Political Anthropology Bibliography Final

Political Anthropology Bibliography Surey M.
Galarza
Introduction:
Political anthropology is a specialized subfield within anthropology, whose central

concerns revolve around questions about the processes, dynamics, organization
and consequences of politics, power and inequality. It emerged as a subfield with an
established canon and an academic program between 1940 and late 1960s in
Britain as part of British structural-functionalism, particularly after the publication of
E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer (1940) and Meyer Fortes and Evans-Pritchard’s
African Political Systems (1940). The concerns of these political anthropologists
developed in a context of British imperial expansion and colonization, and were
influenced by theoretical trends developed in anthropology and other social
sciences during this period. Specifically, their main interest was to understand the
structure of political systems by doing a synchronic analysis of societies and classify
them. In contrast, American political anthropology did not developed before the
1960s, but few American anthropologists published studies on the origins of the
state as early as 1920—e.g. W.C. MacLeod’s The Origin of the State Reconsidered in
the Light of the Data of Aboriginal North America and Robert Lowie’s (1927) The
Origin of the State. However, besides these, American anthropologists had little
interest in political studies until after WWII, when a plethora of descriptive
taxonomic classifications of political systems, and speculations about the origins of
political systems reemerged—e.g. and Morton Fried’s (1967) The Evolution of
Political Society—and new perspectives on politics, power and inequality were
formulated. In a section titled “Classics Revisited,” I review the contributions of
these classical ethnographic works to political anthropology, their context, and their
later critiques.
Politics, however, were a concern previous to this period among anthropologists,

even though they were studied alongside other anthropological issues. Looking
back as far as late 18th-century anthropologists such as Henry Lewis Morgan, we can
see how politics were incorporated into anthropological studies, in particular to
produce evolutionary classificatory schemes. Such studies which can be considered
as formative to the subfield, nonetheless, are not going to be discussed in this text
since my main interest is to trace the major theoretical and ethnographical trends in
political anthropology as a subfield. However, these will be discussed in relation to
other studies.
After WWII, severe challenges to traditional understandings of politics and power

emerged as a result of political and economic changes occurring in the world: the
emergence of national liberation movements, the independence of most European
colonies and their political reorganizations, socialist revolutions and the emergence
of the cold war, the implementation of development and modernization projects in
former European colonies and their failures. In addition, since the 1990s, a new
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focus in anthropology to globalization processes and politics and its consequences
developed after “globalization” narratives, practices and policies started to
dominate the world and reorganized politics. As a consequence, previous
perceptions about politics and power were scrutinized. I dedicate a section to the
development of new approaches to politics after WWII and explore their
contributions to the subfield.
Moreover, concepts like power and powerlessness, state, nation, civil society,
citizenship, sovereignty and cosmopolitanism have been challenged. Therefore,
below I will discuss these concepts and its revisions. Specifically, I divide these
debates in relation to:
1) different approaches and conceptualizations of politics
2) the concept of power, which became central in political anthropology after

imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism critiques emerged, and its relationship
with inequality, empowerment, and resistance;
3) the concept of the state, in which I explore current debates about its meanings
and uses, its limits as a conceptualized bounded entity, its connections to nation
and nationalisms, and with civil society, sovereignty and citizenship;
Also, I dedicate a section to the topic of collective political action and organization
since this is my central concern for research. In this section I will explore theoretical
and ethnographical approaches to the development of local and transnational
political movements, and other forms of collective action.
Finally, a final section will include bibliographic work to show the interests of
political anthropologists in Puerto Rico.
I. Classics Revisited
This section discusses the contributions of the founding fathers of political

anthropology, and their critiques. It is divided in two subsections in order to
recognize different traditions in political anthropology, and shifts of interests. In the
first, I explore the work of early American anthropologists on the origins of the
state, their context and legacies. A second subsection includes what are considered
the founding fathers of political anthropology, their contributions and critiques.
A. Early American Anthropology and the Origins of the State
The purpose of this subsection is to acknowledge some early attempts in American

