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Political Anthropology (Anthropology)

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. Political anthropology emphasizes context, process, and scale. The field has been most concerned with the contextual specificity of political processes and the mechanisms through which localities are differentially incorporated into larger scales of social, economic, and political life. Whereas political anthropology inhabits much of the same analytical ground as political science in considering phenomena such as state formation, democracy, citizenship, rights, and development, political anthropologists challenge normative assumptions of what counts as “politics” by illuminating connections between formal and informal political arenas, and among cultural, social, and political processes. There is a key internal distinction that has marked political anthropology virtually from the outset: that between a structuralist approach emphasizing the systemic nature of power and the role of political behavior and institutions in social reproduction, and a processual approach that highlights conflict, contradiction, and change. Significantly, political anthropology has been distinguished from other fields of anthropology by its relative lack of preoccupation with “culture” as an analytical category; most political anthropologists focus instead on social inequality, institutional dynamics, and political transformation. To put it differently, political anthropologists typically think of their research sites relationally and dynamically, and not in terms of enduring difference from a purported mainstream.
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  5. Bibliographies
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  7. Several volumes provide overviews of work in political anthropology, and together they mark shifts in the themes and approaches of the field. Swartz, et al. 1966 marks a shift from an older structuralist analysis to a focus on political processes, highlighting in particular the role of conflict, authority, ritual, and boundary-making in the politics of decolonization. Vincent 1978 also elaborates a processual approach to politics but draws attention to interest, strategy, and the role of individuals within wider political dynamics. Lewellen 1992 offers a comprehensive survey of 20th-century trends in political anthropology, whereas Vincent 1990 situates Anglophone anthropological work on politics in its broader historical context. Finally, Vincent 2002 and Nugent and Vincent 2004 are masterful collections of essays that convey the breadth of political anthropological scholarship, including the thematic continuities and shifts that comprise the field.
  8.  
  9. Lewellen, Ted C. 1992. Political anthropology: An introduction. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
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  11. Very useful and comprehensive overview of the history of political anthropology that illuminates shifting trends in context, from structural-functionalism, through process theory, to the impact of theoretical work on postmodernism and globalization.
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  13. Nugent, David, and Joan Vincent, eds. 2004. A companion to the anthropology of politics. Oxford: Blackwell.
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  15. Follows Vincent 2002, offering essays on central themes in political anthropology by leading anthropologists. Themes include citizenship, cosmopolitanism, development, feminism, globalization, hegemony, identity, and postcolonialism.
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  17. Swartz, Mark, Victor Turner, and Arthur Tuden, eds. 1966. Political anthropology. Chicago: Aldline.
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  19. Essays documenting the shift from a structuralist to a processual approach to political analysis, with a particular focus on contexts of decolonization.
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  21. Vincent, Joan. 1978. Political anthropology: Manipulative strategies. Annual Review of Anthropology 7:175–194.
  22. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.07.100178.001135Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  23. Review essay that highlights work on strategy, interest, and individual agency in wider political processes.
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  25. Vincent, Joan. 1990. Anthropology and politics: Visions, traditions, and trends. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press.
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  27. Wide-ranging critical review of Anglophone political anthropology from 1879 to the present, situating it in national and international contexts of production, and considering how intellectual, social, and political conditions have influenced the field. Also examines reasons for the survival of particular schools of thought and the influence of certain individuals and departments.
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  29. Vincent, Joan, ed. 2002. The anthropology of politics: A reader in ethnography, theory, and critique. Oxford: Blackwell.
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  31. A masterful collection of essays that includes key Enlightenment texts whose ideas continue to find resonance within anthropological work on politics, classics in political anthropology, and contemporary works organized under imperialism and colonialism, and under cosmopolitics. Also includes an extremely useful introduction by Vincent on trends, continuities, and ruptures in political anthropology.
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  33. Journals
  34.  
  35. Few journals are devoted specifically to political anthropology, such as Political and Legal Anthropology Review and the new International Political Anthropology. In addition to these periodicals, work in political anthropology appears in general anthropological journals as well as more thematic journals such as City and Society, Transforming Anthropology, and Dialectical Anthropology.
  36.  
  37. City and Society.
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  39. This is a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Anthropological Association on behalf of the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology. It is mainly concerned with theories, problems, processes, and institutions of urban, national, and transnational life.
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  41. Dialectical Anthropology.
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  43. This is a peer-reviewed journal that invites work on social theory and political practices by scholars and activists working in Marxist and broadly political-economic traditions, and by those in dialogue or debate with these traditions.
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  45. International Political Anthropology.
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  47. This is a new peer-reviewed journal that is published biannually. It is committed to publishing interdisciplinary, comparative scholarship that addresses the problematics and concerns of contemporary politics through the prism of anthropologically based approaches.
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  49. Political and Legal Anthropology Review.
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  51. This is a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Anthropological Association on behalf of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. It features articles on such issues as nationalism, citizenship, political and legal processes, the state, civil society, colonialism, postcolonial public spheres, multiculturalism, and media politics.
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  53. Transforming Anthropology.
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  55. This is a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Anthropological Association and organized by the Association of Black Anthropologists. It focuses on issues of race, inequality, transnationalism, and diaspora.
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  57. Evolutionism and Historical Particularism
  58.  
  59. It is difficult to pinpoint a tradition of political anthropology, in part because the field only acquired a distinct institutional presence for a brief period from the 1940s to the 1970s. Nevertheless, a broad spectrum of scholarship dating from well before to well after this period addresses the concerns of political anthropology. One could trace the beginnings of political anthropology to Lewis Henry Morgan’s work (Morgan 1954, Morgan 2000), which established a standard for studying Native American political organization as part of an evolutionary sequence from clan- to state-based political society. Morgan’s method was one of functionalist holism that presupposed the existence of comparable, closed societies with their own embedded political institutions. In the 1910s, Franz Boas (Boas 1920, Boas 1928, Boas 1940) and his students—Robert Lowie (Lowie 1927), Alexander Lesser (Lesser 1933), and others—took up the anthropological study of Native Americans and challenged Morgan’s evolutionism by arguing for the historicity and dynamism of culture. Another of Boas’s students, Edward Sapir (Sapir 1938), extended the view of culture as a system of configurations through its application to language, though he departed from other Boasians in his emphasis on the individual. Rather than assume a self-contained social whole with its component parts, then, Boasians argued for a diffusionist theory of culture, in which social boundaries are assumed to be porous, allowing for cultural traits to diffuse from one society to another. They also understood the historical particularity of political forms as products of their environment rather than representing predefined stages of evolution.
  60.  
  61. Boas, Franz. 1920. The methods of ethnology. American Anthropologist 22.4: 311–321.
  62. DOI: 10.1525/aa.1920.22.4.02a00020Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  63. A key text to the Boasian argument against cultural evolutionism and for historical particularism, or the understanding of culture as the amalgam of environmental conditions, psychological factors, and historical connections.
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  65. Boas, Franz. 1928. Anthropology and modern life. New York: W. W. Norton.
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  67. Discusses biological and cultural inheritance; the fallacy of racial, cultural, or ethnic superiority; and the scientific basis for human individuality.
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  69. Boas, Franz. 1940. Race, language, and culture. New York: Macmillan.
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  71. Establishes the independence of race, language, and culture as variables of social life and constitutive of human diversity.
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  73. Lesser, Alexander. 1933. The Pawnee Ghost Dance hand game: A study of cultural change. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
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  75. Pathbreaking work on cultural revivalism among the Pawnee, through a focus on the transformations of the Ghost Dance. Later reprinted as The Pawnee Ghost Dance hand game: Ghost Dance revival and ethnic identity.
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  77. Lowie, Robert H. 1927. The origin of the state. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
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  79. Argues against Henry Maine’s evolutionary progression from pre-state societies organized by kinship to state societies organized by contiguity, and shows instead that the existence of notions of territorial belonging among so-called primitive peoples warrants their consideration as state societies.
