Colonialism and the Categorization of Political Systems

Authority, Decisions, and Power: Political Anthropology ANTH 2301 Colonialism and the Categorization of Political Systems In the late 1800s, a number of European nations started establishing official colonial authority over other regions of the world. Securing the raw resources required to support their own expanding industrial economies served as their primary driving force. Ethnocentrism preconceptions about non-Western peoples had a great impact on European administrators when they started to form their own administrations in colonised cultures. They often believed that non-Western countries were either chaotic anarchies devoid of any political structure or were dominated by oppressive dictators. The administrative framework for anthropologists to research non-Western populations in nations ruled by Europeans was established with the advent of colonial authority. Early in the 20th century, cultural anthropologists conducting study in African colonies made the startling conclusion that European presumptions about African political organisation were wholly incorrect. The British anthropologists Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard released a very significant collection of articles in 1940 that was authored by a number of anthropologists with expertise doing ethnographic research in African civilizations. Native American politics were neither repressive nor chaotic, an assumption that was thoroughly disproved by this book, African Political Systems. Each of the eight chapters provided evidence that African communities were well planned structures with established structures for joint decisionmaking and political representation. Fortes and Evans-Pritchard summarise the chapters by pointing out the main difference between acephalous (meaning "headless") societies, where authority is exercised through family or village meetings rather than official political office, and centralised political systems, which have leaders like chiefs. Africa was home to a wide variety of acephalous and centralised governmental structures, all of which were useful for upholding social order. Using a structural-functionalist approach, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard attempted to illustrate the cohesiveness and stability of precolonial political formations by illustrating how each society's constituent parts work together to generate a robust whole that is sustained throughout time through social activity. Following the 1960s and 1970s revival of evolutionary social theory, anthropologist Elman Service proposed four primary patterns of social organisation, each with its own political system, drawing on earlier typologies. Band, tribe, chiefdom, and state are his four primary social organisation categories. These are related to the subsistence patterns covered in Work, Life, Value: Economic Anthropology (Service 1962). Bands are linked to hunting and gathering. Tribal communities are born out of horticulture. The foundation of chiefdom development is agricultural surplus. Additionally, nations depend on a variety of subsistence strategies in addition to military conquest and significant regional trade, which promotes the growth of multiethnic regions. Neo-evolutionists like Service were sceptical of structural functionalism's enduring depictions and sought to comprehend how civilizations progressed from one type to the next in an evolutionary chain. Modern political anthropologists reject the idea that all societies can be categorised according to phases in an evolutionary model of development from simple to sophisticated, and instead place a greater emphasis on history than on evolution. The structural-functional paradigm, which portrays non-Western society as eternal and unchanging, is likewise criticised by anthropologists. Rather frequently, political anthropologists focus on the distinct historical trajectories and comparable levels of political sophistication of the countries they examine by delving into the specific histories of political practices and institutions. Political anthropology is grounded in fieldwork, but it also draws on sociological theories of political structure. Politics, according to sociologist Max Weber, is the use of power—or at least the effort to use it. The capacity to sway others and/or mould societal institutions and procedures is known as power. Power is distributed broadly among members of a community in many acephalous cultures, but power is concentrated in one or many social roles in centralised societies. We refer to these as positions of authority. Three categories of authority were established by Weber in 1946: charismatic, conventional, and rational-legal. Based on their status in the family or their level of religious knowledge, priests and family elders wield traditional power. Power wielded by personal attributes like remarkable talents, social appeal, or skillful oratory is known as charismatic authority. Persuasive power is predicated on the capacity to persuade people as opposed to coerce them into obeying. Power that is characterised by a legal position in society, like that of president or prime minister, is known as rational-legal authority. An individual who has been elected or appointed to a rational-legal position goes about exercising the authority that comes with it. Such authority is coercive, meaning it is predicated on the capacity to compel compliance by law. We'll examine Service's four primary categories of social organisation and the corresponding political forms in the next two parts. The first two—bands and tribes—align with the Fortes and Evans-Pritchard categorization of acephalous societies. The latter two social organisation types—chiefdoms and states—have centralised leadership. Keeping in mind that the diversity of political organisation in the world is more of a spectrum than a collection of distinct categories, we shall examine the characteristics of each idealised type throughout this chapter. Power is distributed more evenly among all community members at one extreme of the spectrum, and more centralised and formalised in bureaucratic institutions at the other. Furthermore, while a certain political organisation model serves as the fundamental structural basis for any society, most societies include a range of forms of representation, authority, and decision-making that interact and overlap with the dominant form—and occasionally contradict and undermine it. Cultural anthropologists are often cautious to avoid oversimplified typologies of cultural development, but archaeologists frequently contemplate how one kind of sociopolitical order may evolve into another. We'll adopt a modified strategy between those two stances in this chapter by going over the various types of political organisation and talking about shared routes for social change across systems. It is essential to underscore that civilizations do not evolve along a singular evolutionary trajectory, but rather via intricate and even capricious processes of historical transformation.