Civil society refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values. In theory, its institutional forms are distinct from those of the state, family and market, though in practice, the boundaries between state, civil society, family and market are often complex, blurred and negotiated. Civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy and power. Civil societies are often populated by organisations such as registered charities, development non-governmental organisations, community groups, women's organisations, faith-based organisations, professional associations, trades unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy group.[1] A healthy civil society (NGOs, unions, academia, human rights organisations) are considered by some theorists to be important for democratization, as they give people a unity and a common purpose.[2] World Bank uses the term Governance as the exercise of political authority and the use of institutional resources to manage society's problems and affairs, which puts adequate emphasis on the involvement of civil society in development.[3]

Theories of civil society:

Before the work of Hegel, the term civil society was roughly equivalent to state. In using this term, Hegel was alluding to the social domain of market exchange [in Smith’s (1976) sense] in which individual civil agents freely engage in the pursuit of financial wealth, and the ownership and exchange of goods. Later on many social thinkers have developed their own brand of theories of civil society.

Jurgan Habermas:

Compared to the concepts of the public sphere and communicative action, the concept of civil society is deﬁnitely less prominent in Habermas’ writings. It was only in his book Faktizita¨t und Geltung (1992) that he sketched his ideas on civil society in a chapter entitled ‘‘On the role of civil society and the political public sphere’’. Yet the foundation for these reﬂections on civil society can be found in his earlier work, in particular his opus magnum Theory of Communicative Action (1981). Here he provides some hints on how to deﬁne the public sphere against the backdrop of his general theory of society. In discussing the exchange processes between the functionally integrated subsystems and the life-world, Habermas attributes to the lifeworld two ‘‘institutional orders’’ (1981: 473): ﬁrst, the private sphere which primarily rests on the core family, specialises in the task of socialization and, in the modern capitalist system, is discharged from economic functions; second, the public sphere based on networks of communication which are intensiﬁed by cultural institutions and, in the later stages of modernity, the mass media. In terms of material or monetary exchanges, the state (or administrative system) provides organizational services (e.g., infrastructures) by taking taxes. In terms of power exchange, the state offers political decisions by expecting mass loyalty. Thus, from the perspective of the state, the public sphere is able to procure legitimacy. Strikingly, the category of civil society is absent in this conceptualization. This gap is at least partially ﬁlled in some of Habermas’ later publications.

Habermas’s central concept:

His conceptualization of civil society and the political public sphere in Faktizita¨t und Geltung is inspired by two lines of thought. First, regarding the structure and processes of politics, Habermas draws on a model developed by Bernhard Peters (1993).[4] Accordingly, democratic constitutional systems are characterized by the dissociation between the political center and its periphery. The center, institutionally represented by administrations, judiciaries, election processes and parliamentary bodies, has the formal authority to make decisions. The periphery is broadly divided into an internal and external segment. The former consists of a range of quasi-statist institutions (e.g., universities, social security organizations) which closely interact with administrations or perform functions that the state has delegated to them. The outer periphery, in turn, is divided into two parts. On one hand, there exists a host of organizations with whom state authorities coordinate in order to secure smooth implementation of their policies. This coordination occurs mainly in informal and non-transparent ways, as exempliﬁed by the tripartite neo-corporatist arrangement that exists in some countries. On the other hand, there is a vast array of associations, private and public interest groups, social movements, and citizen initiatives that seek to inﬂuence the state. It appears that Habermas considers this outer periphery to be the stronghold of a politically attentive civil society that, in extraordinary situations, has the will and capacity to challenge the political center by the ‘‘mode of besiege’’ (1989: 475)[5]. In such a situation, the political decision-makers are forced to justify their decisions, to engage in a public discourse, and probably to make concessions or even to fundamentally change their position.

Second, in specifying the role and quality of civil society, Habermas draws on the work of Cohen and Arato (1992)[6]. According to them, civil society is marked by the principles of plurality, publicity and legality. Habermas also adopts their idea that civil society could serve as a mediator between the political system and the lifeworld. Through this idea, he seems to re-deﬁne the status of the public sphere. While in 1981 he deﬁned the public sphere, along with the private sphere, as an ‘‘institutional order of lifeworld’’, he now understands the public sphere to be a structure that ‘‘mediates between the private sectors of lifeworld on the one hand and the functionally speciﬁed action systems on the other hand’’ (1992: 451)[7] and, in other terminology, as a resonance board for those problems which have to be solved by the political system (1992: 435).

In a recent article Habermas (2008)[8] further speciﬁes his understanding of the public sphere and civil society. The public sphere is deﬁned as a space between the formally organized consultations and negotiations within the center and the activities and informal talks of civil society at the margins of the political center (2008: 164). More importantly, Habermas elaborates on the role of the public sphere and its relationship with civil society in both descriptive and normative terms. All participants, whether from the center, the functional systems or civil society, engage in political communication to inﬂuence the formation of public opinion. Even when operating in a strategic manner (as opposed to the spirit of seeking mutual understanding), these participants have to respect certain rules in order to become effective: ‘‘They must contribute to the mobilization of important themes, provable facts and convincing arguments which, in turn, are submitted to critical examination’’ (2008: 177). This very much resembles Immanuel Kant’s thoughts on how to establish public reason.

Contemporary relevance in relating civil society with the public sphere:

Habermas’s relevance to the study of civil society theory lies in several of his theoretical building blocks support or complement the idea of civil society, most importantly the concepts of the (political) public sphere, the role of morality, law and civil liberties as a precondition for a thriving civil society, and the relevance of discourse with its central element of the ‘‘forceless force of the better argument’’ (1971: 131)[9]. At the same time, Habermas warns us against an idealization of the role and the potential of civil society. To him, civil society is not the heart of society at large. Nor does he agree with attempts to reintegrate the economy into the concept of civil society attempts primarily promoted by neo-liberal strategists and transnational corporations. After all, according to him, modern societies are a web of various systems and spheres which should maintain their relative autonomy. Civil society can only unfold its complementary and critical potential under certain conditions and in interaction with more formalized institutions of the political center under the rule of law.

While some commentators blame Habermas for idealizing the power of discourse and deliberation, they fail to recognize his distinction between a highly conditional potential and empirical reality. Habermas has only slightly softened his sceptical view of the structures and processes of political communication (Habermas, 1990)[10]. And to the extent that political communication is shaped, if not distorted, by the use of power and money, the civil society, which has to pass the public sphere to inﬂuence the political decision-makers, generally remains a weak participant. There is a lesson, then, for the passionate promoters of civil society: It is more important to reduce the obstacles for a deliberative communicative praxis within the public political sphere than it is to strengthen the associational web of civil society. Also in taking a look at transnational public spheres and the use of the Internet, Habermas is not overly optimistic that civil society will be able to strongly inﬂuence, via the public sphere, the political decision-making processes.

Antonio Gramsci:

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), an Italian journalist and the leader of the Italian Communist party who died in the Fascist prison, is considered one of the major theoreticians of civil society. Gramsci’s concept of civil society, like much of his notions and conceptions, isn’t summed up in a single place in his writing, but rather develops gradually from early remarks in his pre-prison writings through fragmentary and seemingly haphazard formulations in several of his prison notebooks. While there are a few passages in the Prison Notebooks where Gramsci addresses the concept of civil society in a more formal and systematic way, much of his observations on civil society are intertwined with his analyses of a wide variety of topics.

Gramscian central concept:

For Gramsci, civil society is located within society’s superstructure (in Marxist and Neo-Marxist thought the base is equivalent to the mode of production and the social order enforcing it, while the superstructure is the culture, technology, institutions, etc. which emerge from the material conditions and circumstances of production and support it), which in Gramsci’s works, pertains to institutions, forms of consciousness and political and cultural practices (Williams, 1978)[11]. The superstructure is the sphere of mass cultural and ideological reproduction, and it consists of two major levels:

[O]ne that can be called civil society, that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called private, and that of political society, or the State. (Gramsci, 1971: 12)[12]

Since the superstructure is distinct from the base, which consists of social relations of production of a predominately economic character, and following Gramsci’s critique of Marxist economism, it is often argued that Gramsci developed a three-way distinction between the economy (the market), civil society, and the state or government. And indeed, elsewhere Gramsci writes that ‘‘between the economic structure and the state with its legislation and coercion stands civil society’’ (Gramsci, 1971: 209).

However, it is important to note that for Gramsci these distinctions are only analytic or theoretical.

As Joseph Buttigieg explains: "Gramsci’s enlarged concept of the modern State is, therefore, triadic; its three elements, political society, civil society, and the economic sphere, are inextricably intertwined— they are separable only for methodological or heuristic purposes. (Buttigieg, 2005: 43)

Civil society and hegemony:

The concept of Hegemony is central to Gramsci’s idea of civil society. Gramsci’s idea of hegemony is based on Marx’s notion of ‘‘false consciousness,’’ which is a state in which the members of the dominated classes are ideologically blinded to their subordinate position in the social structure. Thanks to false consciousness, true class consciousness is hindered by the ideology of the ruling class, and the masses are made to identify with a system which exploits them and its underlying ideology. Gramsci used the term ‘‘hegemony’’ to name the process of political domination through ideological domination. He showed how dominant elites use the state as well as the popular culture, mass media, education, and religion to reinforce an ideology which supports their position in the relations of force. Gramsci deﬁnes hegemony as a form of control exercised by a dominant class over subaltern groups in society. Although in his prison writings Gramsci typically is careful not to use Marxist terminology such as ‘‘class,’’ and ‘‘proletariat’’ (because his work was read by a Fascist censor), his class distinctions reﬂect the reality of his place and time. Gramsci’s dominant class was the bourgeoisie, the modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of waged labor; and the central subordinate class was the proletariat, but also other subaltern groups. Gramsci’s hegemony refers to a process of moral and intellectual leadership through which dominated or subordinate classes succumb to their own domination by ruling classes, as opposed to being simply forced or coerced into accepting inferior positions. Hegemony, thus, refers to a sociopolitical situation or as Gramsci calls it ‘‘a moment,’’ in which there is an alignment of the superstructure (the dominant ideology) with the base (class divisions and the economic and political practices that support them). In hegemony, a certain way of life and thought is dominant, and is diffused throughout society to inform norms, values and tastes, political practices, and social relations (Showstack-Sassoon, 1982). Hegemony thus saturates the society to such an extent that it corresponds to the reality of social experience. In this way, people contribute to the continued dominance of the ruling class, by accepting the dominant culture’s values and assumptions as their own: repression is replaced by inculcation (Moen, 1998[13]).

Class dominance, as theorized by Gramsci, results from a combination of coercion and consent. The dominant class becomes hegemonic and promotes it own ideology as the commonsensical way of thinking through leadership and persuasion, so that instead of imposing itself on the subaltern classes, it acquires their consensus. Naturally, coercion is never completely missing from arrangements of power, but in hegemonic arrangements what matters is the power of ideas and the politics of consent, while force and coercion are less visible (Rupert, 2005[14]). Since hegemony is not a result of imposition but rather of consent, this leadership is not exercised primarily through the mechanisms of government, rather it is acquired chieﬂy in the sphere of civil society where consensus is generated. In order for the hegemonic groups to control political society with the consent of the governed, that is for them to be ‘‘hegemonic,’’ they must allow for a space where free association and action (or a belief of free association and action) is allowed. When the ideas and worldviews formed in this ‘‘free’’ space buttress existing social, economic, and political arrangements, they are thought of as doing so willingly and spontaneously. In this, the action within civil society, directed by hegemonic elites and the forma mentis they engender, serves to legitimize existing arrangements and relations of power.

Achieving a hegemonic position in civil society is resolutely more important to the ruling classes than gaining control over government. Controlling government allows hegemonic groups to use the legitimate force of the state to protect their interests, if they must. However, relying only on brute force as their only source of power would make them vulnerable to a simple straight-on challenge on the control of legitimate force such as in a coup d’´etat. Contrastingly, hegemony causes potential opposing groups to consent with the dominant groups’ control and identify with its ideology, and this is likely to prevent a coup d’e´tat from occurring in the ﬁrst place.

Therefore, civil society is the arena where the prevailing hegemony in the modern state is constantly being reinforced, but also the only arena where it can be truly contested. Since in Gramsci’s thought civil society, and not the state as in Hegel, is the active and positive element in historical developments, it is the locus of impending change. It is the creative space, where subaltern groups can coalesce and engage in a counter-hegemonic effort to alter society (Showstack-Sassoon, 1982[15]). Actually, hegemony necessitates counter-hegemony, since it creates contradictions that cause unrest among subaltern groups. Hegemony and counter-hegemony are best seen as ‘‘simultaneous double movements’’ that reciprocally shape one another – hegemony informs counter-hegemony, and counter-hegemonic efforts cause hegemonic forces to realign and reorganize themselves (Persaud, 2001: 49)[16].

Contemporary relevance of Gramsci:

State and civil society:

Gramsci’s use of hegemony cannot be understood apart from other concepts he developed, including those of ‘‘State’’ and ‘‘Civil Society.’’ Actually, what sets hegemony apart from domination is the symbiosis between government and civil society. This can only be analyzed in a meaningful way when one understands that civil society is not separate from or exclusively opposed to the state (Buttigieg, 2005)[17]. He saw civil society as a part of his notion of the ‘‘integral state’’ (Gramsci, 1971: 267[18]). In fact, although political society is the most immediately visible aspect of the state, civil society is its most resilient constitutive element. The intricate, organic relationships between civil society and political society is what produces hegemony, and thus makes it possible for certain classes of society to dominate the state and maintain their dominance, perpetuating the subalternity of other classes. Political society and civil society mutually reinforce each other to the advantage of certain classes, groups, and institutions. Control of the state is accomplished through hegemony in civil society, hegemony that is achieved through consent. But consent of the subaltern groups to hegemonic ideology is not a truly free choice; it is manufactured and manipulated by the dominant classes who control certain institutions of civil society, co-opt others, and infuse the rest with the forma mentis that they desire.

Civil Society as a Revolutionary Project:

Gramsci’s elaboration of the concept of civil society is not just a theoretical or philosophical project. It is set up expressly to develop a revolutionary strategy that would disable the coercive apparatus of the state, allow subaltern groups to gain access to political power, and create the conditions that could give rise to a consensual society wherein no individual or group is reduced to a subaltern status (Anderson, 1976)[19]. Gramsci’s transformation of society starts in civil society, and ideally ends with the complete extension of civil society so that it no longer needs a coercive apparatus to protect it. The existence of civil society and the necessity of hegemonic elites to permit some freedom of action within it (otherwise they rely on force alone, and cannot achieve hegemony) provide the space and opportunity for counter-hegemonic mobilization. The subaltern state provides the incentive. The reliance of the modern liberal state on acquiring dominance through hegemony (that is, through generating consent in civil society) brings about the very cultural, social, and political formations that challenge hegemony. Hegemony in Gramsci’s view is not a ﬁnal and unchangeable state, but rather an unstable result of an ongoing process of political and ideological altercation, which he called ‘‘war of position’’ and which takes the form of a ‘‘reciprocal siege’’ between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic actors.

Cohen and Arato:

Cohen and Arato have made valuable contribution to the theory of civil society, especially in their collaborative publication in 1992 – “Civil society and political theory.” [20]

Influences:

Cohen and Arato have referred to many notable scholars of the civil society theory, of which mentioning a few is necessary.

Hannah Arend’s politics, which sees politics as decaying because of looming expansion of plurality leading towards a blurred boundary of publics and privateness.

Carl Schmitt argues that continued political democratization leads to the loss of state neutrality and to actions by the state affected by private interests. In addition to the overlapping of government actions and private interest, the private sphere is politicized because of expanding state activities.

Habermas shares with Schmitt the diagnosis that state interventionism is expanding and that the political space is occupied by corporatism of private interests and adds the culturally and theoretically pessimistic thesis of manipulated mass culture, which leads to the disintegration of the public as mediating agent between civil society and state.

However, Cohen and Arato rejected the idea of decaying politics. They reject the differentiation of state and society and contrary to Habermas’s thesis of decay of public sphere they refer to associations of society as an issuer of public processes.

Michel Foucault’s discussion on the theory of power, which analyses society as a network of relationships of power, lead Cohen and Arato discuss the scope and outlines of the concept of power in civil society theory.

Systems theory has left significant impact on Cohen & Arato’s theory. Luhmann’s system-theoretical analysis of societal differentiation processes denies further theoretical value to the basic distinction between state and society: According to Luhmann, the variety of externally differentiated societal subsystems, the internal differentiation of the political system and the many speciﬁc intersystem connections cannot be sufﬁciently analyzed any more by such dichotomic theory concepts.

Cohen and Arato’s central concept:

Cohen and Arato give an overview of the development of the concept of civil society in the twentieth century. The starting point for this development is the categorical differentiation between economy, civil society and state. In order to avoid such conceptual weaknesses, where, Gamsci with a Marxian perspective reduces civil society to a form of cultural domination in capitalism and Talcott Persons’s reduction of civil society towards “societal community” Cohen and Arato resort back to the differentiation of systems (state/economy) and the living world (civil society) introduced by Ju¨rgen Habermas.

Civil society – the concept

They discuss societal framework conditions and civil societal actors, framed by thoughts on political ethics at the beginning and a discussion of civil disobedience at the end. At the center of the argument are the ethics of discourse and the theory of law. It is evident, that in connection with the conception of political ethics the term politics is deﬁned based on the concept of civil society. The concept of politics championed by Cohen and Arato speciﬁcally take into consideration the cultural aspects of political action and what effect they have in processes of articulation of interests and interpretation of needs. In that sense, politics is not a process reduced to negotiating and aggregating interests; not the existing interests of individuals, but the formation of interests of civil societal actors while networking in a coordinated way. This developed grown political knowledge moves quite far from politics as a pursuit of conﬂicting interests and as a negotiation of interests and focuses on the legitimizing sensible side of political action in political society.

Cohen and Arato follow Habermas’social theory. Using the concept of institutional intermediation, they would like to discuss options and scope of democratizing the question of differentiation – increasing the weight of Habermasian thoughts. Institutional ‘‘sensors’’ and ‘‘receptors’’ in societal subsystems are supposed to keep the system integration sensitive to the requirements of social integration. They do not orient themselves defensively to the Habermasian thesis of ‘‘colonialization of the living world’’ in the sense of looking for barriers against the escalating dynamic of system integration. In fact, Cohen and Arato aggressively look for possible forms of ‘‘self-limiting’’ inﬂuence of civil society on the state and economy through institutional intermediation (Habermas has followed them later on this point). With that institutional intermediation, the democratization of differentiated societies without the price of external differentiation and subsequent loss of effectiveness in connection should become possible. Unfortunately, substantiating this theoretically promising goal is one of the weaker parts of their main work.

Social movement inputs:

In social movements, a phenomenon especially prominent in the 1970s and 1980s, Cohen and Arato see the self-limiting radicalism at work they themselves demanded which connects defending and democratizing civil society to forms of influence on state and economy, which does not call into question the complexity level of structural differentiation as such.

The Resource Mobilisation and New Social Movements:

The argument proceeds in two steps: At ﬁrst, Cohen and Arato carve out the alternate unilateralism of the American research on movements (Resource-Mobilization-Approach, RMA) and European research on movements (New Social Movements approach, NSB-approach). RMA methodically assumes social movements to be strategic actors, particularly, through Rational Choice. A look at structures of political opportunities of movement organizations complements the RMA paradigm, which concentrates on their contribution to the formation of interest organizations. Here, RMA’s analytic framework also works for Cohen and Arato. What the approach cannot do is to analyze collective actions below the threshold of interest conﬂict and strategic actions. Civil society’s actors use political public processes to influence political society and forms of ‘‘politics of identity’’ in civil society that aim to form (group) identities but do not tackle the democratization of social relationships. In this area the analytical power of the NSB approach can be used with its attention to cultural processes, development of social identities or normative changes and relationships between associations.

Implications:

Through differentiation between civil society and political society, Cohen and Arato’s concept of civil society isable to assign both approaches to the research on movement an appropriate place and to support their alternate emphasis for political theory. Concerning the two paradigms of research on movements, the authors distinguish between different forms of politics: Civil societal actors emerge through politics of identity; civil societal actors enter the sphere of activity of political society in forms of inclusive politics; through politics of inﬂuence civil societal actors participate in public political discourse and inﬂuence political societal actors; reform politics is the institutional establishing of discursive elements as ‘‘sensors’’ and ‘‘receptors’’ in the societal subsystems, also establishing the political and economic society. According to Cohen and Arato, social movements are found in the whole broad scale of different forms of politics and act in civil society as well as in the political society. Movement politics are a normal part of self-democratizing civil societies.

Ernest Gellner:

Although Ernest Gellner was an erudite polymath whose expertise covered such diverse research ﬁelds as kinship studies, nationalism, civil society, Islam, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, state socialism, analytical philosophy and historical sociology, his intellectual preoccupation was focused on one central puzzle: how the modern social form came into being and in particular to what extent modernity is unique relative to all other social orders? The key to unlock this puzzle was to be found in comparing and contrasting two historically dominant forms of social organization: the agrarian and industrial world.

Central concept of Ernest Gellner:

For Gellner (1994)[21] civil society is more than a cluster of nongovernmental institutions and associations which are independent and strong enough to counterbalance the state. Although civil society requires the existence of autonomous and powerful nongovernmental bodies which can keep the state authority in check without paralyzing its role as an arbitrator between group interests and an essential keeper of internal peace these characteristics are insufﬁcient for the existence of a fully ﬂedged civil society. In Gellner’s view the indispensable ingredient of civil society is an individual autonomy. Any concept of civil society that does not incorporate an emphasis on the personal liberty, in Gellner’s view, cannot differentiate between civil society proper and the premodern segmentary communities. In other words many traditional patrimonial collectivities such as clans, lineages, bands, or tribes were characterized by a substantial degree of autonomy vis-`a-vis central authorities, often being in position to strongly challenge the will of the rulers. However as these collectivities clearly lacked a sense of individual freedom and were governed by the strict ritualistic practices they had little, if anything, in common with the civil society. Rather, as Gellner (1994: 7) puts it one could escape the tyranny of kings at the expense of living under the tyranny of cousins. That is, the only way one could evade the oppression of the central authority in premodern world is through the obedience to a particular social subgroup. Hence in his theory civil society is conceptualized in wider and historically speciﬁc terms as a distinctly modern social order amiable to proliferation of independent associations which do not stiﬂe one’s personal liberty.

Since the emergence of civil society is firmly tied to modernity Gellner argues that one of the key preconditions for it to happen involves the structural transformation in human relations: from the rigidities of social status to ﬂexibilities of contractual arrangements. Consequently Gellner (1995) depicts modern individuals as ‘‘modular’’ creatures who, just like modular furniture units, are variable and adaptable to ever changing conditions and opportunities of the modern world. In his view modularity is the precondition of civil society as under modern conditions one has the freedom to change memberships in various associations, to switch allegiances and loyalties to distinct subgroupings without being automatically ostracized from the society. Unlike the agrarian world where one’s social status and communal membership were inscribed on birth and regularly reinforced through ritual and coercion and thus were not particularly efﬁcient, the human relationships in the industrial world derive their efﬁciency from their ﬂexibility, instrumentality, and temporary character. In Gellner’s (1994: 103) witty and colorful language one can join a modern political party ‘‘without slaughtering a sheep’’ and one can leave it ‘‘without incurring the death penalty for apostasy.’’

In Gellner’s view liberal individualism is a distinct feature of civil society and as such it was bound to ﬁnd itself on the collision course with the stringent collectivist ethos of nationalism. Hence much of the twentieth century saw nationalist movements as hostile opponents of civil society.

Relevance:

Contemporary relevance of Gellner’s theory of civil society can be summarized in three main points. Firstly, Gellner proposes that civil society can only ﬂourish in modern context where the separation of political and socioeconomic spheres clearly exists. If this precondition is to be met, a balance of power between market regulators and state authorities is essential to ensure scope for actions and relationships that transcend both kinship ties and extreme individualism.

Secondly, Gellner suggests that civil society requires modular persons who are engaged in a whole set of relationships but free to leave any associations without fear of stigmatization. Modularity is another precondition for a functional civil society since allegiance to a speciﬁc group is transferable within conditions of modernity.

Finally, Gellner’s concept of civil society offers a broader understanding of the conditions of modern life than most standard liberal democratic models. While context of liberal democracy may be conducive to extreme individualism, atomization, social isolation and formal recognition (but possibly poor implementation) of political freedoms and human rights, Gellner’s idea of civil society is focused on the institutional preconditions necessary for the emergence and persistence of a thriving civil society.

[1] www.traditionalknowledge.info/glossary.php on 11th April, 2011

[2] http://fact-archive.com/encyclopedia/Democratization on 11th April, 2011.

[3]Managing Development, The Governance dimension. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2006/03/07/000090341_20060307104630/Rendered/PDF/34899.pdf on April, 11, 2011

[4] Peters, B. (1993). Die Integration moderner Gesellschaften. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.

[5] Habermas, J. (1989). Volkssouver¨anit¨at als Verfahren. Ein normative Begriff von O¨ ffentlichkeit. Merkur, 43(6), 465–477.

[6] Cohen, J. L., & Arato, A. (1992). Civil society and political theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[7] Habermas, J. (1992). Faktizita¨t und Geltung. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.

[8] Habermas, J. (2008). Hat die Demokratie noch eine epistemische Dimension? Empirische Forschung und normative Theorie. In Habermas, Ju¨rgen (Ed.), Ach, Europa. Kleine Politische Schriften XI. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp.

[9] Habermas, J. (1971). Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie der kommunikativen Kompetenz. In Habermas, J¨urgen, Luhmann, Niklas (Eds.), Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie (pp. 101–141). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.

[10] Habermas, J. (1990). Vorwort zur Neuauﬂage. In Habermas, Ju¨rgen (Ed.), Strukturwandel der ¨Offentlichkeit (pp. 11–50). Frankfurt/M Suhrkamp.

[11] Williams, R. (1978). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[12] Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio

Gramsci. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

[13] Moen, D. G. (1998). Analysis of social transformative movements in advanced capitalism: A neo-Gramscian approach. Journal of Policy and Culture, 3, 117–133.

[14] Rupert, M. (2005). Reading Gramsci in an era of globalizing capitalism. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8(4), 483–97.

[15] Showstack-Sassoon, A. (1982). Approaches to Gramsci. London: Writers and Readers.