anthropology to understand political structures based on fieldwork data collected
from Native Americans. Most American anthropologists paid attention to politics
only as part of other interests: among evolutionists such as Henry Lewis Morgan,
political organization was important along with other aspects to trace evolutionary
schemes of human groups; and for Boasians and historical particularists, they were
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subsumed to other topics. Yet, as early as 1920, empirically grounded attempts to
understand political structures were developed by Robert Lowie and William
MacLeod. Among these two, Lowie’s work is the more cited for his clarification on
many issues of importance for political anthropology. In particular, he rejected
Morgan’s stages of development and argued against Morgan’s understanding of
‘civilization’ as related to territory, which he argued, was universal (Lewellen 1983).
Instead, he situated the origins of the state initially with the formation of non-kin
associations that weakened kin political systems (Lowie 1920), and later with the
presence of a supra-ordinate authority that could achieve a high level of integration
of disparate groups (Lowie 1927). He also rejected the view that the state resulted
from conquest and subsequent subjection and exploitation of the conquered
(Claessen 1979:10).
Besides these early discussions, an interest in understanding the development of

political structures was not developed until after the 1960s among American
anthropologists, when political evolution was revived to classify political systems
(see Fried 1967; and Service 1962, 1975).
Balandier, Georges
1970. Political Anthropology. New York: Pantheon Books.
Claessen, Henri M.
1979. Introduction. In Political anthropology. The state of the art. Seaton, S.
Lee and Henri J. M. Claessen, eds. pp.7-28. The Hague, Paris and New York:
Mouton Publishers.
Fried, Morton H.
1967. The Evolution of Political Society. New York: Random House.
Lewellen, Ted C.
1983. Political Anthropology. An Introduction. Massachusetts: Bergin &
Garvey Publishers, Inc.
Lowie, Robert
1920. Primitive Society. New York: Horace Liveright.
1927 (1962). The Origin of the State. New York : Russell & Russell.
MacLeod, William Christie
1924. The Origin of the State Reconsidered in the Light of the Data of
Aboriginal North America. Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia.
1931. The Origin and History of Politics. New York: John Wiley.
Service, Elman
1962. Primitive Social Organization: An evolutionary perspective. 2nd ed. New
York: Random House.
1975. Origins of the State and Civilization. The Process of Cultural Evolution.
New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc.
Smith, Michael G.
1979. Prologo: El estudio antropologico de la politica. In Antropologia Politica.
Llobera, Jose R., ed. Pp.7-15 Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama.
B. Emergence of Political Anthropology: Period of 1940-