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  81. Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1954. The league of the Ho-de-ne-sau-nee, or Iroquois. New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area Files.
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  83. Pathbreaking study of the political organization of the Iroquois confederacy in relation to its social, ritual, and economic aspects. Originally published in 1851.
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  85. Morgan, Lewis Henry. 2000. Ancient society. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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  87. This work established evolutionary theory as the basis for the study of political societies through successive stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization. It traces the interplay among the evolution of technology, family relations, property relations, and systems of governance. Originally published in 1877.
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  89. Sapir, Edward. 1938. Why the cultural anthropologist needs the psychiatrist. Psychiatry 1:7–12.
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  91. Emphasizes the role of individual psychology, experience, and creativity in shaping a personal world of meanings and actions, focusing on the individual in and of society to speculate on the meaning of dissent and heterodoxy. Sapir was known for his processual approach to grammar and the psychology of language. Reprinted in Psychiatry 64.1 (2001): 2–10.
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  93. Postwar History
  94.  
  95. The 1940s to the 1970s saw two main strands of political anthropological work: a structural functionalist emphasis on institutional continuity and social reproduction, and a historical processual emphasis on contact, conflict, and transformation. Anthropologists who worked in colonial settings, often conducting studies at the behest of colonial administrators, produced analyses of political life that fell into one or the other framework. Some specialized in the study of individual “native” polities, often studiously ignoring the colonial elephant in the room, whereas others placed these polities within the broader context of colonial conquest and the dynamics of decolonization.
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  97. British Structural Functionalism
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  99. The founding of a distinct field of political anthropology is usually associated with structural functionalism in 1940s Britain and the publication of Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940. Postwar British political anthropology was resolutely empirical and worked against older evolutionary and historicist typologies of political forms that charted a linear progression from bands to tribes, chiefdoms, and finally the modern state. Instead, this newer approach illuminated the specificities of political organization, leadership, and conflict resolution in the absence of formal institutions. Structural functionalism allowed for the comparative study of political formations in supposedly stateless societies; however, it also presupposed the self-contained, largely static nature of social groupings. Fortes and Evans-Pritchard’s focus on social equilibrium and the role of institutions in social reproduction was soon challenged by work that insisted on understanding political dynamics in terms of contradiction, conflict, and change. From the mid-1950s, political anthropologists working in newly independent nations witnessing rapid institutional change began to study the relationship between informal political structures and formal power. They tried to understand the politics of ethnicity and the social movements, forms of leadership, and competition that underwrote it. An emphasis on individual action, political strategy, and institutional transformation shifted the earlier systemic analysis in a more processual direction. Most important to this shift were the writings of Max Gluckman (Gluckman 1963) and Edmund Leach (Leach 1954), and of their students (e.g., Turner 1957, Barth 1969, Bailey 1969, Epstein 1958, Mitchell 1956).
  100.  
  101. Bailey, Frederick G. 1969. Stratagems and spoils: A social anthropology of politics. New York: Schocken.
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  103. Breaks with a consensus model of politics focused on the reproduction of social order and argues for an interactionalist approach to politics as a process of competition, conflict, and adaptation, highlighting in particular the role of “political entrepreneurs” in political dynamics.
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  105. Barth, Fredrik. 1969. Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of culture difference. Boston: Little, Brown.
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  107. Pathbreaking work that argues for a relational understanding of ethnicity as constituted by the boundaries between ethnic groups rather than by what is internal to ethnic identity.
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  109. Epstein, Arnold L. 1958. Politics in an urban African community. Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press.
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  111. Study of the administrative and political system in an urban community on the Northern Rhodesia Copperbelt that details the various social cleavages and interdependencies that make this population both a “community” and an integral part of a wider political economy.
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  113. Fortes, Meyer, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, eds. 1940. African political systems. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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  115. Distinguishes between primitive states and “acephalous,” or stateless, societies, and analyzes the role of kinship in structuring political life in stateless African polities. Paradigm-making work that flagged off a generation of structural functionalist scholarship.
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  117. Gluckman, Max. 1963. Order and rebellion in tribal societies. London: Cohen & West.
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  119. Argues for an understanding of political equilibrium as the result of a dialectical process in which conflicts and tensions are a necessary part of any society but ultimately give way to the reproduction of social order. Highlights unity and disunity as two sides of the same coin.
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  121. Leach, Edmund Ronald. 1954. Political systems of highland Burma: A study of Kachin social structure. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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  123. Provides a critique of systems analysis from within structural functionalism by analyzing the heterogeneity of political forms within single societies and the absence of equilibrium among the subsystems. Differentiates clearly between the abstract political structure assumed by contemporary anthropologists and the complexity of actual political life.
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  125. Mitchell, James Clyde. 1956. The Yao village: A study in the social structure of a Nyasaland tribe. Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press.
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  127. Considers the village as internally differentiated and as a unit in a larger field of political relations, and analyzes the persistence of the village as a crucial organizing principle despite the impact of colonialism and other transformative forces.
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  129. Turner, Victor Witter. 1957. Schism and continuity in an African society: A study of Ndembu village life. Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press.
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  131. Offers the concept of social drama as a framework to understand individual and collective manipulation of communal norms and values. Highlights in particular the role of individual decision making in situations of crisis.
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  133. History and Political Economy of “Complex” Societies
  134.  
  135. Beginning in the 1960s, political anthropologists also started to contend with how their field sites were incorporated into larger economic and political spheres of activity. Now, instead of looking simply at local communities as self-contained units, they turned to the study of the relationships among communities, regions, nations, and empires, or, as they glossed it, “social complexity.” This involved more attention to history and political economy, exemplified by work in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia by Eric Wolf (Wolf 1956, Wolf 1982), Sidney Mintz (Mintz 1974, Mintz 1977), F. G. Bailey (Bailey 1960), G. W. Skinner (Skinner 1965), Carol A. Smith (Smith 1984), Clifford Geertz (Geertz 1981), and Bernard Cohn (Cohn 1987). Shifting away from an emphasis on political organization and process that lay beyond the reach of the state and the market, they began to analyze how more localized, informal structures and institutions interacted with states and markets. This involved understanding not just how more formal mechanisms of state and market formation incorporated social spaces previously outside their reach, but also how phenomena such as kinship, patron-client relations, kingship, symbolism, and ritual performance structured the extension of states and markets.
  136.  
  137. Bailey, F. G. 1960. Tribe, caste, and nation: A study of political activity and political change in highland Orissa. Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press.
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  139. Offers an approach to anthropological analysis at a regional scale by considering the rise and fall of political institutions wrought by the incorporation of caste and tribe into modern bureaucracy and representative democracy.
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  141. Cohn, Bernard. 1987. An anthropologist among the historians, and other essays. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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  143. A collection of methodological, theoretical, and empirical essays on the anthropological history of India that paved the way for a generation of scholarship on the impact of British colonialism on the cultural and political makeup of contemporary India.
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  145. Geertz, Clifford. 1981. Negara: The theatre state in 19th century Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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  147. Classic, highly influential work that applies the cultural interpretation of myths, ceremonies, rituals, and symbols to the Balinese precolonial state to show how political authority is cultivated through and for spectacle.
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  149. Mintz, Sidney W. 1974. Caribbean transformations. Chicago: Aldine.
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  151. Situates the Caribbean within historical processes of European colonial expansion and capitalist development, and illuminates its key differences from the Americas, African America, and the Third World. One of the most provocative implications of the book is that the Caribbean, with its history of genocide, slavery, large-scale acculturation, early and forced industrialization, and revolution, was “modern” before most other places in the world.
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  153. Mintz, Sidney W. 1977. The so-called world-system: Local initiative and local response. Dialectical Anthropology 2.2: 253–270.
  154. DOI: 10.1007/BF00249489Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  155. Seminal essay that argues for an understanding of global capitalism as the product of dialectical interaction between wider processes of capitalist expansion and their local cultural responses.
