Chapter 8: Power

Violence is a Cultural Process

- Anthropologists challenge the Hobbesian view that human violence is natural. - First, both violence and nonviolence are learned in particular cultural contexts. - Second, violence is not primal, arbitrary, or chaotic. It tends to follow cultural patterns, rules, and ethics.

Racism and Discrimination

- Racism: the repressive practices, structures, beliefs, and representations that uphold racial categories and social inequality. - Discrimination: the negative or unfair treatment of an individual because of his or her membership in a particular social group or category. - Prejudice: pre-formed, usually unfavorable opinions that people hold about people from other groups who are different from their own

Violence Is not Inevitable or Senseless

(1) interethnic violence is not an inevitable product of human nature ( 2) violence is not senseless but a highly meaningful and even calculated political strategy. - For example, the Bosnian civil war included acts of horrifying brutality and interethnic cooperation. This reality undermines any simplistic narrative. Conflict between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims was not inevitable. In this case, it was manufactured to serve the political and ideological interests of political leaders. - Violence is often used as a strategic political tool. For example, the almost unbelievable cruelty of Revolutionary United Front soldiers in Sierra Leone was systematically calculated to prevent defections, stop local harvests, and instill fear. Such objectives are morally reprehensible but not "meaningless."

Formal Dispute Management

- Adjudication: the legal process by which an individual or council with socially recognized authority intervenes in a dispute and unilaterally makes a decision. Example: court among the Kpelle of Liberia - Negotiation: a form of dispute management in which the parties themselves reach a decision jointly. Example: Tanzanian land and water rights negotiations - Mediation: entails a third party who intervenes in a dispute to help the parties reach an agreement and restore harmony. Example: Native Hawaiian mediation called ho'oponopono, or "setting to right"

Action Theory

- An approach in the anthropological study of politics that closely follows the daily activities and decision-making processes of individual political leaders, emphasizing that politics is a dynamic and competitive field of social relations in which people are constantly managing their ability to exercise power over others. - Normative rules and pragmatic rules apply - As if it was a game, the normative rules are those that are fairly stable and explicit ethical norms by which players must abide. While the pragmatic rules are the creative manipulations necessary to win the game.

Sociopolitical Typology

- BAND: a small, nomadic, and self-sufficient group of anywhere between 25 and 150 individuals with face-to-face social relationships, usually egalitarian. - TRIBE: a type of pastoralist or horticulturist society with populations usually numbering in the hundreds or thousands in which leadership is more stable than that of a band but usually egalitarian, with social relations based on reciprocal exchange. - CHIEFDOM: a political system with a hereditary leader who holds central authority, typically supported by a class of high-ranking elites, informal laws, and a simple judicial system, often numbering in the tens of thousands, with the beginnings of intensive agriculture and some specialization. - STATE: the most complex form of political organization, associated with societies that have intensive agriculture, high levels of social stratification, and centralized authority.

Structural Power

- By the 1980s and 1990s, cultural anthropologists recognized the additional need to investigate structural power: - Structural Power: power that not only operates within settings but also organizes and orchestrates the settings in which social and individual action take place. - David Horn (1994) used the concept of structural power to trace a rise in Italian acceptance of state intervention in healthcare decisions. - Global capitalism is a primary source of structural power in the world today because it can easily constrain, inhibit, and promote economic and political choices.

Structural-Functional

- Colonial studies produced STRUCTURAL-FUNCTIONALISM: theory that the different structures or institutions of a society (religion, politics, kinship, etc.) functioned to maintain social order and equilibrium.

How is race culturally constructed?

- Cultural processes make the artificial seem natural. This is true of race, as with other cultural constructions. -As obvious and natural as American ideas about race seem (to Americans, at least) they were learned at some point. - A primary cause is racialization: the social, economic, and political processes of transforming populations into races and creating racial meanings.

Gender and Political Power

- In a growing number of societies, women exercise leadership and political power. - In others, women have very little formally recognized power but are able to assert various types of informal power to shape events. - For example, in Papua New Guinea, an abused or shamed woman's act of "revenge suicide" shifts the burden of shame to her abuser and can even motivate the victim's relatives to seek violent revenge.

Social Contract

- In addition to ties of kinship, many pastoralist societies (e.g., the Masai of Kenya and Tanzania) divide men from different families into AGE-GRADES: groupings of age-mates, who are initiated into adulthood together. - Religious ritual can reinforce political power, maintain solidarity within groups and unity against other groups, and resolve local disputes. For example, throughout sub-Saharan Africa, people who do not adhere to cultural norms are liable to be accused of witchcraft or sorcery and punished. - Structural-functionalists argued that belief in witchcraft, and the fear it provoked, operated as a rudimentary criminal justice system—all without formal laws.

Political Power in Nonstate Societies

- In nonstate societies, leadership, if any, tends to be temporary, informal, and based on personal attributes (rather than heredity or rank). - For example, the power of an Amazonian headman ("a first among equals") is based on personal charisma and persuasiveness. - Such leaders, sometimes called "Big Men," cannot transfer their status and power through inheritance when they die.