1960s
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The period of 1940-1960 in political anthropology was characterized by synchronic
studies of political structures derived from the British structural-functionalist
tradition of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, and the creation of typologies (Colson 1979:20).
This is the period, also, when political anthropology is established as a specialized
subfield after the publication in 1940 of E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer and Meyer
Fortes and Evans-Pritchard’s African Political Systems. The interest in political
systems of these founders of the subfield emerged as they found themselves doing
fieldwork in African societies characterized by differentiated forms of political
organizations that did not fit into previous political structure categories. In
particular, they found two types of political systems: primitive states with
centralized authority and stateless societies or segmentary lineage societies, whose
authority was dispersed among different groups of peoples (Lewellen 1983:7).
These forms of political organization became the focus of study of many
anthropologists. As part of the structural-functionalist program, they studied these
political systems in search of explaining social order and equilibrium, and followed a
typological approach to classify and describe political systems.
On the one hand, these works became models of a “segmentary lineage theory”
and for studying “acephalous polities” in anthropology. On the other, they initiated
a series of anthropological studies in the 1950s and 1960s classifying “primitive”
political systems that included both segmentary societies and state societies (e.g.
Leach 1954; Mair 1962; Schapera 1956; discussed in Balandier 1970:9-12 and
Claessen 1979:11). Yet they were also criticized for the weaknesses of the
transactional approach (Bailey 1969), their neglect of processes and change
(Gluckman 1965, 1967; Leach 1954), their disregard of politics as an ongoing
process in itself (Lloyd 1968; Smith 1956; Swartz 1968; Swartz, Turner and Tuden
1966), and their lack of attention to history and its effects (Hutchinson 1996). Also,
a critique for the lack of attention to history that led to their over-static
interpretations came from Boasians anthropologists, who opposed themselves and
their methodology to the British social anthropologists (Harris 1968).
Of the works following E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes studies on African
political systems, three are considered very influential in political anthropology
(Vincent 2002): Leach’s Political Systems in Highland Burma (1954), Barth’s Political
Leadership among the Swat Pathans (1959), and Gluckman’s Analysis of a Social
Situation in Modern Zululand (1940). Although they were structural-functionalists,
they developed a dynamic structuralism in their studies by paying attention to the
relative instability of socio-political equilibriums (Gluckman 1940, Leach 1954), the
effects of contradictions (Gluckman 1940, Leach 1954) and competition among
groups or individuals (Barth 1959, Gluckman 1940, Leach 1954), and looking at
social conflict and its role in maintaining structures (Gluckman 1940, Leach 1954)
(discussed in Balandier 1970:17-21, Kurtz 1979:38-46 and Vincent 2002:29-33).
Although these works have gone through revisions and critiques (e.g. Asad 1972,
Moore 1975, Roseberry 1998, Burawoy 2000, Frankenberg 1982), they opened up
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questions about the problems of studying politics, political systems, and its
concepts and methodologies. As a result, political anthropology underwent
challenges to and rethinking of their aims, their uses of concepts, and methods.
Asad, Talal
1972 [2002]. Market Model, Class Structure and Consent: A reconsideration
of Swat Political Organization. In The Anthropology of Politics. A reader in
ethnography, theory, and critique. Pp. 65-81. Malden, MA/ Oxford, UK/
Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing.
Bailey, F.G.
1969 [2002]. Strategems and Spoils. In The Anthropology of Politics. A
reader in ethnography, theory, and critique. Joan Vincent, ed. Pp. 90-95.
Massachusetts, Oxford, and Victoria: Blackwell Publishing.
Balandier, Georges.