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  157. Skinner, G. William. 1965. Marketing and social structure in rural China. Tucson, AZ: Association for Asian Studies.
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  159. Three-part essay tying the economic features of a marketing system to cultural, social, temporal, and political features of its social system. The work spurred an entire generation of scholarship on marketing in agrarian societies.
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  161. Smith, Carol A. 1984. Local history in global context: Social and economic transitions in western Guatemala. Comparative Studies in Society and History 26.2 (April): 193–228.
  162. DOI: 10.1017/S0010417500010872Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  163. Highlighting the role of Guatemalan peasants as active agents shaping Guatemalan history, this essay puts forth a broader argument for understanding the role of local agency in shaping larger processes of capitalist development.
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  165. Wolf, Eric R. 1956. Aspects of group relations in a complex society: Mexico. American Anthropologist 58.6: 1065–1078.
  166. DOI: 10.1525/aa.1956.58.6.02a00070Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  167. Pathbreaking essay that argues for an understanding of community as a “web” that weaves outside influences into the makeup of local groupings, and seeks to understand these dynamics over time.
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  169. Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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  171. A treatise on the need for a historical perspective within anthropology that offers a critical account of how the non-Western worlds typically studied by anthropologists were shaped through responses to European colonialism.
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  173. Contemporary Trends
  174.  
  175. Since the 1980s, political anthropology has extended and developed many of these older concerns. Some of the most productive engagements have been around the study of: Colonialism and Postcoloniality, Subalterns and Social Movements, Critical Development Studies, Anthropology of the State, Anthropology of Law, Socialism and Postsocialism, Neoliberalism, Diaspora and Transnationalism, Human Rights and Humanitarianism, Space and Place, and Secularism and Religion.
  176.  
  177. Colonialism and Postcoloniality
  178.  
  179. Together, Michel Foucault’s corpus of work on the discursive construction of power and Edward Said’s treatise on the role of colonialism in producing “the Orient” as a particular object of knowledge had a profound impact on the anthropological study of colonialism. Following these interventions, a number of anthropologists have looked at how colonial power and knowledge have set the limits of political thought, identity, and action in the postcolony (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, Scott 1995, Dirks 1992). Against this reading of colonialism, with its emphasis on encompassing political rationalities and “the colonization of consciousness,” others have argued for a more materialist understanding of colonial legacies that focuses on institutional formations and political economy. Mamdani 1996 is a particularly productive inquiry into how colonial institutional formations, such as indirect rule, and capitalist unevenness live on in postcolonial Africa as limits on democratization, whereas Fox 1985 shows the impact of colonial political economy and social classification on cultural identity, in this case of the Sikhs. Alongside these works, scholars have pushed back against a view of colonialism as an epistemic or political economic rupture that made the world anew and looked instead to the open-ended interplay between colonial and other influences in the makeup of the postcolony. Moore 2005 (cited under Space and Place) chronicles the historical sediments that constitute political practice in Zimbabwe, whereas Stoler 1995 and Cooper and Stoler 1997 argue for an understanding of how imperialism shaped colonizer and colonized alike. In a different vein, Mbembe 2001 considers the contextual specificity of power in Africa shaped by ongoing histories of interaction between rulers and the ruled. More recent work (discussed below in the section Subalterns and Social Movements) also raises questions about how to understand democracy in the postcolony, not as a subset of European bourgeois civil society, but as emerging out of a longstanding engagement with governmental power.
  180.  
  181. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 1991. Of revelation and revolution. Vol. 1, Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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  183. Historical ethnography of colonial missionizing in South Africa that offers a remarkably fine-grained analysis of how the encounter between missionaries and the Tswana transformed the practices, agents, and subjects of rule.
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  185. Cooper, Frederick, and Ann Laura Stoler, eds. 1997. Tensions of empire: Colonial cultures in a bourgeois world. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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  187. Influential collection on how “civilizing missions” in imperial metropolis and colony produced a bourgeois order where definitions of modernity and welfare, and discourses and practices of inclusion and exclusion, were contested and worked out. Argues that colonial studies must account for how the very categories of colonized and colonizer have been shaped and patterned at different times.
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  189. Dirks, Nicholas B., ed. 1992. Colonialism and culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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  191. Influential set of essays that shifts away from a structuralist to a more processual understanding of cultural formation under colonialism, and argues for the intimate link between culture and colonialism as both project and process.
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  193. Fox, Richard G. 1985. Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the making. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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  195. Historical materialist analysis of the influence of colonial political economy and cultural classification on the making of Sikh identity in the Punjab.
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  197. Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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  199. Offers a perspective on postcolonial African politics and prospects for democratization that situates contemporary Africa in the historical context of colonial indirect rule and patterns of social differentiation.
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  201. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the postcolony. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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  203. Rejects culturalist readings of colonialism that celebrate native culture and sovereignty, and reads interactions between rulers and ruled instead as marked by the “banality of power.”
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  205. Scott, David. 1995. Colonial governmentality. Social Text 42.
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  207. Applies Foucault’s notion of governmentality to understand the reshaping of conduct under colonialism.
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  209. Stoler, Ann Laura. 1995. Race and the education of desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the colonial order of things. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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  211. Offers a re-reading of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality through the prism of empire by considering how Dutch rule in Indonesia shaped the emergence of a European bourgeois sexual order.
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  213. Williams, Brackette F. 1991. Stains on my name, war in my veins: Guyana and the politics of cultural struggle. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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  215. Ethnographic account of the struggles of Guyanese citizens to build a nation against the historical backdrop of Dutch and British colonialism, and of postcolonial polarizations along ethnic, racial, religious, and class lines.
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  217. Subalterns and Social Movements
  218.  
  219. The 1990s witnessed a return to the study of social movements, now transformed by postcolonial studies and poststructuralist critiques of Marxism. Some looked back to older questions of how to understand peasant insurgency and slave revolt, and others turned to work in British cultural studies, such as Hall 1980, to understand the role of culture and the open-ended and fluid process of collective identification within new political struggles. One set of scholars explored what came to be called “new social movements,” which, in their focus on race, gender, sexuality, and indigeneity, and in their quest for cultural recognition as well as economic justice (Alvarez and Escobar 1992, Weston 1991), departed from older forms of class mobilization. But even those looking back to more traditional forms of struggle now revisited them through a disaffection with structural Marxist understandings of the revolutionary class subject. Some of the most influential work in this vein came out of the Subaltern Studies school of Indian historiography and its emphasis on subaltern political agency and history from below (Guha 1982–1985). Subaltern Studies scholars reinterpreted Antonio Gramsci’s work to argue for the radical autonomy of subalterns, their non-Western epistemologies, and insurrectionary agency. Although this particular branch of scholarship is situated in South Asia, the idea of non-Western subaltern life as a critique of capitalist modernity has also had strong resonances elsewhere (e.g., Taussig 1980). Others, particularly scholars working in Latin America in the tradition of 1960s anthropological political economy, drew more directly upon Gramsci’s relational understanding of subalternity as constituted through historical entanglements with state and capital (Roseberry 1989, Nugent 1997). The global turn of the 1990s shifted the scale of analysis for many scholars working on subaltern politics, who now brought increased attention to transnational social movements (e.g., Keck and Sikkink 1998) and the forms of solidarity they forge. Most recently, the national state has reemerged as an arbiter and referent of subaltern rights claims. For example, Chatterjee 2004 has inspired new scholarship on how subaltern politics has shaped the distinct formations of democracy in postcolonial societies.
  220.  
  221. Alvarez, Sonia, and Arturo Escobar, eds. 1992. The making of social movements in Latin America: Identity, strategy, and democracy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
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  223. Collection of essays on new social movements in 1980s Latin America that draws attention to their role in forging collective identities, their innovative social practices and political strategies, and their actual or potential contributions to alternative visions of development and the democratization of political institutions and social relations.
