Power and its disguises. Anthropological Perspectives on Politics

Preface to the Second Edition vii 1. Locating the political: a political anthropology for today 1 How not to use the West as a point of departure 8 The distinctiveness of the modern state 15 Wider implications of historical discontinuity 18 Political anthropology reconstituted 20 2. The origins and limits of coercive power: the anthropology of stateless societies 23 The externalization of the political as the negation of power 27 Sexual politics in stateless societies 32 Civilization, mother of barbarism 38 ‘Stateless societies’ under the modern state 41 3. From hierarchy to surveillance: the politics of agrarian civilizations and the rise of the Western national state 45 Political systems in theories of European development 48 A specifically European dynamic? 51 Agrarian civilization outside Europe 58 4. The political anthropology of colonialism: a study of domination and resistance 67 Structural-functionalist political anthropology as a child of its time 69 The colonial process as an object of analysis 71 Cracks in the structures: the anthropology of resistance 77 5. Post-colonial states: legacies of history and pressures of modernity 92 Regime variation in post-independence Africa 94 Deep politics: the state and civil society 100 v Power relations in the shadow state 103 ‘Democratization’ in Latin America 105 Mexico: democratization versus the shadow state and militarization 110 Indigenous peoples and the state in Mexico and Guatemala 119 6. From macro-structure to micro-process: anthropological analysis of political practice 127 Getting at structure through events 130 Politics as the activity of ‘political men’ 135 The autonomy of the political field and its symbolic practices 138 Insidious strategies of power 149 7. Political process and ‘global disorder’: perspectives on contemporary conflict and violence 153 Expanding capitalism, declining empires 154 Cultural globalization and power relations161 From the fantasies of ‘Senderology’ to the roots of political violence in Peru 167 Sri Lanka: constructing new orders through violence 177 8. Society against the modern state? The politics of social movements 184 Social movements theory: the need for scepticism 185 Alternative modernities196 Cultural politics and political constructions of culture 199 Popular politics and the politicization of gender 205 9. Anthropology and politics: commitment, responsibility and the academy 214 The politics of anthropological knowledge production: some initial dilemmas215 Acting on the basis of knowledge 221 Commitment at the grassroots 227 From knowledge to wisdom? 234 Power and its disguises 238 Bibliography 243 Index 259