Barth, Fredrik.
1959. Political Leadership among the Swat Pathans. London: Athlone Press.
Burawoy, M.
2000. Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a
Postmodern World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Claessen, Henri M.
Mouton Publishers.
Colson, Elizabeth.
1979. Antropologia Politica. In Antropologia Politica. Llobera, Jose R., ed.
Pp.19-25. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E.
1940. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political
Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fortes, Meyer and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, eds.
1940. African Political Systems. London and New York: International African
Institute.
Frankenberg, Ronald
1982 [2002]. “The Bridge” Revisited. In The Anthropology of Politics. A
reader in ethnography, theory, and critique, Joan Vincent, ed. Pp. 59-64.
Malden, MA/ Oxford, UK/ Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing.
Gledhill, John.
2000. 1. Locating the political: a political anthropology for today. In Power
and its Disguises. Anthropological Perspectives on Politics, second edition.
Pp.1-22. London/ Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press.
Gluckman, Max
1965. Politics, law and ritual in tribal society. Oxford: Blackwell.
1967. Introduction. In The craft of social anthropology. Maurice Godelier, ed.
pp.13-142. Paris: Editions socials.
2002. [1940]. Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand. In The
Anthropology of Politics. A reader in ethnography, theory, and critique, Joan
Vincent, ed. Pp. 53-58. Malden, MA/ Oxford, UK/ Victoria, Australia: Blackwell
Publishing.
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Harris, Marvin.
1968. The Rise of Anthropological Theory. A History of Theories of Culture.
New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company.
Hutchinson, Sharon Elaine.
1996. Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War and the State. Berkeley
:University of California Press.
Kurtz, Donald.
1979. Political Anthropology: Issues and Trends on the Frontier. In Political
anthropology. The state of the art. Seaton, S. Lee and Henri J. M. Claessen,
eds. pp.31-62. The Hague, Paris and New York: Mouton Publishers.
Leach, Edmund.
1954. Political Systems in Highland Burma. A study of Kachin social structure.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Lewellen, Ted C.
Lloyd, Peter C.
1968. Conflict theory and Yoruba kingdoms. In History and social
anthropology. I.M. Lewis, ed. pp.25-62. London: Tavistock.
Mair, Lucy
1962. Primitive Government. Harmondsworth, Middlesex : Penguin Books.
Moore, SF.
1975. Uncertainties in situations, indeterminancies in culture. In Symbols and
Politics in Communal Ideologies, S.F. Moore and B. Myerhoff, eds.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Roseberry, W.
1998. Social Fields and Social Encounters. In Close Encounters of Empire:
Writing the Cultural History of U.S. G.M. Joseph, C.C. Legrand, and R.D.
Salvatore, eds. Durham: Duke University Press.
Schapera, Isaac.
1956. Government and Politics in Tribal Societies. London: Watts.
Smith, Michael G.
1956. On segmentary lineage systems. Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute. 86:39-80.
1979. Prologo: El estudio antropologico de la politica. In Antropologia Politica.
Llobera, Jose R., ed. Pp.7-15. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama.
Swartz, Marc J., ed.
1968. Local-level politics. Chicago: Aldine.
Swartz, Marc J., Victor W. Turner and Arthur Tuden, eds.
1966. Introduction. In Political Anthropology. pp.1-41. Chicago: Aldine
Publishing Company.
Vincent, Joan, ed.
2002. Part II: Classics and Classics Revisited. Introduction. In The
Anthropology of Politics. A reader in ethnography, theory, and critique. Pp.
28-33. Massachusetts, Oxford, and Victoria: Blackwell Publishing.
1990. 4. Classical Simplicity, Complexity, and Class, 1940-1953. In
Anthropology and Politics. Visions, Traditions, and Trends. Pp. 225-307.
Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
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II. New Paradigms and Approaches in Political Anthropology:
Theoretical and Methodological Challenges after WWII
After WWII, a series of crises in the world challenged traditional understandings of