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  225. Chatterjee, Partha. 2004. The politics of the governed: Reflections on popular politics in most of the world. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
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  227. Using the tools of classical political theory and Foucauldian theory, Chatterjee argues for an interpretation of postcolonial democracy as distinct from its Western counterparts, particularly in terms of the political role of subaltern populations long shaped by the effects of governmental power.
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  229. Guha, Ranajit, ed. 1982–1985. Subaltern studies: Writings on south Asian history and society Vols. 1–4. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.
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  231. Groundbreaking intervention in historiography and South Asian studies that argued against nationalist and Marxist histories privileging the experiences of a secular elite and illuminated instead the social history and cultural worldviews of non-elites.
  232. Find this resource:
  233. Hall, Stuart. 1980. Race, articulation, and societies structured in dominance. In Sociological theories: Race and colonialism. Edited by UNESCO, 305–345. Paris: UNESCO.
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  235. Very influential essay that presents a theory of articulation elaborating the relative autonomy of cultural and socioeconomic spheres, and of how people in struggle become political subjects through the temporary conjoining of distinct ideological elements. Suggests the provisional and unstable nature of collective identities that have no necessary or essential character but are rather subject to the continuous play of history, culture, and power.
  236. Find this resource:
  237. Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
  238. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  239. Showcases the emergence of transnational advocacy networks in the 1990s working around human rights, the environment, and women’s rights, and both situates these networks historically in relation to previous transnational campaigns, such as for the abolition of slavery, and argues for the specificity of current forms of advocacy.
  240. Find this resource:
  241. Nugent, David. 1997. Modernity at the edge of empire: State, individual and nation in the northern Peruvian Andes, 1885–1935. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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  243. Fascinating historical anthropology of how the people of Peru’s peripheral Chachapoyas region engaged with the project of making the nation-state, first through embrace and then through rejection, and the complex processes that attended both dynamics.
  244. Find this resource:
  245. Roseberry, William. 1989. Anthropologies and histories: Essays in culture, history, and political economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.
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  247. Set of essays that argues for the relevance of an anthropological political economy that considers the relationship of culture and history in the context of the political economy of uneven development.
  248. Find this resource:
  249. Taussig, Michael T. 1980. The devil and commodity fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press.
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  251. A highly innovative treatise that argues for an understanding of the devil cults among workers in Colombia and Bolivia as a critique of capitalist production and exchange, and a mirror to the discipline of anthropology and modern society more broadly.
  252. Find this resource:
  253. Weston, Kath. 1991. Families we choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
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  255. Considers how kinship, that canonical focus of anthropology, becomes the basis of gay and lesbian political claims to rights, in the process both reproducing and reconceptualizing biological and heterosexual conceptions of the family.
  256. Find this resource:
  257. Critical Development Studies
  258.  
  259. The study of economic and political change, and of institutions, has had a major comeback through the explosion of recent anthropological work on development. With the publication of Ferguson 1990 and Escobar 1995, anthropologists built on Michel Foucault’s work to rethink development as a form of governmentality, or a discursive regime that constitutes power and subjectivity. More recently, in a move reminiscent of the 1960s move away from systems to process theory, political anthropologists, notably those working on ecological issues, have reacted against idealist depictions of development as a total system by turning toward an emphasis on political economy, history, and practice (e.g., Moore 1999, Li 2007, Gupta 1998, Walley 2004, Tsing 1993). Mosse 2005 is an incisive critique of international aid organizations that uses ethnography to interrogate the relationship between policy and practice. Edelman and Haugerud 2005 offers a comprehensive survey of scholarship on development, from the classical political economy of Karl Marx and Adam Smith to contemporary work on late capitalist restructuring.
  260.  
  261. Edelman, Marc, and Angelique Haugerud. 2005. The anthropology of development and globalization: From classical political economy to contemporary neoliberalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
  262. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  263. An anthology of work on development ranging from the writings of Karl Marx and Max Weber to contemporary work on the politics of development knowledge, environment, gender, NGOs, new social movements, and postsocialism. Offers a rich array of historical, political, cultural, and economic perspectives on development.
  264. Find this resource:
  265. Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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  267. Considers how the discourse and strategy of development after World War II produced the Third World as an object of intervention. Critiques the epistemological blinders imposed by the hegemony of development and offers ways to conceptualize alternative models of the present and future. This book catalyzed a radical critique of development and arguments for a postdevelopment era within and beyond anthropology.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Ferguson, James. 1990. The anti-politics machine: “Development,” depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  271. Pathbreaking work that draws attention to the wider affects of “failed development,” most importantly the expansion of bureaucratic power and the assessment of political phenomena in apolitical, technical terms.
  272. Find this resource:
  273. Gupta, Akhil. 1998. Postcolonial developments: Agriculture in the making of modern India. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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  275. Brings together critiques of development and work in postcolonial studies to explore what the postcolonial condition has meant to rural people in the Third World. Focusing on local-level agricultural practices in India since the 1960s “green revolution,” Gupta challenges the dichotomy of “developed” and “underdeveloped,” as well as the notion of a monolithic postcolonial condition.
  276. Find this resource:
  277. Li, Tania Murray. 2007. The will to improve: Governmentality, development, and the practice of politics. Durham: Duke Univ. Press.
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  279. Empirically rich and theoretically nuanced work that engages the work of Marx, Foucault, and Gramsci in analyzing a long history of development interventions—their intentions, practices, and effects, as well as their limits—in highland Indonesia.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Moore, Donald. 1999. The crucible of cultural politics: Reworking “development” in Zimbabwe’s eastern highlands. American Ethnologist 26.3: 654–689.
  282. DOI: 10.1525/ae.1999.26.3.654Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  283. Influential essay arguing for a more historically sensitive, dialectical approach to universalizable development that would highlight its role as a “crucible” of historical meanings and political practices, rather than simply as a monolithic imposition of governmental power.
  284. Find this resource:
  285. Mosse, David. 2005. Cultivating development: An ethnography of aid policy and practice. London; Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press.
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  287. An incisive ethnography of the dynamic relationship between aid policy and practice in a development project among the Bhil “tribal” communities in rural Western India. Asks critical questions about what constitutes “policy” and inverts the premise that policy drives development practice.
  288. Find this resource:
  289. Tsing, Anna L. 1993. In the realm of the diamond queen: Marginality in an out-of-the-way place. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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  291. Lyrical book that offers an account of marginality, not as a feature of isolated locals outside of development modernity, but as an outcome of interactions that undermine simple oppositions of Western and Other, developed and primitive, and state and nonstate spaces.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Walley, Christine J. 2004. Rough waters: Nature and development in an East African marine park. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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  295. Lucid, theoretically nuanced account of the politics around conservation in Tanzania’s Mafia Island that situates this locality within historical dynamics of East African and Indian Ocean interaction in order to challenge the assumptions of globalization theory.
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Anthropology of the State
  298.  
  299. Political anthropologists have long studied political organization and authority, primarily at more localized levels, and brought a focus on process, symbolism, and relationality to the study of political power. With the impact of Marxist and post-structuralist critiques of objectification and unitary understandings of the state, newer anthropological work considers the state as an effect of alienation (Trouillot 1990), as a fetish (Coronil 1997), as a set of symbolic practices (Herzfeld 1992), as a set of everyday forms and practices (Feldman 2008, Nugent 1997, cited under Subalterns and Social Movements), and as a fractured, contested site of power (Sivaramakrishnan 1999). In addition to these monographs, several recent volumes offer new approaches to a political anthropology of the state. Joseph and Nugent 1994 is a wonderful set of theoretical and empirical essays on revolution as a process that knits together local cultural dynamics, popular struggle, state formation, and the production of new hegemonies. From a consideration of the making of the postrevolutionary Mexican state, Hansen and Stepputat 2001 take us to more contemporary analyses of the postcolonial state with a set of essays on the persistence in the late 20th century of popular imaginaries of the state. In a different way, Das and Poole 2004 continues the critique of the state as a unitary actor and a centralized authority by showcasing work on the making of the state at its margins. Finally, Sharma and Gupta 2006 offers a genealogy of scholarship tying current anthropological work on the state to the classical theories of Marx, Weber, and Gramsci.
