POWER AND ITS DISGUISES Anthropological Perspectives on Politics Second Edition JOHN GLEDHILL Pluto P Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA First published 1994 Second Edition 2000 by PLUTO PRESS 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © John Gledhill 1994, 2000 The right of John Gledhill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 1686 7 hbk ISBN 0 7453 1685 9 pbk Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gledhill, John. Power and its disguises : anthropological perspectives on politics / John Gledhill.—2nd ed. p. cm.—(Anthropology, culture and society) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7453–1686–7 1. Political anthropology. 2. Power (Social sciences) I. Title. II. Series. GN492.G55 2000 306.2—dc21 00–026069 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 10987654321 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Production Services Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed in the European Union by TJ International, Padstow CONTENTS Preface to the Second Edition vii 1. Locating the political: a political anthropology for today 1 How not to use the West as a point of departure 8 The distinctiveness of the modern state 15 Wider implications of historical discontinuity 18 Political anthropology reconstituted 20 2. The origins and limits of coercive power: the anthropology of stateless societies 23 The externalization of the political as the negation of power 27 Sexual politics in stateless societies 32 Civilization, mother of barbarism 38 ‘Stateless societies’ under the modern state 41 3. From hierarchy to surveillance: the politics of agrarian civilizations and the rise of the Western national state 45 Political systems in theories of European development 48 A specifically European dynamic? 51 Agrarian civilization outside Europe 58 4. The political anthropology of colonialism: a study of domination and resistance 67 Structural-functionalist political anthropology as a child of its time 69 The colonial process as an object of analysis 71 Cracks in the structures: the anthropology of resistance 77 5. Post-colonial states: legacies of history and pressures of modernity 92 Regime variation in post-independence Africa 94 Deep politics: the state and civil society 100 v vi Power and Its Disguises Power relations in the shadow state 103 ‘Democratization’ in Latin America 105 Mexico: democratization versus the shadow state and militarization 110 Indigenous peoples and the state in Mexico and Guatemala 119 6. From macro-structure to micro-process: anthropological analysis of political practice 127 Getting at structure through events 130 Politics as the activity of ‘political men’ 135 The autonomy of the political field and its symbolic practices 138 Insidious strategies of power 149 7. Political process and ‘global disorder’: perspectives on contemporary conflict and violence 153 Expanding capitalism, declining empires 154 Cultural globalization and power relations161 From the fantasies of ‘Senderology’ to the roots of political violence in Peru 167 Sri Lanka: constructing new orders through violence 177 8. Society against the modern state? The politics of social movements 184 Social movements theory: the need for scepticism 185 Alternative modernities196 Cultural politics and political constructions of culture 199 Popular politics and the politicization of gender 205 9. Anthropology and politics: commitment, responsibility and the academy 214 The politics of anthropological knowledge production: some initial dilemmas215 Acting on the basis of knowledge 221 Commitment at the grassroots 227 From knowledge to wisdom? 234 Power and its disguises 238 Bibliography 243 Index 259 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION This second edition has been prepared at the end of my third year at the University of Manchester. Occupying the chair once occupied by Max Gluckman, I have approached the task with considerable fear of failing to measure up to the tradition that I have inherited. Much has, of course, changed since Gluckman’s day. My predecessors as heads of the department, Marilyn Strathern and Tim Ingold, set their own distinctive stamps on its development. But political anthropology remains central to Manchester’s work. I have already learned a lot from my new colleagues and from three generations of outstanding undergraduate and postgraduate students. Special thanks are due to John Hutnyk and Karen Sykes. I shamelessly took over some of John’s ideas for a stimulating second-year Political and Economic Anthropology course when he left Manchester in 1997, and he remains a good friend and fellow advocate of a more politicized approach to what we do. Karen patiently answered my dumb questions about Melanesia and steered me towards readings that rapidly pointed a scholar drowning in administrative tasks in the right direction. But I have benefited greatly from working with every one of my new colleagues at Manchester, even if the fruits are only partly visible here and I must absolve all of them from respon- sibility for my mistakes or misunderstandings. A special acknowledgement is, however, also due to Katrin Lund, whose work as tutorial assistant on the second year course contributed immeasurably to its success. I would also like to thank Matthew Gutmann, Ananth Aiyer and other friends in the United States for their useful suggestions for the second edition, although I will certainly have fallen short of satisfying their demands for a tougher line on certain theoretical tendencies. Since I have been teaching with new ethnographic material and addressing new issues, the temptation to rewrite the book radically was hard to resist. It had, however, proved valuable to teachers in its original form, and the positive feedback that I have received from colleagues in Europe and the United States suggested that the main priority was to ensure that it remained up to date. I have introduced some new material and ideas, and developed and nuanced some of the existing lines of argument. A consider- able amount of what is new is, however, simply to keep up with what has happened in some of the places I discussed since the original edition was vii viii Power and Its Disguises completed in 1993. This exercise also proved valuable from the point of view of looking at explanations of the changes that have occurred and considering their broader theoretical implications. There are many contributions to which I have still failed to give the place they are due. I must excuse myself to their authors on the pragmatic grounds of lack of space, but I hope that the book’s principal message is that there is always much more to be explored and rethought. Since much of the book remains as it was, I remain deeply indebted to my old colleagues at University College London and must reiterate my gratitude to them all, again with the absolution that none should be held responsible for either my views or my mistakes. Particular thanks are due to Rob Aitken, who shared the class teaching with me when I tried the original book out as a lecture course, and now figures as a published authority in its bibliogra- phy. I continue to owe a special debt to Bruce Kapferer, who has not only forced me to think about a lot of things over the years, but was generous enough to give me access to an unpublished manuscript which I plundered freely of its rich ideas. Our dialogue continued for a year in Manchester while he was with us as Hallsworth Senior Research Fellow in 1997. To Richard Wilson, the editor of this series, and another scholar from whom I continue to learn much on a regular basis, I owe even more than when he first invited me to write the book and steered it through to publication. What I know about political anthropology has been influenced by a large number of other scholars, in Britain, Mexico and the United States, many of whom are cited extensively in the text. Even so, I continue to omit much work that I value greatly because it is not accessible to English-speaking readers, as those who consult some of my more specialized publications will readily see. Although most of the case studies used to illustrate the arguments of this text are drawn from the work of other anthropologists, I have used a little more of my own ethnography in this edition. Thanks are due to the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and to the London University Central Research Fund for financing this work. Last but certainly not least, I remain indebted to Kathy Powell for her friendship and continuing contributions to my thinking about politics and anthropology. 1 LOCATING THE POLITICAL: A POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY FOR TODAY We actually know a great deal about power, but have been timid in building upon what we know. (Wolf 1990: 586) Half a century ago, the subject matter and relevance of political anthropol- ogy still seemed relatively easy to define. Under Western colonial regimes, one of the most valuable kinds of knowledge which anthropologists could offer to produce was that relating to indigenous systems of law and government. Most colonial governments had opted for systems of indirect rule. Colonial authority was to be mediated through indigenous leaders and the rule of Western law was to legitimate itself through a degree of accom- modation to local ‘customs’. In the last analysis, however, the laws and authority of the colonizers were pre-eminent. Anthropologists in the twentieth century found themselves in the same position as clerics in the Spanish-American Empire at the dawn of European global expansion.