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POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: an Introduction, Third Edition POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: An Introduction, Third Edition Ted C. Lewellen PRAEGER Political Anthropology POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY An Introduction Third Edition Ted C. Lewellen Foreword by Victor Turner, Written for the First Edition Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lewellen, Ted C., 1940– Political anthropology : an introduction / Ted C. Lewellen ; foreword to the first edition by Victor Turner.—3rd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–89789–890–7 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0–89789–891–5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Political anthropology. I. Title. GN492.L48 2003 306.2—dc21 2003052889 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright ᭧ 2003 by Ted C. Lewellen All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003052889 ISBN: 0–89789–890–7 0–89789–891–5 (pbk.) First published in 2003 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10987654321 CONTENTS Foreword, Written for the First Edition vii Victor Turner Preface ix 1. The Development of Political Anthropology 1 2. Types of Preindustrial Political Systems 15 3. The Evolution of the State 43 4. Religion in Politics: Sacred Legitimacy, Divine Resistance 65 5. Structure and Process 81 6. The Individual in the Political Arena: Action Theory and Game Theory 95 7. The Power of the People: Resistance and Rebellion 111 8. Gender and Power 131 9. The Politics of Identity: Ethnicity and Nationalism 159 10. Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Emerging Synthesis 181 11. From Modernization to Globalization 201 vi CONTENTS Glossary 227 Bibliography 235 Index 255 FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION Victor Turner (1920–1983) In this succinct and lucid account of the sporadic growth of political anthropology over the past four decades, Ted Lewellen traces the devel- opment of its theoretical structure and the personal contributions of its main formulators. He makes available to the wider public of educated readers the issues, problems, perplexities, and achievements of political anthropologists as they have striven to make sense of the multitudinous ways in which societies on varying levels of scale and complexity handle order and dispute, both internal and external. He assesses the strengths and probes the weaknesses of successive anthropological approaches to the study of political structures and processes, viewed both cross-cultur- ally and in terms of intensive case studies. The result is a commendable guide to the varied sources of this increasingly important subdiscipline, a guide which, as far as I know, is unique of its kind; his criticisms are sharp, his style genial, and his judgments just. As a student of the first generation of British political anthropologists of the structural-function- alist school, and a teacher of the medial generation of American political anthropologists, I can vouch for the accuracy and balance of Professor Lewellen’s conclusions, and applaud the penetration of his criticisms, even when they are directed at positions promoted by those of my own theoretical persuasion. Professor Lewellen states candidly that he has not written a textbook. Indeed, most textbooks are bulkier and overcharged with disparate ma- terials, mainly descriptive. But this concise book is theoretically fine- viii FOREWORD honed and minutely integrated. It seems to be the introduction to political anthropology that we have all been waiting for, the prism which accu- rately segregates the significant constituents. Not only students, but also seasoned scholars will find worth in it. It is at once a summation and a new start. PREFACE This book had its origins in 1980 when a sociologist friend who was editing the multivolume Handbook of Political Behavior asked me to supply the entry on Political Anthropology. My protestations that I knew no more about the subject than any other budding anthropologist fell on deaf ears. He wanted nothing fancy or even particularly erudite, just a workmanlike overview of the subject matter and theoretical orientation of the subdiscipline. How hard could that be? Barely a year out of gradu- ate school and in need of publications to beef up an emaciated vitae, I finally agreed to do it. I thought I could seek out a few overview books and an encyclopedia article or two on the subject, peruse the most im- portant works in the bibliography, and write it up in short order. This was not to be the case. It quickly became evident that no remotely com- prehensive overview book or article existed. There was no shortage of works with “political anthropology” in their titles, but most were theo- retically narrow, and those that did attempt some sort of summation were incomplete or hopelessly out of date. The unfortunate reality was that political anthropology existed mainly in widely scattered ethnographies and theoretical writings that had little to do with each other. What Ronald Cohen (1970: 484) had written a decade earlier was still true: “There are, as yet, no well-established conventions as to what [political anthro- pology] includes or excludes or what should be the basic methodological attack on the subject.” There even seemed to be some doubt that there was such a thing as political anthropology: in a 1959 review article, x PREFACE political scientist David Easton charged that political anthropology did not really exist because the practitioners of this nondiscipline had utterly failed to mark off the political system from other subsystems of society. The Handbook entry (Lewellen 1981a), followed in the same year by an article on the anthropological classification of political systems in Micropolitics, seemed quite inadequate to the need. The goal of filling in these early outlines, defining the areas that comprised political an- thropology, and discovering some coherence in a plethora of viewpoints turned into a fascinating, difficult, and highly rewarding long-term pro- ject of which this Third Edition of Political Anthropology is the latest installment. When the first edition was about to go to press, the publisher—real- istically fearing a miniscule market—asked that I get a “big name” to write a Foreword. This seemed like an impossible task; there were rela- tively few superstars in the field, and I did not know any of them per- sonally. On the timeworn principle that you might as well wish for the bakery as wish for the bread, I tried to contact Victor Turner, who was at that time teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Turner was not widely identified as a political anthropologist, but his Schism and Continuity in an African Society (1957) was—and still is— among the best books ever published in the field, and he was part of the editorial triumvirate that brought out the revolutionary anthology on pro- cess theory (Swartz, Turner, and Tuden 1966). My unsolicited manuscript caught up with him in Israel, where he was teaching and researching. I was quite surprised when I received in the mail Turner’s Foreword on two single sheets of crumpled onionskin paper typed almost beyond leg- ibility on an ancient typewriter, which Turner apologetically explained he had inherited from Max Gluckman. His enthusiasm for the project probably had less to do with any writing or research skills on my part than with the fact that someone was finally solidifying a field that had previously been amorphous. I never had the opportunity to meet Turner in person before his un- timely death in 1983. However, in many ways he still lives on in the works of contemporary political theorists. Turner did not witness the critical deconstruction that would so severely split anthropology in the 1980s, but he anticipated it with his own emphasis on symbolism and subjectivity, on understanding the worldviews underlying the actors in his ethnographic dramas. I think that he would be right at home with the current synthesis-in-the-making, in which well-sifted postmodern ideas are finding form in the hard-nosed empiricism that Turner himself practiced. PREFACE xi The years have been good for political anthropology. Easton’s com- plaint that political anthropology was unable to mark off the political system from other subsystems of society was, at the time, generally ac- cepted with the humble mortification proper to a young science being criticized by one much older and wiser. It turned out, however, that Easton had construed political anthropology’s greatest virtue into a vice. In the societies in which anthropologists have traditionally worked, poli- tics cannot be analytically isolated from kinship, religion, age-grade as- sociations, or secret societies, because these are precisely the institutions through which power and authority are manifested; in many societies and in political subgroups within larger societies, “government” either does not exist or is irrelevant at the local level. The specification of the manner in which the idiom of politics is expressed through the medium of apparently nonpolitical institutions, ideologies, and practices may be the primary contribution of anthropology to the study of comparative politics. Political anthropologists have even carried these insights into the sacred domain of the political scientist by demonstrating that infor- mal organizations and relationships may be more important than are for- mal institutions, even in such modern governments as those of the United States and China (Britan and Cohen 1980; Weatherford 1981). Postmod- ern concepts of subtle forms of authority that inhere in knowledge, dis- course, and gender have broadened the purview of political anthropology to consider power in all its forms. A new anthropology of globalization is inevitably and profoundly political, demanding analysis not only of how global structures impose themselves at the local level, but also of how these impositions are resisted and opposed.
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