  300.  
  301. Coronil, Fernando. 1997. The magical state: Nature, money and modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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  303. Powerful account of how the Venezuelan state harnessed petroleum wealth to fetishize itself as a near-mystical entity.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Das, Veena, and Deborah Poole. 2004. Anthropology in the margins of the state. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
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  307. Collection of essays that address how practices and politics in supposedly peripheral areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have constituted the state, and the unique contribution of anthropology as a discipline in illuminating these processes.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Feldman, Ilana. 2008. Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, authority, and the work of rule, 1916–1967. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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  311. Nuanced account of how the everyday work of rule produces normalcy in an exceptional place, offering a powerful interpretation of what government is and how it operates.
  312. Find this resource:
  313. Hansen, Thomas Blom, and Finn Stepputat, eds. 2001. States of imagination: Ethnographic explorations of the postcolonial state. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  314. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  315. Essays on the postcolonial state that showcase late-20th-century popular imaginaries of the state as a locus of sovereignty, as the representation of the general will, as a source of social order, and as the agent of national territoriality.
  316. Find this resource:
  317. Herzfeld, Michael. 1992. The social production of indifference: Exploring the symbolic roots of Western bureaucracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  318. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  319. Takes us to the representational forms underpinning bureaucratic practice and shows that, far from a “rational” worldview, they express moral distinctions between insiders and outsiders that allow for prejudice and neglect.
  320. Find this resource:
  321. Joseph, Gilbert M., and David Nugent, eds. 1994. Everyday forms of state formation: Revolution and the negotiation of rule in modern Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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  323. Compelling set of theoretical and empirical essays on revolutionary Mexico that considers revolution not as an event, but as a process that knits together popular struggle and its meanings, state formation, and the production of new hegemonies.
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Sharma, Aradhana, and Akhil Gupta. 2006. The anthropology of the state: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
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  327. A collection of essays divided into a first section on theoretical genealogies and a second on ethnographic mappings. The first section offers excerpts from the writings of Weber, Gramsci, Althusser, Abrams, Foucault, and Rose. The second has a range of essays organized under four subheadings: Bureaucracy and Governmentality; Planning and Development; Violence, Law, and Citizenship; Popular Culture.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Sivaramakrishnan, K. 1999. Modern forests: Statemaking and environmental change in colonial Eastern India. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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  331. Exemplary historical anthropology of the making of the state through forestry policy and practice in colonial Bengal that offers a systematic critique of approaches to the state that assume its unitary character, and of primarily discursive approaches to colonial power.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1990. Haiti: State against nation; The origins and legacy of Duvalierism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
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  335. Historical anthropology of state power in Haiti that argues for an understanding of Haiti’s current economic and political crisis as the product, not just of the Duvalier dictatorships, but of a longer history of peasant marginalization and American occupation, which witnessed a growing separation of the state from the rest of political and civil society.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Anthropology of Law
  338.  
  339. Scholarship at the intersection of anthropology and law has had a long history, dating back to Henry Maine’s 1861 Ancient Law. Although work in legal anthropology had lost its evolutionism by the mid-20th century, comparative work on dispute resolution now underwrote a debate over whether law was expressive of a universal rationality or of cultural differences (Nader 1969). Beginning in the 1970s, the standoff between law as reason and law as culture was eclipsed by new work that deemphasized the systemic force of law as a set of social rules or cultural patterns governing behavior. As with other subfields of anthropology, system gave way to process, and consensus to negotiation, and law began to be treated as a set of usable ideas, materials, and institutions. Comaroff and Roberts 1981 argues that the social life of law was a dialectic of rules and negotiations, of formal mechanisms and informal strategies. Another major shift involved a turn toward history and power in the study of law, best captured in the collection of essays in Starr and Collier 1989. An exemplary text in this regard is Moore 1986, examining how the distinction between law and custom in Africa was itself a legacy of colonial policies. More recently, Comaroff and Comaroff 2006 interrogates the historical circumstances that have produced the simultaneous experience of rampant disorder and fetishizing of the law in the postcolony. In the late 1970s, the notion of pluralism also came to refer not to the production and management of differences by the state, but to the limits of state regulation. Legal pluralism scholars emphasized the plurality of institutional authorities and mechanisms of redress that undercut the incorporative thrust of state law in arenas as varied as the application of religious norms and resource management (e.g., Benda-Beckmann 2002). Another interpretive thread from the 1970s considers the work of law as language, and ranges from attention to narratives to linguistic analysis in courtroom settings on translation, transcription, and the relationship between linguistic and language ideologies (Conley and O’Barr 1998). More recently, scholars have considered how the codification of new forms of property has remade social life and cultural meanings alike (e.g., Coombe 1998). Others combine an early emphasis on the mechanics of law with science and technology studies to understand the networks of experts who create laws in national and transnational arenas (e.g. Riles 2000).
  340.  
  341. Benda-Beckmann, Franz von. 2002. Who’s afraid of legal pluralism? Journal of Legal Pluralism 47:38–82.
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  343. Presents an overview of work in legal pluralism, with arguments for and against the analytical purchase of the concept.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff, eds. 2006. Law and disorder in the postcolony. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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  347. Interrogates the coincidence of disorder with a fixation on legalities in various postcolonial societies.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Comaroff, John L., and Simon Roberts. 1981. Rules and processes: The cultural logic of dispute in an African context. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  350. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  351. Argues that, far from a singular set of legal rules dictating social dynamics, many types of dispute resolution could coexist within a social space, with litigation providing occasion to negotiate the terms of social relationships more broadly.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Conley, John M., and William M. O’Barr. 1998. Just words: Law, language, and power. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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  355. Useful review of literature on discursive and linguistic approaches to law.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Coombe, Rosemary. 1998. The cultural life of intellectual properties: Authorship, appropriation, and the law. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  358. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  359. Shows how legal regimes shape both economic and cultural values while being open to popular re-signification and political use.
  360. Find this resource:
  361. Moore, Sally Falk. 1986. Social facts and fabrications: “Customary” law on Kilimanjaro, 1880–1980. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  362. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  363. This study in historical legal anthropology examines the colonial production of “customary” laws in Kilimanjaro and their subsequent role in shaping Tanzania’s experiment with African socialism.
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Nader, Laura, ed. 1969. Law in culture and society. Papers presented at the Second Conference of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, held at Burg Wartenstein, Gloggnitz, Austria, 3–13 August 1966. Chicago: Aldine.
  366. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  367. Collection of essays featuring the most important authors in legal anthropology at the time, showcasing the debate over whether to understand the comparative study of law as a window into a universal legal rationality or into cultural differences.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Riles, Annelise. 2000. The network inside out. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
  370. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  371. Tracks transnational networks of NGO-affiliated human rights activists and bureaucrats as they create laws and legal knowledge.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Starr, June, and Jane Fishburne Collier, eds. 1989. History and power in the study of law: New directions in legal anthropology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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  375. Very important collection of essays that together make a case for the relevance of a historical approach in understanding the workings of law within societies structured by inequality.
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Socialism and Postsocialism
  378.  
  379. The rapid changes wrought to former socialist societies have been particularly challenging for anthropologists seeking to understand cultural meaning and subject formation in relation to state and economic structures. Scholars have analyzed the introduction of private property and its impact on the uses and meanings of land (Verdery 2003, Humphrey 2002), the growth of underground economies (Mandel and Humphrey 2002), the growth of a mobile, informal labor force (Zhang 2001), the escalation in ethnic politics and new forms of cultural affiliation (Borneman 1993, Verdery 1999), the production of new states and citizens in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dissolution (Petryna 2002), and how the end of socialism sheds new light on the force and limits of state socialist ideology (Yurchak 2006, West and Raman 2008). Even as they offer nuanced and fascinating accounts of the profound transformations underway, most of these scholars caution against a model of rupture and question the easy use of the “post” prefix to understand social and political processes that are far more uneven and open-ended.
