Collin Wong

March 3, 2019
Chapter 8 Anthro Notes
Who has the power to act?
 Human societies organize human interdependency only if they successfully
maintain relations of power among different individuals and groups
 Power: Transformative capacity; the ability to transform or control a given
situation
 Social power: type of power/transformation that affects whole group
 Types of social power:
o Interpersonal power: Involves ability of one individual to impose his
or her will on another individual
o Organizational power: Highlights how individuals or social units can
limit actions of other individuals in particular social settings
o Structural power: Organizes social settings themselves and controls
allocation of social labor
 Draws attention to large scale divisions of labor among regions
and social group
 Political anthropology: The study of social power in human society
What is coercion? --Hobbes
 Political anthropologists strongly influenced by other Western thinkers who
assumed that state was prototype of “civilized” power
o Absence of state could mean only anarchy: aka disorderly struggles
for power among individuals
 In context of anarchy, power is known as coercion or physical
force
o Eg: fistfight
o Hobbes and others saw coercion as necessary way to keep order
 War of all against all
 Assumption that coopertaive social living is unnatural for
human individuals because we are born with free agency
 Discussions of power as coercion tend to see political
activity as competition between individual free agents
over political control
 Violence sustains society
Coercion in Societies without States
 Kinship institutions could organize orderly social life in societies without
states
o View confirmed by other anthropologists
 Social life of Azandes
o Life did not resemble war all against all
o Stateless, yet had complex beliefs and such
o People were not helpless, since they had vengeance magic
o Organizational power did not depend on state coercion
o Depends on persuasion
 
Domination and Gegemony
 Ideology: A worldview that justifies social arrangements under which people
live
o Marxian thinkers emphasized that rulers can consolidtate power by
persuading subjects to accept ideology that portrays ruling class
domination as legit
 Groups who accept such an ideology suffer from false
consciousness
 Problematic because false consciousness suggests that
people are passive and cannot withstand indoctrination
 Domination: Coercive rule
o Expensive and unstable
o Rulers do better if they can persuade dominated to accept rule
 Like material benefits
 Or education
 Hegemony: Persuading subordinates to accept ideology of dominant groups
by mutual accommodations that nevertheless preserve rulers’ privileged
position
o Never absolute +vulnerable to changes
o Struggles may develop between rulers trying to justify dominationan
and subordinate groups
o Threatened if groups under rtuler develop counterhegemonic cultural
practices
o Successful hegemony involves linking understandings of dominant
and subordinate groups into mutual accommodation
o Draws attention to central role of cultural beliefs and symbols in
struggles to consolidate social organization and political control
o Draws attention to verbal skills and personal charisma of leaders who
can persuade others to follow them w/o coercion
 Ex: Zande belief that people use witchcraft only against those they envy
o Psychological insight embodied makes it highly plausible
o Belief makes it impossible to accuse chiefs of using witchcraft against
commoners—because why would chiefs envy their subjects
 Hegemonic ideology deflects challenges that might be made
against those in power
 Hegemonic ideology may also justify social action in some individuals that
would be condemned in others
o Withcraft and kingship in Beng of Ivory Coast
 Beng organized into two regions—each region ruled by king
and queen
 King is owner of earth, primary focus of worship among
Beng
  Violations of taboos concerning Earth are believed to
endnger entire region and therefore must be dealt with
by king of region
o King is said to have power to foresee those
natural calamities that are punishments for sins
committed
 King is responsible for legal and moral and spiritual
wellbeing
 Legit power of king is contrasted with power of witches, who
are immoral
 They use illigitemate power, working in secret to kill
and consume their matrilineal kin
 A man who becomes king has one year to bewitch (or kill)
three close relatives in his matriline
 If he fails to do that, he will die
 Shows his commitment to greater public good
 Demonstrating control over narrow interests of his own
kinship group
Power and National Identity: A Case Study
 How hegemony is or is not successfully established in state societies
o Ceylon colony
 Becomes independent in 1948 and changes its name to Sri
Lanka
 Belong to two major populations: Tamils, on northern and
Sinhalese who lived elsewhere
 New Sinhalese rulers worked to forge national identity rooted
in their version of local history excluding Tamils
 1956: Sinhala made only official language
 Tamils’ acess to education restricted and barred from civil
service and army
 Sri Lankan government repressed Tamils’ protests
 Sent many into exhile and increased nationalist
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
o Grew into militant organization
 Many died of ethnic violence since 1980s
o Exclusion pursued by means of violent coercion
o Violence used by government in order to subordinate
o Even after trying peaceful means for settling ethnic conflict
o Sri lankan government efforts at nation building did not rest entirely
on violence
 Tried persuasive power to convince Sinhalese citizens that
state had welfare in mind and prepared to take steps to
improving lives
 Used cultural media, education system, public rituals
and lottery to link national identity to devlopment
  Trying to restore village society to its former pre-colonial state
 Idealized village
 No one resisted it
 Accepted that state sponsored development would improve
lives
o Collaboration with state was undermined
 3 different village factions selectively manipulated
development discourse in struggle to gain access to
governemnt resources
 National rhetoric connected
developmentimprovement of land
 Division leads state to withdraw offer for resources,
preventing implementation of village development
scheme
o Demonstrates contradictory and fragile nature of hegemonic process
 Villagers’ active appropriation of nationalist ideology
undermined efforts to establish very social order it was
supposed to create
 Guatemala, after peace accords 1996
o Agency can still be exercised under dangerous and ambiguous
circumstances
 Mayan farmers know limit points beyond which desire for
change must not be allowed to go
 Discipline themselves to avoid thinking about ways in which
peace accords have failed
 Farmers expressed satisfaction with limited goals
Biopower and Governmentality
 New form of power in nineteenth century called biopower or biopolitics
o Based on bodies, both of citizens and social body itself
o Biopower: Refers to form of power exercised over persons
specifically insofar as they are thought of as human beings; politics
concerned with subjects as members of population, in which issues of
individual sexual and reproductive conduct interconnect with issues
of national policy and power
o European states ruled according to different political understandings
before 1600s
 Politics focused on making sure that absolute ruler maintained
control of state
 Eg. Machiavelli’s The Prince
 Eventually proved insufficient
o Used example of household management
 Model of government
 Running state as household meant that rulers would need
more information about people, goods, and wealth that needed
to be managed
  Foucault—Euro states began to govern in terms of
biopolitics—use of statistics
 Leads to governmentality: The art of governing appropriate to
promoting welfare of populations within state
 Ex using statistics to better serve a population
 In contemporary world too
Trying to Elude Governmentality: A Case Study
 Aihwa Ong: Carried research out among dispersed population of wealthy,
Chinese merchant families
o Explains how they became so successful
o Focuses on different forms of governmentality characteristic of
nation-states
 Family, governmentality and capitalist market
 possess rules for disciplining individual conducts in
ways related to institutions’ exercise of power
o In late 19 century, some Chinese managed to evade governmentality
th