[16] Persaud, R. B. (2001). Counter-hegemony and foreign policy: The dialectics of marginalized and global forces in Jamaica. New York: State University of New York Press.

[17] Buttigieg, J. (2005). The contemporary discourse on civil society: A Gramscian critique. Boundary 2, 32(1), 33–52.

[18] Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

[19] Anderson, P. (1976). The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. New Left Review, 100, 5–78.

[20] Cohen, J. L., & Arato, A. (1992). Civil society and political theory (771 S). Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.

[21] Gellner, E. (1994). Conditions of liberty: Civil society and its rivals. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Political anthropology

Table of Contents

Table of Contents............................................................................................................................. 1

Introduction:................................................................................................................................. 2

Brief idea of theoretical paradigms:............................................................................................... 2

The development of political anthropology:................................................................................... 3

The evolutionists:...................................................................................................................... 3

A reaction to evolutionary paradigm:.......................................................................................... 4

Robert Lowie:........................................................................................................................ 4

Georges Balandier:................................................................................................................ 4

The functionalists:..................................................................................................................... 4

Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard:.................................................................................. 5

A. W. Southall:....................................................................................................................... 5

A transitional phase:.................................................................................................................. 5

Edmund Leach:...................................................................................................................... 6

Max Gluckmann:.................................................................................................................... 6

The Neo-evolutionists:.............................................................................................................. 7

White:.................................................................................................................................... 7

Steward:................................................................................................................................ 7

The contributions:.................................................................................................................. 7

Women, World Systems and Weapons of the weak:................................................................... 8

Eric Wolf:............................................................................................................................... 8

James Scott:.......................................................................................................................... 8

Suggested further reading:............................................................................................................ 8

Introduction:

Political Anthropology devotes itself to the study of law, order, conflict, governance, and power. Political scientist David Easton in 1959 charged that political anthropology did not really exist because the practitioners of this non discipline had utterly failed to mark off the political system from other subsystems of society. It was not until almost ten years later that anthropologists had gained sufficient confidence to protest that Easton had completely misunderstood the nature of political anthropology and had construed its greatest virtue into a vice ( Bailey 1968; A. P. Cohen 1969; Southall 1974). In the societies in which anthropologists have traditionally worked, politics cannot be analytically isolated from kinship, religion, age-grade associations, secret societies, and so forth, because these are precisely the institutions manifesting power and authority. In many societies government simply does not exist. This recognition, and the specification of the manner in which the idiom of politics is expressed through the medium of apparently non-political institutions, may be the primary contributions of anthropology to the study of comparative politics. Recently, political anthropologists have carried this idea into the sacred domain of the political scientist by demonstrating that informal organizations and relationships may be more important than formal institutions even in such modern governments as those of the United States and Israel. However, political anthropology, like anthropology as a whole, remains immune to precise definition. Cross-cultural studies of law and warfare may or may not be included (they are not included in this book). Numerous theoretical approaches compete with one another-- cultural materialism, structuralism, various Marxisms, neo-evolutionism, feminist revisionism, symbolic anthropology. . . There are world-system perspectives and perspectives that examine the actions of individuals. Cross-cultural statistical analyses vie with historical studies.

Brief idea of theoretical paradigms:

A number of major thrusts of political anthropology can be legitimately delineated. First, in the past the classification of political systems was an important area of research. These studies, some of which are now under attack, provided political anthropology with a basic vocabulary and no few insights into the ways that systems work at different levels of complexity. Second, the evolution of political systems is a continuing fascination in the United States, though British and French anthropologists often like to pretend that evolutionary theory died with Lewis Henry Morgan. Third is the study of the structure and functions of political systems in preindustrial societies. This point of view was vehemently repudiated on both sides of the Atlantic because of its static and ideal nature. After the initial burst of revolutionary rhetoric, there emerged a general recognition that even the most dynamic of political processes may take place within relatively stable structural boundaries. In any case, political anthropology had its beginnings in this paradigm, and many of its enduring works are structural-functionalist. Fourth, for the last several decades the theoretical focus has been on the processes of politics in preindustrial or developing societies. Perhaps the most assertive trend of the 1970s was action theory, an outgrowth of the process approach with an emphasis not on changing institutions but on the manipulative strategies of individuals. Fifth, there is a wide and growing literature on the political response of formerly tribal societies to modernization. Sixth, world-system theory has given rise to a number of studies that interpret politics in the light of the spread of capitalism out of Europe beginning in the sixteenth

century. Seventh, one dominant current theme is how subcultures embedded in state societies non-violently and often quite subtly manipulate power to their own advantage. Finally, the feminist movement in academic scholarship as a whole has introduced a new and important voice into political anthropology, questioning basic assumptions about power and offering new data and interpretations.

The development of political anthropology:

Though political anthropology as a specialization within social anthropology did not appear until as late as 1940, and did not really kick in until after World War II, this is also true for most anthropological subject specializations. Whatever lines were drawn during this period was theoretical: one was either an evolutionist, or a historical particularist, or a structural-functionalist, and so forth, but there was little sense that one might be a political anthropologist, an ethnolinguist, or an ecological anthropologist. The ideal of a holistic anthropology only began to break down through the 1940s as increasing data and increasing numbers of professional anthropologists forced specialization. The development of political anthropology was part of this general process, which continues today, with ever smaller subspecialties being delineated. Yet the comparative study of politics in preindustrial societies dates to the very beginnings of anthropology.

The evolutionists:

Political anthropology’s origins are grounded in concepts drawn from such nineteenth-century theorists of social evolution as Sir Henry Maine (1861), who distinguished societies organized by status and by contract in Law, and Lewis Henry Morgan's (1877) distinction between kinship and territory as the basis for the organization of Government. Prior to this period, the tradition that reached back to Plato and ran through Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and most philosophers of politics until (but not including) Karl Marx described government and politics as products of civilization; lower stages were characterized by anarchy. One of the earliest to challenge this view with hard evidence was Sir Henry Maine, who, in Ancient Law (1861), postulated that primitive society was organized along the lines of kinship, was patriarchal, and was ordered by sacred proscriptions. Evolution was in the direction of secularization and organization based not on kinship but on territory--"local contiguity" formed the basis for political action.

Maine's important insight that kinship could be a primary socio political structure was developed by Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Society (1877). Morgan had studied the Iroquois Indians of New York State first hand and had been fascinated by their kinship terminology, which was very different from that used in Western European countries but similar to that employed in other parts of the world. His description and categorization of kinship systems was itself a lasting contribution, but before these could gain recognition, they had to be couched in the theoretical framework popular at the time. Morgan developed an evolutionary sequence based on the mode of subsistence, the stages of which he termed savagery, barbarism, and civilization. These grossly connotative terms actually translate rather well into their modern equivalents, societies based on hunting-gathering, horticulture, and developed agriculture. Morgan, like others of his time, began with the "postulate of the psychic unity of mankind"-- belief in a common origin and parallel development all over the world--though he was unable to follow the idea to its inherently antiracist conclusions and assumed that the Aryans were naturally "in the central stream of human progress" (Morgan 1877: 533).

A reaction to evolutionary paradigm:

Criticising evolunitionists’ paradigm was F. Boas’ Historical particularism. Boas was absolute, and often vehement, in his repudiation of the comparative method and of the vast generalizations that had emerged from it. He emphasized minute descriptive studies of particular cultures. Theory did not disappear altogether, but such orientations as diffusionism took on a very particularistic turn, with field anthropologists spending years collecting the most minuscule facts of daily life and charting them on enormous trait lists (one suspects this type of inquiry declined through sheer boredom). Though English anthropologists were turning increasingly to the study of kinship, not much was accomplished in the political dimension, aside from an occasional reference to Durkheim's mechanical and organic solidarity. In the United States, little in the way of theory separated out the political for analysis.

Robert Lowie:

A major exception was Robert Lowie The Origin of the State (1927). To find a framework to deal with the political, Lowie reached back to outmoded evolutionary theory. Fittingly enough, he started by rejecting the unilineal evolution of his predecessors; there was no evidence that all societies pass through similar stages of development. Maine's and Morgan's contention that primitive political order was maintained solely through personal relations was also rejected. Rather, the territorial bond, which Morgan saw as a characteristic of civilization, was universal and thus formed a bridge between primitive political organization and the state. In an earlier book, Primitive Society (1920), Lowie had recognized the political importance of associations in uniting otherwise disparate groups, and he saw these as forming the basis of the state because they weakened the blood ties of kin groups. Now he modified this view, showing how associations can also be as "separatistic" as kin relations. Thus associations, which are of their nature neither centralizing nor disruptive, require a supra-ordinate authority to achieve higher level integration.

Georges Balandier:

Georges Balandier (1970) contention that specific, explicit political anthropology developed during the 1920s is true only to a point. Here we find certain lasting ideas: that all societies recognize territory that increases in population and in conflict lead to states, that class stratification is a key element in movement up the evolutionary ladder toward the state, and that the central element of the state is a monopoly of coercive power. Though these concepts were not developed in a systematic causal model, Lowie clarified a number of issues, asked a number of crucial questions, and presented anthropology with a fascinating challenge.

The functionalists:

Malinowskian psychological functionalism, simply put, social systems exists because they have functional importance to the people at large and Radcliffe-Brown’s structural functionalism arguing society as an equilibrium hole where each parts contributes towards this equilibrium forms the backbone of British research in colonial Africa. Much of the research was to instruct colonial authorities on the social systems under their control, and this affected both the emphasis and the image of social anthropology. On the one hand, there was little recognition that the societies anthropologists were studying were severely changed by colonialism, and by the Pax Britannica imposed by English guns. Also,

there was a tendency to study chiefdom and state systems, some of which, like the Zulu, had been integrated partially as a reaction to the British threat.

Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard:

In their African Political Systems distinguish two types of African political system: those with centralized authority and judicial institutions (primitive states), and those without such authority and institutions (stateless societies). A major difference between these types is the role of kinship. Integration and decision making in stateless societies is based on bilateral family-band groups at the lowest level, and on corporate unilineal descent groups at a higher level. State societies are those in which an administrative organization overrides or unites such groups as the permanent basis of political structure. Even though this typology was later criticized as much too simplistic, the detailed descriptions of how lineages functioned politically in several specific societies were lasting contributions. Social equilibrium was assumed, so that the major problem was to show how the various conflict and interest groups maintained a balance of forces that resulted in a stable, ongoing social structure. The integrating power of religion and symbol were also noted, especially the role of ritual in confirming and consolidating group values. African Political Systems' introduction and eight ethnographic articles established the problems, the theoretical foundation, the methodology, and the controversy for more than a decade of research into the politics of preindustrial societies.

A. W. Southall:

The original typology formed by African Political System was increasingly refined. A. W. Southall in Alur Society (1953) challenged the assumption that segmentary systems--those in which authority was dispersed among a number of groups--were always uncentralized; he provided an example of a society in which segmentary lineage organization existed side-by-side with a centralized state. Others questioned segmentation as a factor for typing at all, since even centralized governments are segmented. Nor could lineages be the basis for all stateless societies, because age grades, secret associations, and ritual groups could cross-cut lineage divisions for purposes of political action.

Jumping off from Fortes's and Evans-Pritchard's bare suggestion of types (the two editors did not seem to think their typology universal, or even very important); classifications were increasingly refined until political taxonomy became virtually an autonomous field of research. The static structural-functionalist paradigm maintained itself through a number of studies as the old guard--Evans-Pritchard, Raymond Firth, Daryll Forde, and Meyer Fortes--held, contemporaneously or successively, the princely academic chairs of British anthropology. This is not to say that the situation itself was static; there was constant ferment, as Malinowskian or Radcliffe-Brownian emphases alternated, and as conflict and change increasingly imposed themselves with the rapid demise of African colonialism.

A transitional phase:

By the 1950s, after a decade of gradual chipping away, the edifice of structural-functionalism was showing cracks in its very foundation. There was little sense yet of a complete repudiation of this paradigm, but there was a quite self-conscious sense that fundamental modifications were being made.

Edmund Leach:

A major contribution in this direction was Edmund Leach Political System of Highland Burma ( 1954), which signaled the shift to a more process-oriented, more dynamic form of analysis. In the Kachin Hills area of Burma, Leach found not one but three different politicalsystems: a virtually anarchic traditional system, an unstable and intermediate system, and a small-scale centralized state. The traditional system and the state were more or less distinct communities made up of many linguistic, cultural, and political subgroups, all somehow forming an interrelated whole. This whole could not be supposed to be in equilibrium; there was constant tension and change within and between the various subsystems. To make sense out of all this, Leach felt it necessary "to force these facts within the constraining mold of an as if system of ideas, composed of concepts which are treated as if they are part of an equilibrium system" ( Leach 1954: ix). This was no more than the people themselves did, for they also had an ideal cognitive pattern for their society, expressed in ritual and symbolism. In reality, however, the people were hardly constrained to follow their own, and certainly not the anthropologist's, as if conception of their behavior. These ideas are similar to the mentalistic structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss (whom Leach would later help introduce into English-language anthropology), and there are suggestions of the cognitive mapping later to become central to American psychological anthropology. The immediate importance for the study of politics, however, was in the clear differentiation of abstract political structure from the on-the-ground political reality. Almost as crucial, Leach finally got political anthropology out of Africa and broke it free from the relatively cohesive, single-language societies to which it had been confined.

Max Gluckmann:

Meanwhile, Max Gluckman was also breaking new ground. In his chapter on the Zulu in African Political Systems, in Custom and Conflict in Africa ( 1956), and in Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa ( 1960), Gluckman developed the theme that equilibrium is neither static nor stable, but grows out of an ongoing dialectical process in which conflicts within one set of relations are absorbed and integrated within another set of relations: Cross-cutting loyalties tend to unite the wider society in settling a feud between local groups; witchcraft accusations displace hostilities within a group in a way that does not threaten the system; apartheid in South Africa, while radically dividing white from black, ultimately unites both groups within themselves. The Roman maxim "divide and conquer" is cleverly restated as "divide and cohere." Politically, this is especially evident in African rituals of rebellion in which, periodically, the king must dress as a pauper or act the clown, is symbolically killed, or is subjected to open hatred and obscenities from his people. For Gluckman, such rituals are not merely catharsis; they are the symbolic reassertion of the priority of the system over the individual, of kingship over any particular king.

At this stage, both Leach and Gluckman are transitional figures, still rooted in the structural-functionalism of the 1930s and 1940s, developing ever more clever arguments in defense of equilibrium theory; yet at the same time they are taking a giant step toward a new paradigm. Gluckman, as founder and chairman of the anthropology department at Manchester University, was to see his ideas extensively elaborated by his students, known collectively as the Manchester School, a phrase that came to represent a new orientation to society based not on structure and function but on process and conflict.

The Neo-evolutionists:

Without a doubt, England dominated political anthropology during its first two decades. Meanwhile, in the United States, an incipient and quite different political anthropology was fermenting. Evolutionism, long banned by Boasian edict from the proper study of humankind, began a slow and not entirely respectable resurgence through the writings of Leslie White and Julian Steward.

White:

White (1943, 1959) developed a complex sequence leading through agricultural intensification to private ownership, specialization, class stratification, political centralization, and so forth. Much of this was elucidated at such a high level of generality that it left White open to the charge of merely resuscitating nineteenth century unilineal theory.

Steward:

Steward ( 1955) use of the termmultilinear evolution for his own theory only served to validate an unnecessary dichotomy. Actually, no serious evolutionist has ever held a truly unilineal theory ( Harris 1968: 171-73). But the situation was not clarified until the unilineal/multilineal dichotomy was replaced with the complementary concepts of general evolution and specific evolution, the higher level referring to evolutionary processes such as increased specialization or intensification of production, the lower to the historic sequence of forms ( Sahlins and Service 1960). This clarified, evolutionary anthropology was free to move, unfettered by a heavy load of semantic, rather than substantive, difficulties.

The contributions:

Thus, in contrast to their English colleagues, American political anthropologists started with the idea of change on a panoramic scale in a context that was fundamentally ecological and materialist. White measures evolution in energy efficiency and sees technology as a prime mover. Steward's cultural ecology focused on the "cultural core"-- mainly, the subsistence and economic arrangements that largely determine social structure and ideology. The differences between British and American anthropology were vast but can be overemphasized. For example, one of the earliest American political ethnographies, E. Adamson Hoebel's 1940 study of the Comanche Indians, was neither evolutionary nor materialist. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and into the 1960s, there was a strong current of structural-functionalism in the United States. But that which was particularly American was vastly different from that which was particularly British, to the extent that there was often little communication between the two. Political evolution quickly became almost synonymous with political classification. The two major evolutionary works of the period, Elman Service's Primitive Social Organization (1962) and Morton Fried, The Evolution of Political Society (1967), were more taxonomic and descriptive than causal; the emphasis was on the characteristics of different levels of sociocultural integration, rather than on the factors that caused evolution from one level to another. Causal theories were hardly lacking, but these derived from archaeology rather than cultural anthropology. Many notable archaeologists devoted their careers to the processes involved in the evolution of state societies. These two trends, the archaeological and the cultural, which originally ran parallel, came together in Service Origins of the State and Civilization (1975). Political evolution remains an ongoing field of study, but it can no longer claim to be the major focus of American political anthropology-- process and decision-making orientations have crossed the Atlantic from England.

Women, World Systems and Weapons of the weak:

While earlier perspectives and theoretical approaches continued throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, three strong new trends were evident. Perhaps the most important development was the emergence of a distinctly feminist anthropology. Though not specifically political, virtually all of the writers in the field were examining the relative power of women. Not only has the assumption of universal male domination been challenged (and defeated) but also other anthropological myths, such as the model of Man the Hunter as the focus of physical evolution. In addition to the expected cross-cultural statistical comparisons, two important theoretical schools have developed within feminist anthropology, one analyzing the cultural construction of gender and the other, based on Marxist theory, examining the historical development of gender stratification.

Eric Wolf:

Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982) brought the world-system perspective and so-called dependency theory into the mainstream of anthropology. Wolf contends that all, or virtually all, cultures today can only be understood in relation to the expansion of European capitalism over the last centuries.

James Scott:

In a closely related development, many researchers are countering the natives-as-victims approach, which focused on the destruction of tribal cultures by the spread of Western civilization, with a new emphasis on the ways that indigenous peoples fight back, often quite subtly, against the dominant state, either to maintain their group identity or to create for themselves niches of independence and pride. Political scientist James Scott's Weapons of the Weak (1985) demonstrates how peasants resist through gossip, slander, petty arson, and thievery--the marginalization that comes with large-scale capitalist agriculture. Political anthropology may be as amorphous as ever, but from its rude beginnings it has become a firmly established sub-discipline of cultural anthropology.

Suggested further reading:

Vincent Joan. Anthropology and Politics: Visions, Traditions, and Trends (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990).

Ted C. Lewellen. Political anthropology: an introduction (London: Bergin and Gravey, 1992) Vincent Joan. Political anthropology: A reader.

Branches of social and cultural anthropology

Contents

Economic Anthropology:

Issues of economic anthropology:

Political Anthropology:

Psychological Anthropology:

Cognitive anthropology:

Legal Anthropology:

Ecological Anthropology:

Urban Anthropology:

Symbolic Anthropology:

Philosophical anthropology:

Feminist Anthropology:

Visual Anthropology:

Applied Anthropology:

Cultural and social anthropology are distinguishable if not entirely separated intellectual traditions. The use of the terms "cultural" and "social" to draw the distinction became common in the 1930s, but the divergence arose earlier, most directly from the differences between the studies advocated by Franz BOAS (1858 1942) in the United States from the 1890s, and the new directions anthropology had begun to take in England around that time at the initiative of R. R. Marrett (1866 1943), C. G. Seligman (1873 1940), W. H. R. RIVERS (1864 1922), and Alfred Haddon (1855 1940).

Today the two terms do not denote a precise division of approaches and for this reason some anthropologists have dispensed with the distinction (e.g., R. Barrett 1984: 2). For many others, however, the difference remains important, at least as a shorthand way of characterizing ethnographic styles. The rubric "cultural anthropology" is generally applied to ethnographic works that are holistic in spirit, oriented to the ways in which culture affects individual experience, or aim to provide a rounded view of the knowledge, customs, and institutions of a people. "Social anthropology" is a term applied to ethnographic works that attempt to isolate a particular system of social relations such as those that comprise domestic life, economy, law, politics, or religion give analytical priority to the organizational bases of social life, and attend to cultural phenomena as somewhat secondary to the main issues of social scientific inquiry.

There are several specialized areas on which over the years anthropologists have focused. Following is a representation of such different areas which are also popularly known as branches of social cultural anthropology.

Economic Anthropology:

Economic Anthropology focuses on two aspects of economics: (1) provisioning, which is the production and distribution of necessary and optional goods and services; and (2) the strategy of economizing, often put in terms of the formalist substantivist debate. Earlier anthropologists devoted almost all their time to the study of provisioning, but in the last half-century economizing has received substantially more attention. Formalist-Substantivist Debate is the dispute in economic anthropology between those scholars who argue that formal rules of neoclassical economic theory derived from the study of capitalist market societies can be used to explain the dynamics of premodern economies ("formalists") and those who argue that goods and services in the substantive economy are produced and distributed through specific cultural contexts ("substantivists"). Formalists contend that because all economies involve the rational pursuit of, access to, and use of, scarce resources by self-interested, maximizing social actors, formal economic rules can be used to explain them (H. Schneider 1974). Substantivists, by contrast, contend that different forms of exchange have different sets of rules and expectations (Dalton 1961). Following Karl Polanyi the substantivists argue that there are three major forms of exchange: reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange (K. Polanyi et al. 1957). By this view, the rational, maximizing strategizing that lies at the heart of neoclassical economics and formalist economic anthropology is characteristic only of market economies.

Therefore, because of the nature of economic anthropologist’s engagements with substantivist school they tend to focus on the varieties of ways in which production, and distribution is done.

Production refers to the processes of acquiring resources and transforming them into useful objects and actions. The objects include food, shelter, and craft goods, as well as symbolic items ranging from totem poles to pyramids. Before 1940 anthropologists were expected to write a chapter on material culture, which at least gave us a partial inventory of the objects the culture contained.

Food Production systems are often categorized into hunting and gathering (or foraging), horticulture, agriculture, and industry. The underlying dimension of this scale is probably energy input and energy output: both are low at the foraging end, and both are high at the industrial end (Leslie White 1943). Given the greater anthropological expertise with small-scale societies, this scale has more precision and validity at the low-energy end than at the high end.

Distribution is how goods (and services) are transferred from one person to another. Most of the effort in economic anthropology in the last 50 years has been on distribution rather than production. Very early on it was realized that "primitive" societies lacked MONEY, or at least our kind of money. How societies could distribute their goods without money was a key question. Implicated in the answer are questions of value and questions of property.

The work of economic historian Karl Polanyi dominated the scene for 30 years (K. Polanyi et al. 1957). Polanyi proposed that all economies were integrated by one of three major principles of distribution: Reciprocity, Redistribution, and Market, although the remaining two were often present in subordinate roles. More recently the dominant scheme, drawing on MAUSS and Marx, has been GIFT commodity. Reciprocity and redistribution, and the gift, are forms of distribution that do not require the use of money.

Issues of economic anthropology:

PROPERTY rights are implied by the transfer of goods from one person to another, but are one of the least well understood aspects of a society and economy. The transfer of a good from one person to another would seem to require either the concept of property or force. Yet most anthropological attention has been paid to transfers rather than the property aspects. Production may also be instrumental in creating property rights, in that there are natural resources (land, game, clay pits, etc.), tools, processes, and knowledge that can be, and in larger-scale economies usually are, the object of property rules.

SOCIAL STRUCTURE is a major concomitant of economic organization. Through the process of the division of labor societies create distinctive units of production, including work teams, households, men's houses, plantations, firms, and communities. There are also units of consumption (individuals, households, lineages, and communities). Property is held by a jural unit, which can be the individual, the household, a lineage, a village, or a polity. Thus the study of the economics of a society inevitably requires a clear description of some facets of the social structure.

Population has a curious history in economic anthropology. Anthropologists have long known that some economic features are associated with small populations with low population densities whereas others are associated with large populations and high densities. There is a strong correlation between population size and the basic form of production and the distribution of resources. Technology such as domesticated plants and animals, irrigation, and the wheel permits the emergence of much higher population levels than are possible in their absence. And some features of political structure are also correlated with the population size of the society: political office does not occur in the absence of unequal access to resources, which in turn does not normally occur in the absence of intensive agriculture.

This has led to hotly debated questions over whether technology, social organization, or population is the driving force in the system. Population has been granted the status of driving force by such scholars as Boserup (1965), M. Cohen (1977), and HARRIS (1979), who see a rising population as the stimulus for changing technology, which in turn permits higher population levels. But if this is the case it does not explain why some societies, particularly foragers, underproduce and maintain longterm populations that stay well below carrying capacity (see ORIGINAL AFFLUENT SOCIETY).

DIFFUSION of culture traits has always been of interest to anthropologists. One presumes that there has been a noncoercive diffusion of traits over very large areas (at least continental in scale) for millennia. Copper, obsidian, and gems are routinely found thousands of kilometers from their sources at very early times. Some sort of exchange mechanism is almost certainly implied. Although the spread of physical objects is easier to document, ideas, tools, and knowledge of processes can spread in the same way. This model of diffusion based on noncoercive borrowing has more recently been replaced by the impact of forcible change wrought by CAPITALISM, COLONIALISM, and an accompanying WORLD-SYSTEM that has disrupted small-scale societies at least since the beginning of European expansion in 1400. As a result diffusion is now routinely seen as the impact of more powerful societies on less powerful ones, although a few scholars have objected that a penetration subjugation model of the process is too simplistic, and that people in the smaller-scale societies exercise choice and creativity even in the face of powerful forces.

Political Anthropology:

Political Anthropology devotes itself to the study of law, order, conflict, governance, and power. Its origins are grounded in concepts drawn from such nineteenth-century theorists of social evolution as Sir Henry Maine (1861), who distinguished societies organized by status and by contract in law, and Lewis Henry Morgan's (1877) distinction between kinship and territory as the basis for the organization of government. In addition it owes much to the discussions about the relationships between moral order and social organization found in the writings of Emile Durkheim (1933), Max Weber (1968), and Karl Marx (1887). More recent infusions of theory have come from social scientists such as Michel Foucault (1977b), Pierre Bourdieu (1977), and Anthony Giddens (1984), who focus on the structure of power in society.