politics in political anthropology—independent and nationalist movements, socialist
revolutions, Vietnam War, unrest in cities and universities, civil rights movements,
increase in emergence of political parties in democracies, the establishment of new
political orders in the world, development and modernization projects and their
failures, etc. Moreover, after the 1990s, globalization narratives and practices
became hegemonic in international politics and in worldwide practices and
imaginations, challenging also anthropologists’ theoretical approaches to the
concepts of politics, power, state, culture, etc. In the following subsections I explore
the different perspectives and revisions of these concepts. Anthropologists doing
fieldwork from the 1950s on could not ignore processes of change, resistance,
ethnic diversity, sharp socio-economic inequalities, political heterogeneity,
increasing migrations, displacement of groups, political and economic interventions
of international organizations or other nations, etc.
A. Politics Revisited
Political anthropologists deal with politics, and therefore, have tried to generate a
consensus about what it means, and how to distinguish it from other dimensions of
society and culture. However, their definitions always reflect their research aims.
Politics for structural-functionalists was a matter of structures and functions, while,
for processual political anthropologists, politics became processes, activities,
actions, networks and transactions. Others have come to grapple these two
perspectives, while paying attention to history. Some of these approaches were
influenced by social philosophers such as Marx, Simmel and Hegel; others by
corporate, individualist and game theory models coming from political sciences.
In addition, some anthropologists have paid attention to politics by giving a central

place to economy at local and global levels—an approach that has become known
as political economy. In particular, this approach to politics was influenced by
Marxism, imperialism and colonialism critiques, Latin American dependency
theories developed in the 1960s, and world-systems theory. These studies have
established connections between local politico-economic experiences, their history,
and the penetration of capitalism.
Moreover, the interconnections and intersections between politics and culture have
been the topic of analysis of many anthropologists. Although this relationship was
obvious in ‘simpler’ societies, since the 1960s cultural turn in anthropology, such
interrelationships are studied in all societies.
All these approaches, their contributions, debates and critiques are developed in
the subsequent subsections.
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1. From Structures to Processes
Whereas structural-functionalists tried to explain the permanent character and

