Political Anthropology

Victor W. Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351499026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Politics: a static network of structural and functional models? Is it a "given" set of rules, statuses and procedures? Or a dynamic process, a continuum related to the past as well as to the present and continually influenced by pressures within and outside of a society? Taking the latter view of the nature of political behavior, the editors of Political Anthropology here present an original compilation of papers that thoroughly assess contemporary anthropological research and theory on political phenomena and explore the sources and maintenance of political power. One of the aims of this book is to take tentative steps toward resolving the developing crisis by investigating the structure of political action revealed in empirical data. Within the general framework of political dynamics the book uses processes such as decision making, the judicial process, the disturbance and settlement of policy issues, the application of sanctions, and the outcome of disputes among other things. These items will find their places as components of phases in the major sequence. Investigating societies from Africa to Alaska, politics is shown to be a global phenomenon--a "human process of action" centering on the conflict between the "common good" and "interests of groups, " and on the resolution or extension of that conflict by the religious, structural, sociocultural, and psychological pressures within and external to a social grouping. Essential reading for anyone concerned with the nature of political process, Political Anthropology presents a fresh, important and comprehensive overview of the "wind of change" currently abroad in the study of political behavior.

Part I

DIMENSIONS OF CONFLICT IN POLITICAL ACTION

The articles in this section, for all their apparent diversity, all make direct or indirect reference to the concept of “conflict,” a term that requires some preliminary scrutiny. We would be in general agreement with those authorities who would restrict its use to “oppositions compelled by the very structure of social organization” (Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society [Chicago: Aldine, 1965, p. 109]). Gluckman has in fact proposed a clarifying refinement of the technical vocabulary for referring to different levels of phenomena and processes involving the collision or clashing of social variables, which includes the definition just given.

In addition, he suggests that

He defines the corresponding associative or conjunctive process as follows:

Three of the papers refer directly to the process of contradiction as it is manifested in political fields formed by the incorporation of formerly autonomous tribal or peasant communities in large-scale modern political systems. Nicholas, for example, shows how segmentary factional political systems are often found precisely where rapid social change is in train, “where the rules of political conflict [or as Gluckman might say, of “struggle”] are fluid and ambiguous.” He indicates, too, how the kinds of bonds and solidarities that link faction leaders to their followers in Indian village factional disputes rest on both traditional and modern criteria: kinship, caste, education, cash employment, landholding, political party membership, etc. Modes of interdependence that in the past formed systematic patterns have now become isolates—kinship, caste, and affinity need no longer necessarily constitute a cluster of political “supports”—and have been augmented by new modes, such as occupational ties, party affiliations, and the like.

The successful faction leader is the one who can best manipulate and exploit these modes to build up a following. Herein lies contradiction, for all loyalties are thus placed on an equal footing and traditional values are debased. Members of the same family, kin group, or caste may be split between different factions by cash inducements, political party affiliation, or voluntary associational links. The segmentary factional system is a temporary phenomenon of transition between traditional rivalries that are based on “oppositions compelled by the very structure of social organization” (Gluckman) and modern national party politics. Such a compromise formation may endure a long time, but ultimately it cannot resist the forces of industrialization, urbanization, and the increasing division of labor.

Other political outcomes of contradictory relations are illustrated in Harriet Kupferer’s interesting comparison of the roles of the Cree chief and the New Guinea headman. She draws attention to a problem that has already been discussed in social structural terms by several anthropologists who have worked in African contexts (Mitchell, The Yao Village [Manchester University Press, 1956]; Fallers, Bantu Bureaucracy [Cambridge: Heffer, 1956]; and Gluckman, Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa [New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963]). This problem is that of the role or office that lies at the bottom of the administrative hierarchy.

This “intercalary role,” under conditions of alien rule, interlinks two disparate sets of political relations. On the one hand, it represents the state, with its bureaucratic techniques and ideology and its impersonal relationships; on the other, it is deeply enmeshed with the multiplex relationships of the local political community. A cross-cultural comparison of this type of role, under varying conditions of sociocultural homogeneity, heterogeneity, and pluralism, would provide valuable insights into the nature of the administrative process. Kupferer, working within the tradition of culture-personality studies, succeeds in showing us how the Cree band leader is rendered politically impotent because of a contradiction between the traditional Cree expectations associated with the role of the “good man” (who may counsel but cannot coerce) and the Euro-Canadian expectations of the role (here defined as that of a liaison between white authority and Cree subordinates).