Political anthropology today is the product of two different legacies. The first, primarily associated with cultural anthropology in the United States, remained focused on the comparative and historical questions of how and why political systems evolved. The second, associated with British social anthropology, was more interested in how politics worked in different societies and the roles of individuals.

For decades evolution-minded anthropologists, along with archeologists, have busily classified societies into categories such as bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states, and then debated the merits of one another's typologies (Fried 1967; Service 1975). Conflict is often accorded a central if not catalytic role in virtually all these schemas. Yet though war has traditionally been studied as a means to an evolutionary end (Otterbein 1970), it has only recently been studied as an institution in and of itself (Turney-High 1949; R. Ferguson 1995; Otterbein 1994). This new focus on violence in the contemporary world has made this branch of political anthropology much more salient than in the past. For example, although the FEUD (as a form of containable conflict) was one of the first political institutions to be studied, only recently have the uncontainable effects (and not just the causes) of organized violence in their various ethnic, political, sectarian, religious, and economic manifestations become subjects of research by anthropologists (Nordstrom & Martin 1992), along with possible solutions such as mediation and conflict resolution.

The second, and perhaps more influential, branch of political anthropology has its origins in the experience of anthropological fieldwork and the very practical concerns associated with locating order in non-Western societies. This was the explicit aim of the founding work in the field, African political systems (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard 1940b). Based on a set of descriptions and analyses of centralized and decentralized systems of governance in Africa, societies were divided into two types: "primitive states" that possessed government institutions and "stateless societies" that did not. This work, and examples of detailed fieldwork on political systems such as Evans-Pritchard's (1940) among the Nuer and Fortes's (1945) among the Tallensi, inspired a generation of fieldworkers to concentrate on the varied ways in which political order might be embedded in kinship relations, ritual practices, age systems, and other order-keeping institutions that did not require separate institutions of government. Such a focus was of clear concern to colonial administrators anxious to understand how to govern and control "subject" peoples, and the role anthropologists may have played in aiding colonialism has been the subject of considerable debate in recent decades (Asad 1973; Kuklik 1991). It is clear, however, that the results of such work, particularly in Africa, pushed anthropology in a number of new directions.

Later on Manchester School especially through the work of Max Gluckman have focused on the central concern of the conflict and conflict resolutions. Political anthropology, however, was not confined to Africa or the Manchester school. Edmund Leach (1954) examined the connection between ritual, identity, and ethnicity among the Kachin of Burma in terms of an oscillating political system that regularly shifted between ranked and egalitarian forms of social organization (gumsa and gumlao). Leach's suggestions about the role of individual agency in politics were followed up by F. G. Bailey (1960) in India and Fredrik Barth (1959a) among the Swat Pathans to explore the aggregate effects of political maneuvering.

Psychological Anthropology:

Psychological Anthropology approaches the comparative study of human experience, behavior, facts, and artifacts from a dual sociocultural and psychological most often psychodynamic perspective. It emerged in the early twentieth century as an attempt to understand our common humanity, led by such figures as Franz Boas and his students Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Melville Herskovits. Psychological anthropology displays an arc of theoretical approaches ranging from scientific positivism, which embraces objectivity and the scientific method, through various hermeneutic humanisms that emphasize the role of subjectivity in fieldwork and writing (Suárez-Orozco 1994).

The origin of such approaches in rooted to Culture and Personality school, which was a broad and unorganized movement that brought together anthropologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists who agreed on the mutual relevance of their disciplines but lacked a common theoretical position, an acknowledged leader, and an institutional base. Its founders were Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Edward SAPIR, all students of Franz Boas, whose influential concept of Culture had implied a psychological dimension they attempted to spell out and translate into research. They argued that culture played a role in individual psychological development (Mead) and in the emotional patterns typical of particular cultures (Benedict), and also that individuals of a particular society realized its culture in different ways (Sapir). They criticized psychological theories that posited Universals for the human species without taking into account human variability as revealed by anthropological fieldwork in diverse cultures. At the same time, they were influenced by those psychological and psychiatric theories that emphasized social influences on the individual, such as the neo-Freudian formulations of Karen Horney and the interpersonal psychiatry of Harry Stack Sullivan. Although the movement had no formal organization, its anthropological founders were joined at seminars, conferences, and in publications by sociologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts including W. I. Thomas, John Dollard, Erik Erikson, Abram Kardiner, Henry A. Murray and by a growing circle of anthropologists Ralph Linton, A. Irving Hallowell, Gregory Bateson, Cora Du Bois, Clyde Kluckhohn, and John W. M. Whiting, to name but a few. The field of culture and personality studies was very active during the 1930s and in the postwar period 1945 50, as a new generation of anthropologists conducted studies among Native American peoples and in the Pacific.

Psychological anthropology has made one of its enduring tasks to cultivate the theoretical space where the individual emerges as an active agent in the cultural realm. Historically, psychological anthropologists have been critical of approaches to the human condition that privilege one level of analysis (such as the cultural) at the expense of others (such as the psychological). Sapir, for example, rejected Alfred Kroeber' (1917a) cultural overdeterminism as espoused in his "superorganic" model of culture. Sapir (1917) argued that anthropology could not "escape the ultimate necessity of testing out its analysis of patterns called 'social' or 'cultural' in terms of individual realities," and that "we cannot thoroughly understand the dynamics of culture, of society, of history, without sooner or later taking account of the actual relationships of human beings."

Cognitive anthropology:

Cognitive Anthropology is the study of the relationship between mind and society. Traditionally, cognitive anthropology examines cultural knowledge in terms of its organization and application in everyday life, in activities such as classification and making inferences. Early in its development, in the 1950s, cognitive anthropology was synonymous with ethnoscience or ethnosemantics. Studies focused on the structure of conceptual categories in folk classification systems and the meanings encoded in these systems, in areas such as kinship, ethnobotany, and color classification. The central unit of analysis was the shared conceptual category, a conjoined set of distinctive features.

More recent studies of classification systems have concentrated on the psychological reality of conceptual categories. If such categories are only conjunctions of features, then the members of a category should not vary in terms of their psychological salience. But they do. Take the category "bachelor," defined in traditional ethnoscience terms as the conjunction of three distinctive features: male, adult, and unmarried. Men are categorized according to whether or not they represent the conjunction of these features; there is no middle ground. This does not represent classification in real life, however, since popes and priests are not normally viewed as bachelors. It is more likely that we apply categories like bachelor by matching potential instances to prototypes, which are stereotypical representations of concepts that serve as standards for evaluation (Rosch & Lloyd 1978). Since the prototypical bachelor is promiscuous, non-domestic, and also potentially marriageable, applying the category to popes and priests would strike most speakers of English as unnatural.

Research has shown that many categories are organized around prototypes, from kin terms to furniture (Lakoff 1987; Lakoff & Johnson 1980). Most of this work has been done by linguists, while cognitive anthropologists have focused on a related knowledge structure, the "schema," a term borrowed from the early work of F. C. Bartlett (1932) in social psychology. The difference between a prototype and schema is that while both are stereotypical, a prototype consists of a specified set of expectations, while a schema is an organized framework of relations that must be filled in with concrete detail. Schemas are highly generalized, culturally specific knowledge structures that help generate appropriate inferences. They fill in the gaps by supplying information that is usually taken for granted, thus enabling individuals to identify actions, events, and consequences based on only brief exposure to only partial information.

Although the evidence that cultural knowledge structures are highly schematized is strong, studies by cognitive anthropologists generally avoid making encompassing ethnographic or psychological statements about whether some knowledge structures are universal, and (if they are) the extent to which they depend on universal cognitive processes. For such answers one must turn to the theorists who draw on research in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. They have proposed three basic models: information-processing models, cognitive-developmental models, and perception and experiential models.

(1) Information-processing models attempt to employ important general principles about the architecture of artificial intelligence systems and their implications for research in human cognition. Computer models provide a means of assessing the plausibility of particular proposals. Occasionally, such models have proved sufficiently well formulated to be subjects in experimental testing with human subjects. At present there is interest in parallel distributed processing (PDP) and connectionism, the idea that things that consistently occur together in an individual's experience become strongly associated in that person's mind (Bechtel & Abrahamsen 1991).

(2) Cognitive-developmental models compare cultures to find common developmental traits and themes. Most of this literature has focused on religious systems and ritual practices. E. Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley (1990) borrowed the notion of "competence" from Chomsky to argue that participants in religious systems represent knowledge to generate definite intuitions about the "well-formedness" of religious phenomena. These intuitions are the basis of universal principles of religious ritual, specifically with regard to the relative centrality of specific ritual actions. Similarly, Boyer (1994) found that intuitions about religious phenomena spring from universal principles that act as tacit theories that are not in themselves intuitive and may require a "leap of faith". For example, the most widespread ontological assumption of religious systems postulates the existence of agencies such as SPIRITS whose physical properties are counterintuitive. Boyer hypothesized that because counterintuitive assumptions are the focus of more cognitive investment and more emotional effects than representations of other types, they are more likely to survive cycles of transmission.

(3) Perception and experiential models argue that shared perceptual processes and experiences in the environment shape cognitive forms cross-culturally, a view influenced by studies of human perception. Most notable in this category are the works of Lakoff (1987) and M. Johnson (1987), who argued for an "experiential realism" that is not prey to the conceptual trappings of subjectivism and objectivism. Lakoff and Johnson began with the premise that the movements of our bodies and their placement in space generate knowledge structures and modes of reasoning that are evident in linguistic usage. A central component of their argument is metaphor. Our thoughts, works, and even our actions are affected by networks of systematically structured metaphors, which reflect basic kinds of physiological experience. The difference between up and down, for example, is an essential aspect of human experience and is evident in English in the pervasiveness of expressions in which the words "up" and "down" metaphorically conceptualize moods, states, and emotional experiences. Other work has focused

Legal Anthropology:

Anthropological studies of law have been conducted within historical and cross-cultural frameworks and have contributed to the development of evolutionary, correlational, and ethnographic theories of social and cultural control. Among eighteenth-century European intellectuals the idea of Law as universal was common. Nineteenth-century anthropologists, though armchair speculators, first began to document the differences between Western and non-Western law. In 1861, Sir Henry Maine examined materials from Europe and India, arguing that changing relations in law (from status to contract) were the result of shifts from kinship-based societies to territorially organized societies. Later researchers, focusing on dominant modes of subsistence, argued that human societies could be scaled along a progressive sequence of legal systems from self-help to penal or compensatory sanctions. For example, Hobhouse (1906) correlated level of economy with types of law, while Durkheim (1933) associated sanctioning patterns with degrees of societal integration, repressive law in primitive societies being progressively replaced by restitutive law in civilized ones.

Malinowski (1926) used direct ethnographic field observations to question widespread myths about law and order among preliterate peoples. He called attention to the important connection between social control and social relations, foreshadowing a generation of anthropological research on how order could be achieved in societies lacking central authority, codes, and constables. Radcliffe-Brown (1933: 202) employed a more jurisprudential approach, making use of Roscoe Pound's definition of law as "social control through the systematic application of the force of politically organized society." By defining law in terms of organized legal sanctions, Radcliffe-Brown concluded that in some simpler societies there was no law.

Henceforth whether all societies had law became a hotly debated topic (Pospisil 1958). If law was defined in terms of politically organized authority, then not all societies had law. If law was defined as "most processes of social control," then all societies did have law, but social control became synonymous with law. Today most anthropologists do not seek to define law either so narrowly or universally. For purposes of analysis, they increasingly report data in the categories used by the people studied or in the analytic categories of the social scientist. Debate continues over whether Western jurisprudence is itself a folk or an analytic system.

Ecological Anthropology:

Although the environmental sciences and environmentalism, including conservation, have roots extending back many centuries (Glacken 1967), they have crystallized mostly since the 1960s and their use in anthropology has been part of this historical process. Each of the subfields of anthropology has developed its own approach to human ecology: paleoecology in archaeology (Butzer 1982); primate ecology (Richard 1985), human adaptability or more narrowly physiological anthropology (Frisancho 1993), and human behavioral ecology (Eric Smith & Winterhalder 1992) in biological anthropology; cultural ecology and later systems ecology in cultural anthropology (Ellen 1982; Hardesty 1977; Netting 1986); and ethnoecology in linguistics (Berlin 1992). Here it must suffice to briefly review the most important developments in attempts by cultural anthropologists to understand human ecology and adaptation since the pioneering work on cultural ecology of Julian Steward and others in the first half of this century.

Although continuities remain from the work of Steward (1955) and his cohorts and predecessors, many of the subsequent ecologically oriented cultural anthropologists have developed new approaches in response to perceived deficiencies in the work of their predecessors (Sponsel 1987). Among these are Andrew Vayda and Roy Rappaport (1968), who developed a systems approach to investigate the interplay of culture and ecology as human populations adapt to their ecosystem(s). They systematically applied concepts from biological ecology to human ecology, including population as the unit of analysis, ecosystem as the context, and adaptation as the dynamic process of interaction between population and ecosystem. They first focused on an analysis of energy input and output in the technology and social organization of work to collect and produce food. All of this was set within the biological framework of limiting factors and carrying capacity. Components of culture such as religion and warfare were viewed as regulating mechanisms that helped to maintain a balance between the population and its resources. This theoretical framework was elegantly implemented by Rappaport (1967) in his fieldwork with the Tsembaga of New Guinea. He viewed their ritual and warfare as regulating the delicate balance between the human and pig populations to reduce competition between these two species. (Humans and pigs are surprisingly close in physiology, body and group size, and omnivorous diet). This "biologization" of the ecological approach in cultural anthropology led to the label "ecological anthropology" replacing Steward's label of "cultural ecology," although the two are sometimes used as synonyms (Bennett 1976, 1993).

Marvin Harris (1979) attempted to advance the ecological explanation as well as description of cultures by developing a more explicit and systematic scientific research strategy, which he called "Cultural Materialism." In this strategy he assigned research priority and causal primacy to infrastructure over structure and superstructure because it is most fundamental for human survival and adaptation. Harris and his students have applied this research strategy to explain many puzzling customs and institutions. The classic case is the sacred cow of India. Harris (1985) argued that the cow is not sacred simply because of Hindu and other religious beliefs, but ultimately because the cow is indispensable to the agricultural economy in the environments of India, especially for plowing, fertilizer (dung), cooking fuel (dried dung), and milk (instead of meat).

The work of Rappaport, Harris, and others working along similar lines has been criticized on many points, but especially for confusing origins and functions (Moran 1990) and for assuming that almost anything that persists is adaptive (Edgerton 1992).

Whereas Harris concentrates on observable behavior because he is impressed with the discrepancy between what people say and do, ecologically oriented linguistic anthropologists have emphasized the investigation of native thought about environmental phenomena. Much of this work has concentrated on constructing hierarchical classifications of native terms referring to particular environmental domains such as soil types for farming or wild plants used for medicinal purposes. Ideally, ethnoecology encompasses local environmental knowledge, beliefs, values, and attitudes, and links environmental ideas with actions and their adaptive or maladaptive consequences. In practice, ethnoecology has often been confined simply to a native taxonomy of some environmental domain or a mere descriptive inventory of the names and uses of a subset of animal or plant species (Berlin 1992). However, some ethnoecologists, such as Harold Conklin (1957, 1980), have gone much further and published unusually detailed data, as exemplified by Conklin's research integrating the ethnoecology and cultural ecology of the agroecosystems of the Hanunoo and Ifugao in the Philippines.

Recently, a few anthropologists have started to transcend some of the limitations of the approaches previously discussed by adding a diachronic dimension in examining how both culture and environment mutually influence and change each other over time, an approach called "historical ecology" (Crumley 1994). Most notable is the work of William Balée (1994) on the Kaapor in the Amazon of Brazil, who recognize 768 species of plants from seed to reproductive adult stages, the largest ethnobotanical repertoire reported for any people in the Amazon. Moreover, Balée has applied historical ecology to integrate aspects of ethnoecology, cultural ecology, biological ecology, political ecology, and regional ecology in a processual framework. In this context he has analyzed the Ka'apor's response to adaptive constraints and opportunities in both their social and natural environments, including other indigenous societies, Afro-Americans, and European migrants who have each had an impact on their natural environment.

Urban Anthropology:

Urban Anthropology examines the social organization of the city, looking at the kinds of social relationship and pattern of social life unique to cities and comparing their different cultural and historical contexts. It emerged as a separate subdiscipline of sociocultural anthropology during the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast to earlier studies of urbanism, urban anthropology applied anthropological concepts and field research methods to urban populations where the city was the context of the research rather than the phenomenon under study.

This focus is most readily apparent in the tendency of urban anthropologists to examine the social organization of small social worlds within the city, analyzing their social life in terms of larger institutional structures of power. Some of these studies are based on territorial units such as neighborhoods; others examine social networks, webs of relationships linking people who may or may not live nearby. Social networks in cities are frequently nonlocalized, stretching from rural areas of origin to larger ethnic settlements in the cities (Boissevain 1974; Gmelch & Zenner 1995).

Urban anthropology also examines social problems characteristic of large cities such as crime, social disorder, poverty, homelessness, and transience. These studies examine the social organization and cultural practices of distinct groups within the city such as gangs (Suttles 1968), ethnic villagers (H. Gans 1962), kinship networks (Stack 1974), homeless alcoholics (Spradley 1970), and criminals and prostitutes (Merry 1981). These studies usually include the systems of bureaucratic regulation, urban politics, welfare administration, urban renewal, and economic conditions that shape local communities. Other research focuses on systems of formal social control such as police, courts, and prisons.

Despite the concentration of research on the United States and Great Britain, urban anthropology is a comparative field. Studies of kinship and neighborhood in British (Michael D. Young & Willmott 1957) and American cities (Liebow 1967; Lamphere1987) are paralleled by similar studies in India (Lynch 1969), South Africa (Philip Mayer 1961), Japan (Bestor 1989), and many other parts of the world. Some anthropologists explore the changing nature of work and union movements in urban centers in developing countries (Epstein 1958). Others examine the disproportionate growth of primate cities at the expense of regional towns as a result of economic development in Third World countries.

Urban anthropologists have worked extensively on the migration of rural peasants to the cities. This research has challenged the proposition that as rural migrants settle in cities their social order and cultural life disintegrates, an argument fundamental to the theory of urbanism as a way of life. Studies of the squatter settlements that grew up as a result of rural migrants flooding into the cities of developing countries during the 1960s and 1970s revealed not anarchy, but emerging forms of social order, planning, and institutional structure (Peattie 1968; Mangin 1970; B. Roberts 1978).

Urban anthropology has always focused particularly on the plight of the urban poor. In his controversial work, Oscar Lewis (1966) argued that there was a culture of poverty, a uniform way of life that emerged among the poorest groups in a variety of urban environments such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, and New York. Although this concept has been extensively criticized, it was an important effort to theorize the social impacts of living on the economic fringes of a large industrial city (Valentine 1968). More recent research views local communities in large industrial cities as the product of late-capitalist development and the progressive impoverishment of the poor. Susser (1982), for example, explored how the changing political economy of the city shapes the life situations of poor people. D. Harvey (1989b) examined changes in urban life as a result of global capital and labor flows. Anthropologists examine political and economic forces that transform urban neighborhoods such as urban renewal, gentrification, disinvestment in cities, the flight of jobs from the city, racial discrimination in the private housing market, public housing policies, and the creation of new towns. Some work explores the way features of architectural design and urban planning shape social life or foster criminal behavior (J. Jacobs 1961; Merry 1981). There has been considerably less published on the way Postmodernity is redefining urban life.

Race, ethnic group, class, and gender as forms of differentiation and exclusion are fundamental to the field, and studies frequently examine how categories of race and ethnicity shape migration and settlement patterns, job opportunities, voluntary organizations, community institutions, access to work and leisure, and the maintenance of kinship relationships (Philip Mayer 1961; Mullings 1987). Ethnicity, in particular, persists in urban areas in the form of ethnic neighborhoods or in such voluntary associations as rotating credit associations and burial societies (Hannerz 1980). Thus, urban anthropology, although inspired in its earlier years by theories of urbanism, now examines social life in the city as it exists for the people who live in it, rather than the city itself.

Symbolic Anthropology:

Symbolic Anthropology takes as its basic tenets the ideas that indigenous meanings are the goal of research and that these meanings, though not explicit, may be discovered in the symbolism of such things as myth and ritual. It is a term that marks both an intellectual movement of the 1970s and 1980s and an anthropological method.

The interpretation of symbolism per se is nothing new, of course. Presumably, it is as old as literature. Moreover, it was the stock in trade of the first generation of anthropologists, in the late nineteenth century. For example, Edward Burnett Tylor (1871) based a reconstruction of the stages of human mental evolution on what was then known about "primitive religions," that is any other than a handful of world religions. By contemporary standards, however, Tylor's interpretations are naive and ethnocentric. They are naive because, in the rationalist mode of his time, Tylor began with the assumption that all the complex rites of primitive religions are a result simply of faulty logic: wrong answers to questions about real phenomena. Tylor's program is often characterized as "intellectualist" in a derogatory sense, but J. W. Burrow caught it better: "the sociology of error" (1966: 7 9). Tylor's interpretations are ethnocentric because he saw no need to delve into other cultures; on the contrary,he assumed that he could see directly into the mind of "primitive man," so that his approach is also called "empathic," again in a derogatory sense.

In the middle decades of this century, interest in symbolism retreated as functionalism advanced. The new paradigm emphasized sociological topics, such as kinship and politics, at the expense of religion. Moreover, the old symbolic studies were tarnished by their association with nineteenth century evolutionism, which functionalism condemned. British functionalists like A. R. Radcliffe-Brown saw themselves as building a new science of society, and they distrusted, with good reason, the manner in which Tylor and his contemporaries had dwelt on the bizarre and the sensational. A concern with symbolism survived only where functionalism failed to gain the ascendancy, notably in the American culture and personality school, which included several members with psychiatric training. But their predisposition toward the universalizing theories of Freud obstructed culturally specific interpretation and tended to perpetuate the ethnocentrism of the evolutionists.

In one important respect, however, functionalism prepared the way for symbolic anthropology by its insistence on holism. Where nineteenth-century anthropologists had made customs seem odd by tearing them out of their proper cultural contexts, functionalism sought to make sense of them by putting them back. It escaped Ethnocentrism by expecting institutions to be intelligible only as parts of whole social systems, and symbolic anthropology does the same with regard to ritual and belief.

Consequently, there was no major break between functionalism and symbolic anthropology. Moreover, interest in religion had never completely disappeared; Max Gluckman wrote interestingly about ritual while remaining the archfunctionalist, for instance in his study of Swazi royal rites (1954). A re-study by T. O. B. Beidelman (1966) demonstrates nicely how a symbolic approach might differ from a functionalist one.

In bridging the two approaches, the most important figure was Gluckman's student Victor TURNER. Turner began his research among the Ndembu of northwestern Zambia with issues of SOCIAL ORGANIZATION, which he found intractable because of the instability of Ndembu villages. By degrees, he realized that the true continuity of Ndembu life lay in its rituals and the ideas and values they expressed. To arrive at these ideas, he devised or adapted methods of interpretation that are best described in the essay "Symbols in Ndembu ritual," which was first published in a collection (Gluckman 1964) and later as a chapter in Turner's most widely read book The forest of symbols (1967). Turner listed three sources of relevant information: "(1) external form and observable characteristics; (2) interpretations offered by specialists and laymen: (3) significant contexts largely worked out by the anthropologist" (1967: 20). In arriving at his interpretations, Turner moved constantly between these sources, checking one against another. The key point is that an interpretation arrived at with one source of data gains conviction when it provides insight elsewhere; it was an inductive process that genuinely sought Ndembu meanings, and in that lies its power and appeal.

Philosophical anthropology:

Philosophical Anthropology is a branch of philosophy concerned to show that, owing to his preponderantly underdetermined nature, man is that animal who must, in large part, determine himself. Although its roots are diffuse and its boundaries fuzzy, in its modern form philosophical anthropology got its beginnings in the 1920s and was especially prevalent in German philosophy. It has ties with existentialism, phenomenology, and Dilthey's "philosophy of life" (in which consciousness is understood in terms of lived or immediate experience). In its development it has drawn on a number of outstanding thinkers, including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Pascal, Herder, Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and von Humboldt. Recent prominent scholars who may be associated with philosophical anthropology include Max Scheler, Adolf Portmann, Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, F. J. J. Buytendijk, Medard Boss, Ludwig Binswanger, Erwin Straus, and Michael Landmann.

What distinguishes philosophical anthropology is its ontological focus on man as the mediator of his own nature. According to Herder, in whose ideas philosophical anthropology is rooted, in man instinct is replaced by freedom; the deficit of specific determinations becomes a condition for the emergence of reason, understanding, and reflection. "No longer an infallible machine in the hands of nature, [man] becomes a purpose unto himself." In effect, a qualita-tive leap is postulated by philosophical anthropology: " in man something is not simply added to the animal . . . [rather] he is fundamentally based on a completely different principle of organization . . . he is the only one who has an open world" (quoted in Landmann 1982).

Feminist Anthropology:

Feminist Anthropology takes as its major premise the idea that the study of women's roles, beliefs, and practices in society is critical to understanding both the particulars and potentials of human social life. Although feminist anthropology focuses on women and women's roles its goal is to provide a more complete understanding of human society. Most feminist anthropologists believe that the insights gathered in Western and non-Western contexts should be used to better the lives of people throughout the world.

Historically, anthropology, like other academic disciplines, was androcentric with a 'deeply rooted male orientation" (Reiter 1975b: 12). Bronislaw Malinowski, the founder of the contemporary anthropological method of participant-observation, typified a variant of this bias when he quipped that "Anthropology is the study of man embracing woman" (Moore 1988: 1). But alongside a general demeaning of the agency of women and the importance of their social roles to the central meaning of human life, anthropologists were likely to present men's perspective as the general perspective of a social group.

For example, when anthropologists wished to study the ritual beliefs of an Australian Aboriginal group they would study the ritual practices of male Australian Aborigines in the mistaken belief that they were the most sociologically important practices. In short, men's roles were not only more centrally studied, but they were also presented as representative of the entire community's beliefs and experiences. Some of the earliest works in feminist anthropology countered this presumption by demonstrating the importance of women and their social and cultural roles to the anthropological endeavor. They studied women and women's roles in the evolution of human society, in the maintenance and negotiation of kinship and the family, and in the operation of global capitalism. Feminist anthropologists posit that it is only by studying women and men across their various age groups that anthropology can truly consider itself a student of the cross-cultural variety of human social experience.