stability of structures through synchronic studies, other researchers started to pay
attention to conflict, the instabilities of political structures, and how they change. In
particular, anthropologists dealing with politics as process addressed how the
political order is in constant change, even if the political structure maintains
(Gluckman 1940; Leach 1954; Lloyd 1968), and attended to decision-making
activities and political actions, and how they influence or determine public interests
(Lloyd 1968; Smith 1956; Swartz 1968; and Swartz et al 1966). Attention has also
been paid to radical political change, conflict resolution and agitation in diverse
cultural contexts (Swartz et al 1966:2). On the other hand, some anthropologists
have combined both structuralist and processual approaches with historical
analyses to account for changes in political systems (e.g. Vansina 1966). As a result
of these revisions, politics has come to be seen not only as embedded in socio-
cultural processes but as processes themselves that influence and determine the
socio-cultural and political organization, and its changes. Politics are processes in
which power is employed that contribute to public or social interests (Claessen
1979:12; Swartz 1968; and Swartz et al 1966).
This new theoretical tendency towards political dynamics emerged clearly during
the mid-fifties and 1960s (e.g. Firth 1957; Swartz et al 1966), although some
previous publications did focus on social conflict (e.g. Lewellyn and Hobel 1941).
Some of these researchers employed Marxist theory and colonialism critiques to
explain political changes (e.g. Gluckman 1967 and the Manchester school); others
were influenced by social network and transactional approaches (e.g. Bailey 1969;
Barth 1959; see Claessen 1979:9-15). In addition, many concepts employed by
processual researchers came from social philosophers like Hegel, Marx, Simmel
(Swartz et al 1966:2) and Weber (Cohen 1979:66). The Manchester school and the
work of Max Gluckman, in particular, are recognized for their use of such concepts
and the ‘extended case method’ to study diachronically political processes in pre-
industrial societies, and for paying attention to radical change (Swartz et al.1966:2-
3)
The critiques of anthropologists attending to politics as intentional and manipulative

actions has focused on their assumption that individuals’ nature is to obtain the
most for themselves, ignoring therefore the influence and impact that other forms
of power (structural power, ideological or hegemonic power, etc) have in political
dynamics (Swartz et al 1966).
Bailey, F.G.
1969 [2002]. Strategems and Spoils. In The Anthropology of Politics. A
reader in ethnography, theory, and critique. Joan Vincent, ed. Pp. 90-95.
8
Barth, F.
1959. Political Leadership among the Swat Pathans. London: Athlone.
Claessen, Henri M.
Mouton Publishers.
Cohen, Abner.
1979. Antropologia Politica: El Analisis del Simbolismo en las Relaciones de
Poder. In Antropologia Politica. Llobera, Jose R., ed. Pp. 55-82. Barcelona:
Editorial Anagrama.
Firth, R.
1957. Introduction to factions in India and overseas Indian societies. British
Journal of Sociology. 8:291-295.
Gluckman, Max
1967. Introduction. In The craft of social anthropology. Maurice Godelier, ed.
pp.13-142. Paris: Editions socials.
2002. [1940]. Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand. In The
Anthropology of Politics. A reader in ethnography, theory, and critique, Joan
Vincent, ed. Pp. 53-58. Malden, MA/ Oxford, UK/ Victoria, Australia: Blackwell
Publishing.
Leach, Edmund.
1954. Political Systems in Highland Burma. A study of Kachin social structure.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Llewellyn, KL and EA Hoebel
1941. The Cheyenne Way. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Lloyd, Peter C.
1968. Conflict theory and Yoruba kingdoms. In History and social
anthropology. I.M. Lewis, ed. pp.25-62. London: Tavistock.
Smith, Michael G.
1956. On segmentary lineage systems. Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute. 86:39-80.
Solenberger 1979
Swartz, Marc J., ed.
1968. Local-level politics. Chicago: Aldine.
Swartz, Marc J., Victor W. Turner and Arthur Tuden, eds.
1966. Introduction. In Political Anthropology. pp.1-41. Chicago: Aldine
Publishing Company.
Vansina, Jan.
1966. Kingdoms of the savanna. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
2. Political Economy Approaches
The relationship between politics and economy has been explored in anthropology
by evolutionists and materialists perspectives. However, my interest in this section
is to pay attention to the emergence of a well-defined political economy approach in
anthropology, which developed after WWII. Although cultural materialists from this
period (e.g. Leslie White and Steward) paid attention to the impact of materials,
technologies, ecology and environment to the formation and development of social
9
and political structures—and thus, contributed to a political economy approach—
these perspectives are not going to be discussed in this section. In particular, they
have been extensively criticized for their causal and determinist explanations
(Claessen 1979:16-17).
After WWII, anthropologists that were concerned with the penetration of capitalism
in local communities and with the ongoing impact of Western dominance over
former colonies employed Marxist approaches, creating a version of Marxist
anthropology eventually termed ‘political economy’ (Firth 1972; Ortner 1984;
Roseberry 1988). They were also influenced by World Systems theory (Wallerstein
1974, 1980), dependency and underdevelopment theories (e.g. Frank 1967), and
different versions of Marxism (e.g. different readings of Marx, Gramsci and
Atlhusser; see discussion in Roseberry 1988); and were very critical of
anthropologists’ participation in the Vietnam War and in colonialism.
In general, political economy anthropologists have focused on how the modes,