  380.  
  381. Borneman, John. 1993. Belonging in the two Berlins: Kin, state, nation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  383. Taking the practices of everyday life in the divided Berlin as a point of departure, investigates the meaning of German selfhood during the Cold War and shows how ideas of kin, state, and nation were constructed through processes of mirror imaging and misrecognition.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Humphrey, Caroline. 2002. The unmaking of Soviet life: Everyday economies after socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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  387. Influential collection on the meanings of socialism in Russia and Mongolia, and how people have engaged economic, cultural, and political changes since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Considers the making of localities and new moral economies, the emergence of new actors and activities in the frontiers and gaps between local polities, and the reimagining of personhood.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Mandel, Ruth, and Caroline Humphrey, eds. 2002. Markets and moralities: Ethnographies of postsocialism. Oxford: Berg.
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  391. Set of essays examining how processes of change glossed as marketization have shaped social life and economic morality in the societies of Eastern Europe and Russia.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Petryna, Adriana. 2002. Life exposed: Biological citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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  395. Tracks the emergence of new forms of “biological citizenship” in which assaults on health become the coinage through which sufferers stake claims for biomedical resources, social equity, and human rights. Provides an anthropological framework for understanding the politics of emergent democracies, the nature of citizenship claims, and everyday forms of survival in post-Soviet Ukraine.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The political lives of dead bodies: Reburial and postsocialist change. New York: Columbia University Press.
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  399. Investigates the deeply symbolic nature of politics in the turbulent context of postsocialist Eastern Europe where the dead bodies of revolutionary leaders, heroes, artists, and others became pivots for revising the past and reorienting the present.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. Verdery, Katherine. 2003. The vanishing hectare: Property and value in postsocialist Transylvania. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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  403. Fine-grained ethnography of the transformation of land from socialist to private property following the collapse of state socialism in the Soviet bloc. Examines the impact of new values, uses, and meanings of land on the people of one Transylvanian community.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. West, Harry, and Parvathi Raman, eds. 2008. Enduring socialism: Explorations of revolution and transformation, restoration and continuation. New York: Berghahn Books.
  406. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  407. Against the historical backdrop of successive socialist and postsocialist claims to have completely remade society, the contributors to this volume explore the complex and often paradoxical continuities between diverse postsocialist presents and their corresponding socialist and presocialist pasts.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Yurchak, Alexei. 2006. Everything was forever, until it was no more: The last Soviet generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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  411. Using historical, ethnographic, and linguistic analysis, Yurchak explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the late socialist period of the 1960s–1980s through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Zhang, Li. 2001. Strangers in the city: Reconfigurations of space, power, and social networks within China’s floating population. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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  415. Traces the reconfigurations of space, power, and social networks within China’s “floating population” under late socialism and globalization.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Neoliberalism
  418.  
  419. The term neoliberalism has been widely used to describe the ideologies and conditions of life characterized by capitalist restructuring in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. There is now an expanding volume of literature that theorizes neoliberalism as governmentality (Ong 2006); attempts to understand continuities and departures from previous political economic formations (Maskovsky and Kingfisher 2008, Ferguson 2006); and interrogates the new forms of property that have emerged (Hayden 2003, Verdery and Humphrey 2004), the everyday practices underpinning finance capitalism (Ho 2009), popular idioms of political diagnosis during a time of supposed “transparency” (West and Sanders 2003), and the new forms of political mobilization that have arisen to check the excesses of state power and capitalist restructuring (Sawyer 2004, Tsing 2005). Although some see neoliberalism as a rupture into a radically new regime of corporate power, individuation, and the eclipsing of older forms of politics, others attend to persistent struggles over the meaning of economy and society, and to longer trends that cut against a view of neoliberalism as a wholly novel configuration.
  420.  
  421. Ferguson, James. 2006. Global shadows: Africa in the neoliberal world order. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  422. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  423. Provocative set of essays, written over a decade, addressing the predicament of African states and peoples in the context of late-20th-century economic and political restructuring. Offers a nuanced, compelling, and timely approach to “scaling up” ethnography as a means to address political conditions and processes that have translocal relevance.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Hayden, Cori. 2003. When nature goes public: The making and unmaking of bioprospecting in Mexico. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  426. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  427. Tracks relationships among “local” communities, public sector scientists, and drug companies involved in controversial benefit-sharing agreements in order to understand the emergence of new intellectual property regimes and how ideas of the public are constituted through the biosciences.
  428. Find this resource:
  429. Ho, Karen. 2009. Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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  431. Compelling ethnography of finance capitalism that focuses on the daily lives of Wall Street investment bankers to reveal a web of practices, beliefs, and structures that underpin a culture of constant downsizing, high-risk/high-reward job liquidity, and shortsighted compensation structures, as well as the rhetorical inflation of shareholder value.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Maskovsky, Jeff, and Catherine Kingfisher, eds. 2008. The limits of neoliberalism: Culture, power and governing practices in the contemporary world. Critique of Anthropology 28.2.
  434. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  435. Journal issue that probes the limits and boundaries of neoliberalism as it plays out in different cultural and political-economic contexts. Argues for the need to move beyond abstract and totalizing approaches to neoliberalism and attend instead to its instabilities, partialities, and articulations with other cultural and political-economic formations.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  438. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  439. Argues for an understanding of neoliberalism, not as an apolitical economic doctrine, but as a mode of governmentality through which new geographies and socialities have reworked older configurations of sovereignty and citizenship.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Sawyer, Suzana. 2004. Crude chronicles: Indigenous politics, multinational oil, and neoliberalism in Ecuador. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  442. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  443. Fine-grained ethnography of indigenous political mobilization for cultural and ecological rights during a period marked by the simultaneous expansion of multinational oil drilling and the emergence of new forms of plurinationalism in late-20th-century Ecuador. A model of ethnographic writing on social movements in real time.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  446. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  447. Wonderfully fine-grained analysis of the role of networks, collaborations, and contingent events in producing what we commonly think of as “the global.” Offers a strikingly fresh perspective on scale, process, and the dynamics of politics that departs from more systemic and structuralist approaches to neoliberalism.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Verdery, Katherine, and Caroline Humphrey, eds. 2004. Property in question: Value transformation in the global economy. Oxford: Berg.
  450. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451. Set of essays that interrogate the concept of property and its new millennial transformations through bio-transactions, music copyright, cyberspace, oil prospecting, debates over privatization of land and factories, and dilemmas arising with new forms of ownership of businesses.
  452. Find this resource:
  453. West, Harry G., and Todd Sanders, eds. 2003. Transparency and conspiracy: Ethnographies of suspicion in the new world order. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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  455. Collection of rich, ethnographic essays that treat conspiracy narratives as windows into the experience of social, economic, and political transformations in a late-20th-century context of supposed post–Cold War “transparency.”
  456. Find this resource:
  457. Diaspora and Transnationalism
  458.  
  459. Although there has been a long tradition in historical anthropology of looking beyond the nation to see how global circuits of trade, religion, and migration shape cultural formations, the study of diaspora and transnationalism became more institutionalized in the 1990s. The impetus for this new generation of scholarship came mainly from work on the African diaspora. Writing from a Britain where Thatcherism had enhanced the appeal of majoritarian nationalism, Paul Gilroy made a case for transnational mobility and affiliation as key constituents of cultural identity and minority politics, particularly among New World black populations (Gilroy 1993). In the United States, Sidney Mintz and Richard Price argued for an anthropological perspective on African America that highlighted the emergence of a distinct African American culture among the different African ethnic groups enslaved in the Americas (Mintz and Price 1992. In a more general vein, Clifford 1994 and Appadurai 1996 cover the relationship of diaspora to cultural identity, and, more broadly, the impact of global flows, to argue for thinking about culture beyond the nation. Since then, there has been an explosion of scholarship on diaspora and transnationalism. Some work extends earlier scholarship on the African diaspora, such as Brown 2005 on black Liverpool and Matory 2005 on the production of transnational African religious formations. Other work addresses minority experiences of racialization and stigmatization in the Anglo-American world more broadly, such as Werbner 2002 on South Asian Muslims in Britain. In contrast to this dominant focus on New World diasporas, Ong 1999 considers flexible forms of citizenship exercised by transnational Chinese, and Ho 2006 chronicles the forms of local cosmopolitanism crafted by members of the five-hundred-year Hadrami diaspora stretching from Yemen to South and Southeast Asia.
