POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Political anthropology is a sub-discipline within social anthropology which deals with different
ways of assuming political power, prevailing political activities, political institutions and
exploring political life of people across societies. It is also the study of political organizations
and processes, power (its source), authority, control or influence over others. Political
Anthropologist focus their attention on some of the following areas:
1) Comparative legal system.
2) Authority
3) Leadership
4) Political succession
5) Legitimacy (is it legal, traditional or charismatic?)
6) Levels of socio-political complexity: band, tribe(egalitarian), rank (chief), stratified
(class) societies and nation state.
7) Bureaucracy in complex societies; social group formation, social movements
8) Colonization & post colonization
9) Where power comes from I.e. Culture, economic institutions, Social institutions (kinship,
religious); political institutions etc.
Hence, Political Anthropology develops itself to the study of law, order, conflict, government
and power. It focuses on how power and social control organize, distribute and manage. It deals
with power, authority and influence in social context. Power is the ability to exercise one’s will
over others. Authority is the socially approved use of power. Influence is the ability to affect the
behavior of others without coercion or holding an explicit leadership status or office. In general,
it focuses on the role of power on cultural context and vice versa. Political anthropology
concerns the structure of political systems, looked at from the basis of the structure of societies.
In the West, we are used to the idea of government within the framework of the state and through
the medium of specialised political and legal institutions (eg parliament, police and law courts).
Such forms are now found world-wide, but this has not always been so, and even today many
peoples living within modern states rely to a great extent on other mechanisms for the
maintenance of law and order. In societies where people live in closely-knit communities, and
rely heavily on each other for economic assistance, the local maintenance of good social
relations can be a matter of life or death. Many ways of dealing with offences and of settling
disputes may be used. For example, in some societies community tensions are released through
the use of ritualised insults. In others, divination is employed to discover the sources of conflict
and aggression between people.
Political anthropology examines and compares these diverse systems of social control. It also
explores the power structures of societies, including the extent of consensus and the patterns of
equality or inequality within them. It examines the ways in which leaders establish or bolster
their authority through tradition, force, persuasion, and religion. It asks whether a society can
have a legal system even without formal courts and written laws. It is also interested in the ways
people resist excessive domination, both passively and through Robin Hood-style banditry and
other means.
TYPES OF PREINDUSTRIAL POLITICAL SYSTEMS
Societies in ethnographic records vary in levels of political integration. Societies are classified
into 4 principal types of political organizations: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. With very
few exceptions there are no political autonomous bands or tribes or chiefdoms in the world. They
are incorporated in state political organizations.
UNCENTRALIZED SYSTEM
Bands: The band form is extremely rare today; as such, this classification is more historical than
contemporary. Bands are typically small, with perhaps 25 to 150 individuals, grouped in nuclear
families. Although there is a division of labor along age and sex lines, there is virtually no
specialization of skills, with the result being that the unity of the wider group is, in Emile
Durkheim’s term, “mechanical”—that is, based on custom, tradition, and common values and
symbols, rather than on an interdependence of specialized roles. A strict rule of band exogamy
forces marriage alliances with other bands. Morton Fried (1967) categorizes such groups as
egalitarian in terms of economy, social organization, and political structure. Distribution of food
and other needed goods is at the simplest level of sharing; bonds are established within the band
and between bands on the basis of on- going reciprocal relations. Political organization is also
egalitarian to the extent that decision making is usually a group enterprise, and access to
leadership positions is equally open to all males within a certain age range. Leadership, which is
temporary and shifts according to the situation, is based on the personal attributes of the
individual and lacks any coercive power.
