthropology in distinctive ways through an engagement with Geertz’s work. Geertz argued that the study of culture required an in-depth analysis of the system of meanings that shape people’s identities and actions. According to Geertz, culture is defined as a set of complex webs of significance that provided the context necessary for understanding social and political systems in comparative contexts.
Geertz’s approach differed from existing approaches that political scientists used at the time to study political culture. These approaches viewed political culture as an independent factor or variable that casually shaped patterns of behavior and political processes. For instance, scholars studying political culture sought to measure civic culture in comparative contexts and argued that the strength of civic culture explained the relative success or failure of democratization (e.g., Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s The Civic Culture, 1989). Geertz, on the other hand, argued for an approach that focused on systematically analyzing the signs and symbols that make up the webs of significance of specific societies. Culture, in Geertz’s view, is fundamentally public because the meanings that make up such webs are shared by societies. Actions carry meanings only when such meanings are shared and understood by groups. The task of the political anthropologist, then, was to sort out these structures of meaning in a particular society.
This approach, or what Geertz called thick description, is one of the central methods adopted by political anthropologists to study political behavior and processes. Contrary to what the term implies, thick description does not simply involve accumulating comprehensive empirical details about particular societies in a purely descriptive manner. Rather, thick description involves a method of interpretative analysis in which political anthropologists decode the signs and symbols through which social relationships and structures of authority function in various societies. In this endeavor, political scientists have used ethnographic methods (the central methods used by anthropologists) to engage in the close, in-depth qualitative study of specific cultures. Ethnographic data can include quantitative forms of research (e.g., collecting census data and carrying out surveys in villages). However, ethnography usually involves long-term participant observation in which the anthropologist lives in the context being studied. The ethnographer interacts with the subjects being studied over an extended period of time and observes and participates in local activities. Observations gained through this process provide the data for the analysis of the structures of meaning of the society in question.
Ethnography, Interpretive Methods, And Concept Formation
Political scientists use interpretive methods to inform studies of political behavior, institutions, and identities. Early work in political science used ethnographic methods to rethink some of the central concepts in the discipline. For instance, one of the classic examples of political anthropology is James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1987). Scott used an in-depth ethnographic study of a rural village in Malaysia to fundamentally reconceptualize existing conceptions of social movements and political resistance. Conventional studies of social movements at the time focused primarily on large-scale or organized protest movements. Scott argued that such studies were narrowly focused on movements that either were marked by formal organizational features (e.g., formal leaders and institutional structures) or were able to mount large-scale protests that challenged the state.
Drawing on two years of extended field research in rural Malaysia, Scott demonstrates that patterns of social conflict and resistance did not take this form. His systematic observations of village-level behavior show that class conflict occurred through daily conflicts and acts of resistance that were usually anonymous. Marginalized villagers could not afford to overtly challenge their landlords and resorted instead to “everyday acts of resistance” such as work slowdowns and ideological challenges through culturally specific languages (e.g., rumor and folk stories).
Scott’s study illustrates the contributions of political anthropology in terms of both the methodological and conceptual significance of the research conducted. Scott’s extended ethnographic research on everyday practices and politics in a particular village in Malaysia provided him with a view of the daily forms of resistance that were being missed by scholars. Existing research had assumed that an absence of political protests by rural villagers meant that peasants were a politically compliant social group. Scott’s immersion in the social and political life in rural Malaysia enabled him to challenge this understanding. For instance, by observing the everyday meanings used to express class politics, he was able to demonstrate that poor rural villagers engaged in resistance through localized, daily practices that could not be measured by membership in formal organizations. This use of interpretative methods enabled Scott to both challenge existing depictions of peasant political behavior and, more significantly, to provide a new conception of political resistance.
Scott’s ethnographic approach is an example of one of the central methods that political anthropologists use to produce interpretive studies of social and political behavior and processes. However, other political scientists use other methods and forms of qualitative research to engage in the interpretive study of politics and culture. Scholars of comparative politics, for instance, use mixed methodological approaches to produce new understandings of political phenomena and theoretical concepts. These scholars use historical and sociological data instead of ethnographic research to provide an interpretive understanding of the cultural signs and symbols that shape political life in comparative contexts. Two of the foundational examples of these approaches are studies that emerged as classic texts on modernization and on modern nationalism.
One of the earliest examples of this approach is Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph’s The Modernity of Tradition (1967). These researchers used a combination of sociological and historical data on political behavior in India to rethink the paradigm of modernization. Modernization was one of the central paradigms that scholars were using to understand and study non-Western societies and political systems. Most scholars of modernization at the time were basing their models and approaches on the assumption that one of the central challenges that newly developing societies in non-Western countries faced was the ability to move beyond old cultural traditions and embrace modern forms of economic development and political institutions.