  460.  
  461. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
  462. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  463. A treatise on the distinct character of later 20th-century “globalization” as a departure from older formations of culture limited by the territorial nation–state and center–periphery hierarchy. Offers a notion of “scapes” as new spatial formations of culture that transgress national borders and are products of accelerated migration and mobility.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Brown, Jacqueline Nassy. 2005. Dropping anchor, setting sail: Geographies of race in black Liverpool. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  466. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  467. Argues for an understanding of place-making as a process forged through the selective engagement of diasporic currents of gender and race.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Clifford, James. 1994. Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (August): 302–338.
  470. DOI: 10.1525/can.1994.9.3.02a00040Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  471. Argues for pluralizing diaspora beyond the paradigmatic model of Jewish dispersal.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
  474. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  475. In this pathbreaking work, Gilroy offers the dynamism of black transnational migration as an argument against racial essentialism and cultural nationalism.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. Ho, Engseng. 2006. The graves of Tarim: Genealogy and mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  478. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  479. Cultural history of the Yemeni Hadrami diaspora that offers a portrait of local cosmopolitanism, or the simultaneous integration of mobile subjects into new societies alongside continuing transnational affiliations.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. Matory, J. Lorand. 2005. Black Atlantic religion: Tradition, transnationalism, and matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  482. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  483. Employs a dialogic approach to the emergence of Afro-Brazilian religion, integrating simultaneous developments in Africa and the Americas.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Mintz, Sidney W., and Richard Price. 1992. The birth of African American culture: An anthropological perspective. Boston: Beacon Press.
  486. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487. Offers a method of studying a distinct African-American culture as it emerged in the context of slavery in the Americas.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  490. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  491. Incisive analysis of the economic and cultural practices of a transnational Chinese business elite. Ong argues for an approach to diaspora that puts social inequality, state power, and political economy at its center.
  492. Find this resource:
  493. Werbner, Pnina. 2002. Imagined diasporas among Manchester Muslims: The public performance of Pakistani transnational identity politics. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
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  495. Ethnographically rich study of how overlaps in Muslim, Pakistani, and Punjabi diasporas in Manchester produce novel articulations of public life, ethical practice, and cultural rights.
  496. Find this resource:
  497. Human Rights and Humanitarianism
  498.  
  499. Anthropology as a discipline has long been concerned with how to reconcile the universalism of human rights with the imperative to recognize and respect cultural worldviews and practices that depart from a liberal norm. Anthropological work on human rights since the 1990s has moved beyond the binary between universalism and relativism to the circulation and use of human rights discourse. An intersecting strand of scholarship focuses not so much on the political life of the idea of human rights but on humanitarianism as institutional practice. The literature on both human rights and humanitarianism can be grouped into two key categories that depart from a treatment of human rights as a power-free universal framework that is inherently liberatory. The first set of works argues for human rights and humanitarianism as inherently imperial in their vision and scope, and as mechanisms for the extension of Euro-American material and discursive power (Asad 2000, Clarke 2009). A different, equally critical stance—such as that taken in Allen 2009, which looks at Palestinian claims to human rights, and Malkki 1996, on humanitarian actors working with Hutu refugees—illuminates the universalizing (and ultimately depoliticizing and dehistoricizing) effects of the deployment of “the human” as the basis of rights. The second set of works withholds a definitive judgment on whether human rights and humanitarianism are inherently imperial or depoliticizing, and instead investigates the complexity of origins and forms. Dubois 2004, for instance, argues against the Europeanness of human rights by locating its emergence instead in the transnational and transcultural context of 18th-century imperialism. In a different way, Cowan, et al. 2001; Bradley and Petro 2002; and Merry 2005 also challenge the notion of human rights as necessarily European or depoliticizing by emphasizing the wide variation in its political circulation, interpretation, mobilization, and outcomes. Finally, Feldman 2007 is a fascinating account of how humanitarianism came to acquire its apolitical stance. Feldman looks at how the historical convergence in Gaza between an emergent human rights regime and the practice of humanitarianism operationalized the distinction between citizen and refugee, with only the latter deemed a subject of human rights.
  500.  
  501. Allen, Lori. 2009. Martyr bodies in the media: Human rights, aesthetics, and the politics of immediation in the Palestinian intifada. American Ethnologist 36.1: 161–180.
  502. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.01100.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  503. Argues that the growth of the human rights regime in the Palestinian occupied territories and the spread of visual media have transformed Palestinian practices of claims-making, with rights increasingly seen as arising not from a political status but from a condition of human suffering. Available online.
  504. Find this resource:
  505. Asad, Talal. 2000. What do human rights do? An anthropological inquiry. Theory & Event 4:4.
  506. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  507. Argues that, rather than simply a universal ideal, human rights discourse is the post–World War II mechanism for universalizing Euro-American norms and takes its force and meaning relative to structures of international politics, of nation-states, and of totalizing narratives of emancipation in which the human being is redeemed.
  508. Find this resource:
  509. Bradley, Mark Philip, and Patrice Petro, eds. 2002. Truth claims: Representation and human rights. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.
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  511. Explores the transnational and diasporic forces shaping human rights claims in a wide variety of geographical areas, and seeks to ground the emergence of a global human rights culture in its local instantiations.
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Clarke, Kamari Maxine. 2009. Fictions of justice: the International Criminal Court and the challenge of legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  514. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511626869Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  515. Critically assesses the International Criminal Court as one mechanism for the extension of a normative regime of human rights that sidesteps both the legacy of colonialism and existing ethical systems, but is nevertheless forced to contend with both through ongoing negotiations.
  516. Find this resource:
  517. Cowan, Jane K, Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, and Richard A. Wilson, eds. 2001. Culture and rights: Anthropological perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  518. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  519. Moving beyond frameworks that pit rights against culture, or that emphasize the right to culture, this volume explores anthropological approaches to rights as culture by showing how rights talk and practices emerge from the contextual particularities of social life.
  520. Find this resource:
  521. Dubois, Laurent. 2004. A Colony of citizens: Revolution and slave emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2004.
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  523. Against the view of universal rights as the product of Europe, this book demonstrates that it was profoundly shaped by the struggle over slavery and citizenship in the French Caribbean, where slaves-turned-citizens expanded the political possibilities of the Enlightenment by giving new and radical content to the idea of universal rights.
  524. Find this resource:
  525. Feldman, Ilana. 2007. Difficult distinctions: Refugee law, humanitarian practice, and political identification in Gaza. Cultural Anthropology 22.1: 129–169.
  526. DOI: 10.1525/can.2007.22.1.129Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  527. Fascinating account of the emergence of the distinction between “citizen” and “refugee” in post-1948 Gaza, situating this process within the wider context of a consolidating human rights regime and its relationship to the practice of humanitarianism. Shows in nuanced detail how humanitarian practice participated in distinguishing population categories and ultimately undercut its own task of providing relief to all in need.
  528. Find this resource:
  529. Malkki, Liisa H. 1996. Speechless emissaries: Refugees, humanitarianism, and dehistoricization. Cultural Anthropology 11.3: 377–404.
