How much do you know about Political Anthropology?

Overview of Political Anthropology

• Political anthropology is a comparative study of politics across various social, cultural, and historical contexts.
• Political anthropology has its roots in the 19th century, with thinkers like Lewis H. Morgan and Sir Henry Maine tracing the evolution of human society from 'primitive' to 'advanced'.
• Early political anthropology was ethnocentric, speculative, and often racist.
• Political anthropology became a modern study inspired by modern science, especially the approaches espoused by Charles Darwin.
• Political anthropology focused on kinship as the key to understanding political organization and emphasized the role of the 'gens' or lineage as an object of study.
• Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard rejected historical reconstruction and argued for a scientific study of political institutions focused on taxonomy by comparing societies in order to make generalizations about them.
• Political anthropology developed a conflict-oriented approach, which maintained the stability of political systems through crosscutting ties among social actors.
• Anthropologists began to study more complex social settings in which the presence of states, bureaucracies, and markets entered both ethnographic accounts and analysis of local phenomena.
• Anthropology became inherently more political as states and their institutions became the main focus of study.
• Political anthropology also focused on ethnicity and nationalism and the construction of cultural/political identity.
• There is now an anthropology of policy making, development anthropology, and an anthropology of borders.
• Notable political anthropologists include Max Gluckman, Edmund Leach, Pierre Bourdieu, Benedict Anderson, and James C. Scott.