Drawing on an interpretative analysis of sociological data on caste associations and historical data on Gandhi’s culturally rooted organizational strategies in India, Rudolph and Rudolph illustrate the ways in which such traditional forms of organization provided the institutional foundations for modern forms of behavior. For instance, they argue that caste based associations allowed particular caste groups to press for social equality in ways that integrated them within modern democratic political institutions in India. Drawing on this analysis, they challenged scholars to rethink concepts such as modernity and tradition.
A second foundational text in the field of political anthropology is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983). As with work by political scientists such as Rudolph and Rudolph, Anderson drew on a combination of forms of research methods including historical analysis and ethnographic observations. Drawing on such research, Anderson traced the rise of the modern nation and argued that the primary characteristic of the modern nation was that it represented a formation that rested on horizontal links between people who imagined that they were part of a single cultural identity.
Anderson was also interested in using interpretative methods that had often been used to focus on specifically rural or local cultural practices to understand and explain broader modern political phenomena. Anderson, for instance, focuses on explaining why the nation had emerged as the universally legitimate political unit by the twentieth century. As Anderson notes, even the Marxist revolutions in countries such as China and Vietnam had defined themselves in national terms and had thus rooted themselves “firmly in a territorial and social space inherited from the pre-revolutionary past” (12). Drawing on a Geertzian-style analysis, Anderson points to the ways in which modern monuments such as war memorials serve as the cultural symbols that produce the shared cultural identification between people who otherwise do not share kinship ties. Thus, Anderson argues that nationalism operates differently from traditional political ideologies such as Marxism and liberalism. He argues that nationalism is a cultural formation rather than a political ideology. National identity is formed through a set of cultural symbols that make people imagine that they are members of a distinctive community .The cultural roots of nationalism thus explain the power of this identity and its ability to move millions of people not just to kill, but also to willingly die for their nations.
A shared approach to the study of politics characterizes the classic examples of studies in the field of political anthropology such as those by James Scott, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, and Benedict Anderson. These researchers all use interpretative analysis to rethink central concepts in political science. While such approaches contribute to the discipline’s interest in producing explanations of particular outcomes, they do so primarily by interpreting the data to refine categories and concepts used by political scientists. For instance, by rethinking the concept of resistance, Scott provides an alternative explanation of peasant behavior as rooted in everyday protest rather than consent to authority. This approach to social science explanation is distinct from competing approaches within subfields, such as comparative politics, that have focused on developing causal explanations by isolating and identifying independent variables that can explain a particular political outcome. Some scholars have sought to combine interpretive approaches associated with political anthropology with this model of causal explanation that has been dominant in fields such as comparative politics.
Political Anthropology And Causal Social Science Explanation
A well-known example of a combined approach is David Laitin’s Hegemony and Culture (1986). Laitin’s study uses fifteen months of extended ethnographic research conducted in Yoruba land, Nigeria, to intervene in political science debates that sought to explain when and under what conditions ethnic and religious conflicts occur. Laitin sought to explain a particular puzzle in the Yoruba case—why there had been religious tolerance despite the existence of social forces that usually produced religious conflict in other contexts. Laitin argues that an explanation of this anomaly required a conception of what he calls the “two faces of culture” (12). The first face of culture draws on Geertz’s conception of the symbolic webs of significance, which Laitin argues reveals how cultural meanings shape the ways in which social groups order their political priorities. The second face builds on an instrumentalist understanding of cultural identity as a political resource. Such a rational actor approach focuses on how groups or political actors instrumentally manipulate cultural symbols and people’s cultural identities. Laitin argues that a successful explanation of a political culture characterized by nonpoliticized religion must account for both faces of culture.
By combining these two approaches, Laitin also sought to combine the interpretive depth of Geertz’s conception of culture with social scientific concerns with the development of systemic causal explanations that could be tested and falsified. He demonstrates that neither the rational actor approach nor the Geertzian understanding of culture adequately explains or predicts the nature of religious politics among the Yoruba. Laitin argues that his ethnographic study thus contributed to the creation of a theory of politics and culture that was based on social scientific objects of causal explanation.
The question of how political anthropology fits within this model of social science explanation is a central area of debate among political scientists. Critics of political anthropology question both whether the findings of single case studies based primarily on ethnographic research can be generalized, and whether interpretive methods can contribute to theory building when the explanations cannot be falsified. Scholars drawing on such methods respond in a number of ways. Some scholars combine ethnographic research with other methods. They build on the kind of model exemplified in Laitin’s work, seeking to produce mixed methods and often use ethnographic research to supplement other forms of data. Other scholars argue that political anthropological work provides a distinctive approach that is best able to address particular kinds of research questions. Rogers Smith, for instance, argues in his chapter in Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics (2004) that understanding the politics of identity requires methods that draw primarily on interpretive approaches based on ethnographic methods.