  530. DOI: 10.1525/can.1996.11.3.02a00050Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  531. Outlines the striking contrast between Hutu refugee responses to their own exile, which they see as inherently historical and political, and their treatment by humanitarian actors as universal humanitarian subjects. Argues that refugee issues are one privileged site where “the international community” constitutes itself, while constituting refugees not as historical actors, but as mute victims.
  532. Find this resource:
  533. Merry, Sally Engle. 2005. Human rights and gender violence: Translating international law into local justice. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  534. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  535. Explores how global law is translated into local vernaculars, and highlights the role of activists who serve as intermediaries between different sets of cultural understandings of gender, violence, and justice.
  536. Find this resource:
  537. Space and Place
  538.  
  539. Since about 1990, political anthropology has engaged very productively with the centrality of spatial imaginaries and practices in the constitution of social and political life. In part, this focus on space came out of an anthropological turn to the city and efforts to understand cultural dynamics in urban settings. It has also come out of engagements with the discipline of geography—particularly Marxist critical geographers such as Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, who highlight the relationship between global capitalism and spatial politics, and with Michel De Certeau’s practice theory. In addition to these trends, there has been a longstanding focus on the embodied and lived aspects of locality (Ingold 2000), which has been reconfigured in more recent scholarship as “place-making.” In general, the anthropological literature on space and place can be divided between two not necessarily opposed analytical impulses: (1) to understand the production of space as the outcome of contestation over the makeup and meaning of shared spaces, or, to put it differently, to understand the workings of hegemony through spatial politics (Gregory 1999, Holston 1989, Caldeira 2001, Moore 2005, Abu el-Haj 2002, Subramanian 2009); and (2) to understand place-making as an ethics of resistance through which local worldviews and practices are secured against the incorporative thrust of broader social forces (Basso 1996, Escobar 2008).
  540.  
  541. Abu el-Haj, Nadia. 2002. Facts on the ground: Archaeological practice and territorial self-fashioning in Israeli society. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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  543. Incisive analysis of how archaeology in Israel came to underwrite hegemonic understandings of territory, history, and identity by inscribing them on the landscape as material “facts.”
  544. Find this resource:
  545. Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the western Apache. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press.
  546. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  547. Lyrical account of Apache place-making—the interweaving of language, landscape, and cultural affiliation—that argues for the making of place-worlds as a practice of constructing the past, social traditions, and personal and social identities.
  548. Find this resource:
  549. Caldeira, Teresa P. R. 2001. City of walls: Crime, segregation and citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  550. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  551. Explores the new pattern of urban segregation developing in São Paulo, where the production of spatial enclaves is underwritten by police violence, privatization of justice, and disrespect for human rights; argues for understanding these processes as emergent metropolitan phenomena the world over.
  552. Find this resource:
  553. Escobar, Arturo. 2008. Territories of difference: Place, movements, life, redes. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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  555. Analyzes the politics of place-based difference enacted by Afro-Colombian activists of Colombia’s Pacific rainforest region, the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN), detailing the movement’s struggles for autonomy, territory, justice, and cultural recognition in the context of neoliberal globalization.
  556. Find this resource:
  557. Gregory, Steven. 1999. Black Corona: Race and the politics of place in an urban community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  558. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  559. Demonstrates how working-class and middle-class African Americans in New York City construct and negotiate complex and deeply historical political identities and institutions through struggles over the built environment and neighborhood quality of life, and provides an insightful analysis of the interplay of race, class, and space in contemporary urban communities.
  560. Find this resource:
  561. Holston, James. 1989. The modernist city: An anthropological critique of Brasília. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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  563. Analyzes the making of Brasilia as an attempt to change society by building a new kind of city, and looks at how this goal was subverted both by the internal paradoxes of urban spatial engineering and through residents’ reassertion of social structures and cultural values that the planned city intended to destroy.
  564. Find this resource:
  565. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling, and skill. London: Routledge.
  566. DOI: 10.4324/9780203466025Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  567. Highly original and provocative work that argues for an understanding of human beings as equally biological and social, through a reinterpretation of culture as variation in skill, understood as the incorporation of the human organism into the environment through practice and training.
  568. Find this resource:
  569. Moore, Donald S. 2005. Suffering for territory: Race, place, and power in Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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  571. Fine-grained and theoretically rigorous account of how the production of racial hierarchies through the spatial operations of power has generated material and symbolic battles over the meanings and uses of land from the precolonial to postcolonial periods.
  572. Find this resource:
  573. Subramanian, Ajantha. 2009. Shorelines: Space and rights in South India. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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  575. Narrates a politics of space-making among India’s southwestern fisher Catholics, through which they have constituted themselves as subjects of rights. Illustrates how political struggles for rights have been battles over competing imaginings and uses of space.
  576. Find this resource:
  577. Secularism and Religion
  578.  
  579. Most recently, in part driven by the political demonization of Islam in Europe and the United States after September 11, 2001, anthropologists have argued for an understanding of Muslim religious and political subjectivity that takes into account historical dynamics of secularization. Starting with Talal Asad’s work (Asad 1993, Asad 2003), which illuminated the historical production of religion as a distinct sphere of experience, anthropologists studying Muslim communities (e.g., Mahmood 2005, Hirschkind 2006, Bowen 2008) have critiqued the equation of liberalism with freedom, showing instead how liberal ideology produces its own forms of discipline and marginality. Conversely, they have tried to understand religious practice, not in terms of subjugation or false consciousness, but as itself constitutive of political agency. Others working on non-Western secular states, such as Turkey (e.g., Navaro-Yashin 2002, Tambar 2009) or India (e.g., Madan 1987), have pointed, not to the opposition between secular and faith perspectives, but to how the contextual specificities of state secularism have generated particular forms of political and religious mobilization.
  580.  
  581. Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
  582. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  583. Pathbreaking work that explores the emergence of religion as a historical category in the West, and its universalization. Argues that “religion” is a construction of European modernity that authorizes particular forms of “history making.”
  584. Find this resource:
  585. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
  586. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  587. Explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with an emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East.
  588. Find this resource:
  589. Bowen, John R. 2008. Why the French don’t like headscarves: Islam, the state, and public space. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  590. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  591. Traces the development of the French state view of secularism, or laicité, and its consequences for the crisis over veiling in public schools, drawing attention to the specificity of French secularism with its compulsory republican homogeneity in public self-presentation, and the complex reasons for the decision by French schoolgirls to don the veil.
  592. Find this resource:
  593. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The ethical soundscape: Cassette sermons and Islamic counterpublics. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
  594. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  595. Explores how a popular Islamic media form—the cassette sermon—has profoundly transformed the political geography of the Middle East over the last three decades, generating an “Islamic counterpublic” where Islamic traditions of ethical discipline are linked to practices of deliberation about the common good, the duties of Muslims as national citizens, and the challenges faced by diverse Muslim communities around the globe.
  596. Find this resource:
  597. Madan, T. N. 1987. Secularism in its place. Journal of Asian Studies 46.4: 747–758.
  598. DOI: 10.2307/2057100Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  599. Argues that Indian religious fundamentalism is a response to the hidden intolerance of Western-style secularist policies, making the larger point that, far from a universalizable principle, the Western model of a state freed from religion is specific to and only feasible within a particular European, post-Protestant context.
  600. Find this resource:
  601. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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  603. Groundbreaking critique of liberal feminism, arguing for understanding piety and religious discipline as constitutive of Muslim women’s political agency.
  604. Find this resource:
  605. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2002. Faces of the state: Secularism and public life in Turkey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  606. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  607. Examines competing claims by secularists and Islamists about Turkish culture, and their common contribution to the “fantasy of the state” in the public-political domain of Istanbul.
  608. Find this resource:
  609. Tambar, Kabir. 2009. Secular populism and the semiotics of the crowd in Turkey. Public Culture 21.3: 517–537.
  610. DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2009-006Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  611. Considers the current transformation of secularism in Turkey into a populist movement defined against an elite Islamic leadership, and how it proceeds through the mechanism of the crowd as much as the vote.
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