of Chinese kinship and family by moving physically out of China and

into merchant cities of European imperial possessions in Asian and
Southeast Asia
 Obligations to one’s lineage severed
o Individual families was only expected loyalty
o Had to deal with new governmentalities
 New state
 New forms of biopower
 Doing business according to governmentality of capitalist
market
o Families were mobile because doing business/governmentality was
least susceptible to evasion or manipulation
 So would move to new place to take advantage of fresh
opportunities
The Ambiguity of Power
 Exercise of power cannot be equated to violence alone
 Political anthropologists who studied power as coercion thought of human
inequality
 Others have concentrated on other things
How can Power be an Independent Entity?
 In North and South America, power understood to be entity existing in
universe independent of human beings
o Not produced or accumulated through human interactions
 People can only ritually gain access to power
o Control of resources evidence of power
 Societies that see power as independent force embed this understanding
within larger world view where universe consists of balance of different
forces
 Coercive means of tapping power sources ruled out
 o Violence threatens to undo balance
 So many societies were requiring gentler measures
 So through prayer and supplication
 Violence and accesss to power mutually contradictory
 Power of individuals to resist affects how stateless societies arrive at
decisions
 Resistance: Power to refuse being forced against one’s will to conform to
someone else’s wishes
 Consensus: An agreement to which all parties collectively give their assent.
 Persuasion: power based on verbal argument
 Stateless organization strongly resistant to emergence of hierarchy
 This attitude in power is foundin Pacific: the Big Man