Feminist anthropology and the broader field of contemporary feminist studies arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s during what is commonly referred to as the "second wave of feminism." During these years, Western European and American women in the feminist liberation movement petitioned for their civil and economic rights. The academic, social, and political goals of the feminist liberation movement were developed alongside the black power, native American, and gay and lesbian liberation movements. All these social groups, with representatives in and outside the academy, argued that their social perspectives, experiences, and cultural practices were critical to a proper understanding and appreciation of modern society. The movements came to be known as "identity politics" and helped lead to the institutionalization of women's studies programs, ethnic studies programs, and queer studies programs and to the increase of women and minorities in various academic disciplines.

The analytic concepts sex-difference, gender, and sexuality are critical to the methods and theories utilized in feminist anthropology. The meaning and use of these three terms has changed over the last one hundred years and are currently undergoing significant revision. Generally, "sex-difference" is used to refer to the biological and anatomical differences that exist between males and females. Thus, whether ultimately referred to genetic, genital, hormonal, brain, or physiological differences, sex-difference was privileged over sex-similarities between women and men. This was not always the case even in Western history, where women and men were once believed to share one sex (Laqueur 1990). Throughout history, moreover, there have been "hermaphroditic" humans whose sex organs include components of both female and male physiology.

"Gender" is commonly used to indicate the meanings and roles that a society assigns to sex-difference. Gender is what a society makes of the physical, anatomical, and developmental differences it recognizes. The concepts of masculine and feminine behavior the type of demeanor, activities, and speech that "real men" and "real women" are expected or allowed to have are gender constructs. They are cultural beliefs that organize social practice, not biological facts. Indeed, feminist anthropologists have shown that there are no universal gender roles for women or men. Thus, more than 50 years ago, Margaret Mead (1935: 16, 18) could speculate that,while every culture has in some way institutionalized the roles of men and women . . the temperaments which we regard as native to one sex might be mere variations of human temperament, to which the members of either or both sexes may, with more or less success in the case of different individuals, be educated to approximate.

Recently, a number of poststructural feminists and gender theorists have argued that, in a similar manner to how it constructs gender, culture constructs sex (Butler 1990). In other words, all societies, these theorists argue, construct the body differently, selecting which anatomical differences will be construed as sex-differences and which will not. Moreover, sex is as available for cultural manipulation and alteration as gender, especially in technologically advanced nations. Much of this research has been inspired by, and conceptualized within, the study of sexuality.

"Sexuality" generally refers to how a society and individuals within it organize, act on, conceive of, and represent their erotic and reproductive acts (see sex). Influenced by the emergence of modern psychoanalysis and psychology, anthropologists have studied both institutionalized and noninstitutionalized forms of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Harriet Whitehead (1981: 80) has, however, noted a parallel between the androcentrism of early anthropology and a contemporary "anthropological solecism that often appears in studies . . . interpreting the styles of homosexuality that are fully institutionalized in the light of those that are not." Irrespective, anthropologists have now demonstrated that sex, gender, and sexuality are often closely linked concepts in other cultures and are often utilized for social control. For instance, a society may attempt to control the sexual practices of some age and gender groups but not others. Moreover, societies often represent the sexuality of men and women quite differently: the former as active, virile, and productive, and the latter as dangerous, polluting, or socially problematic. Societies also vary widely in how they think about, represent, and regulate the sexual practices of same-sex couples and cross-sex couples. In the West, same-sex partners suffer political and economic discrimination. But in many societies same-sex sexuality is accepted as a vital erotic practice, part of religious ceremonies, or part of the kinship and alliance systems. Influenced in part by the works of Michel Foucault, recent theorists of culture and sexuality have begun to question the applicability of Western notions of homosexuality and heterosexuality to non-Western cultures.

Visual Anthropology:

Visual Anthropology is the visual and perceptual study of culture, material culture, and forms of human behavior in different communities and environments. As a foundational capability for doing observational fieldwork, the visual and perceptual capacities have been a part of anthropological research since the inception of the field. As a systematized subfield of anthropology, visual anthropology has been undergoing rapid expansion since the 1960s in terms of theory and practice, as well as the availability of resources for teaching and carrying out research. Today, advancing communication technologies are making it possible for anthropological researchers and film- and videomakers to present elements of their visual and intellectual experience to a much wider audience worldwide.

Certain basic elements have been of central concern in visual anthropology since Felix Regnault first shot four short film sequences of a Wolof woman in Paris in 1895. These include purpose, depth of knowledge of the subject, nature of the relationship to the subject, techniques and strategies of expression such as the storyline, themes, editing, intertitles, narration, voice-over, dialogue, subtitles, style, artistic and aesthetics sensibilities, and accuracy and film truth (Hockings 1995; Crawford & Simonsen 1992).

What exactly is an "ethnographic" film has been a source of anguish to many, and the debate has not necessarily helped produce more accurate or telling renditions of social life and behavior. Notwithstanding all the problems of intervention, interpretation, positionality, and subjectivity, today, with the high-level word and image interface, film, video, and television are playing a crucial role in making people better informed cross-culturally. The actual record as images, films, videos is much in demand by audiences, academic and otherwise, worldwide.

More recently issues of levels and acknowledgment of collaboration, gender, authorship, indigenous media, and power have been of concern. Indeed, the concern with power, politics, and poetics of representation is a serious one for cultural translation, comparison, and identity. To be behind the camera is to possess technology, power, and operational knowledge. The dynamics of power sharing and collaboration in the field and in the sites of production and consumption are complex, and morally and ethically delicate. To have control and influence over the distribution of media into today's global market is to have an overriding power to represent and define the terms of cultural identity and cross-cultural recognition (L. Taylor 1991; Crawford & Turton 1992; Lutkehaus 1995b).

Applied Anthropology:

Applied Anthropology is the use of anthropology beyond the usual academic disciplinary concerns for research and teaching to solve practical problems by providing information, creating policy, or taking direct action. The process takes many forms but is always shaped by the practical problem at issue, the available disciplinary knowledge, and the role the anthropologist is expected to play. Since the mid-1970s the term "practicing anthropologist" has increasingly come to replace "applied anthropologist" for those in the field. Practicing anthropologists who apply their knowledge to particular domains (such as health, development or education) also are increasingly defining themselves more specifically (i.e., as "medical anthropologist," "development anthropologist," or "educational anthropologist").

The number of practicing anthropologists has increased significantly in the last 25 years. This trend has been disguised because the anthropologists often hold titles and play a variety of significant roles that do not explicitly highlight their disciplinary background. Such roles currently include those of policy researcher, evaluator, impact assessor, planner, research analyst, advocate, trainer, culture broker, program designer, administrator, and therapist, among many others, and the range is increasing.

Conventional wisdom often assumes that academic anthropology arose first and that it came to be applied. In fact, in many areas the relationship was opposite: applied anthropology was often the starting point of research financed because its sponsors stressed the potential of its practical benefits. Only later did more exclusively academic projects emerge and receive support. For example, the first departments of anthropology in Britain appear to have been touted as kinds of applied anthropology training programs for colonial administrators. The term "applied anthropology" itself was, in fact, first used in a 1906 article describing a program for training administrators at the University of Cambridge. In the United States, The American Bureau of American Ethnology was established in the nineteenth century as a matter of national policy. Its voluminous research on native Americans greatly exceeded that of any university program at the time. This trend continues today. Much foundational work in legal anthropology, medical anthropology, urban anthropology, diet, and demography was first done for applied reasons. Many of the anthropologists who are now regarded as founders of new fields in academic anthropology were at the time they conducted this research regarded as not doing "real" anthropology.

Applied anthropology falls into two general categories: applied research and intervention. Much of the former is done for reasons of social policy, that is, to help inform the policy development process either in a specific or general sense, assess the impact of policy or policy decisions, or evaluate something done because of a policy. It is often conducted under the rubric of social impact assessment, evaluation, cultural resource assessment, or technology development research. Intervention practices most commonly focus on communities rather than individuals. They attempt to (1) identify community perceptions of need as an important part of the program-design process and (2) foster the development of empowered community organizations. Such intervention practices include action anthropology, research and development anthropology, advocacy anthropology, cultural brokerage, participatory action research, and social marketing. Although some anthropologists have served as policymakers, this is still rather rare.

Further readings:

1. Thomas Barfield. 1997. Dictionary of Anthropology, USA: Blackwell.

2. M.D. Murphey introductory notes from the website. Type M.D. Murphey Anthropology in google.

3. Alan Bernard and Jonathan Spencer. 2002. Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. New York: Routledge

Anthropology of Power

Preconditions for power:

Early anthropologies of power:

Power and inequality:

Studies on institutional power:

Colonial influence over the anthropology of power

A note on the evolution of political anthropology and anthropology of power:

Current issues in anthropology of power:

Issues of legitimacy:

Perspectives of legitimacy – I: tale of origins

Perspectives of legitimacy – II: non-rational sources

Power in rituals and performances:

Power in communication:

Power in direct communication:

Construction of messages and world:

Appeal of messages – the efficiency in communication:

Power in presentation of self:

Power in cultural formations:

Effects of cultural aggregation:

Cultural diffusions and power:

Power and access:

Power in public sphere:

Cultural power in the market:

Future directions of anthropology of power:

Global market dimension of power:

Internet and power

Few contemporary theories of power:

Reflections on a few contemporary theories of power:

Concept of Hegemony in anthropology and power:

Foucaultian influence over anthropology of power:

Pierre Bourdieu’s and possible anthropology of power:

Preconditions for power:

Human beings having the capacity for symbolic interpretation of the world around them stems the primary basis on which power rests. Their set of psychological values lead to the emotions that makes them accountable to larger groups like kinship, tribes, and nations. Individuals experience feel sorrow, joy or shame on behalf of the group or some of its members. To remove uncertainty human beings tend to follow the successful actions of others which lead to action in concert. This action in concert results in the tendency to call for leadership and adapt to hierarchical modes of organisation (DiMaggio, 1997). For Boudon (1994) another major attributes of human behaviour is self-delusion. Human beings are part rational with tendency to rationalise their own behaviour, cling to unfounded convictions and adhere ideologies based on false assumptions.

Viewed in a segregated manner these tendencies have significant cultural patterns without hidden power structures of any sort being involved. However, it is more important to understand that these dispositions serve as material for the exertion of power. Organising mass rallies, shaping public opinion, elaborating common symbolic systems, etc. are only possible because of common cultural and psychological predispositions. What makes the study of power more exciting is the fact that the tendencies of human beings discussed above are not deterministic blueprints but are shared to varying degrees among individuals and when they are aggregated researchers are facing an unaccountable variety of political behaviours, mechanics of exercising power.

Early anthropologies of power:

The concept of power is rooted from such nineteenth-century theorists of social evolution as Sir Henry MAINE (1861), who distinguished societies organized by status and by contract in LAW, and Lewis Henry MORGAN's (1877) distinction between kinship and territory as the basis for the organization of GOVERNMENT. In addition it owes much to the discussions about the relationships between moral order and SOCIAL ORGANIZATION found in the writings of Emile DURKHEIM (1933), Max WEBER (1968), and Karl Marx (1887). More recent infusions of theory have come from social scientists such as Michel Foucault (1977b), Pierre Bourdieu (1977), and Anthony Giddens (1984), who focus on the structure of POWER in society.

Power and inequality:

While most anthropological analyses of power have investigated social stratification and hierarchy, some have looked at forms of social organization which assure that power is not individually concentrated, as in the industrial collectives or collectives not organized within state societies. Just as Marx was preoccupied with the question of how labourers came to give up their labour power, anthropologists have studied historically, and prehistorically, the question of how individuals might have come to dominate groups and how one group might have come to dominate another. Archaeological theorizing of inequality has been accompanied with methodological innovations in studying relational power over time (McGuire and Paynter 1991).

Social theorists Max Weber and Émile Durkheim influenced anthropological conceptualization of bureaucratic power in state societies and the perpetuation of institutional authority. Anthropological studies of social movements and state-making, and of national policy, have furthered conceptualization of institutional power and the rituals of its replication. Legal anthropologists, too, have studied cross-culturally the different systems through which power is legitimized, enforced, and contested.

Studies on institutional power:

Anthropologists undertaking studies of institutional power must engage the debates formulated within sociology about structure and agency. C. Wright Mills (1956) argued influentially that social stratification and hierarchy are forcefully maintained by the ‘power elite’, those who, between themselves, mobilize the power to transcend ‘ordinary’ social environments and make decisions that pertain to the lives of people they will never meet, in nations they might never visit. This kind of structural analysis can be seen, for example, in anthropological studies of the itinerant power of transnational corporations. Class analysis has been used by anthropologists to study inequality in many social contexts, not all of them industrialized (see, again, McGuire and Paynter 1991). Anthropologists have also argued that class analysis has its limits, especially in contexts where exploitation is multidirectional, and have been drawn to reformulations of historical materialism, as in Giddens’s theory of structuration—in which ‘power is regarded as generated in and through the reproduction of structures of domination’ (Giddens 1981:4), across time and space, whether those structures of domination rely on the allocation of material resources (as emphasized by Marx) or on, for example, information and surveillance.

Colonial influence over the anthropology of power

Colonial process has considerable influence over anthropology of power. While colonial political structures gave rise to early anthropological studies of the distribution of power through political systems, they also stimulated a variety of intriguing critiques, led most notably in anthropology by Asad (1973) and those in his collection, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Writers outside anthropology greatly influenced the way many anthropologists have conceptualized power and powerlessness, whether between colonizers and colonized or within societies as similar power relations, racialized, have been enacted. Colonial and neo-colonial relations between nations became a useful trope for anthropologists seeking to critique institutional power and the discipline of anthropology’s epistemological role in perpetuating institutionalized power relations. Colonial critiques made more obvious, for example, the ways in which ‘observers’ assigned themselves the power to summarize others’ experience (and that power was reinforced through institutional resources and legitimacy), and the ‘observed,’ as encapsulated in those analyses anyway, were without the power to define themselves or assert autonomy in many other ways. A ‘reinvented’ or ‘decolonized’ anthropology was envisioned as work done by anthropologists with diverse ethnic, class, and political identities on not only traditional topics, but also, as Nader put it (in Hymes 1969), ‘studying up’: to really learn how those who held institutional power did so, and to use that knowledge to address—rather than simply document—social inequalities.

A note on the evolution of political anthropology and anthropology of power:

Text Box: African Political Systems’ introduction and eight ethnographic articles established the problems, the theoretical foundation, the methodology, and the controversy for more than a decade of research into the politics of preindustrial societies.

There are approaches to politics by nineteenth century evolutionists and their counterparts. British functionalists coupling with African experience made lasting contribution on the ways in which pre-capital, pre-colonial societies maintained power relations. The two trends, structural-functionalism and the African experience, came together in 1940 in a work that, at a single blow, established modern political anthropology: African Political Systems, edited by Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. In their introduction, the editors distinguish two types of African political systems: those with centralized authority and judicial institutions (primitive states), and those without such authority and institutions (stateless societies). A major difference between these types is the role of kinship. Integration and decision making in stateless societies is based, at the lowest level, on bilateral family/ band groups and, at a higher level, on corporate unilineal descent groups. State societies are those in which an administrative organization overrides or unites such groups as the permanent basis of political structure. This typology was later criticized as much too simplistic, but the detailed descriptions of how lineages functioned politically in several specific societies were lasting contributions. Social equilibrium was assumed, so that the major problem was to show how the various conflict and interest groups maintained a balance of forces that resulted in a stable, ongoing social structure. The integrating power of religion and symbol were also noted, especially the role of ritual in confirming and consolidating group values.

A more process oriented study is that of by Edmund Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954), which signaled the shift to a more process-oriented, more dynamic form of analysis. In the Kachin Hills area of Burma, Leach found not one but three different political systems: a virtually anarchic traditional system, an unstable and intermediate system, and a small-scale centralized state. Meanwhile, Max Gluckman was also breaking new ground. In his chapter on the Zulu in African Political Systems, in Custom and Conflict in Africa (1956), and in Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (1960), Gluckman developed the theme that equilibrium is neither static nor stable, but grows out of an ongoing dialectical process in which conflicts within one set of relations are absorbed and integrated within another set of relations: cross-cutting loyalties tend to unite the wider society in settling a feud between local groups; witchcraft accusations displace hostilities within a group in a way that does not threaten the system; apartheid in South Africa, while radically dividing white from black, ultimately unites both groups within themselves.

Neo evolutionists especially in United States started more classificatory study of the different forms of political systems. The two major evolutionary works of the period, Elman Service’s Primitive Social Organization (1962) and Morton Fried’s The Evolution of Political Society (1967), were more taxonomic and descriptive than causal; the emphasis was on the characteristics of different levels of

sociocultural integration, rather than on the factors that triggered evolution from one level to another.

The 1980s and 1990s sees the emergence of a distinct feminist anthropology. Virtually all of the writers in the field were examining the relative power of women. Not only was the supposition of universal male domination challenged, but so were other anthropological assumptions, such as the Man-the-Hunter model of physical evolution. In addition to the expected cross-cultural statistical comparisons, two important theoretical schools developed within feminist anthropology—one analyzing the cultural construction of gender and the other, based on Marxist theory, examining the historical development of gender stratification. More recently, postmodern influences have refocused feminist studies away from concerns with male domination to analyses of identity and the ways in which power is subtly infused through every aspect of culture and discourse.

Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982) brought the World System perspective and so-called dependency theory into the mainstream of anthropology. Wolf contended that all, or virtually all, cultures can be understood only in relation to the expansion of European capitalism over the last centuries. In a closely related development, many researchers began to counter the natives-as-victims approach—which focused on the destruction of tribal cultures by the spread of Western civilization—with a new emphasis on the ways in which indigenous peoples fight back, often quite subtly, against the dominant state, either to maintain their group identity or to create for themselves niches of independence and pride. Political scientist James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak (1985) demonstrated how peasants resist—through gossip, slander, petty arson, and thievery—the marginalization that comes with large-scale capitalist agriculture.

Current issues in anthropology of power:

At present anthropology of power has effectively participated in the larger domain power with an interdisciplinary perspective. There are economists, political scientists, cultural geographer, and historians working on the cultural backdrop of power, which is indeed very much anthropological in nature. Following is a list of issues which are both anthropological and have loads of scope for making them anthropological.

Issues of legitimacy:

Among the anthropological concerns one of the spurring areas of research is the variety of works questioning the legitimacy of efficient use of power. Before explaining the issues of legitimacy it is important to clarify why legitimacy is important? While history has numerous examples of maintaining authority with threat and terror, but the cost of constant surveillance of large groups are formidable and next to impossible while governing larger groups. Hence, even the autocratic rulers tend to strengthen their regime by legitimising their strategy.

Legitimacy is inherently cultural phenomena. Legitimacy is attained and expressed by signs and arguments, attached to religious or political doctrines, popularised through slogans, publicised through posters, public decorations or monuments.

Perspectives of legitimacy – I: tale of origins

One of the special type of gaining legitimacy is that of the tale of origin, linked to Weber’s (1978) concept of traditional authority. A group claims the right to rule because its members in the past victoriously fought a common enemy or developed common resources or founded a kingdom or established a special relationship to a deity. The tales often becomes poetic-mythical, full of factual errors but nevertheless remains a powerful mechanism of maintaining legitimacy.

Perspectives of legitimacy – II: non-rational sources

Legitimacy has a vast array of non-rational sources. Daloz (2007) for example argues that claims of legitimacy are often associated with aesthetic appearances. Elaborate and expensive dress, large palaces, breathtaking cathedrals all reinforce the feeling that the powerful deserves their power. Pierre Bourdieu (1996) with his concept ‘Misapprehension’ circles around the attempt to uncover and describe inauthentic versions of legitimacy in a bottom-up perspective. He argues with misapprehension members of a society are drawn into supporting present power holders against their interest, or at least to abstain from protest. This is primarily done by means of subtle mechanisms of persuasion. This is part of the so called concept of teaken for grantedness as Lerner (1980) with his “just world” hypothesis notes humans have a tendency to experience present conditions as generally fair and based on good reasons.

Power in rituals and performances:

Rituals are social occasions to recapitulate an ancient event. It is stylised and repeated. Goffman (1967) finds rituals in everyday interaction, in so far as they represent patterned ways of interaction. Alexander (2004) and Collins (2004) finds that rituals reinforce social relationships, hence social rules and legitimacies are also get reinforced. Religious communion, parades on national day, weddings and funerals all have the aspect of internalisation of common values, power structure and legitimacy.

There are aspects of conflicts in rituals. Gomard and Krogstad (2001) argue that in many modern democracies, election campaigns are concluded by television debates where the main contenders fight like gladiators over the confidence of their voters.

Power in communication:

The primary necessity of communication in the power is to make oneself understandable in order to impinge on the behaviour of the other. However, this does not mean that the power exercisers must let the others know their true intentions; rather, it requires strategic behaviour where the actor must suppress parts of actual intentions.

Power in direct communication:

Speech acts does not always mean exercising of power through only the said part. Grice (1989) finds that utterance refers to the meaning implied even without being directly expressed by the speaker. For example stating “window is open” often carries order or request (depending on the tone/voice/relationship/hierarchy) to the listener to “close the window.” Thomas (1996) studies the range of external sanctions and attributes to make the speaker’s intentions understandable.

There are understudied aspects of threats and promises, command and subordination, normative commitments, appeals etc. lying inherently in power in communication.

Construction of messages and world:

With the rise in social constructivism as a powerful theoretical tool the domain power in constructing the world and messages of the world becomes a plausible way of interpreting the mechanism of exercising power. In this communication system, the speaker does not make any requests or commands but pre-empts that the listener will make decisions on his own base on the new information.

Pernot (2005) explains this from the perspective of Aristotlian logos, pathos and ethos of speech. Logos stands for the subject matter under discussion, and how to articulate speech to make meaning optimal. Logos means the subject under discussion. Pathos means the pre-emption of reactions in the audience, i.e. how to make people listen. Ethos means the ways of making the speaker credible.

Scholars like Lamont (1990), Lamont and Fournier (1992) focus on the selection procedure, i.e. how selective reading, focusing and explaining part of given fact leads to the distinctions between worthy/unworthy, decent/indecent, high culture/low culture, right belief/heresy, national loyalty/treason.

Appeal of messages – the efficiency in communication:

The appeal of messages reflects its ability to speak to the hearts of the audience. Max Weber’s (1922) notion of bureaucratisation of charisma discusses the difficulties of striking balances between relatively abstract and generalised message construction in addressing complex and heterogenous audiences as the generalisation loses appeal. Addressing the deep concerns of people, often the messages conveyed by charismatic leaders is seen as highly efficient means of exercising control.

Power in presentation of self:

One of the major aspects of communication termed as ethos (Pernot, 2005) concerns the speaker presenting himself or herself as a competent and trustworthy person. Baur and Esaiasson (2001) studied the different modes of making the self trustworthy. The major forms are: a) speaker’s lived and/or eyewitness experience, b) speaker’s referencing of earlier success, c) speaker’s general prestigious position in the social field. Bourdieu’s (1990) work on symbolic capital focus on the transfer of credibility of person acquired in one field to another. The most conspicuous example is film star’s participation in politics and election.

Varieties power and their location in the entire cultural field centre on the presentation and conception self. Studies include the variations in senses and meanings of the word charisma. In democratic countries it is difficult for a leader to strike the balance between being a part of the voters and yet being different and charismatic. Krogstad and Storvik (2007) with their detailed comparative studies argue that political charisma range from outer-directed, conquering form of charisma to more inner-directed, compassionate form. Daloz (2003, 2007) points that while Scandinavian leaders are expected to appear in modest way, Nigeria occupies another end of the spectrum. Here politicians must demonstrate their power ostentatiously, by their way of dressing, their cars and their residences.

Krogstad and Storvik (2007) examine the connections between power and sex in politician’s presentation of self. This ranges from most sublime way in countries like Scandinavia and most openly in France. With the rapid spread of mass media credibility of a politician is most commonly linked to sex appeal, and that lack of sex appeal easily gets translated to lack of political appeal. Although less studied, the dimensions of femininity and gender with charisma reserves unexplored aspects of femininity in power positions.

Power in cultural formations:

Existing cultural formations, popularly known as social structure form the necessary context for action. Actions entail a reconfiguration of structures, and the actions in the next round contribute to shaping the identity of the actors themselves. The structure of dominance is studied from the lens of cultural dominance that requires a closer examination of the larger mechanisms at work (Mann, 1986).

Effects of cultural aggregation:

A widely studied aspect of cultural aggregation is the focus on the ways in which individually rational actions entail unintended, collectively irrational outcomes. Leiss et al. (1990) focus on the ways in which because advertisements people individually make rational choices of buying a product but it in turn lead to emergence of a commercial culture with significant elements of irrationality.

Sheer fact of numbers results in dominance of numerically strong group over the weak. This is especially true in case of two tolerant religious communities cohabiting together. Even though they are tolerant to each other isolated events of atrocities might lead to chain of events disrupting the equilibrium (Schelling, 1978).

Cultural diffusions and power:

Social prestige serves as a crucial factor in diffusion of cultural patterns. The mechanism of transmission of such cultural elements involves power. One of the earlier issues of such diffusion is that of trickling down of fashion which results in a situation where potentially everyone buys into style originated in the most prestigious layers of the society (Fallers, 1954).

Power and access:

Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) link the attributes of power with the access. A well known power position is that of gate-keeping. The gate-keepers, whether secretary to a boss, or ministers, men of political leaders, and have a special opportunity in filtering information flows and regulating access.

Power in public sphere:

Public sphere represents an arena where citizens meet and exchange views on matters of common interest. More recently, especially after the rapid spread of internet there is over expanding boundaries and participation of public in public sphere. This new form of public sphere is a product of what is known as medialization.

Jurgan Habermas (1989[1962], 1994), a well known theorist of public sphere in his initial work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere argues that the growing commercialisation of mass media has a negative effect as it restricts the free development of civil society and making discussing citizens to a passive audience. With similar tone Sennett (1977) characterises the fall of ‘public men’ with the rise of media. In a later work Further Reflections on the Public Sphere, (Habermas, 1994) he accepts the positive roles of the media and wide spread education in shaping public opinion. Others like, Schudson (1995) is of the view that the development of media is core component of the development of democracy. For Schudson economically and politically media is dependent on its readers, listeners and spectators, something that strengthens the power of the public. However, the power tend to flow on the opposite direction. The media cannot dictate their audience which opinions to hold , their power lies in their ability to turn the attention of the public in a given direction by selecting information, shaping perceptions and evoking core values (McCoombs and Shaw, 1972)

Cultural power in the market:

One of the growing and still understudied areas of research is the focus on cultural power in markets of mass production. Due to growing affluence of the larger part of the population, design, advertising and distribution of everyday utensils has acquired a distinct aesthetic and cultural component. While Thorstein Veblen’s (1994 [1889]) conspicuous consumption, originally alluding to upper classes, has become relevant for the majority of the population in modern societies. In a parallel process the cultural industry has taken off as one of the major industries in the modern economy, creating a role model for larger number of people. The result is anesthetization of everyday life on an unprecedented scale.