Because the chief is appointed by aliens, a process that has no direct precedent in Cree culture and values, the Indians do not regard his authority as fully legitimate. His legitimacy is further called in question by his repeated failures to meet popular expectations, because the Euro-Canadians largely ignore the representations he makes on his people’s behalf. Under the British colonial system of indirect rule, certain administrative, legislative, and judicial functions were reserved to African chiefs and headmen; under the Canadian government, the Cree leader is a chief only in title. The result is a tendency for the incumbent to “withdraw from the field,” and not to act positively—either for or against the superior authority—unlike African chiefs under comparable circumstances.

Kupferer contrasts this ineffectual “modal role” behavior with that of the New Guinea headmen. In this culture area (before European over-lordship) certain leaders—known in the literature as “big men”—acquired ephemeral influence through aggressive exchange relationships with other men; they were expected to aggrandize themselves at the expense of others. When Australian agents from government stations decided to appoint, as junior officials, “younger men [who were] less aware of tradition” than the former community headmen, their junior role was defined in terms of the “big man” model; and these officials exploited their new status (to advance their interests) even more ruthlessly than their archetypes had done. They were less concerned with representing and satisfying the interests of their fellows than either the Cree or the African headmen, and thus did not experience the conflict of authority and representation that rendered the Cree chief “impotent” and that removed many African headmen from their positions.

The impact of the modern world did not produce such direct contradictions in the structure of the political system of the Kuikuru Indians of central Brazil. Yet Gertrude Dole indicates that, even without European overlordship, European contact drastically altered the structure of tribal political relationships.

In the past few decades the Kuikuru, and other Upper Xingu tribes, have “suffered acute depopulation through epidemic diseases of European origin, to which the Indians have no natural immunity.” This has had the demographic consequence of reducing the size of tribes below a viable threshold of structural continuity, so that several tribes have had to amalgamate. It has had the further political consequence that headmen have died before their oldest sons and heirs were mature. “The absence of a legitimate heir has made it necessary for an adult male in another family to assume the responsibility of leadership.” The net result of depopulation and amalgamation has been that leadership has been distributed among several families instead of in a single patrilineage, as in the past, and claims to succession have been vested in rival patrilines. Because rigorous patriliny was formerly the legitimate mode of succession, this multiplication of criteria for candidacy has resulted in a dilution of the authority of leaders.

A contradiction now exists between the ideal of headmanship—which should be strongly authoritative, and based on patrilineal descent—and the reality—in which “a man who is quite unsuited finds himself recognized as headman but has not had the training necessary to provide leadership.” Because succession is uncertain, Dole reports, there has been a tendency to neglect leadership training of boys in any one family.

The result is a power vacuum, which apparently has been partially filled by an ascription of greater-than-traditional authority to the role of the shaman. The shaman has acquired powers of social control that were formerly vested in headmen; for example, he can make a public indictment of “bad lots,” persons who cause “resentment and anxiety” as sorcerers. Although ordinary Kuikuru may not thus accuse one another, after the shaman’s indictment the accused may be hunted down and killed.

This situation reminds one of the new quasi-political role of Separatist church leaders in modern Zululand, as described by Bengt Sundkler (in African Systems of Thought, Fortes and Dieterlen [eds.] [Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1965]), who writes: “When chieftainship falls into limbo, there follows a vacuum of power and authority, and the Separatist church leader steps in” (pp. 280f.).

Although Marc Swartz’s paper lays dominant stress on the psychological bases for political compliance in Bena micropolitics, conflicts of value and interests in crucial sets of social relations are closely examined. He shows how the specifically Bena patterning of psychological characteristics—such as distrust, dependence, and hostility—are congruent with social interaction in a small-scale political community whose “vertebral” structural relationships are based on patrilineal descent and virilocal marriage. He shows how individuals are confronted by the almost insuperable task of allocating their scarce resources between the equally valid demands of a range of kinsmen so as to offend no one. On the one hand, community of interest in certain crucial relationships comes into conflict with a major value, which is attached to economic individualism, and, on the other hand, with customary allegiance to others. Each relationship is therefore divided by conflicts of loyalties and charged with ambivalent emotions.

It is in such a milieu that the relationship with the adjudicator acquires an extreme degree of political importance, for it appears to the Bena as relatively free from the dangers inherent in other kinds of social relationships. It is because the oppositions in these relationships are “compelled by the very structure of social organization” that they appear to be inevitable; and they tend to be hedged about by mystical beliefs. Ill feeling in them is thought to give rise to sorcery, if it is allowed to reach a certain threshold of intensity. Sorcery is believed to inhere especially in the relationship between seminal brothers, and is not unknown between father and son.

These relationships link men closely, but at the same time set them at odds in matters of succession to office and inheritance of property. Sexual jealousies that arise in the marital and affinal contexts are also associated with sorcery beliefs. Thus there is little psychical security in the long-term operation of these ties.