Subjective Knowledge
While Smith argues that inter pretivists such as political anthropologists must address how their work contributes to the objectives of social scientific explanations, some scholars contend that political anthropology challenges scholars to rethink some of the disciplinary conventions of political science. In their 2003 article, “Engaging Subjective Knowledge,” Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph argue for new approaches that more consciously address various forms of subjective knowledge. Drawing on an analysis of an extended historical diary by Amar Singh, a colonial subject who wrote about his experiences living under British colonial rule, Rudolph and Rudolph argue that this subjective diary can be treated as a form of ethnography. In their view, such forms of subjective knowledge deepen understandings of identities, conceptual categories, and the politics of recognition. They note that such forms of subjective analysis provide a unique form of access to marginalized groups who may remain outside the public sphere of politics, or as they put it, “those whose behavior is not easily observed or counted by objective political science” (689). This kind of political anthropology, they argue, blurs the line between subjective and objective knowledge and also challenges political scientists to question what counts as knowledge.
New approaches in political anthropology elaborate on the ways in which such interpretative approaches can provide understandings of political phenomena that other social science approaches may be less well-equipped to grasp. In this endeavor, they move beyond Geertzian interpretative approaches to the study of politics and culture. For instance, political anthropologists note that Geertz’s approach to culture as a complex set of webs of significance rests on an assumption that the inhabitants of the cultural context implicitly accept or consent to these meanings. They argue that Geertz generally failed to explore the ways in which such meanings are often disputed or rejected by particular social groups.
While Geertz tended to think of culture in more consensual and normative terms, scholars now focus on how cultural meanings are contested. Political anthropologists are now concerned with analyzing the ways in which such multiple and contested cultural meanings provide new understandings and explanations of political behavior. For instance, Geertz discussed the ways in which ritual was an embodiment of various forms of authority. However, more recent work shows how rituals are often interpreted in different ways by different social groups, and are also often the source of culturally specific forms of resistance. For example, scholars illustrate how social movements have used religious rituals as means to express political protest.
Political Anthropology And Social Construction
These new approaches converge with the rise of social constructivist approaches to the study of political phenomena. Social constructivist approaches broadly address how concepts, categories, and knowledge are constructed or created by social relations. For instance, political anthropologists such as Michel Foucault (1980) build on poststructuralist approaches that call attention to the relationship between power and knowledge. Poststructuralist theorists argue that texts both reflect and produce relationships of power. Drawing on this theoretical approach, political ethnographers seek to show how an adequate conception of political power requires an interpretative analysis of various cultural texts (e.g., films, television programming, political cartoons, novels, and advertising images). Scholars working in this tradition treat these texts as the cultural signs and symbols through which relationships of power are expressed and produced in modern and postmodern contexts. At one level, such texts make up the political languages of authority and protest. At another level, political ethnographers argue that these texts do not simply reflect underlying relationships of power but also “produce” these relationships.
In her study of authoritarianism in Syria, Lisa Wedeen argues in Ambiguities of Domination (1999) that the state uses visual spectacles (e.g., state festivals, royal rituals, and state sponsored mass demonstrations) to discipline citizens. Such spectacles are not simply reflections of state coercion; these spectacles shape people’s identities as citizens and “regiment their bodies” in ways that produce obedience to the state (19). State power, in this approach, is exercised not only by coercion and ideological manipulation, but also by teaching citizens the acceptable political scripts and behaviors they can use in public. Such visual spectacles thus “produce” citizens.
Conclusion
Political ethnographers have pushed political scientists to expand their definitions of what counts as empirical evidence when studying the nature of power and politics in modern nation-states. Scholarship in political anthropology now encompasses a broad range of methods, forms of research, and theoretical approaches. With this, political anthropologists use interpretive analysis and ethnographic methods to rethink theoretical categories and concepts, provide alternative explanations of political phenomena, and challenge definitions of social science knowledge.
Bibliography:
- Almond, Gabriel Abraham, and Sidney Verba. The Civic Culture Revisited. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1989.
- Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York:Verso, 1983.
- Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon, 1980.
- Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
- Laitin, David D. Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Change among the Yoruba. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
- Rudolph, Lloyd, and Susanne Rudolph. “Engaging Subjective Knowledge: How Amar Singh’s Diary Narratives of and by the Self Explain Identity Formation.” Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 4 (2003): 681–694.
- The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
- Scott, James. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
- Smith, Roger M. “The Politics of Identities and the Tasks of Political Science.” In Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics, edited by Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, 42–66. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
- Wedeen, Lisa. Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
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