The main power component lies in the process of branding of commercial goods by means of symbolic connotations. Through advertising campaigns the brand name is connoted to youthfulness, playfulness, sophistication or seriousness, depending on the target group. The crucial link in branding is the combination of confidence – the customer presumes that the soft drink will be of the same quality tomorrow that it is today – and identity – the quality and characteristics of the product spill over to the customer herself. These presumptions are reinforced by the observation that large groups of consumers think the same way.

Future directions of anthropology of power:

The above discussion represents major areas where research work on power has been done and still growing. These issues are mostly taken up from the studies which concentrate on the 20^th century power relations. The dynamics of information technology and internet in the twenty-first century certainly opens up new avenues of research.

Global market dimension of power:

One of the obvious aspects of changing cultural power relations all over the world is the diffucion of branded consumption goods. The same jeans, snickers, hamburgers, soft drinks, watches or their pirate imitations are offered almost everywhere in the world. The few international corporations controlling the symbolic capital of international brands exert a formidable power in global market segments. Gereffi (2005) gives a descriptive analytical study of how the corporate power not only concerns the distribution of goods charged with symbolic messages, their production is globalised in chains of manufacturing as well. There are arrangements of countries hierarchical order where low-wage countries make up long hierarchical production chains. The parallel rise of media communication funded by these corporations, where no corner of the world is remote enough to receive a satellite signal to listen to pop music, see Hollywood movies, and soap operas contributing to the process of increasing commodification and for Larkin (2002) the growing homogenisation. On the other side, there is rising discomfort among many who suffer from the feeling of cultural inferiority. Henceforth, for Gray (2004) the fundamentalist movement like Al-Quaida is not a traditional one, rather, it is acutely modern phenomenon.

Internet and power

The power dimension in society has gained newer dimensions with the rise in internet usage. Internet has greatly facilitated the organising of social movements. Scholars mostly focus on the major strategies, or major strategic uses of internet in the dimension of power. Kolb (2005) and Porta at al. (2006) notes one of the major strategic use of internet in social movements is to gather mass support, organise rally, and spread news. Vegh (2003) focus on the exercise of power through hacktivism in cyberwars by attacks on websites. A third and much less studied dimension is the growth of discussion groups radically beyond physical boundaries but creating newer and micro boundaries based on particular taste and openion. For Engelstad (2009) this area needs much detailed studies in near future.

Few contemporary theories of power:

Although there is immense and growing scope for anthropologists to explore some, or all of the above mentioned fields of power, yet what seems from the bulk of ethnographic materials is that early Anthropologists concentrated on the types of pre-industrial political systems, evolution of states, religious issues in politics and much later process theory and action theory. Issues of social movements, gender issues in power, ethnicity and nationalist issues of identity in the context of globalisation are gaining attention in much recent period.

Reflections on a few contemporary theories of power:

Several contemporary theories growing outside the strict domain of anthropology has significant influence on the anthropological concept of power.

Concept of Hegemony in anthropology and power:

Hegemony, the concept of totalizing power (in which the state and/or a popular majority dominate, through every means, ‘civil society’) articulated by Gramsci (1971), provided anthropologists with a way to think about pervasive institutionalized power. The Subaltern Studies group (Guha and Spivak 1988), worked through a critical deconstruction of colonial historiography to recognize the powerful ways in which colonial subjects had been left without a voice in strategic discussions of their identity, resources, and future. Earlier, as anthropologists in the US and in France rethought the political role of intellectuals in reaction to their nations’ protracted war in Vietnam, the concept of hegemony became a way to think about how the state did indeed have agency, through a militarized institutional apparatus, to repress—ideologically, socially, and physically– those citizens who held contradictory views about state actions. That was also a time when, in anthropology, theories of resistance took their cue from political movements.

Foucaultian influence over anthropology of power:

The social theorist who has most shaped anthropologists’ recent discussions of power is Michel Foucault (1977, 1980), although not all those writings influenced by him reproduce Foucault’s views of power.

Two of his writings a) Discipline and Punish (1977) and b) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings have influenced and shaped whole lot anthropological discussions of power. His more recent publication with neologism “governmentality” which discusses the essential nature of power in governing virtually every human affair gives a new dimension to the study of power.

Concept of power in Discipline and Punish:

In his Discipline and Punish Foucault begins with an agonizingly detailed account of a public torture that took place on March 2, 1757, in the plaza in front of the main door of the Church of Paris. Over a period of hours, the accused’s ﬂesh was torn with red-hot pincers and upon the wounds was poured “molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together,” and then his limbs were pulled off by six horses. Finally, his still living body was thrown on a ﬁre. The crime that justiﬁed such grisly spectacle was an attempted assassination of the king of France, within who resided the power of the state. Public torture was thus a form of ritual that symbolically reafﬁrmed and restored threatened sovereignty. In the preindustrial economy of France, society was based on a personal relationship between the sovereign and his subjects. Within the theatre of pain, spectators were not mere observers, but were active participants in the re-establishment of order.

Jump ahead 80 years—the period of the French Revolution. Foucault quotes from the rules governing a prisoner’s day. Gone is any deliberate attempt to inﬂict pain. Rather, what we see is dreary regimentation, based on the belief that the prisoner can be redeemed through control of his most minute behavior. Incarceration becomes the primary means not so much of punishment but of transformation. Public execution continues, but without the torture, and its meaning has radically changed. State killing is no longer an afﬁrmation of the power of the king over his subjects, but has become a morality play in which the public is instructed in proper behavior.

This does not mean that the state has become more benign or less repressive, but only that a new political economy has brought about an alteration in the way that power functions. For Foucault, this was a crucial transitional period, when the mechanisms of power assumed a “capillary form of existence...where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives. The eighteenth century invented, so to speak, a synaptic regime of power, a regime of its exercise within the social body, rather than from above it” (Foucault 1980: 39). In the world of feudalism, serfs could be easily regulated from above, but industrial capitalism required that the individual regulate himself. This would be accomplished through a process of disciplinary observation, or surveillance, which was aimed not only at the body but also at the subject’s very soul (a term Foucault takes seriously to represent the psyche, personality, consciousness, and subjectivity of the individual). The quintessential model of surveillance is found in Jeremy Bentham’s design for the panopticon prison, a circle of cells built around a central guard tower. In concept, each inmate is visible every moment. Of course, in practice every convict could not be under the guard’s gaze at all times, but the possibility and illusion of constant surveillance would be sufﬁcient to induce proper prison behavior. Here we have an inversion of visibility. In the days of the sovereign, it was the powerful that were most visible; now the subject is visible and power is hidden.

Power in Power/Knowledge:

‘Power in the substantive sense, “le” pouvoir, doesn’t exist…power means…a more-or-less organised, hierarchical, co-ordinated cluster of relations’ (1980:198), despite the fact that it ‘is never localised here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity’ (1980:98), never alienable or transferable. Foucault rejects what he calls the juridical/liberal/economic view of power as ‘that concrete power which every individual holds, and whose partial or total cession enables political power or sovereignty to be established’ (1980:88). Yet he sometimes reifies power as beyond individual or even collective control: ‘the impression that power weakens and vacillates…is…mistaken; power can retreat…reorganise its forces, invest itself elsewhere’ (1980:56).

In contrast to the binary views of power articulated by so many, whether cast in terms of gendered power relations focusing on patriarchy and those oppressed by it, or domination and resistance, Foucault saw power as being produced and reproduced through constant social interaction, from many different directions. He countered arguments about power as constituted through structural positions between individuals or social classes with arguments about power as being problematic, contested, and requiring constant, disciplined persuasion to convince those construed as powerless of their powerlessness and those construed as powerful of their powerfulness. Although he wrote about institutional sites as important for reproducing power relations, Foucault (1981:93) described power as ‘not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society’. Influenced by Foucault’s analysis, Kondo (1990:307) stated in her ethnography of the crafting of identity in Japan that power is ‘creative, coercive, and coextensive with meaning’. A view of power as not simply embedded in structural relations—maintained by force of one kind or another—but also as constituted through language and everyday practice (Bourdieu 1991) engendered many ethnographies exploring the specific, historicized ways in which power has been constructed and challenged in different social contexts (cf. Comaroff 1985). Foucault’s work has drawn anthropological attention to the relational aspects of power, with a concentration on the contexts of actions and interpretations, and away from structural control of resources by individuals with fairly static institutional authority. Some critics of Foucault think that attention has strayed, in the late 1980s and 1990s, too far from structural power; some feminist theorists, for example, have argued that Foucault and other writers of postmodern social criticism have—while meaning to eliminate ‘big stories’—replaced binary structural models of power which have been useful for theorizing oppression (especially by those working to understand the social mechanism of their own disempowerment) with a less useful totalizing model of over determination (e.g. power is everywhere, thus what social site does one go about working to transform?). They also argue that, once again, the ‘powerless’ have not been left space, or agency, in the discussion to articulate their own theories of power. (This, of course, has continued to happen despite the actions of any social theorist.) The historical focus that Foucault brought to his discussion of the disciplining of bodies and minds through hospitals, prisons, courts, and schools, has had its effect in medical, legal, and educational anthropology, or at least coincided with trends in these and other areas of anthropological study, as more anthropologists have turned from synchronic ethnographic studies to diachronic discussions of social institutions. For example, Emily Martin’s comparative study of birthing practices (1987) demonstrates the institutional ways in which women are empowered or disempowered in relation to control of their own bodies and actions. Anthropologists have been informed, also, by researchers working in sociology and other disciplines on collective—or participatory—research strategies that challenge the epistemological leverage of an ‘expert,’ whether the researcher or some other person asserting ‘legitimate authority’ in a social setting, and recentre the ‘subjects’ of study as those with the power to legitimize research design and documentation.

Power in Governmentality:

The lectures of 1978 and 1979 focus on the "genealogy of the modern state" (Lect. April 5, 1978/1982b, p. 43). Foucault coins the concept of "governmentality" as a "guideline" for the analysis he offers by way of historical reconstructions embracing a period starting from Ancient Greece through to modern neo-liberalism (Foucault 1997b, p. 67). The semantic linking of governing ("gouverner") and modes of thought ("mentalité") indicates that it is not possible to study the technologies of power without an analysis of the political rationality underpinning them. But there is a second aspect of equal importance. Foucault uses the notion of government in a comprehensive sense geared strongly to the older meaning of the term and adumbrating the close link between forms of power and processes of subjectification. While the word government today possesses solely a political meaning, Foucault is able to show that up until well into the 18th century the problem of government was placed in a more general context. Government was a term discussed not only in political tracts, but also in philosophical, religious, medical and pedagogic texts. In addition to the management by the state or the administration, "government" also signified problems of self-control, guidance for the family and for children, management of the household, directing the soul, etc. For this reason, Foucault defines government as conduct, or, more precisely, as "the conduct of conduct" and thus as a term which ranges from "governing the self" to "governing others".

The concept of governmentality has correctly been regarded as a “key notion” (Allen 1991, p. 431) or a “deranging term” (Keenan 1982, p. 36) of Foucault’s work. It plays a decisive role in his analytics of power in several regards: it offers a view on power beyond a perspective that centers either on consensus or on violence; it links technologies of the self with technologies of domination, the constitution of the subject to the formation of the state; finally, it helps to differentiate between power and domination. There are several aspects of the concept of governmentality that needs attention:

Introducing the problematics of government Foucault takes up this question. He now underlines that power is foremost about guidance and “Führung”, i.e. governing the forms of self-government, structuring and shaping the field of possible action of subjects. This concept of power as guidance does not exclude consensual forms or the recourse to violence, it signifies that coercion or consensus are reformulated as means of government among others, they are rather “elements” or “instruments” than the “foundation” or “source” of power relationships (Foucault 1982a, pp. 219-222).
Governmentality is introduced by Foucault to study the "autonomous" individual's capacity for self-control and how this is linked to forms of political rule and economic exploitation. In this regard, Foucault’s interest for processes of subjectivation does not signal that he abandons the problematics of power, but on the contrary, it displays a continuation and correction of his older work, that renders it more precise and concrete.
Foucault introduces a differentiation between power and domination which is only implicit in his earlier work. He insists that “we must distinguish the relationships of power as strategic games between liberties – strategic games that result in the fact that some people try to determine the conduct of others – and the states of domination, which are what we ordinarily call power. And, between the two, between the games of power and the states of domination, you have governmental technologies” (Foucault 1988b, p. 19). It follows that Foucault identifies three types of power relations: strategic games between liberties, government and domination.

Power as strategic games is a ubiquitous feature of human interaction, insofar as it signifies structuring the possible field of action of others. This can take many forms, e.g. ideological manipulation or rational argumentation, moral advice or economic exploitation, but it does not necessarily mean that power is exercised against the interests of the other part of a power relationship; nor does it signify that “to determine the conduct of others” is intrinsically “bad”. Moreover, power relations do not always result in a removal of liberty or options available to individuals, on the contrary power in the sense Foucault gives to the terms, could result in an “empowerment” or “responsibilisation” of subjects, forcing them to “free” decision-making in fields of action.

Government refers to more or less systematized, regulated and reflected modes of power (a “technology”) that go beyond the spontaneous exercise of power over others, following a specific form of reasoning (a “rationality”) which defines the telos of action or the adequate means to achieve it. Government then is “the regulation of conduct by the more or less rational application of the appropriate technical means” (Hindess 1996, p. 106). For example in his lectures on the “genealogy of the state” Foucault distinguishes between the Christian pastorate as a spiritual government of the souls oriented to salvation in another world and state reason as a political government of men securing welfare in this world. In much the same way disciplinary or sovereign power is reinterpreted not as opposite forms of power but as different technologies of government.

Domination is a particular type of power relationship that is stable and hierarchical, fixed and difficult to reverse. Foucault reserves the term “domination” to “what we ordinarily call power” (1988b, p. 19). Domination refers to those asymmetrical relationships of power in which the subordinated persons have little room for manoeuvre because their “margin of liberty is extremely limited” (1988b, p. 12). But states of domination are not the primary source for holding power or exploiting asymmetries, on the contrary they are the effects of technologies of government. Technologies of government account for the systematization, stabilization and regulation of power relationships that may lead to a state of domination (see Hindess 1996; Patton 1998, Lazzarato 2000).

Pierre Bourdieu’s and possible anthropology of power:

For Bourdieu, the crucial question faced by the social sciences is one of power: How do hierarchical social systems maintain and reproduce themselves over time? Obviously, in modern democratic societies, social status is not maintained by force, nor is it—a la Marx—essentially a matter of economics, of who owns the means of production. Indeed, teachers, artists, writers, and other intellectuals are often represented in the status hierarchy at much higher levels than might be predicted by their incomes or political power. The answer lies partially in that all cultural symbols and practices embody social distinction and thus help to determine the hierarchies of power.

Crucial to this analysis is that culture itself is a form of capital, just as are money and property. Cultural capital is manifested in several different ways. It can be a largely unconscious set of predispositions that emerge from socialization into a particular class: ways of speaking and writing; a general awareness of how society works; preferences for certain types of art, music, and literature; and even posture and stride. Cultural capital can also be objectiﬁed in published books, in the possession of scientiﬁc instruments that require specialized knowledge, or in paintings that one has produced. Finally, cultural capital includes such things as graduate degrees or licenses to practice medicine that have been achieved within an educational credentials market. Side by side with such cultural capital is social capital: kin relations, circles of friends, and inﬂuential old-boy networks. Cultural capital, like economic capital, is a limited and often-scarce resource. One inherits a certain amount of it from one’s parents, but much has to be attained and maintained through intense competition throughout life.

Those with the most and most valued cultural capital at once reﬂect the norms of society and establish those norms. It is they who have the capacity to impose a taken-for-granted worldview on the rest of society. For the middle classes and under classes this worldview—an unquestioned acceptance of hierarchies of power and of inequalities—is close to what Marx refers to as “false consciousness,” but it does not necessarily emerge from nor is it reproduced among the wealthy alone. This is why Bourdieu puts such an emphasis on intellectuals; in France he ﬁnds in writers, artists, musicians, and philosophers the means of creating and legitimizing power. The social conditionings implicit in such legitimization are embraced within the individual’s habitus. Bourdieu (1990: 53) deﬁnes this term in The Logic of Practice, rather confusingly, as:

“Systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aim at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them.”

In other words, habitus is Bourdieu’s solution to the perennial problem of structure versus agency: how does society determine or at least circumscribe individual behavior when individuals are ostensibly free to act of their own accord? Why does the behavior of individuals follow statistically predictable patterns? For Bourdieu, social reality is objective and subjective, simultaneously in-here and out-there. Habitus is the largely unconscious internalization of the objective norms and rules of society that suggest how we might act within any given situation. It is not determinative, because norms and rules are not rigid; indeed, it may be conﬂictive; contested; and, within limits, malleable. In fact, in situations in which action is highly regulated, as in a prison or the military, habitus may play little or no role because decision making is minimized. Most human action does not result from consciously selecting among all possible alternatives, but is, rather, the result of mental habit. Given any situation, habitus will provide a framework that will direct action within a very limited number of improvisations.

Holism in Anthropology

Definition:

Anthropological Sense:

Holism as an approach and research strategy:

Functionalism and holism:

Applications of Holism:

Contemporary relevance in Anthropology:

Definition:

Holism (from holos, a Greek word meaning all, entire, total) is the idea that all the properties of a given system (physical, biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, etc.) cannot be determined or explained by its component parts alone. Instead, the system as a whole determines in an important way how the parts behave.

Anthropological Sense:

Whether anthropology should be considered as holistic in spirit or not is a debatable issue. The supporters of holistic camp give the concept two senses, first, it is concerned with all human beings across times and places, and with all dimensions of humanity (evolutionary, biophysical, sociopolitical, economic, cultural, psychological, etc.). Further, many academic programs following this approach take a "four-field" approach to anthropology that encompasses physical anthropology, archeology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology or social anthropology. Each of these unique subdisciplines in anthropology contributes different aspects to the understanding of humans in the past and present. Rather than focusing on a single aspect of being human, such as history or biology, anthropology is distinct in its holism. These subdisciplines provide the basis for this holistic approach. Second, the functional school which strives for an approach of studying human society and culture in terms of integrated components together comprising a social hole.

According to McGee and Warms’s discussion of Boas in their history of anthropological theory, Boas “pioneered the concept of cultural relativism in anthropology.” Further, his approach of historical particularism emphasized the discipline’s holism, and drew upon the study of “prehistory, linguistics, and physical anthropology” (McGee and Warms 2000, p.131). Boas’s desire to introduce scientific rigor to this emerging academic field and his quest for holism were directly responsible for academic American anthropology acquiring the four-field signature of cultural (social) anthropology, archaeology (or prehistory), biological (or physical) anthropology, and linguistics anthropology (Miller 2004, p. 2). This holistic approach would distinguish American anthropology, going forward, from its European progenitors. Boas also brought to this emerging discipline a new “agenda for social reform” as well as theories of race that challenged the prevailing status quo beliefs. He believed that environment and nurturing were significant factors in human development. In his 1940 essay, “Anthropological Study of Children,” Boas noted, “Some observations have been made that illustrate the influence of environment, not only upon growth of the bulk of the body but also upon some of the forms that develop very early in life” (Boas 1982, p. 101). Boas’s students were the first generation of formally trained academic American anthropologists, and many would become leading figures in the discipline— Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, and Ruth Benedict. Subsequent students included Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston.

In contemporary cultural anthropology, the theoretical positions of the cultural materialists and the interpretive anthropologists correspond to two different definitions of culture. Cultural materialist Marvin Harris defines culture as the total socially acquired life-way or life-style of a group of people, a definition that maintains the emphasis on the holism established by Tylor. In contrast, Clifford Geertz, speaking for the interpretivists, defines culture as consisting of symbols, motivations, moods, and thoughts. The interpretivist definition excludes behavior as part of culture. Again, avoiding a somewhat extreme dichotomy, it is reasonable and comprehensive to adopt a broad definition of culture as all learned and shared behavior and ideas.

While, the holistic approach permits anthropologists to develop a complex understanding of entire societies, anthropology also adds another dimension of analysis through cross-cultural comparison. When examining any particular society, the anthropologist is interested in seeing how that society is similar to or differs from others. This perspective allows anthropologists to open their eyes to what may seem "obvious" or "natural" in the cultural world in which they are immersed. For example, an anthropologist studying Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Rwanda will understand this experience and its theoretical implications more fully by comparing it to the Serb-Croat-Albanian conflict in the former Yugoslavia and to other cases of nationalism which have not led to mass violence, such as the situation of nationalism and separatism in Quebec Click on the links below to find out more about social and cultural anthropology.

Holism as an approach and research strategy:

Holism is also seen as a research strategy that separates cultural anthropology from other disciplines. Holism is the search for systematic relationships between two or more phenomena. One of the advantages of lengthy periods of fieldwork and participant observation is that the anthropologist can begin to see interrelationships between different aspects of culture. One example might be the discovery of a relationship between ecological conditions, subsistence patterns, and social organization. The holistic approach allows for the documentation of systematic relationships between these variables, thus allowing for the eventual unravelling of the importance of various relationships within the system, and, ultimately, toward an understanding of general principles and the construction of theory.

In practical terms, holism also refers to a kind of multifaceted approach to the study of culture. Anthropologists working in a specific cultural setting typically acquire information about topics not necessarily of immediate importance, or even interest, for the research project at hand. Nevertheless, anthropologists, when describing the culture they are working with, will often include discussions of culture history, linguistics, political and economic systems, settlement patterns, and religious ideology. Just as anthropologists become proficient at balancing emic and etic approaches in their work, they also become experts about a particular theoretical problem, for which the culture provides a good testing ground, and they become experts about the cultural area, having been immersed in the politics, history, and social science of the region itself. Anthropology's holistic perspective helps fieldworkers understanding this pattern. Holism means that an anthropologist looks at the entire context of a society when analysing any specific feature. For example, to understand the Japanese tea ceremony, anthropologists might investigate Japanese religion, aesthetics and history, as well as the economy, social relations and the politics of gender. Their colleagues studying medical practices in Japan might find the tea ceremony interesting as an alternative therapy used by people who also rely on hospital-based physicians.

Functionalism and holism:

Functionalist assumption was that the constituent parts of every society, from individuals to the largest political and social institutions, must be seen as interrelated and from a holistic point of view. While variations on this assumption divided British anthropologists from their U.S./American colleagues (see below), the important methodological ramification of this assumption, holism, remained true on both sides of the Atlantic. In other words, all constituent parts of a society must be seen as interacting with and influencing all others. As a result, it was impossible to study, for example, kinship in this paradigm without also looking at religion, politics, subsistence, and all other aspects of society.

Every version of the theory is that functional characterization is holistic. Functionalists hold that mental states are to be characterized in terms of their roles in a psychological theory—be it common sense, scientific, or something in between—but all such theories incorporate information about a large number and variety of mental states. Thus if pain is interdefined with certain highly articulated beliefs and desires, then animals who don't have internal states that play the roles of our articulated beliefs and desires can't share our pains, and humans without the capacity to feel pain can't share certain (or perhaps any) of our beliefs and desires. In addition, differences in the ways people reason, the ways their beliefs are fixed, or the ways their desires affect their beliefs — due either to cultural or individual idiosyncracies — might make it impossible for them to share the same mental states. These are regarded as serious worries for all versions of functionalism (see Stich 1983, Putnam 1988).

Some functionalists, however (e.g. Shoemaker 1984c), have suggested that if a creature has states that approximately realize our functional theories, or realize some more specific defining subset of the theory particularly relevant to the specification of those states, then they can qualify as being mental states of the same types as our own. The problem, of course, is to specify more precisely what it is to be an approximate realization of a theory, or what exactly a “defining” subset of a theory is intended to include, and these are not easy questions. (They have particular bite, moreover, for analytic functionalist theories, since specifying what belongs inside and outside the “defining” subset of a functional characterization raises the question of what are the conceptually essential, and what the merely collateral, features of a mental state, and thus raise serious questions about the feasibility of (something like) an analytic-synthetic distinction. (Quine 1953, Rey 1997).

As the name implies, the primary quest for understanding among functionalists was the search for the biosocial or social structural function of any given institution for maintaining the integrity of society. Functionalists assumed that all social institutions or cultural traits, no matter how obscure or seemingly maladaptive, were somehow integral to maintaining the society or culture within the ecological and social contexts in which it existed. Methodologically, this contributed to the development and refinement of anthropological relativism, the belief that all cultures and societies, as well as their constituent traits and institutions, must be looked at in their own context rather than judged by the values and norms of the anthropologist.

Applications of Holism:

Cultures are integrated. To state that cultures are internally integrated is to assert the principle of holism. Thus, studying only one or two aspects of culture provides understanding so limited that it is more likely to be misleading or wrong than more comprehensively grounded approaches. Cultural integration and holism are relevant to applied anthropologists interested in proposing ways to promote positive change. Years of experience in applied anthropology show that introducing programs for change in one aspect of culture without considering the effects in other areas may be detrimental to the welfare and survival of a culture. For example, Western missionaries and colonialists in parts of Southeast Asia banned the practice of head-hunting. This practice was embedded in many other aspects of culture, including politics, religion, and psychology (i.e., a man’s sense of identity as a man sometimes depended on the taking of a head). Although stopping head-hunting might seem like a good thing, it had disastrous consequences for the cultures that had practiced it.

Anthropologists like La Barre emphasized holism in anthropology, as indicated by his classic 1954 work, The Human Animal. Here, he showed how specific human traits such a language, family, and culture were reciprocally related to the specific biology and evolution of the human species. He later continued this theme and argued for the role of human biology in religion and even gender. In his 1970 classic, The Ghost Dance, he argued that religion’s origins must be sought in its creators, human beings, and their experiences of socialization and society, a theme to which he returned in his last book, Shadow of Childhood (1991).

