Political Anthropology Part 2

Political anthropology is the study of the role of power, specifically social power, in societies. It involves doing fieldwork, or ethnography, understanding political theories, and reflecting on the application of these theories in society. Societies can only organize human interdependency if they manage relations of power, and human interdependency is the basis on which a society forms.

To understand political anthropology, it is important to recognize the three main eras associated with it: the formative era (1851-1939), the classical era (1942-1971), and the time period of the 1970s-1980s. In the formative era, basic orientations on some of the first political ideas were established.

In the classical era, most ideas were based on British social anthropology and were deeply rooted in functionalist theory, which posits that society has many interconnected parts that work together to maintain stability and order. This era, following World War II and marked by decolonization, influenced many anthropologists and their ideologies. Their studies focused on topics like pre-industrial political systems and their characteristics, as well as the local processes in non-Western societies. This era also included the turbulent politics of the 1960s and 1970s, which prompted anthropologists to analyze the effects of modernization on traditional political structures, particularly in non-Western societies.

During the era of the 1970s-1980s, anthropologists questioned power and inequality, especially how power shaped and affected the lives of the people they studied through ethnography (fieldwork). They also focused on the effects of globalization on different types of societies and their cultures. One particularly interesting point of focus was the connection between a society’s development in terms of population and its economic practices. This raises the question: Do humans depend on economics to sustain increasing population numbers, or do population numbers and influxes determine a society’s economic basis and practices?

Lastly, to understand how anthropologists view the concept of power, I looked into Eric Wolf’s work. He describes power in three modes: interpersonal power, organizational power, and structural power. Interpersonal power is when individuals impose their will on others. Organizational power is when individuals limit each other’s powers in social settings. Structural power is what organizes social settings and the allocation of social labor. To lay this out, one must be aware of large-scale global divisions of power in terms of trade and the locations of factories.