But the adjudicator is thought to be above these tacit battles; he represents, for Bena, “an agency for the emergence of objective truth.” The village executive officer and his elders constitute a politico-jural agency in which trust may be reposed. In reaction to the ambivalence with which close kinship and affinal relationships are regarded and experienced, Bena seek recourse to their adjudicating agencies as their only hope. Indeed, “as ascension of the hierarchy progresses, the prestige of adjudicators increases.” The reason for this is that the higher they are, the further removed they become from the intimate arenas of tacit conflict, and the more prestige they have, the greater the likelihood that they can bring about acceptable resolution.

In other words, as people bring their disputes to higher and higher courts, these public forums make it increasingly less difficult to disclose matters that would be subject to concealment and dissimulation in relations between close kin and affines. Nor is open speaking by plaintiff and defendant liable to mutual reprisal; there is, as it were, a privilege of the baraza. Openness is expected here, just as closeness—masked by a “pleasant and ingratiating demeanor”—is expected in extrajural relationships.

One of the politically significant effects of this emphasis on trust and truth in the adjudicative process is the effect upon the role of the political officials who adjudicate: the headmen and the village executive officers. Bena are strongly motivated to comply with their decisions, for they feel relatively secure in the knowledge that the adjudicators are disinterested. Moreover, because the Bena courts and moots (as elsewhere in Africa) see their major role as the reconciliation of persons rather than the strict administration of law and the imposition of sanctions on the lawbreaker, the adjudicators have the function of reintegrating a disturbed social group. Success in this task enables the political official “not only to meet the expectations of the disputants that their difficulties be resolved, but also to contribute to the general expectation that he can bring about the resolution of significant disputes.” In other words, an official’s success in adjudication contributes directly to his legitimacy, “not only in the eyes of those actually involved in disputes but also for those who feel they might become involved in disputes— the entire Bena public.

Swartz’s account throws light on one of the important ways in which a store of political credit is built up—and is an asset that can see the official through the “lean days” of imposing unpopular decisions upon his people. His article also puts into sharp forcus the role of the judicial process as an accumulator of legitimacy—in political systems in which judicial, administrative, and legislative functions are undertaken by the same sets of officials. Legitimacy acquired in the exercise of one function may be transferred to the exercise of another.

Finally, this set of papers exemplifies the current emphasis on process rather than structure, and enable us to relate such concepts as conflict, struggle, contradiction, power, support, legitimacy, and compliance to our process models.

SEGMENTARY FACTIONAL POLITICAL SYSTEMS ¹

Ralph W. Nicholas MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

Social anthropology is generally vague about the relationship between “social structure,” as an all-encompassing system, and subsystems of such pervasive importance as the political and economic systems. In “simple” societies, where a comprehensive picture of social relations can be drawn in terms of consanguinity and affinity, the question of discrete “components” of social structure is avoided: political, economic, kinship, and religious roles are ideally allocated by a single system of kinship statuses. Radcliffe-Brown, and his immediate heirs, recognized, of course, that no real society fulfills the ideal conditions. Their task—which is still the task of the field anthropologist—was finding order in the chaos of many people doing many things with many meanings.

One important means of reducing field observations to order is through the customary laws of the society. The work of the first structural anthropologists was to write systematic accounts of social rules. The most impressive fact about the relatively isolated, homogeneous societies that were the subjects of these rule-writing accounts was their stability. Not only were they relatively unaffected by what little outside contact they had, but they contained “tension-handling mechanisms” that, through ritual or other means, prevented internal forces from disrupting their equilibrium.

Professor Fortes worked with the Tallensi between 1934 and 1937, and it was on the basis of this research that he prepared his two monographs on Tallensi social structure. In a footnote to the foreword of the first book, he wrote: “In 1943, in the course of other duties, I had occasion to spend some time in the Northern Territories [of the Gold Coast]. I found that no social changes of significance had taken place among the Tallensi since 1937” (1945, p. xii). This comment raises a question: What would constitute a “social change of significance"?

Professor Fortes is perfectly clear about what is important in structural analysis; after his detailed examination of the segmentary structure of Tallensi clanship, he says (1945, p. 232): “This is an architectural way of looking at the structure of Tale society.… Our attention has been fixed mainly on the permanent edifice in which social relations and social activities are congealed rather than on their emergence in process.” A “social change of significance” would obvio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Dimensions Of Conflict In Political Action
• Part II Authority And Authority Codes
• Part III Politics And Ritual
• Part IV Political Fields And Their Boundaries
• Index