Contemporary relevance in Anthropology:

American anthropology continues to embrace holism, and although the four-field approach, the culture concept, and cultural relativism have drawn sharp criticism and debate, they remain cornerstones of the discipline’s distinctiveness. American anthropology’s history of contributing to social reform has also attracted new thinkers that include women, nonwhite, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered anthropologists. Their contributions include ongoing interrogations of evolutionist

theories, positivism, modernization, critiques of ethnocentrism, homophobia, sexism, and racism, both in the society and within the academy, and challenges to the scientific validity of the concept of race, while acknowledging the power of social race. Their interpretive approaches and use of identity politics support methodologies quite different from the empiricism that H. Russell Bernard (1998) claims is ubiquitous to the discipline. These characteristics, along with the persistence of the four-field approach, and a long-standing tension between humanism and science, continue to distinguish American anthropology from its British and French cousins.

Culture Change

Culture change is both a process underway in all societies and a field of study in anthropology which has undergone complex development and several important transformations.

History:

The cultural evolutionists of the late nineteenth century, such as Edward B. TYLOR (1881) and Lewis Henry MORGAN (1877), regarded non-Western cultures as relatively static (see EVOLUTION). For them societies could be ranked hierarchically on a single scale from the savage to the civilized, with the peoples at the bottom being less intelligent than those at the top. Therefore, on utilitarian grounds, the institutions of lower societies were less worthy, and non-Western peoples were seen as comparatively unreflective, their customs as tightly binding, and change as very slow. By contrast, civilized peoples were conceived of not only as more intelligent, but as less bound by the fetters of tradition and more amenable to progressive change. Combined with these notions was the view that there is an overall pattern to cultural change in which all societies are moving in the same direction, and that as a consequence, even the most savage societies will over time become more and more like the Western peoples who are at the top of the scale. The mechanism behind this development is the intellect: as savages apply their minds, they replicate the same, superior institutions that were invented by higher societies long ago.

The notion of a hierarchy of societies was widely criticized by anthropologists (most notably Franz BOAS) before the turn of this century, and it had been generally discredited by the 1920s. A variety of new ideas about cultural change then emerged in this context. Theories of DIFFUSION, according to which a key process in cultural change is cultural borrowing, or the diffusion of cultural traits (such as design motifs, folktales, and values) from one society to the next, became important in the first few decades of this century among North American anthropologists. An element of CULTURAL RELATIVISM was inherent in the diffusion concept, because the borrowing of traits implied that the cultures or institutions of a society reflected not the level of the people's intelligence, but their position on the map. Even European cultures were now conceived of as unique concatenations of cultural traits, most of which had diffused from elsewhere, particularly the Middle East and Asia. The course of human history (and the overall direction of cultural change) became less a matter of progressive development and more a product of historical accident (see HISTORICAL PARTICULARISM).

Approaches:

A particular kind of cultural change that the American anthropologists were interested in was ACCULTURATION, by which was usually meant the changes that come about when Western and non-Western societies come into long-term contact, and especially the effects that dominant societies have had on indigenous peoples. In British anthropology, on the other hand, theorists of SOCIAL CHANGE looked at similar problems but from a different perspective.

Another important approach to cultural change in North American anthropology was that of cultural ecology, which was first articulated by Julian STEWARD (1955) and became very influential in the 1960s (Service 1971; see ECOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY). Steward was critical of diffusionism, with its implication that change can be explained primarily as a product of historical accident, or the chance occurrences of contact among cultures. Rather, Steward sought to demonstrate that cultural change can be explained largely in terms of the progressive adaptation of a particular culture to its environment, with the result that the direction of change is predictable: given the subsistence base of a society, it should be possible, in principle, to predict how that society will change over time as a response to certain environmental conditions.

A strong alternative to cultural ecology soon emerged in cultural anthropology (Frake 1962b). The cultural ecologists tended to assume that all peoples will respond the same way under the same circumstances, and that such features as cultural values and beliefs do not play a significant role in influencing cultural change. The alternative view is that the environment is culturally mediated: people do not experience the world directly, but through cultural systems of thought, with the result that peoples with different conceptions of the world will respond to it in different ways. Thus, by this view, the cultural ecologists were mistaken when they failed to take cultural systems of thought into account in their analyses of cultural change.

In Britain a different approach to cultural change held sway from the 1920s through the 1950s. This was FUNCTIONALISM, which was associated with both RADCLIFFE-BROWN and MALINOWSKI. Functionalism took a conservative approach to change, since it assumed that societies and cultures are relatively well integrated and stable. By this view, if a culture undergoes change, then typically it is the result of outside influences. The functionalists were not oriented toward the study of change; their main interest was the functional interrelationships of cultural and social systems, not how they were transformed.

In the early 1970s the interest in cultural change took yet another important turn, a large majority of the work from that time has focused less on the problem of indigenous changes in culture or on how "traditional" cultures came to be the way they are independently of the West and more on understanding them in terms of the larger economic and political developments of the world. Particularly influential in this regard was WORLD-SYSTEM THEORY, which is associated with Immanuel Wallerstein (1974). Similarly, Eric Wolf (1982) and others have argued that the changes in local, indigenous cultures around the world are to be seen to a large extent in relation to several centuries of confrontation with and domination by Europeans. Consequently cultural change in non-Western societies is seen as an extension of the history of the West.

Perspectives explaining culture change:

1) Materialistic perspectives (materialistic factors are usually economic production and technology)

	Marxist perspective: economic production, economic classes form the basic anatomy of society, and everything else arises in relationship to them
	Other materialistic perspectives: Cultural lag theory (W. Ogburn) technological causes of change, material culture (technology) changes more quickly than nonmaterial culture (values, ideas, norms, ideologies), i.e. there is a period of maladjustment (a lag time) during which nonmaterial culture is still adapting to new material conditions

Technology causes change in 3 ways:

- increases alternatives available to society, creates new opportunities

- alters interaction patterns among people, changes structures of human groups

- creates new problems

2) Idealistic perspectives (idealistic factors/ideational aspects are values, beliefs and ideologies)

Weber’s perspective: in essence, values and beliefs, both religious and secular, have decisive impact on shaping social change, as well as other factors such as those outlined by Marx:

Protestanism: He argued that values of Protestanism, esp. Calvinism and related, produced a cultural ethic which sanctified work and worldly achievement, encouraged frugality and discouraged consumption. Unintended consequences of this religious worldview, this-worldly asceticism, encouraged development of large pools of capital through encouraging work, savings and non-frivolous consumption, and encouraged rational reinvestment and economic growth. Work was a religiously sanctioned calling. Each man is a moral free agent, accountable only to God. Suspicious of material consumption beyond bare necessities believing it led to moral corruption.

In Catholicism, work is merely mundane activity to keep one alive, encouraging other-worldly asceticism where highest form of activity was devotion to God, men were accountable to the Church which sought to regulate the operation of the economy and other secular aspects of society in terms of religious values. No reason in values to ban consumption.

Discussed China and India, whose faiths, Confucianism & Taoism and Hinduism respectively, also weren’t favorable to the development of capitalism.

Other ideational perspectives: Lewy focused on role of religion in social change citing examples of Puritan revolt in England, Islamic renaissance in Sudan in 1800s, Taiping & Boxer Rebellion in China, Islamic fundamentalism in Iran.

Cultural ideas, values, and ideologies that have broadly shaped directions of social change in modern world:

	freedom and self-determination
	material growth and security
	nationalism, e.g. French & English Canadians, English & Irish, Germans & French, Palestinians, Kurdish, Basque separatists and Spanish
	capitalism: not only type of economic system but also ideology, connected set of values and ideas emphasizing positive benefits of pursuing one’s private economic interests, competition and free marketS
	Marxism

Ideas and values can cause change or be barriers to change, can be barriers at one time or promote change at another time. Ideational culture can cause change by:

	legitimizing a desired direction of change, e.g. promoting further equality and democracy
	providing a basis for social solidarity necessary to promote change, i.e. integrative mechanisms, neutralizing the conflicting strains found in society, e.g. mobilizing force during war
	highlighting contradictions and problems, e.g. US cultural value of equality of opportunity have highlighted racism and sexism

Not all anthropological research on cultural change today looks to world-systems theory for its inspiration, but nearly all of it is strongly influenced by the idea of the global society, or the view that a variety of transnational processes are critical for understanding cultural change among all peoples. The world is viewed as increasingly integrated economically, politically, socially, and culturally.

Major Factors and processes of Culture Change:

Acculturation:

Acculturation is the process of culture change set in motion by the meeting of two autonomous cultural systems, resulting in an increase of similarity of each to the other. It always involves a complex interaction with attendant social processes, the parameters of which were most carefully laid out in two important memoranda commissioned by the Social Science Research Council (Redfield et al. 1936; Broom et al. 1954). In such conjunctions the donor culture may not present the full range of its cultural elements, and the recipient culture's own value system may act to screen out or modify certain elements. Acculturation may also be sharply socially structured, as in the case of conquest or other situations of social or political inequality, which channel the flow of cultural elements. Acculturation subsumes a number of different processes including DIFFUSION, reactive ADAPTATION, various kinds of social and cultural reorganization subsequent to contact, and "deculturation" or cultural disintegration. The range of adjustments that results includes the retention of substantial cultural autonomy ("stabilized pluralism") or, more typically, the assimilation of a weaker by a stronger contacting group, and (though rarely) cultural fusion, whereby two cultures may exchange enough elements to produce a distinctive successor culture.

Inasmuch as acculturation involves the interaction of two or more distinct groups, social interaction among them strongly conditions the outcome. The extreme social pressure attendant upon conquest, for example, may prove effective in breaking down the mechanisms by which the conquered group has maintained its culture. In other cases, a high degree of enclosure may preserve a politically weak culture in spite of seemingly overwhelming odds. Furthermore, the lessening of culture distance (acculturation) may not be accompanied by a symmetrical lessening of social distance (assimilation) if, for whatever reason, one group refuses to validate the other's acculturation.

Cultural adaptation:

Cultural adaptation is a relatively new concept used to define the specific capacity of human beings and human societies to overcome changes of their natural and social environment by modifications to their culture. The scale of culture changes depends on the extent of habitat changes and could vary from slight modifications in livelihood systems (productive and procurement activity, mode of life, dwellings and settlements characteristics, exchange systems, clothing, and so on) to principal transformation of the whole cultural system, including its social, ethnic, psychological, and ideological spheres.

Diffusion:

Diffusion is the transmission of elements from one culture to another. Such elements are transmitted by agents using identifiable media and are subject to different barrier or filter effects. It is one of the processes of accuturation but may lack the close contact between peoples that acculturation presupposes. Diffusionism refers to any learned hypothesis that posits an exogenous origin for most elements of a specific culture or cultural subset. An example is the proposition advanced by some nineteenth-century folklorists that most popular European story frames had been transmitted to Europe by Gypsies from India. Robert Lowie emphasizes on the association of diffusion and historicism, independent invention, and evolutionism (Harris 1968: 173 6).

Assimilation:

Assimilation refers to that result of culture change whereby the members of one society modify their behavior and values to become very similar to, or identical with, those of another society possessing a different culture. It is to be distinguished from the potentially rapid processes of culture change due to internal innovation and invention and external borrowing through intermittent diffusion of culture elements from outside the society, and the very gradual process by the absence of exact replication by a younger generation of the beliefs and behavior of an older generation. Innovation and diffusion are ongoing features of human life, and their effects are usually gradual (over many generations), limited to distinct subsets of a cultural system, and, more important, typically greatly modified in turn to mesh with the existing culture. The process of change giving rise to assimilation, however, is acculturation. Acculturation is the complex and dynamic set of processes resulting from close, prolonged contact between two societies, one of them dominant. This imbalance of power is necessary for assimilative change, since the drastic and total character of assimilation requires that the dominant society monopolize prestige, resources, and force and possess an ideology that rewards and/or demands corresponding change in the subordinate society. There are modifications to both societies in the acculturative situation, the dominant as well as the subordinate.

Modernisation:

Modernisation is a process of economic, social, and cultural development that is expected to lead to a level of organization and production, along with belief systems, similar to those already achieved by INDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES, primarily based on examples from the West. Consistent with a general Western idea of progress according to which human knowledge and rationality increasingly triumph over ignorance and adversity and improve the conditions of human life, it was generally assumed that modernization was inevitable and global. But as former colonial societies in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Caribbean became independent nations following World War II, much concern was expressed over how, or even if, this modernization process would occur. This concern was also directed at Latin America, which was similarly regarded as "underdeveloped."

Demographic factors:

A population change is itself a social change but also becomes a casual factor in further social and cultural changes. When a thinly settled frontier fills up with people the hospitality pattern fades away, secondary group relations multiply, institutional structures grow more elaborate and many other changes follow. A stable population may be able to resist change but a rapidly growing population must migrate, improve its productivity or starve. Great historic migrations and conquests of the Huns, Vikings and many others have arisen from the pressure of a growing population upon limited resources. Migration encourages further change for it brings a group into a new environment subjects it to new social contacts and confronts it with new problems. No major population change leaves the culture unchanged.

Technological factors:

The technological factors represent the conditions created by man which have a profound influence on his life. In the attempt to satisfy his wants, fulfill his needs and to make his life more comfortable man creates civilization. Technology is a byproduct of civilization .When the scientific knowledge is applied to the problems in life it becomes technology. Technology is a systematic knowledge which is put into practice that is to use tools and run machines to serve human purpose. Science and technology go together. In utilizing the products of technology man brings social change. The social effects of technology are far-reaching. According to Karl Marx even the formation of social relations and mental conceptions and attitudes are dependent upon technology. He has regarded technology as a sole explanation of social change. W.F Ogburn says technology changes society by changing our environment to which we in turn adapt. These changes are usually in the material environment and the adjustment that we make with these changes often modifies customs and social institutions. A single invention may have innumerable social effects. The development of mass media, from Radio to internet for example have made a rapid change and global cultural integration possible.

Policy factors:

The government policies especially the economic policies which makes it possible to communicate, use and see other cultural products accelerates culture change. The opening up of national boundaries especially after the adoption of neo-liberal policies worldwide have made significant impact on previously existing power relations and people’s commodity procurement and usage pattern. The social policies, promoting particular behavior, for example in India the Total Sanitation Programme, Sarva Sikhsha Mission, etc. help making significant change in the society.

Books used:

Barfield, T. (Ed. 1997). The Dictionary of Anthropology. Massachusetts: Blackwell

Birx, H. J. (Ed. 2006). Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Thousand Oaks: Sage

Bernerd, R and Spencer, J. (2002). Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. London: Routledge

Social Institution (Brief idea)

Contents

Introduction: 1

Types of institutions: 1

Institutionalisation: 1

Approaches: 2

Further reading: 2

Introduction:

Any pattern of behaviour which by repetition, traditional sanction and legal reinforcement acquires a degree of coercion could be described as a social institution: marriage would be a good example. The use of the term institution in sociology, meaning established aspects of society, is close to that in common English usage. However, there have been some changes over time in the exact conceptualization of the term, and there are differences in the analytical precision with which it is used. In some ways an institution can be seen as a sort of ‘super-custom’, a set of mores, folkways, and patterns of behaviour that deals with major social interests: law, church, and family for example. Thus, a social institution consists of all the structural components of a society through which the main concerns and activities are organized, and social needs (such as those for order, belief, and reproduction) are met. Social institutions are forever being modified because they rest on repetition

(and hence may change if large numbers of people stop acting in accordance with them or become selective in precisely how they will support them) but they have a degree of solidity that allows us to forget that they are human creations. In many traditional societies social institutions are bolstered by being given supramundane origins: marriage, for example, is often presented as a divine obligation. Modern societies are more likely to admit the human origins of social institutions and justify them by claims for efficiency: in the West marriage is now commonly defended with the claim that it provides the most effective way of meeting a wide variety of personal and social needs.

Types of institutions:

A very useful way of grouping social institutions is as follows:

(a) kinship institutions deal with marriage, the family and primary socialisation;

(b) political institutions regulate access to and the use of power;

(c) cultural institutions deal with religious, artistic and scientific activities;

(d) stratification institutions deal with the distribution of social positions and resources; and

(e) economic institutions produce and distribute goods and services.

Institutionalisation:

A term used to describe the adverse psychological effects on individuals of residence in institutions, especially of long stays in large-scale institutions, such as mental hospitals and prisons. Most frequently mentioned effects, whose precise causes are debated, are dependency, passivity, and lethargy. These effects are sometimes termed institutionalism. Therefore, institutionalisation is the process whereby social practices become sufficiently regular and continuous to be described as institutions. The notion is a useful corrective to the view that institutions are given and unchanging entities, indicating that changes in social practice both modify existing institutions and created novel forms. This is the correlate of the idea in role theory that people have some freedom to role make in their interactions with others and do not simply act our prescribed patterns of behaviour.

Approaches:

The concept of institution is widely used in sociology, though often without precise specification. Different schools of sociology treat it in different ways. For example, funcionalists can see institutions as fulfilling the needs of individuals or societies. This is the sense in which Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore (1945) used the term. For both of whom it was central to the notion of society as an organism or functioning system. However, as the functionalist perspective gave way to ideas based on society as being in a state of flux, with fewer consensuses over values, so the functionalist association between institution and function also withered away. The phenomenologists may concentrate on the way in which people create or adapt institutions rather than merely respond to them.

The new institutional theory, developed in the 1970s and 1980s. The basic proposition is that the actions of organisations are not determined solely by the logic of economic and technological factors, but also by the institutions which comprise their social environments. These include, for example, the state, professions, and other organisations, together with the values of culture of the broader society in which an organisation is embedded. Institutional pressures influence both organisational goals and means.

It follows from the basic proposition that organisations within a particular institutional environment should tend to be similar. For example, it is a leager rewuirement of the Germand system of Industrial democracy in large firms that employees’ representatives occupy a certain proportion of seats on company’s top board of directors and that managers also consult regularly with employees about workplace issues vial works councils. This legal framework, enacted by the state, reflects, and is reinforced by, a wider culture that values participative management. Thu business organisations in Germany are likely o share similarities in their stricture and how they are managed and to doffer from organisations in, say, the UK or USA. Institutionalists contend that organisations select institutionalised practices which are appropriate within a particular environment.

Institutional theory is a useful corrective to the notion that there is a simple link between economic and technological variables and how organisations act. This link is made in the contingency approach to organisational theory and also in the rational profit-maximising assumptions of neo-classical economics.

The current concept of institution is more fluid, seeing the family or church, for instance, as comprising changing patterns of behaviour based on relatively more stable value systems. This allows sociologists to consider the moral ambivalence of human behaviour as well as its creative effects on social change. In addition to these more global and theoretical concerns, there is also a tradition of the ethnographic study of institutions that constrain, or from some points of view determine, the behaviour of specific social groups. Chief among these are Erving Goffman's studies of total institutions—for example the mental hospital (Goffman, 1961).

In a more recent synthesis, Richard Scott (2008) argues:

Institutions are comprised of regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive elements, that, together with associated activities and resources, provide stability and meaning to social life.

The anthropological concerns:

While economists are concerned with how markets direct the actions of profit-maximising actors, anthropologists have been interested in exploring how actors’ perceptions, social relations and obligations affect their economic decisions.

The Farming Systems Research:

This wider social perspective became necessary when agricultural research stations began to design programmes to increase the productivity of small farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It became clear that an economic evaluation of the technical packages designed by agronomists did not suffice. To avoid failures, researchers had to incorporate in their analysis an evaluation of the ecological, social and political conditions of the region and the goals and preferences of farmers. They also had to consider the information that was available to producers and the risks that they had to assume. This wider approach was known as Farming Systems Research and relied on interdisciplinary teams that included anthropologists and sociologists, though in secondary roles.

One of the key findings that anthropologists and sociologists brought to Farming Systems Research was that, in non-Western societies, resources were often controlled by household or larger kin-based units rather than by individuals. Hence, production and investment decisions had to be made at the household or homestead level. Farming Systems Research adopted their recommendation; the household became the unit of analysis in surveys and assessments of production decisions (Mook 1986; Shaner, Philipp and Schmehl 1982; Turner and Brush 1987).

Research on Problem solving actors:

Rational choice is the heart of the microeconomic model of economic man, who is portrayed as a logical thinker who evaluates options and inputs consistently and coherently, and selects those that maximise his utility. Economic men and women are expected to decide ‘rationally’ how much to produce or buy and sell. If their decisions do not conform to predictions, it raises questions about social or market impediments to an efficient allocation of resources. Some economists even argue that when rational choice is possible, it is unnecessary to protect individuals from the consequences of their choices.

Anthropologists have challenged some of the assumptions of microeconomic models by focusing on how culture and social relations frame the decision process. Mayer and Glave (1999: 345) suggest that Peruvian ‘peasants evaluate profit and losses in terms of a simple cash-out and cash-in flow, ignoring household inputs and family labor’. Appadurai (1991) shows that food provision decisions by Indian women are made as part of other decisions, in a pre-attentive manner except when the problem becomes crucial. Other anthropologists have focused on how power and social conditions define options. Psychologists, instead, have focused on how decisions are made. They have examined how individuals simplify information in order to attend to their preferences and how they evaluate the uncertain outcomes they experience. Some of their findings and propositions have been used by some anthropologists to explore cropping decisions (Gladwin 1975, 1979a, 1979b, 1980) or marketing decisions (Quinn 1978).

Bargaining decisions:

Most peasants are not lone decision makers. They are forced to interact with others in order to gain access to land or labour. Peasants can expand production by borrowing, renting or sharecropping land. However, unless they have a large family they will also need to hire labourers or negotiate a reciprocal labour exchange. In either case, peasants cannot solve their problem by simply evaluating costs, risks and preferences. They have to negotiate a solution with others for labour and land. Bargaining peasants must cope with preferences and consider the transaction cost associated with each offer and counter-offer. Borrowing land may engage him in some future debt, sharecropping may limit how he can use the land.

Studies on sharecropping by anthropologists focus on power imbalance in bargain. A powerful landlord can limit access of inputs and bias the outcome of the bargain. Wells’s (1984, 1996) account of the adoption of share contracts by strawberry producers in California and the subsequent return to day- and piece-rate contracts serve to illustrate the multiple characteristics of sharecropping and the role played by government, unions and growers’ organisations in defining the nature of the contract.

Political economy and anthropology:

From the point of view of economics, the central concept in political economy is that of the ‘mode of production’. This focus on production is in sharp contrast to various forms of exchange theory, which characterised the work of both the formalist and substantivist schools of economic anthropology and which continues unabated in recent work on anthropological theories of value (Graeber 2001). The discussion begins with the themes raised in the work of the most influential group of political economists in the field of anthropology to date; the French structural Marxists, also known as the ‘articulation’ school. This trend arose in the late 1960s and exerted a major influence on economic anthropology and anthropology in general through the entire decade of the 1970s. Here the critical representatives were Claude Meillassoux, Maurice Godelier, Emmanuel Terray, Pierre-Phillipe Rey, Georges Dupré, Marc Auge as well as historians of Africa – Jean Suret-Canale and Catherine Coquery- Vidrovitch – with whom they worked closely (Seddon 1978). Today all of these anthropologists have abandoned or substantially modified their theoretical outlook with the consequence that this once highly influential school of economic anthropologists is now largely defunct. Where their influence is still strongly felt is in South African anthropology and social science, where structural Marxism was one of the inspirations leading to the efflorescence of neo-Marxist political economy (Asad and Wolpe 1976).

Structural Marxism was primarily an Africanist school, except for Godelier whose speciality is Melanesia. Their work was characterised in particular by a detailed empirical knowledge of the societies of West and Central Africa and Madagascar, which had been a part of the French African colonial empire. This was by no means the first application of a Marxist-influenced political economy in anthropology. The work of Godfrey Wilson and of Ronald Frankenberg, strongly influenced by the more processual functionalism of Max Gluckman, preceded that of the French by decades (Frankenberg 1978; Wilson 1939). This group of early British political economists was not theoretically oriented. They were primarily interested in analysing and documenting empirically the impact of British colonialism: the transformation of land tenure relations; the effects of copper mining in Zambia and of diamond and gold mining in South Africa; the breakdown of ‘tribal cohesion’ in the economies and societies of Central and Southern Africa; the rise of large scale labour migration, forced or otherwise, leading to urbanisation and ‘detribalisation’. Their work in the application of political economy in anthropology, economics and history was pioneering. It provided an invaluable account of the dire economic and social impact of colonialism in the inter-war and early post-war years.

World systems and anthropology:

Popularised by Wallerstein in his three-volume work The modern world-system (1974, 1980, 1989) and in numerous essays (for example, Wallerstein 1975, 1979, 1983, 1984, 1991, 1995, 2000, 2001). Once again there was a period of intense theoretical debate, but by the late 1980s many of the main features of world-system theory had been generally agreed (for a synthesis, see Shannon 1989).

1. The world-system arose as the different regions of the world became linked through exchange and trade into a single economic system with a distinctive division of labour between core and peripheral areas.

2. The system is based on capitalist exploitation: the appropriation of surplus value through the exploitation of the labour of the poor by the rich.

3. Individual parts of the system cannot be analysed in isolation from the others, but only in relation to the whole.

4. The world-system is an inter-state system: the world is divided into nation-states which vary widely in size and wealth, and which compete with one another for power and wealth within the capitalist system.

5. Zones within the world-system can be divided into ‘core’, ‘semiperipheral’ and ‘peripheral’ regions. The core consists of the most technologically advanced and powerful states. These rise and fall over time, so that the core moves over time. Since the start of international maritime trade in Europe, the core has been centred on Spain and Portugal, followed by Holland and England, and more recently by the United States. The states in the periphery are poorer, less advanced technologically, and their economies are often based on the export of raw materials. In between the core and the periphery lies the semiperiphery. This consists of states which are poor relative to the core but which are capable of making the transition to core status if the conditions are right. This may come about through the use of their low-wage advantage to take over some forms of production from the core countries, thus generating economic growth. The usual pattern in worldsystem theory is not for the most advanced states to continue to develop, but rather for them to be overtaken by new arrivals that find it easier to adopt the latest technology.

6. The concept of social class takes on a new meaning in world-system theory as classes are seen as transcending national borders, to become world-wide strata. They include not only capitalists and proletarians, but also petty commodity producers and a middle class of skilled and professional workers. In some cases different forms of production may exist in the same household. For instance, wage earners whose wages do not cover their living costs may have to supplement their incomes through various forms of petty commodity production. These workers have been described as ‘semi-proletarian’ and ‘super-exploited’: wages can be kept low because part of the cost of reproducing the household is met through non-wage labour economic activities. Much of the debate about the ‘informal sector’ of the economy in the 1970s and 1980s revolved around the status and role of these nonwage forms of production within the capitalist system.