Nation-states

- Modern states are typically called nation-states - Nation-states: independent states recognized by other states, composed of people who share a single national identity. -Of those contemporary societies classified as bands, tribes, or chiefdoms, most exist within the geographic borders of a state. - States employ many forms of control over their populations, from surveillance of their activities to terror and outright genocide.

Violence and Nonviolence

- Napoleon Chagnon (1968) published a famous ethnography of the Yanomamo of Brazil called "The Fierce People". Other anthropologists think this emphasis on fierceness overshadows the more peaceful attributes of Yanomamo culture. - A cultural ideal of nonviolence pervades most aspects of Semai life. However, in times of warfare, Semai males have been recruited for military service and, contrary to their pacifist enculturation, have engaged in acts of violence. - The most important point illustrated by these examples is that violence and nonviolence are not absolute or static conditions but the result of cultural, social, and historical conditions.

Power Distribution

- Non-centralized: A political system in which power and control over resources are dispersed between members of the society. Examples are bands and tribes. - Centralized: A political system in which certain individuals and institutions hold power and control over resources. Examples would be chiefdoms and states.

How do people avoid cycles of aggression, brutality, and war?

- North Americans are culturally primed to view disputes (and sporting events) in terms of winners and losers. In other cultures the emphasis is on repairing strained relationships or maintaining social harmony. - For Trobriand Islanders, the goal of cricket matches is to end with a tie. The match is not about winning or losing but about lessening tensions between villages. A tie allows both teams to subjectively assert that they played the better game.

What is political power?

- Political power: the processes by which people create, compete, and use power to attain goals that are presumed to be for the good of a community. - For political power to be legitimate, it must be based on a culturally recognized source: deities, ancestors, hereditary transfer, legal inheritance, or elected office. - Political power is also drawn from material resources (territory or money), human resources (willing followers and supporters), symbolic resources (flags, uniform, or other objects that give meaning to political power) or ideological resources.

Politics

- Politics: those relationships and processes of cooperation, conflict, and power that are fundamental aspects of human life. - We can't understand diverse expressions of power if we focus exclusively on the formal political institutions of states. - Cooperation, conflict, and power are rooted in people's everyday social interactions, belief systems, and cultural practices.

Political Power in State Societies

- Power in states and chiefdoms is controlled by officials and hierarchical institutions. Formalized laws determine who may hold office, for how long, and the power that may be legitimately wielded by an official.

"one drop rule"

- Racial thinkers faced the challenge of maintaining cultural boundaries where nature saw none. The "one drop rule" served this purpose by labeling anyone with known African ancestry as African. - Where individuals were defined as "black" if they were believed to have just one drop of African blood

What is race?

- There are many ways of structuring racial typologies. All share one fundamental flaw: no diagnostic genes or genetic traits exist for any one "racial" group. - Race: a concept that organizes people into groups based on specific physical traits that are thought to reflect fundamental and innate differences. -"Historical research has shown that the idea of 'race' has always carried more meanings than mere physical differences; indeed, physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them." - American Anthropological Association Statement on Race

The Problems of Racial Thinking

- These typologies rarely describe any actual individual, and they do not characterize whole groups of people. - Racial thinking assumes that one visible trait (e.g., skin color) correlates with complex behavioral attributes like intelligence, athletic ability, or personal character. - Each one of us is an expression of thousands of genetically based traits. The ones we (still) use to determine "race" aren't especially important, but they share one common characteristic: they are visually obvious! - We divide humans into group based on blood type or fingerprint patterns that make biological sense, but we do not give them "racial" significance.

Why do some societies seem more violent than others?

- Violence, like any form of power, is rooted in cultural processes and meanings. - Violence: the use of force to harm someone or something. - This is a simple working definition, and violence may mean very different things to different people. - Culture shapes what people consider "legitimate" violence and how, why, and when they use it as a form of power relations.

The !Kung

- are a acephalous society that use group consensus - The !Kung did not recognize a separate political sphere; decisions were made by group consensus. Food sharing was the major organizational principle, and failure to share could result in shaming, ostracism, or banishment. - These informal social controls regulated !Kung behavior without a need for laws: a set of rules established by some formal authority.

The Idea of "Politics" and the Problem of Order

- our modern notion of politics emerged during the Enlightenment (1650-1800) - English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) famously called life without formal political control "nasty, brutish, and short," thus requiring absolute rule of a monarch. - John Locke (1632-1704) argued for the necessity of a "social contract" and "rule of law," still central tenets of many societies.

Does every society have a government?

- some societies have centralized political authority in the form of a government: a separate legal and constitutional domain that is the source of law, order, and legitimate force. - other live in ACEPHALOUS SOCIETY: societies without a governing head, generally with no hierarchical leadership.

Explicit and Disguised Discrimination

-Explicit discrimination is easier to identify because it makes no effort to hide and is an accepted norm, evident in institutions and laws. -Disguised discrimination may live on well beyond the "official" end of its explicit source.

When (and why) did "race" become so important in the United States?

-In the earliest days of European colonies in North America, Africans were not viewed as racially inferior. - In 1676, a class rebellion was spurred by poor workers and indentured servants, among them Africans. Leaders began to divide people along color lines as a means of controlling people and preventing future rebellions. -By the end of the seventeenth century, the terms "black" and "white" came to symbolize the differences between the two groups, shifting the emphasis of stratification from class to "race."