forms and relations of production, distribution and consumption determine or
influence specific groups or communities, their values, ideologies, politics, and
material life. As mentioned, some of these approaches have been criticized for their
economic determinism, for following evolutionary schemes, for reducing socio-
political change to class conflict or for producing grand narratives (Roseberry
1988:170, 1997). Engaging seriously with these critiques, however, this approach to
politics has proved useful to understand local politics dynamics (resistance,
struggles, alliances, consent, reorganization, etc.) as they are influenced and
shaped by broader historical, political, economic, social, cultural and ideological
processes.
The most influential anthropologists to the development of this approach have been
Eric Wolf, Sydney Mintz, Eleonor Leackock, and June Nash, whom started to apply
Marx and Marxist approaches since the 1940s to the study of communities and
specific groups (Ortner 1984; Roseberry 1988; see a list of their studies below). By
the 1970s, many anthropological studies were already calling their approach
political economy (e.g. Magubane 1972; Magubane & O’Brien 1972; O'Brien 1979;
Schneider et al 1976). Since then, political economy approaches have been used to
understand local and global politics in studies of colonialism (e.g. Comaroff et al
2002a; Mintz 1975, 1985; Stoler 1985; Taussig 2002; Wolf 1959), rural (e.g. Kahn
1985; Roseberry 2002; Scott 1985; Wolf 1955, 1969; Wolf & Mintz 1957) and urban
labor (e.g. Ong 1987), gender (e.g. Khun & Wolpe 1978; Nash & Safa 1980),
consumption (e.g. Mintz 1985), and capitalist globalization (e.g. Comaroff 2000,
2002b; Friedman 2002; Edelman 2002; Ong 2002; Tsing 2002).
Claessen, Henri M.
Mouton Publishers.
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Comaroff Jean and John Comaroff.
2000. Millenial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming. Public Culture
12(2):291-343.
2002a. Of Revelation and Revolution. In The Anthropology of Politics. A
Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique. Joan Vincent, ed. pp. 203-212.
2002b. Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism South
Atlantic Quarterly.2002; 101: 779-805
Edelman, Marc.
2002. Peasants against Globalization. In The Anthropology of Politics. A
Firth, R.
1972. The skeptical anthropologist? Social Anthropology and Marxist view on
society. In Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology. M. Bloch, ed. Pp.29-60.
London: Malaby.
Frank, Andre G.
1967. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Friedman, Jonathan.
2002. Transnationalism, Socio-Political Disorder, and Ethnification as
Expressions of Declining Global Hegemony. In The Anthropology of Politics. A
Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique. Joan Vincent, ed. pp.285-300.
Khan, Joel.
1985. Peasant Ideologies in the Third World. Annual Review
of Anthropology 14:49-75
Khun, A. and A. Wolpe, eds.
1978. Feminism and Materialism: Women and the Modes of Production.
London: Routledge
Leacock, Eleanor.
1954. The Montagnais “Hunting Territory” and the Fur Trade. American
Anthropology Association.
Magubane, B .
1979. The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa. New York:
Monthly Review
Magubane, B . and J. O’Brien
1972. The political economy of migrant labor: a critique of conventional
wisdom or a case study in the functions of functionalism. Critique of
Anthropology 2(2):88-103
Mintz, S. W.
1974. The rural proletariat and the problem of rural proletarian
consciousness. Journal of Peasant Studies 1 :290-325
1975. Worker in the Cane. New York: Norton. 2nd ed.
1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York:
Viking
Nash, June.
1981. Ethnographic aspects of the world capitalist system. Annual Review of
Anthropology. 10:393-423.
Nash, June and M. P. Fernandez-Kelly, eds.
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1984. Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Nash, June and Helen Safa, eds.
1980. Sex and Class in Latin America: Women’s Perspectives in Politics,
Economics and the Family in the Third World. South Hadley, Mass: Bergin.
O'Brien, J.
1979. The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment: An
Introduction. Khartoum: Univ. Khartoum
Ong, Aihwa.
1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline. New York: State
2002. Flexible Citizenship among Chinese Cosmopolitans. In The
Anthropology of Politics. A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique. Joan
Vincent, ed. pp. 338-355. Massachusetts, Oxford, and Victoria: Blackwell
Publishing.
Ortner, Sherry.
1984. Theory in anthropology since the Sixties. Comparative Studies
in Society And History. 26: 1 26-66
Roseberry, William.
1988. Political Economy. Annual Review of Anthropology 17:161-185.
1997. Marx and Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 26:25-46.
2002. Images of the Peasant in the Consciousness of Venezuelan Proletariat.
In The Anthropology of Politics. A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and
Critique. Joan Vincent, ed. pp. 187-202. Massachusetts, Oxford, and Victoria:
Blackwell Publishing.
Scott, James C.
1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Schneider, J . , Schneider, P.
1976. Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily. New York: Academic
Press.
Stoler, Ann.
1985. Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870-1979.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Taussig, Michael.
2002. Culture of Terror—Space of Death. In The Anthropology of Politics. A
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt.
2002. Politics on the Periphery. In The Anthropology of Politics. A Reader in
Ethnography, Theory, and Critique. Joan Vincent, ed. pp. 325-337.
Wolf, E. R .
1957. Closed corporate communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java.
Southwest Journal of Anthropology 1 3 :1-18
1955. Types of Latin American peasantries: a preliminary discussion.
American Anthropol. 57:452-71
1959. Specific aspects of plantation systems in the New World: community
subcultures and social class. In Plantation Systems in the New World. A.
Palerm and V. Rubin, eds. pp.136-47. Washington:Pan American Union
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1969. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper and Row
Wolf, Eric and Edward C. Hansen.
1972. The Human Condition in Latin America. New York: Oxford University
Press, New York.
Wolf, E. R., Mintz, S. W.
1957. Haciendas and plantations in Middle America and the Antilles. Social
and Economic Studies 6:380-412.
Wallerstein, Immanuel.
1974. The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the
European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic
Press.
1980. The Modern World Systems II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of
the European World Economy 1600-1750. New York: Academic.
3. Politics and Culture
After much debate in anthropology between cultural and political approaches to