The power of the weak

 20th century prototype of downroden and exploited human being was

industrial laborer
o Industrial Rev brought on significant cultural and social
dislocation
 Anomie: Pervasive sense of rootlessness and normlessness in osciety
 Alienation: Term used by Marx to describe separation that workers
experience between innermost sense of identity and labor they were
forced to perform in orer to earn enough money to live
 Do industrial workers in “third word” suffer from anomie and
alienation?
o Some argue that their conditions are worse
o Because context of non-Western industrialization is very
backward
 “scars of bondage” thesis
 Predicts that more complete the political domination
and exploitation, themore deeply people are
dehumanized and brutalized
 1978 field study Tswana
o Informants had low standards of life
 Yet not much evidence of alienation, brutalization and
dehumanization
 Mining experience was not what outsiders believed
 Tswana could make meaning+come to terms
with mining
 Could come to terms with own experience
 Eg bosses+workers==parents and children
 Tswana still encounter brutal inequality and
discrimination
 So drew on resources from their traditional
culture to make sense of their experiences
  Bolivian tin miners
o June Nash
o Similar to Botswana miners
o Worse than Tswana migrants
o Labor force is made up of local indigenous
o But tin miners could combine elements of dominant industrial
culture with elements from indigenous traditions
o Juxtaposition of genuine suffering and celebration
o Also exploited, but resist alienation from culture
What does it mean to Bargain for Reality?
 Power people have to invest experiences with meanings of their own
suggests ruler’s power of coercion limited
o Any hegemonic establishments runs risk that dominated may create
new plausible accounts of domination
 Aka hidden transcripts
o Those who are dominated may be able to organize themselves in
order to transform their hidden transcriptsinto counterhegemonic
discourse aka protests etc
 Sefrou
o Listed to informants discussing and defining relationships with each
other
o No traditional concepts used could be said to have a fixed meaning
o Negotiation was norm
 Aka bargaining for reality
o Truth is debatable in this society
o But persuasive accounts need coherency
 Comprehendible
 Bargaining over Marriage in Morocco
o Men view women as lesss intelligent and less everything
o Women do assent to male account
 Do not accept it sometimes though
o Women in Sefrou must depend on men
o Security of women depends on strengthening their positions within
families
 Women try to influence marriage negotiations to protect
themselves and daughters from oppressive demands of
husband
 Peasant Resistance in Malaysia
o Poor Malaysian peasants at bottom of social hierarchy
o Not kept in line by some form of state-sponsored terrorism
 Highly restrictive environment
 Sedaka could not rise up against oppressors
 Did not accept low status
 Organized overt defense of interests would have been
difficult given conflicts
  Engage in everyday forms of peasant resistance
 Foot dragging
 Dissimulation
 Desertion
 False compliance
 Pilffering
 Feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage etc
o Attempts to challenge local hegemony
 Each side contruscts worldivew
o Rice harvesting
 Introduction of machinery eliminated rich farmers’ need to
hire labor
 Hurting poor, help rich
o Essentially Negotiable concepts: Culturally recognized concepts that
evoke a wide range of meanings and whose relevance in any
particular context must be negotiated
 Morrocan values like intelligence, and self control and
generosity
How does History Become a Prototype of and for Political Action?
 Rondas Campesinas
o Armed groups of peasants who walk paths around their hamlets at
night
 Keeping eye on animal rustlers
o Became an alternative justice system with open peasant assemblies to
resolve problems, aka vigilante group
o 5 forces that led to this group
 Increased animal theft in 1970s
 Peasants got no relief from official justice system
 Government authorities tried to enlarge shrinnking
salaries through corruption
 Government only had weak presence in mountains
 Country people in northern Peru value toughness and bravery
in face of violence
 Local organizers had outside support
o Borrowed from national and local cultural patterns
 Peasants served on patrols to stop thieves on aciendas
 Men in hamlets had served in Peruvian military—used military
strategies
 Used local patterns too, like keeping ronda patrols under
collective authority of community
 Used state bureacracy—judge bench, rubber stamps, recording
secretary with notarized minutes
 Openness in ronda system different from state
bureaucracy
 o Final decision rests on ronda president’s
evaluation of response of people attending
 Still connected to national parties
 Squabbles in party weakened ronda movement
 They are not working for overthrow of state, but see
themselves as upholders of law and peruvian
constitution
 Only men patrol
 Patriarchy
 Used police techniques of whipping, hanging
 Started peaceful—ended up violent—became peaceful again
after rustling controlled
 Alternate modernity
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