7. The global class system is also cross-cut by status groups whose unity is based on culture, including nations. Nationalism is seen as a major factor preventing members of the same social classes from uniting across international boundaries.

8. Political relations with the periphery can involve various forms of domination, ranging from seizure and colonial occupation to the establishment of networks of client states by a major power, as during the Cold War. Semi-peripheral states may therefore be co-opted as regional allies of the major powers.

9. Even though the interests of the state and the national capitalist class may not be identical, they are often symbiotic. The capitalist class provides the resources on which the state depends, while the state performs a number of important roles for the capitalist class: control of the workers, foreign relations initiatives in support of local businesses and opening up new areas for exploitation as part of the periphery.

10. In the core areas, states have acquired legitimacy by allowing workers political rights and bargaining powers, concessions made possible by the inflow of resources from the periphery. On the other hand, continued exploitation of the periphery tends to result in protest and instability, and in the growth of repressive and authoritarian states.

The work of Frank and Gills (1993) on the date of the origins of the worldsystem, mentioned above, has led to other interesting possibilities for worldsystems analysis. If the world-system developed long before the capitalist period, then pre-capitalist and non-capitalist world-systems are also theoretically possible. Frank and Gills’s own analysis was historical, tracing the origins of the modern world-system back to ancient Mesopotamia, via the civilisations of Mediterranean Europe. But another possibility for the use of the world-system concept is to refine it as an ideal type for use in comparative analysis, and this has been carried out most systematically in the work of Chase-Dunn and Hall during the 1980s and 1990s. They define their core concept in the following way:

We define world-systems as intersocietal networks that are systemic … [that is] they exhibit patterned structural reproduction and development. We contend that the developmental logics of world-systems are not all the same, though they do share some general properties … We envision a sequence of changes in which thousands of very small-scale world-systems merged into larger systems, which eventually merged to become the global modern world-system … How and why did these many small systems coalesce and transform over many millennia into a single, global world-system? (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: 4–5)

This brings out well three propositions that are central to their work. First, world-systems are intersocietal; that is, they link together societies. This derives from the old political-economy critique of modernisation theory, that societies cannot be studied in isolation from one another. Second, they are systemic, sharing general properties of development. Third, over time many world-systems have merged together, finally creating the single integrated capitalist world-system that we see today.

Chase-Dunn and Hall offer other variations on the world-system theme. Unlike many authors, they do not take core–periphery relationships for granted, but as something to be investigated in each case. In their view, a world-system could theoretically consist of a network of partners of equal status (1997: 28). They also spell out the different kinds of networks through which societies are connected with one another, based on flows of information, prestige goods, power, basic foodstuffs and raw materials. The largest networks are usually those within which information flows, followed by those in which prestige goods are exchanged. Next in size are what they call ‘political/military networks’ (PMNs), forming political units, while ‘basic goods networks’ based on the exchange of foods and raw materials tend to be smaller still.

The key dynamic for the evolution of world-systems, however, lies not in modes of production as in orthodox Marxist theory, but in modes of accumulation, defined as ‘the deep structural logic of production, distribution, exchange and accumulation’ (1997: 29). Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997: 30) distinguish four modes of accumulation: kinship modes, ‘based on consensual definitions of value, obligations, affective ties, kinship networks, and rules of conduct’; tributary modes, based on political (including legal and military) coercion; capitalist modes, based on the production of commodities; and socialist modes (which they describe as ‘hypothetical’), that is, democratic systems of distribution based on collective rationality. Different modes can co-exist within the same system, and there are also transitional and mixed systems. The final concept they use to tie all this together is that of incorporation, the process through which separate systems become linked (1997: 59). The nature of this process changes with the mode of accumulation (1997: 249).

This leads to a typology of world-systems based on the mode of accumulation, which incorporates many of the classic categories of earlier anthropology (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: 42–4):

1. Kin-based mode dominant

a. Stateless, classless

i. Sedentary foragers, horticulturists, pastoralists

ii. 2. Big-man systems

b. Chiefdoms (classes but not states)

2. Tributary modes dominant (states, cities)

a. Primary state-based world-systems (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus Valley, Ganges Valley, China, pre-Columbian Mexico and Peru)

b. Primary empires in which a number of previously autonomous states have been unified by conquest (Agade, Old Kingdom Egypt, Magahda, Chou, Teotihuacan, Huari)

c. Multicentred world-systems composed of empires, states and peripheral regions (Near East, India, China, Mesoamerica, Peru)

d. Commercialising state-based world-systems in which important aspects of commodification have developed but the system is still dominated by the logic of the tributary modes (Afroeurasian worldsystem, including Roman, Indian, and Chinese core regions)

3. Capitalist mode dominant

a. The Europe-centred sub-system since the seventeenth century

b. The global modern world-system

Recent synthesis:

The most recent ‘grand narrative’ to provide a framework for explaining the political economy of the modern world is that of Castells in his three-volume work, The information age (1996, 1997, 1999). This work traces the impact of information technology on the world economy and social structure. It brings together a number of Castells’s earlier interests, including the role of the state in consumption (compare Castells 1977), social movements (Castells 1983) and the relationship between information technology and urban development (Castells 1989; Castells and Hall 1994). It also shows how the new technology is leading to a process of polarisation between the rich and the poor, as well as to the erosion of the nation-state and the internationalisation of organized crime. A large part of the third volume deals with regional polarization between a ‘fourth world’, consisting of much of Africa and the former Soviet Union, and the major growth poles of Europe, North America and East Asia (Castells 1999).

Culture:

Culture (from Latin: cultura, meaning. "cultivation")is a term that has many different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses:

· Excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture

· An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning

· The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group

The earliest anthropological use of "culture" was by E. B. TYLOR (1871), who defined it memorably as that "complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."

Tylor's formulation can still serve today to express anthropologists' views. First, culture comprises those human traits that are learned and learnable and are therefore passed on socially and mentally, rather than biologically. Second, culture is in some sense a "complex whole." Although hotly debated, the fundamental idea that all those "capabilities and habits" can and should be considered together is a powerful one. It means that vast areas of human life, spanning everything from techniques of food production to theories of the afterlife, have some coherence and a distinct logic that can be discovered by a single discipline.

The debate: Culture plural or singular?

The focus of anthropology is upon the diversity of ways in which human beings establish and live their social lives in groups, and it is from this diversity that the anthropological notion of culture, at least in the twentieth century, is derived. This idea of the plurality of culture contrasts with the idea of culture in the singular, an interpretation that began its development in eighteenth century European thought (see Williams 1983a), and became predominant in the nineteeth century. Framed through the social evolutionary thought linked to Western imperialism, culture in the singular assumed a universal scale of progress and the idea that as civilizations developed through time, so too did humankind become more creative and more rational, that is, people’s capacity for culture increased. The growth of culture and of rationality were thought to belong to the same process. In other words, human beings became more ‘cultivated’ as they progressed over time intellectually, spiritually and aesthetically.

It was Franz BOAS who championed the concept of culture, and with it the discipline of anthropology, to challenge the elaborate and influential late-nineteenth-century theories that attributed most human differences to RACE that is, biological inheritance. Anchored in the new science of biology by evolutionary ideas, they suggested that some races, when compared to northern Europeans, were more primitive and therefore more animal-like in bodily form, mental ability, and moral development.




		Boas (1911) broke the evidently seamless simplicity of this theory by showing that bodily form was not linked to language nor to any of the matters we associate with culture. In addition, he challenged the assumption that other "races" were less moral or less intelligent than northern Europeans. Whereas Tylor had spoken of "culture" in the singular, on the assumption that all societies possessed a more or less advanced version of the same heritage, Boas wrote of plural "cultures" that were different and could not be measured against some supposed single standard of advancement. Moreover, he argued that the complex forms and patterns in human life, when investigated through FIELD-WORK, were so various that they could not arise from a uniform process of social or cultural EVOLUTION, or from biological or geographical causes, but were fruits of complex local historical causes that escape simplification.

In contrast, the modern anthropological stance, on the side of cultural relativism and in confrontation with racism (cf. Boas 1911), has been startlingly liberal in its insistence that culture must always be understood in the plural and judged only within its particular context.

The Boasian influence:

These ideas were later elaborated by his students, including Edward SAPIR, Alfred KROEBER, Margaret MEAD, and Ruth BENEDICT. They argued that although human beings everywhere possessed much the same biological heritage, human nature was so plastic that it could sustain kaleidoscopically different sets of values, institutions, and behaviors in different cultures. Margaret Mead, for example, spent a long career of fieldwork demonstrating how matters that might appear to be easily explained by human biology the experience of ADOLESCENCE, patterns of SOCIALIZATION, SEX roles in society vary so greatly that no simple natural scientific explanation could comprehend them. And Kroeber espoused the notion that culture is "superorganic," possessing a unique character within itself that goes beyond anything that could arise in the course of biological evolution.

Other Boasians devoted themselves to exploring the notion of culture within the bounds of anthropology. Benedict (1934a) argued that a culture was not simply a "planless hodgepodge" or an affair of "shreds and patches," as her older contemporary Robert LOWIE supposed. Rather, each culture "discarded elements which were incongruous, modified others to its purposes, and invented others that accorded with its taste" (p. 34). The result was a way of life arranged around a few aesthetic and intellectual principles that produced a unique Weltanschauung, a WORLDVIEW. These arguments contributed to setting an aspiration that is still very powerful today: the task of the anthropologist is not just to record a myriad of details about a people, but to demonstrate a deeper unity integrating different features of a culture. Running through her, and others', arguments were an aspiration to tolerance and a mutual informing and respect among societies.

The cultural homogeneity and objectivity: a critique

Although Boas was the most important force in introducing the idea of the plurality of historically conditioned cultures into anthropology, the discipline has not always followed his insistence that culture itself is an ongoing creative process through which people continually incorporate and transform new and foreign elements. A later version of anthropology being influenced by Functionalism and Structural – functionalism and later structuralism is that the notion of the aesthetic autonomies of cultures. The idea that culture refers to a systematically harmonized whole with each therefore comprising a shared and stable system of beliefs, knowledge, values, or sets of practices held sway for a very long time in anthropology. Thus this notion of the homogeneity of culture flourished and developed through many versions, but in the direction that assumed (unlike Boas) the fixity, coherence and boundedness of cultures. In what Fabian (1998:x–xi) refers to as this ‘classical modern concept’, a position of ‘ontological realism’ is assumed with respect to culture which understands tradition as something real, to be found outside the minds of individuals, and objectified in the form of a collection of objects, symbols, techniques, values, beliefs, practices and institutions that the individuals of a culture share. On the whole, however, we see that Boas‘s most important argument, that creative process, historical contingency, and learned, socially transmitted behaviour are not in conflict, has not been widely explored until fairly recently. We find instead that the notion of culture as a coherent, bounded, and stable system of shared beliefs and actions has been a powerful twentieth-century idea that has been very difficult to shift. As intimated above there were reasons for such neglect.

The crisis of representation:

In the 1960s there was a move away from the earlier emphasis upon culture as customary or patterned behaviour, to a stress upon culture as idea systems, or structures of symbolic meaning. Each culture was understood in this later view to consist of a shared system of mental representations. As David Schneider saw it, culture consists ‘of elements which are defined and differentiated in a particular society as representing reality—the total reality of life within which human beings live and die’ (1976:206). In this view culture is not just shared, it is intersubjectively shared (cf. D’Andrade 1984). Culture, as a conceptual structure made up of representations of reality, was understood to orient,

direct, organize action in systems by providing each with its own logic. Culture gave purpose to the social system, and ensured its equilibrium. Behaviour out of sync with the system’s cultural valuations was said to be abnormal, deviant, dysfunctional, with the implication being that it was aculturally, or anticulturally, driven. It took some time for this powerful law-and-order (as Fabian dubs it) concept of culture to be seriously questioned.

However, over the past couple of decades anthropology has increasingly been involved in a crisis over its representational theories of meaning, and at the same time expressing deep regret over its former misdirected scientific hopes—those as envisioned by our more sociologically oriented masters, who used the natural sciences as the yardstick for judging our own success. What is particularly being called into account is the understanding of cultural (collective) representations as a template for social action, with its related unfortunate effect—all those anthropological portrayals of cultural dopes who act unconsciously in accordance to underlying structures of shared symbolic meaning. The world of meaning, as Roy Wagner insists (1986, 1991), cannot articulate with a natural science format, which must by the very nature of its task (of objectification) ignore, mystify, disdain, doubt personal invention and concrete imagination. Wagner, one of the most persuasive in his critique of the idea of shared, stable systems of collective representations, suggests that cultural meanings are not constituted of the signs of conventional reference, but instead ‘live a constant flux of continual re-creation’. He goes on to say that ‘the core of culture is…a coherent flow of images and analogies, that cannot be communicated directly from mind to mind, but only elicited, adumbrated, depicted’ (Wagner 1986:129).

Any fieldworker who has worked carefully with the telling and learning of myths, or the performance of rituals, should recognize the wisdom of Wagner’s insight into the poetics, creativity, individuality, inconsistencies, contradictions of such cultural processes (also see Dell Hymes (1981) on the poetics of the American North West Coast telling of myths, and Overing (1990) on the tropes and performance of Amazonian myths). As Ingold says (1994b:330, his italics), ‘what we do not find are neatly bounded and mutually exclusive bodies of thought and custom, perfectly shared by all who subscribe to them, and in which their lives and works are fully encapsulated’. What we do find can be much more challenging, and, as one antidote to the treatment of culture through the lens of representational theories of meaning and other grand theory, many anthropologists today are focusing upon the dialogics and poetics of everyday behaviour. In so doing the primary concern is with living, experiencing, thinking, affectively engaged human beings who follow (in varying degrees and a myriad of manners) particular lifeways. It is antagonistic toward all those attempts to create ‘objective’ abstract structures that have the effect of dismissing much of what the rest of the world has to say.

The question of practice:

There is much, it would seem, that representational theorists omit in the experiencing of culture (also see Ingold 1994b). First, while it is meaning systems that is their primary concern, it is cogent to stress that these systems are creations of the anthropologist, and not of the people who supposedly ‘follow’ them. The usual claim is that, for the people, the ‘system’ and the mental representations that comprise it are unconsciously followed. Thus the meaning-creating, speaking, socially occupied person (whether from Chicago, Italy or Timbuktu) is omitted. As too is all practice in which he or she engages, and this by definition since the symbolist view of culture excludes behaviour.

What, we may ask, is the relation between meaning and practice? between mind and body? concept and performance? The present trend is to oppose the representational view of the body as a passive instrument, and thus time and again we find in today’s literature across a range of disciplines—in anthropology (e.g. Wagner 1986, 1991; Fabian 1983, 1998; Ingold 1994b), cognitive psychology (e.g. Shanon 1993), philosophy (e.g. Meløe 1988a, 1988b) and culture theory (e.g. de Certeau 1997)—the plea to recognize embodied meaning, that is, to wed concept and practice, the perceiving with the acting agent. We might say that there is no such thing as ‘a culture’, or rather that ‘culture should

not be a noun, but a verb: “to culture”, or “culturing”’ (Overing 1998; also see Friedman 1994:206). As Ingold notes (1994b:330, his italics), ‘it might be more realistic…to say that people live culturally rather than they live in cultures’. For most people around the world, culturing is an endless and ever ongoing, overt activity, which ill fits the social scientist’s categories. From the Amazonian perspective culture time and again refers to the skills for action, which conjoin (independent) thinking and a sensual life, that individuals have, mould and use to live a particular human life. However, to reunite the body, the sensual, acting, feeling, emotive aspects of self, with the thinking, language-knowing self creates havoc with most modernist versions of culture. As should only be expected, debates today on the implications of a more phenomenological approach to culture for the future development of anthropology have a certain edge, a passion and often a political as well as academic challenge to them.

Introduction

Social movements are fuzzy phenomena with unclear boundaries. They may relatively quickly expand or shrink and change their structure and strategy. This makes it difﬁcult to identify, let alone empirically study social movements. Besides political parties and formal pressure groups, social movements can be seen as a major form of collective will formation and interest representation in modern societies. They usually signal structural strains in a given society and tend to challenge the established power holders by various means of protest. While many social movements failed to reach their aims, others had partial and few even had full success. In exceptional moments of history, social movements were able to bring about a new social and/or political order.

Definition and features

The term social movement refers to a speciﬁc kind of collective actor, namely a network of individuals, groups, and organizations who, based on a sense of collective identity, aim at changing society (or to resisting such a change) mainly by means of public and collective protest (della Porta & Diani, 1999; Rucht & Neidhardt, 2002).

Therefore, first, in structural terms, a social movement is a loosely coupled conglomerate of different components. Contrary to speciﬁc social movement organizations which may have formal statutes, a rigid division of labor, and a clearly deﬁned membership, social movements are networks

which, by deﬁnition, are mainly horizontally and informally coordinated. Such a network can include one or several core groups. Yet there is no central body which would be able to control and dominate the movement as a whole. In terms of degrees of involvement of individuals, a social movement can be conceived as a set of concentric circles ranging from highly committed activists in the core section to the periphery of mere sympathizers who only occasionally express their support to the movement.

Second, in terms of its aims, a social movement seeks to fundamentally change society (or to resist such changes). Ultimately, it targets the prevailing social order including its power structure and basic values. Because a power structure also crystallizes in political institutions and processes, a social movement is necessarily involved in political struggles. Still, it makes sense to distinguish a broadly conceived social movement from more narrowly deﬁned collective actors who primarily focus on political, cultural, or religious matters and could be termed as political, cultural, or religious movements, respectively.

Third, regarding its means of cohesion, a social movement rests on a sense of collective identity, i.e., a we feeling based on shared worldviews, values, claims, and practices that allow to separate the movement as an (imagined) entity from mere bystanders and, above all, from the movement’s opponents. Collective identity is not a pre-existing and stable property based on a self deﬁnition only. Rather, it emerges and develops in interaction with the movement’s environment which, to some extent, also shapes the movement’s identity.

Fourth, social movements strongly rely on the commitment of their constituents who, from time to time, are mobilized in protest activities. These are the major tool to make the movement seen and heard beyond its own ranks. It depends on structural and situational factors whether or not a social movement mainly engages in direct confrontation with an adversary or, especially in democratic systems, tries to inﬂuence its opponents indirectly by attracting public attention and, hopefully, support. The strategies and, even more so, the speciﬁc forms of protest may vary greatly within and across movements. Some movements tend towards a reformist, others towards a revolutionary strategy. But as many historical examples demonstrate, the same movement may include a moderate and a radical tendency. Accordingly, the speciﬁc protest actions range from friendly (e.g., collection of signatures) to confrontational (e.g., blockades) to violent means (physical aggression and destruction). Whether or not terrorism should be included in the concept of social movements is disputed. Based on the broad deﬁnition proposed here, there would be no reason to set terrorism completely apart, though very few movements systematically resort to extreme violence.

Theories of social movements:

Several perspectives used for understanding social movement include classical approach, rational choice, resource mobilization, new social movement, and political opportunity structure.

A social movement, although it may have secondary aims to promote the development of a subculture, is inherently and fundamentally a political phenomenon since its target is the state. This contention is more clearly demonstrated if we start with Max Weber's (1958) definition of the state as ``a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.'' Since the state holds this legal use of coercive power, it reserves a position as the primary distributor of rights and resources. A social movement, in its attempt to acquire these resources to promote structural change, must view the state as both an objective and an antagonist. Thus, a movement requires the resources of the state it abhors in order to alter that state. An antagonistic relationship exists between the state and the social movement, or between those individuals who hold political power and those who are effectively disenfranchized. Hence, social movements embody sustained collective challenges against political elites and authorities led by people with a common purpose and who lack regular access to existing political institutions.

Classical and Rational Choice theory:

Classical and rational choice theories are micro-level analyses, which mean that they focus on individual motivation to participate in a social movement. Why does an individual choose to participate? As such, these theories concentrate on the existence of individual grievances. Given their base assumption that democratic society is essentially pluralistic or that all voices are heard, classical and rational choice theories perceive collective behavior as fundamentally irrational and indicative of some kind of psychological imbalance; collective action thereby falls outside the realm of legitimate politics.

Resource mobilisation theory:

Encountering the increase of collective behavior in the 1960s, the evidence that participants in such action did not suffer from some psychological dysfunction, and increasing belief that American politics was elitist rather than pluralistic, students of social movements developed a new theory, resource mobilization, to understand the formation of such activity. A caveat of an elite-managerialist theory of democracy is that grievances perpetually exist: ``there is always enough discontent in any society to supply grass-roots support for a movement if a movement is organized and has at its disposal the power and resources of some established elite group;”[1] the centrality of organizational needs and resources, e.g., money, labor, office space, is established as a primary factor in movement development. The research question is altered from why individuals participate to how such participation is possible. In short, resource mobilization is a mesolevel analysis focusing on organizational requirements of social movements.

Classical theory, rational choice, and resource mobilization cluster about the stereotypical American school, which emphasizes individual or collective agency, as opposed to the more Marxist perspective, which places stress on structure. In none of the three theories discussed above is any reference made to traditionally Marxist notions of solidarity, collective identity, or collective (class) consciousness.

New Social Movement theories:

The aim of new social movement theory is to explain the existence of post-1960 movements which do not turn on class consciousness, but on identity – a phenomenon of advanced industrial and/or late-capitalist society – while simultaneously reviving a traditional Marxist interpretation through the incorporation of the participants' collective identity.[2] New social movement theory is a collection of neo-Marxist theories operating at the intersection of micro- and macro-analytic spheres; it seeks to understand why individuals participate in collective behavior via reference to grievance articulation while also claiming the structuralist view that identity is shaped by the overarching circumstances and dynamics of advanced industrial society.

Political Opportunity Structure (POS):

In response to new social movement theory, the American school was forced to focus more fully on macro-level analysis, that is, the interaction between the state and the social movement without relying on a Marxist interpretation. Political opportunity structure (POS) filled this theoretical gap. Political opportunity structures refer not to necessarily permanent nor formal configurations of political institutions and historical precedents for social mobilization which protesters can exploit to promote collective action.[3] In essence, at a macro-level then, social movement formation boils down to a question of timing; as sociologist Sidney Tarrow notes, ``People join in social movements in response to political opportunities and then, through collective action, create new ones. As a result, the `when' of social movement mobilization – when political opportunities are opening up ± goes a long way towards explaining its `why.'' Therefore, political opportunity structure is a macro-analysis that evaluates how different governing structures affect mobilization by providing possible institutional opportunities such as electoral realignments; hence, POS is useful when comparing and contrasting similar movements in different countries.

Political Process Model (PPM):

All theories are relatively incapable of accurately depicting and evaluating historical circumstance; however, some are better able to minimize the distorting lens. The aim, when understanding social movements, is not to develop a totalizing theory that accounts for every potential variable, but to derive a model which can answer the foundational questions of any given analysis. In this case: why people participate (micro-level), how they (afford to) participate (meso-level), and when they participate (macro-level). Each of these questions underlies a specific focus whether it be oriented toward individual motivation, organizational resources, or the external/institutional environment.

The political process model (PPM) accomplishes this by successfully navigating the junctures of the micro-, meso-, and macroanalytical levels to isolate three crucial factors in the development of collective insurgency: changing opportunity, pre-existing organizational strength, and cognitive liberation coupled with collective identity formation. PPM is essentially made up of two distinct but related dynamics: movement formation and movement maintenance. The first part is represented by the tri-factor interaction of a changing opportunity structure, organizations to seize control of this opportunity, and the psychological alteration of a minority group from an isolated victimized perspective to a sense of collective empowerment. The second part of the model refers to the actions of the organizations that make up the movement. These networks are sometimes called pressure groups, special interests, or interest groups. Unlike a movement, interest groups are characterized by defined membership, permanent staff, and fiscal responsibilities. More importantly, whereas a movement is sometimes characterized as acting outside of the political system, interest groups navigate from within it.[4] They interact with the political institutions – the legislative-executive system, the judiciary structure, and the political party dynamics of a state - in an attempt to reform the ruling ideology.

[1] For more detailed synopsis of the classical approach see Doug McAdam, ``The Classical Model of Social Movements Examined'' in Social Movements: Perspectives and Issues, eds. Steven M. Buechler and F. Kurt Cylke, Jr. (Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1997) 135±48; William Kornhouser, ``The Politics of Mass Society'' in Social Movements: Perspectives and Issues, eds. Steven M. Buechler and F. Kurt Cylke, Jr. (Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1997), 91±7; Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965); John Elster, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 22±42, 124±73.

[2] Hank Johnston, Enrique Larana, and Joseph Gusfield, ``Identities, Grievances, and New Social Movements'' in Social Movements: Perspectives and Issues, eds. Steven M. Buechler and F. Kurt Cylke, Jr. (Mountain View, California: May®eld Publishing Company, 1997), 274±94. Alberto Melucci, ``The New Social Movements: A Theoretical Approach,'' Social Science Information 19 (2) 1980, 119±26.

[3] Herbert Kitschelt, ``Political Opportunity Structures and Political Protest: Anti-Nuclear Movements in Four Democracies'' in American Society and Politics, eds. Theda Skocpol and John L. Campbell (New York: McGraw Hill, Inc., 1995), 321. Tarrow, Power in Movement, 85.

[4] Ronald J. Hrebenar, Interest Group Politics in America (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997)

Contents:

History of Anthropology: with special emphasis on European continent

The confusing beginning:

The enlightenment:

Few early works:

The Rigorous Anthropological practice: a possibility

Anthropology in Europe:

The British Social Anthropology:

The evolutionist paradigm:

Diffusionist and historical particularist:

The functionalist:

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942, Poland-Britain-The United States)

Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955, Britain)

The African Political System: An Anthropological Landmark

The Early post war anthropology:

The 1960s: the construction of Mediterranean

The 1970s: expansion and fragmentation – work at home

1980s and 1990s the conceptualization of Europe:

Future directions:

History of Anthropology: with special emphasis on European continent

The word ‘anthropology’ is ultimately from the Greek (anthropos, ‘human’, plus logos, ‘discourse’ or ‘science’). Its first usage to define a scientific discipline is probably around the early sixteenth century (in its Latin form anthropologium). Central European writers then employed it as a term to cover anatomy and physiology, part of what much later came to be called ‘physical’ or ‘biological anthropology’. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European theologians also used the term, in this case to refer to the attribution of human-like features to their deity. The German word Anthropologie, which described cultural attributes of different ethnic groups, came to be used by a few writers in Russia and Austria in the late eighteenth century (see Vermeulen 1995). However, this usage did not become established among scholars elsewhere until much later.