The Eskimo: Despite the vast territory inhabited by the traditional Eskimo—from Siberia to
Greenland—they have been described as remarkably alike in their political and social
organization. Environmental determinist arguments are especially tempting, for the Eskimo lived
in possibly the most hostile humanly habitable regions on Earth. Their food resources—mainly
fish, caribou, and seal—were seasonal and widely scattered, which would logically lead to low
population densities, nomadism, and extremely fluid social organization based on small
subsistence groups. The basic unit was the extended family, which could take advantage of
bilateral kinship relations to join with other families in temporary bands or even villages as food
supplies waxed and waned during the year. A household might comprise a family of 12, which
subsisted alone part of the year but joined groups of up to 270 at other times. Leadership outside
the household was elementary; even villages sometimes lacked a head-man, and what minimal
influence might be possessed by an individual rested with the local shaman, whose authority was
neither coercive nor uniting. Along the coast, the owner of a whaling boat had unrestricted
authority over his crew during a voyage, and might, by the prestige of his wealth, maintain a
loose chieftainship over a community; but even in this case, group unity was maintained not by
government, but by conventionalized reciprocal obligations among kin
Tribes: When local community act autonomously but there are kinship group (such as clan or
lineage) or associations (such as age-sets) that can potentially integrate several local groups into
a larger unit, we say that the society has tribal organization. Tribes are un-centralized egalitarian
systems in which authority is distributed among a number of small groups; unity of the larger
society is established from a web of individual and group relations. Because these groups rely on
domesticated food sources, they are more densely populated and usually more sedentary than are
hunting-gathering bands. As with bands, there is little political or economic specialization,
except for a division of labor along age and sex lines, and there is no religious
professionalization. However, according to Elman Service (1962), the defining quality of the
tribe—that which separates it from the band—is the existence of pan- 25 tribal sodalities that
unite the various self-sufficient communities into wider social groups.
A sodality is simply a formal or informal association, such as a family group, a college fraternity,
or the Boy Scouts. In tribal societies there are two types of sodalities: those that are derived from
kinship, and those that are not. Kinship sodalities include lineages — groups tracing descent
through either the male line (patrilineage) or the female line (matrilineage)—and clans, which
are groups of lineages tracing common descent to an often-mythical ancestor.
Non-kin sodalities include a host of voluntary and involuntary associations. If tribes are viewed
in terms of the types of sodalities that unite them, or in terms of who makes the decisions for the
group, a number of subtypes immediately emerge. Even in cases in which other forms of
sodalities are evident, kinship will almost invariably be an important element of social
integration. One form of political organization based on kinship is the segmentary lineage—
especially common in Africa—in which a number of autonomous village groups can join
together in ever larger units for ritual purposes or to counter some threat. Many tribal societies
are integrated by associations, which cross-cut kinship divisions. In age-set systems, the group
initiated together at puberty will form a continuing sodality that takes on different functions as it
passes through certain age levels—for example, if the group is male, they will form a warrior
society as young men, and will become the governing body of the community as elders. In other
tribes, such as the American Plains Indians, voluntary societies of warriors, clowns, or police
may serve important integrating and decision-making functions.
CENTRALIZED SYSTEMS
Chiefdoms: These have some formal structure that integrate more than one community into a
political unit with or without a chief who has more rank or authority than others. The chief and
his family has greater access to prestige. The chief redistributes goods and directs public labor.
Chiefdoms are more densely populated and permanently settled than tribes. The position of the
chief is sometimes hereditary and generally permanent. With respect to social integration, the
chiefdom level transcends the tribal level in two major ways: (1) it has a higher population
density made possible by more efficient productivity; and (2) it is more complex, with some
form of centralized authority. The position of chief, unlike that of headman of a band or lineage,
is a position that accesses a certain amount of coercion. The chief may be the final authority in
the distribution of land, and may be able to recruit an army. Economically he is the center and
coordinator of the redistribution system: he can collect taxes on food or goods, some of which
will be returned to the populace, creating a new level of group solidarity in which a number of
specialized parts depend on the smooth functioning of the whole. Even if the chief’s position is
not directly hereditary, it will only be available to certain families or lineages. Although actual
class stratification is absent, every individual is ranked according to membership in a descent
group; those closer to the chief’s lineage will be higher on the scale and receive the deference of
all those below.
The State: According to Elman Service (1971: 163), the distinguishing quality of the state, that
which separates it from the chiefdom, “is the presence of that special form of control, the
consistent threat of force by a body of persons legitimately constituted to use it.” Morton Fried
(1967), on the other hand, emphasizes stratification: the state has special institutions, both formal
and informal, to maintain a hierarchy with differential access to resources. This stratification
goes beyond the individual and lineage ranking found in less complex societies; it involves the
establishment of true classes.