The confusing beginning:

If we restrict ourselves to anthropology as a scientific discipline, some would trace its roots back to the European Enlightenment during the eighteenth century; others would claim that anthropology did not arise as a science until the 1850s, yet others would argue that anthropological research in its present-day sense only commenced after the First World War. It is beyond doubt, however, that anthropology, considered as the science of humanity, originated in the region we commonly but inaccurately call ‘the West’, notably in three or four ‘Western’ countries: France, Great Britain, the USA and, until the Second World War, Germany. Historically speaking, this is a European discipline, and its practitioners, like those of all European sciences, occasionally like to trace its roots back to the ancient Greeks.

The enlightenment:

The eighteenth century saw a flowering of science and philosophy in Europe. During these years, the self-confidence of the bourgeoisie increased, citizens reflected on the world and their place in it, and would soon make political demands for a rational, just, predictable and transparent social order. As Philosophers like As Hobbes, Locke and Descartes had argued, the free individual was to be the measure of all things – of knowledge and of the social order – the authority of God and Ruler was no longer taken for granted.

Traditional religious beliefs were increasingly denounced as superstitions – roadblocks on the way to a better society, governed by reason. The idea of progress also seemed to be confirmed by the development of technology, which made its first great advances at this time. New technologies made scientific measurements more accurate. Industrial machinery began to appear. Descartes’ purely theoretical attempt to prove the universal truth of mathematics suddenly became a practical issue of burning relevance. For if mathematics, the language of reason, could reveal such fundamental natural truths as Newton’s laws, did it not follow that nature was itself reasonable, and that any reason-driven enterprise was bound to succeed? All of these expectations culminated abruptly in the French Revolution, which attempted to realise the dream of a perfectly rational social order in practice, but was quickly superseded by its irrational opposite: the revolution devoured its children. And then all the dreams, the disappointments, the paradoxes of the Revolution spread during the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s to all of Europe and deeply influenced the ideas of society that later generations would develop.

Few early works:

In eighteenth century with the age of reason, it was the beginning of considering anthropology as science. An important early work was by Italian scholar Giambattista Vico’s (1668–1744) La scienza nuova (1725; The New Science, 1999). This was a grand synthesis of ethnography, history of religion, philosophy and natural science. Vico was among the first to embrace the idea of social progress explicitly. He proposed a universal model of social development, arguing that all societies must go through three stages, with particular, formally defined characteristics. The first stage was the ‘Age of Gods’, an age of nature worship and rudimentary social structures, traits that Vico associated with ‘primitive’ peoples. Then came

the ‘Age of Heroes’, with widespread social unrest due to great social inequality – both the European Middle Ages and Vico’s own time have doubtlessly served as models here. The final stage, the ‘Age of Man’ was an envisioned future era ruled by reason.

Baron de Montesquieu’s work on comparative, cross-cultural study of legislative systems uses first hand and second hand data to find out general principles in legal systems. He is sometimes identified as being proto functionalist. It is because he sees polygamy, cannibalism, paganism, slavery and other barbarous customs could be explained by the functions they fulfilled within society as a whole.

Yet another step towards a science of anthropology was taken by a group of young, idealistic French intellectuals. These were the Encyclopaedists, led by the philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–84) and the mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83). Their aim was to collect, classify and systematise as much knowledge as possible in order to further the advance of reason, progress, science and technology. Diderot’s Encyclopédie was published in 1751–72, and included articles by illustrious intellectuals like

Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu. The encyclopaedia quickly established itself as a model for later projects of its kind. It was a liberal and wide-ranging, not to say a revolutionary work, which was censored in many parts of Europe for its crude criticism of the Church. One of its youngest contributors, Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94), who was to die prematurely in a Jacobin jail, wrote systematic comparisons between different social systems, and tried to develop a synthesis of mathematics and social science that would allow him to formulate objective laws of social development.

For Rousseau development was not progressive, but degenerative, and that the source of this decline was society itself. Starting from an initial, innocent state of nature, where each individual lived by herself in harmony with her surroundings, people went on to found institutions of marriage and kinship, and settled in small, sedentary groups. Eventually, these groups grew in complexity, and invented priests and chiefs, kings and princes, private property, police and magistrates, until the free and good soul of man was crushed under the weight of social inequality.

Between Nepolian war and First World War Europe becomes ‘modernize’ and in consequence it ‘modernizes’ the entire world. The major change that has taken place is that the Europe has transformed from the an agriculture nation to industrially sound nation. In 1830s the railway was established. A massive social change was on the row. In consequence, several peasant economics have now been transformed to a working class labourers. This social change leaves profound influence over the country at large. Several social thinkers have seen it as something having a detrimental effect over the society at large. the French, Austrian and Italian revolutions in 1848–9, the Paris Commune of 1870, also clearly indicate the potential for violence that industrialisation unleashed. And along with the protests, a new, socialist ideology grew. Its roots go back to social philosophers such as Rousseau and Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), and to the German neo-Hegelians, but its decisive formulation came with Karl Marx.

Around the same time period, Charles Darwin’s massive work “origins of species” appears with a potential for a Global science.

The Rigorous Anthropological practice: a possibility

It is hardly surprising that anthropology arose as a discipline at this time. The anthropologist is a prototypical global researcher, dependent on detailed data about people all over the world. Now that these data had suddenly become available, anthropology could be established as an academic discipline. So could sociology. If anthropology grew from imperialism, sociology was a product of the changing class relations brought about by industrialisation in Europe itself – all the founding fathers of sociology discuss

the meaning of ‘modernity’, and contrast it with ‘pre-modern’ conditions.

Anthropology in Europe:

Giving an account of the history of Anthropology in Europe is a challenging to task to apprehend, primarily because the anthropological work in Europe is quite complex and often does not follow any linear progression.

The British Social Anthropology:

The British tradition of anthropology is known as "Social anthropology". It is a term applied to ethnographic works that attempt to isolate a particular system of social relations such as those that comprise domestic life, economy, law, politics, or religion give analytical priority to the organizational bases of social life, and attend to cultural phenomena as somewhat secondary to the main issues of social scientific inquiry.

The evolutionist paradigm:

Inspired by enlightenment philosophy of progress based on reason Early anthropologists tend to focus on society and culture in progress. Among the early evolutionists, H. Spencer is an important figure. Like his older contemporary Auguste Comte, whom he admired and to some extent sought to emulate, he set himself the task of covering all the fields of human knowledge, from physics to ethics. Like Comte, he felt the task only possible if he could discover an overall unifying principle. Sometime in the 1840s Spencer decided that this principle was evolution. First enunciated in an essay of 1852, "The development hypothesis," evolution became the guiding thread of a whole "system of synthetic philosophy" that he expounded in a succession of major works stretching over half a century: The principles of psychology (1855), First principles (1862), The principles of biology (1864 7), The principles of sociology (1876), and The principles of ethics (1892 3). In between came a stream of essays on such subjects as population, progress, parliamentary reform, manners, morals, the philosophy of style, the physiology of laughter, and the function of music many of which were collected together by him as Essays: scientific, political and speculative (1858 74). Although these too tended to take evolution as the axiomatic principle, they mostly managed to evade its restrictive and rigid embrace and although as much ignored today as his larger works they contain some of Spencer's most imaginative and interesting ideas. The fundamental argument to his idea was that human society moves from instable homogeneity to relatively stable heterogeneity.

One of the most notable among the evolutionists is E.B.Tylor. The theory, outlined in his two-volume Primitive culture (1871), laid out an idea of progress in which human societies evolved and improved through time. Tylor argued that all human beings had similar intellectual potential. He rejected the notion, common at the time, that contemporary primitive societies had degenerated after a common Biblical origin. As a basis for demonstrating his evolutionary sequences, Tylor employed what he called the "doctrine of survivals." Survivals were obsolete or archaic aspects of culture preserved from one stage of social evolution into another. Living cultural fossils, they could provide clues to the past and proved that contemporary stages of culture must have evolved from earlier ones. Tylor's evolutionism differed from that of SPENCER and MORGAN by concentrating more on such humanist topics as the evolution of RELIGION, particularly ANIMISM, and less on material culture. He defined animism as the belief in spiritual beings and argued it was the basis of all religions, developing an elaborate evolutionary sequence that ran from a multiplicity of spirits to monotheism.

The functionalist paradigm.

Diffusionist and historical particularist:

Franz Boas German anthropologists started his fieldwork investigation in 1883 when Anthropology did not have any solid ground. Boas (1938) argued that although the independent invention of a culture trait can occur at the same time within widely separated societies where there is limited control of individual members, allowing them freedom to create a unique style, a link such as genetic relationship is still suspected. He felt this was especially true in socities where there were similar combinations of traits (Boas 1938:211). Boas emphasized that culture traits should not be viewed casually, but in terms of a relatively unique historical process that proceeds from the first introduction of a trait until its origin becomes obscure. He sought to understand culture traits in terms of two historical processes, diffusion and modification. Boas used these key concepts to explain culture and interpret the meaning of culture. He believed that the cultural inventory of a people was basically the cumulative result of diffusion. He viewed culture as consisting of countless loose threads, most of foreign origin, but which were woven together to fit into their new cultural context. Discrete elements become interrelated as time passes (Hatch 1973:57-58).

The functionalist:

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942, Poland-Britain-The United States)

Bronislaw Malinowski is credited with Functionalism, which explains a culture as an interrelated whole, not a collection of isolated traits. Based on his fieldwork in various areas of the world, particularly the Trobriand Islands in New Guinea, Malinowski established the theory of Functionalism. A culture is composed of many different elements, such as food acquisition, family relationships, and housing. Malinowski believed that all of these elements are connected and work together for one purpose, which is to meet the needs of individuals in the culture. In other words, culture exists to satisfy the basic biological, psychological, and social needs of individuals.

Malinowski is known for his psychological analysis. A classic example is his analysis on magic. In Trobriand Islands, magic was used for various purposes, such as to kill enemies and prevent being killed, to ease the birth of a child, to protect fishermen, and to ensure harvest. Malinowski hypothesized that magic is reliable in domains where there is a limited amount of scientific knowledge. Magic appears to work in these areas because people cannot handle situations with systematic knowledge. For example, the Trobriand Islanders did not practice magic when they fished inside a protected coral reef because they were able to predict catch and safety by weather and the conditions of the sea. In contrast, they did rely on magic when they went ocean fishing because it was difficult to predict unknown dangers and the amount of fish they might harvest. Based on this data, Malinowski argued that magic has a profound function in exerting human control over those dimensions that are otherwise outside of our element. The essential function of magic is to extend control over uncontrollable elements of nature and thereby reduce anxiety.

Malinowski is also known as a pioneer of fieldwork, which is intense and long-term research conducted among people in a particular community. He set criteria for fieldwork and brought this method to a fundamental element of the discipline. His criteria require anthropologists to actually live in communities and to acquire the language of the people among whom they are conducting their researches.

Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955, Britain)

Alfred Radcliffe-Brown is credited with Structural Functionalism, which analyzes particular social systems in a wider context of many different societies. Radcliffe-Brown was concerned with what keeps societies from falling apart. He identified similar customs in different societies and compared them in order to discover the customs’ inherent functions. Through this comparative method, he attempted to explain underlying principles that preserve the structure of each society.

For example, Radcliffe-Brown analyzed exogamous moieties in aboriginal societies of Australia, Melanesia and America. An exogamous moiety is a custom in which a population is divided into two social divisions and a man of one group must marry a woman of another. Since these three different aboriginal societies had almost no contact in history, it is surprising that they shared the custom of exogamous moieties. How can this phenomenon be explained? Radcliffe-Brown found that the two social divisions of exogamous moieties within each culture were named after a pair of animals or birds which are similar, such as coyote and wild cat, or eaglehawk and crow. He argued that these animal pairs represent opposing characteristics of a society, for example, friendship and conflict, or solidarity and opposition. According to Radcliffe-Brown, those aboriginal societies incorporate the dual divisions in their kin systems in order to keep the balance between these opposing characteristics. This balance is important for the stability of the whole society.

Radcliffe-Brown successfully explained many aspects of family structures that other anthropologists viewed as primitive customs. His analysis of social structure and function encouraged anthropologists to look at how a particular custom plays a role in maintaining social stability. At the same time, his analysis was criticized for not considering historical changes of traditional societies, especially those caused by Western colonialism.

The African Political System: An Anthropological Landmark

Influential, branch of political anthropology has its origins in the experience of anthropological FIELDWORK and the very practical concerns associated with locating order in non-Western societies. This was the explicit aim of the founding work in the field, African political systems (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard 1940b). Based on a set of descriptions and analyses of centralized and decentralized systems of governance in Africa, societies were divided into two types: "primitive states" that possessed government institutions and "stateless societies" that did not. This work, and examples of detailed fieldwork on political systems such as EVANS-PRITCHARD'S (1940) among the Nuer and FORTES's (1945) among the Tallensi, inspired a generation of fieldworkers to concentrate on the varied ways in which political order might be embedded in KINSHIP relations, RITUAL practices, AGE SYSTEMS, and other order-keeping institutions that did not require separate institutions of government. Such a focus was of clear concern to colonial administrators anxious to understand how to govern and control "subject" peoples, and the role anthropologists may have played in aiding COLONIALISM has been the subject of considerable debate in recent decades (Asad 1973; Kuklik 1991). It is clear, however, that the results of such work, particularly in Africa, pushed anthropology in a number of new directions.

The Early post war anthropology:

The devastation that brought forth by the Second World War brings immediate challenge of making policies and arranging funding for revival of their economy. One of the immediate responses was the formation of International Monetary Fund an outcome of Bretton Woods’ agreement.

The primary problem encountered by policy makers was to implement the development agenda based on the principles of Modernisation. The modernization theory argued that development can be achieved through Fund Injection based on the principles of Evolutionist paradigm, i.e. society progresses through unilinnear stages of social evolution. In this context, it becomes important to understand the cultural differences and not to take it as unnecessary barrier to implement market economy. In consequence peasant values and their interaction with state becomes a central concern. In USA, studies along this line gains prominence. Redfield (1971, 1956); Foster 1973 (1962); Friedl (1958) find their works as having practical application to policy making and development discourse. The growing interest in peasant societies prompted a number of ethnographic studies, focused initially on Central and South America and on Southern Europe, but rapidly coming to include other areas, and more general discussions and a dialogue between anthropologists and other specialists. Psychological tests utilized by Banfield were also resorted to by other researchers, such as Anne Parsons (1967) in her study of the urban poor of Naples. The anthropologist was concerned not only with defining cultural institutions and values, but also with the enculturation of individuals. In some instances this was linked to the recognition of wider sets of allegiances and a wider cultural context (Benedict 1946a,b; Friedl 1959; Lowie 1954). Although the dominant themes at this time were peasant orientations rather than national cultures (but see Lowie 1954) and 'community', meaning small, homogeneous and relatively self contained groups, there was an increasing awareness of the links between such 'communities' and wider entities and processes. It is in recognition of these connections that, in the Mexican context, Redfield proposed the 'folk-urban continuum' and the distinction between the 'great tradition' and the 'little tradition' (Redfield 1971 [1956]). There was some convergence at this time between the work of US and British anthropologists, although in Britain, owing to its position within the post-colonial world, most anthropologists were not fired with the same enthusiasm over the applicability of their research as were their North American counterparts. Here the agenda was less clear, and the concern with 'applied anthropology' was less prominent at this point. However, the continuing (though increasingly beleaguered) influence of the structural-functionalist paradigm did result in some interesting parallels between cultural and social anthropology - particularly when the focus of study was European societies.

The 1960s: the construction of Mediterranean

In 1959, a conference sponsored by Winner-green foundation anthropologists first discuss on the Mediterranean value of Honour and Shame. Following this, in 1963, several seminars discuss on 'continuity and persistence of Mediterranean modes of thought'. Peristiany (1974 [1966]) clearly finds this meetings as the initial steps in the formulation of a problematic that could define and orientate a Mediterranean field of investigation, based on his belief that the cultural parallels encountered within the area made for the possibility of systematic comparisons. Pitt-Rivers, who in many respects represents a landmark in the development of anthropology of Europe, discusses the concept of Honour in the literature of Western Europe. In spIte of his more general treatment of honour, his discussion reinforces the view, already stated by Peristiany, of honour as a ode relevant to a social system which had largely been superseded in North-Western Europe; a value-system associated largely with aristocrats, clergy and poets of former times. Pitt-Rivers suggests that the mobility of the upper classes, combined with urban life in Spain to expose individuals to cosmopolitan influences, and these influences are incompatible Wl e values of honour and shame. This constitutes a way of defmmg the area of expertise of the anthropologist: the area of study appears to correlate with the relative progress of modernization and of the 'great tradition', restricting research to smaller populations where 'traditional' values might persist. Pitt-Rivers' work as an anthropological account because it is based primarily on direct observation. 'The people he writes about are real people and not figures taken from the printed page of units in statistical tables' (Pitt-Rivers 1971 [1954]: x). What constitutes an anthropological study is, therefore, the specific object of study (a complex set of interpersonal relations and their value systems) and the method of research employed (participatory observation).

The 1970s: expansion and fragmentation – work at home

Changes in the discipline during the 1970s were prompted not only by the limitations and failures of the structural-functionalist paradigm and the modernization perspective, but also by developments in the wider political arena. The late sixties saw a wave of protests and unrest across Europe. The thirdworld perspective was established. The Cold War division of Europe into Soviet and Nato camps was again showing signs of strain. In this situation, Cole (1977) argues that Europe has provided funding to carry our anthropological research on allies and enemies in Europe. Davis (1977) finds Anthropologists lack of interest in doing fieldwork on Europe, as they find it more anthropological to carry out fieldwork in remote corners of African world. Nonetheless, this is perhaps the period when a distinctive anthropology of Europe develops. Freeman (1973) is one of the first anthropologists who attempts to outline the scope and achievements of studies in rural European social Organisation. Analysis of patron-client relations (Wolf 1966b) becomes one of the central concers of Mediterranean anthropologists. Boissevain’s (1975) essay entitled “Towards a social anthropology of Europe” was the first systematic attempt to define an agenda for the emerging “anthropology of Europe”. He further argues that the concepts like equilibrium, corporation, balanced opposition, reciprocity and consensus, developed from the study of Non-Western, Tribal societies were of limited value for dealing with complexity of European societies. Nor was the traditional research technique of participant-observation alone any longer sufficient. For him, anthropologists needed new methods to enable them in studying the liks between different levels of organizations – Local, Regional, National, Core and Periphery. In short they need to focus on the interrelationship between local events and macro social processes of “State formation, national integration, industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, class conflict and commercialization (Boissevain 1975).

One alternative to functionalism was the 'action' approach, pioneered by Barth (1966; 1969), Goffman (1959), and Barnes (1972), and elaborated, in European anthropology, in the work of Boissevain and Bailey and their students. Their work focused on individuals and the stratagems they employ within a given socio-political framework. 'Action theory' covered a variety of approaches, including transactionalism, network analysis, systems analysis and game theory. What united them was an emphasis on the dynamic character of interpersonal exchanges. Instead of looking at the individual as a passive and obedient slave to group norms and pressures, Boissevain stressed that 'it is important to see him as an entrepreneur who tries to manipulate norms and relationships for his own social and psychological benefit' (Boissevain 1974: 6).

For European anthropologists it did provide new research foci and a framework for analyzing elements of the complexity of European societies that had been invisible to functionalist analysis - even if its micro-perspective tended to obscure the wider picture. However, that shift of focus led to the elaboration of a number of new analytical concepts, as well as to a re-evaluation of some old concerns, such as 'patron-client relations', 'micro-politics', 'brokers', 'middlemen', 'informal and non-corporate groups', 'cliques', 'factions and action-sets' and 'instrumental friendship' (d. Banton 1966; Bailey 1971; 1973; Blok 1974; Boissevain 1966, 1968, 1974; Gellner and Waterbury 1977; Wolf 1966b).

1980s and 1990s the conceptualization of Europe:

The economic interdependence among European states and expansion of market economy as well rising increase in contact have made it possible to take Europe as an unit of analyisis. There is political level integration in Europe which brings forth ever increasing consolidation forming the European Union. In this context the study of different religious possibilities including the Catholic-Protestant debate. The nature of anthropological enquiry includes correlation between Protestantism, Liberalism and economic development (MacFarlane, 1978), and Orthodoxy, authoritarianism and economic underdevelopment (Haller, 1990). Anthropological phenomena such as religion, family form and political orientation (Todd, 1985) become the locus and focus of research. Wallace (1990) illustrates the ways in which Europe has been defined in recent years on the basis of shared values, culture and psychological identity (Wallace 1990).

Future directions:

The close of the twentieth century represents a momentous period in the history of Europe, but at present we can only have a hazy picture of what is likely to emerge in the future. As social scientists we have had to confront major international events: the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War, increasing integration of the economies of the European Union, the breakdown of Yugoslavia and protracted war throughout Bosnia. We have simultaneously witnessed prolonged economic recession and mass unemployment, as well as increasing right-wing violence throughout eastern and western Europe. Yet we face these phenomena often bereft of suitable anthropological categories. Although many' classical' anthropologists have contributed to the issues of nationality and nationalism anthropology as a whole has been limited by its emphasis on small-scale units. Where progress has been made, largely through profitable exchanges with sociologists and social historians, this has been limited to developments appropriate only to the national state.

Anthropology has conceptual and practical relevance to human rights. Human rights are predicated on a theory of human nature, and anthropologists can contribute to this through their cross-species and cross-cultural comparisons (D. Brown 1991). Yet one of the greatest challenges to universal human rights is the concept of CULTURAL RELATIVISM, which Franz Boas and other anthropologists originated (Herskovits 1972) and others have criticized (Edgerton 1992; Hatch 1983). Some countries accused of violations of human rights have tried to hide behind cultural relativism and criticized their accusers of being Western moral imperialists. Every culture has its own ideas about morality, but these are usually not readily extended beyond its boundaries to other groups, let alone formulated as universals encompassing all of humankind. Anthropologists can help explore, understand, and mediate the cultural diversity of ideas about human rights (An-Naim 1992; K. Dwyer 1991), and they can attempt to reconcile the fundamental issues of universality vs. relativity (Renteln 1990). At a practical level it must be acknowledged that violators of human rights often target individuals and groups based, at least in part, on their apparent biological, social, cultural, or linguistic differences. Anthropology can address this situation as the humanistic science that documents, interprets, and celebrates the biological and cultural unity and diversity of humankind. Moreover, during their FIELDWORK anthropologists often have a special opportunity to monitor and document human rights, although they must do so discretely because of potential dangers. Anthropologists in rights: Part of the explanation for the shift away from relativism in recent anthropological thinking must be due to the recognition that there are no isolated and bounded cultures and societies to reinforce an ‘archipelago’ view of culture. This observation comes at a point when some voices in the discipline are arguing that we live in a post-cultural world with greater emancipatory potential for individual autonomy and agency. The desire to go ‘beyond culture’ in some quarters of anthropology has led to a variety of attempts to construct new forms of anthropological inquiry – new types of ethnographic research – that transcend notions of isolated, bounded cultures. In some cases, this has provoked an interest in transnational, diasporic populations who are explored through multilocale ﬁeldwork. In other cases, it has led to an ethnography that focuses on global institutions and global processes themselves. Such a move displaces the universalism–relativism polarity, opening space for new – or rehabilitated – forms of critical evaluation based on an analysis of power and agency. For John Gledhill, to give one example of this new thinking, the problem is not about relativism or universalism, but access to global justice and the lack of accountability of rights institutions. Newer debates on power, globalization and transnationalism seem to have displaced the terms of the relativist–universalist polarity. The discussion has been reframed in terms of interconnections, networks and movements of people, ideas and things rather than static and discrete cultures in conﬂict. Nevertheless, the problem remains of ow to steer a path between the rariﬁed and decontextualized ethics of neo-Kantian political philosophers such as Gewirth (1978) and the radical populism of simply reinforcing what informants say about justice, rights and political claims. Even more challenging is how to make that path meet the requirements of being ethical, empirically informed and conceptually sophisticated. Recent works are increasingly focus on the anthropological issues of human rights. For example Good and Navaro-Yashin focus on the processing of asylum claims in UK and European contexts, a political issue which has moved centre stage with the rise of anti-immigration right-wing parties in European elections in 2002. These two authors raise signiﬁcant questions both about the transnational processes of asylum and about the legal process more generally. In both cases, they chronicle the paradoxes of claims caught between the letter of the law and its interpretation in speciﬁc contexts. The question of rights, and the inﬂuence of debates about transnationalism within the social sciences more generally, have increasingly pushed social anthropologists into thinking harder about the problem of comparison. Social anthropology since the 1980s (excepting the Marxian political economy tradition of Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf and others) has largely eschewed large-scale comparison in favour of ﬁne-grained description and analyses of local social practices and beliefs.21 It has been asked, what is to be compared, when the meaning of elements being compared (religion, ethical values or political structures) not only varies enormously, but is highly dependent on local context? The expansion of rights makes rights discussions more ubiquitous but at the same time it makes comparison more difﬁcult since social researchers must always ask themselves if they are comparing the same kinds of social processes and, if so, then what characteristics do they share?
Further reading: Wilson, R. A. and Mitchell, J. P. (Eds.) (2004). Human Rights in global perspective: anthropological studies of rights claims and entitlements.London: Routledge To visit a good blog on anthropological issues of human rights can be found by clicking here To know more about Human Rights go to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: click here Universal declaration of Human Rights - click here 1948 Roosevelt's lecture to the United Nation's general assembly click here (VIDEO) The Rule of Law in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Click here, pdf United Nation's Rights Council click here Inter American Commission on Human Rights Click here African Union click here

Pages

Concepts

Concept of power in Discipline and Punish:

Power in Power/Knowledge:

Power in Governmentality:

Holism in Anthropology

Culture Change

History:

Approaches:

Perspectives explaining culture change:

Major Factors and processes of Culture Change:

Acculturation:

Cultural adaptation:

Diffusion:

Assimilation:

Modernisation:

Demographic factors:

Technological factors:

Policy factors:

Further reading:

Further reading:

History of Anthropology: with special emphasis on European continent