societies, most political anthropologists agree that politics are inseparable from
culture and viceversa (Dirks et al 1994; Claessen 1979:20-21). In particular, during
the 1960s, the concepts of culture, power and history were revisited in
anthropology after the postwar political and economic restructurings (see Dirks et al
1994 and Ortner 1984 for full discussion). As a result, the concept of culture was
rethought as a site of power and political struggles, leading to research on identity
and cultural politics and on cultural production (e.g. Alvarez et al. 1998; Lofgren
1995; Mahon 2000; Tilley 1997; Williams 1977). In addition, anthropologists have
attended to the role of cultural values, symbolic expressions, feelings, rituals,
symbols, representations, discourses, and cultural practices in the formation,
reproduction and challenges of socio-political structures and processes such as the
state and viceversa (e.g. Geertz 1980; Kapferer 1988; Kertzer 1988; Hezfeld 1992;
Steinmetz 1999; Wolf 1991).
Álvarez Sonia E., Evelyn Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds.

1998. Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Re-Visioning Latin American
Social Movements. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press
Claessen, Henri M.
Mouton Publishers.
Dirks, Nicholas B., Geoff Eley and Sherry B. Ortner, eds.
1994. Culture/power/history: a reader in contemporary social theory.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Geertz, Clifford.
1980. Negara: the Theater State in Nineteenth-Century bali. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Herzfeld, M.
1992. The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of
Western Bureaucracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kapferer, B.
13
1988. Legends of People, Myths of State. Washington, DC and London:
Smithsonian Institution Press.
Kertzer , David I.
1988. Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lofgren, Orvar.
1995. Being a Good Swede. National Identity as a Cultural Battleground.
In Articulating Hidden Histories. Essays in Honor of Eric Wolf, Rayna Rapp and
Jane Schneider, eds. California: California University Press.
Mahon, Maureen.
2000. The visible evidence of cultural producers. Annual Review of
Anthropology 29:467-92.
Ortner, Sherry B.
1984. Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties. Comparative Studies in
Society and History 26(1): 126-166
Steinmetz, George, ed.
1999. State/Culture. State-Formation after the cultural turn. Ithaca, New York
and London: Cornell University Press.
Tilley, Christopher.
1997. Performing Culture in the Global Village. Critique of Anthropology 17:
67-89
Williams, Raymond.
1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford : Oxford University Press
Wolf, Eric, ed.
1991. Religious Regimes and State Formation. Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press.
B. Power and Inequality: Identifying power, and its intersections
Understandings of power among social scientists have revolved around

preconceived notions of society as hierarchical—with one or few groups of people
struggling to maintain, acquire or legitimize power and authority over others. In
other words, power has been traditionally conceptualized as domination and
subjugation. However, as many social scientists have argued, there are other ‘forms
of power’ that are not merely coercion, violence, and subjugation. Very recently,
power has been conceptualized as embedded in multiple social domains, such that
it has become difficult to define. Therefore, the idea that power subjugates and
subsumes the dominated has been revised as relational, contingent and negotiable.
In this particular, Max Weber’s notion of power has been the most influential to the
social sciences. Therefore, I dedicate below a section to Weber’s notion of power
and its influence to anthropological approaches to power.
After WWII, power and inequality became central to anthropological analyses. As

mentioned before, during this period former European colonies were fighting for
their independences, and there was an increase in political movements such as
national liberation movements and revolutions. Specifically, anthropologists that got
interested in issues of power started to pay attention to history, inequality,
14
resistance and colonialism. These new approaches were influenced by critiques of
the practice and effects of anthropology’s and West’s knowledge production—
specifically coming from the ‘Third World’ which highlighted Western political
interventions and the creation of dependency by the West—Marxist perspectives on
power, and feminist critiques (Nash 1997). They were also influenced by
anthropologists’ experience at home after WWII (Nash 1975; Periano 1998). In
particular, as it became harder for anthropologists to study abroad, many
anthropologists started to do ethnographic work at home where different civil rights
movements, struggles, riots and protests were also manifesting. As a result,
anthropological approaches to power focused also on the production of inequality
and resistance at home.
In this context, anthropological analyses of power have paid attention to how power
relations and inequality became structured and were reproduced at both national
and global levels. Therefore, in a second subsection, I explore anthropological
research that had focused on ‘structural power’ and structural inequality,
specifically those influenced by Marxists perspectives on power relations as they are
structured by ideology and capitalism. As will be discussed, these anthropologists
took seriously a postcolonial critique that came from former colonies on how
capitalist expansion processes created economic dependency of some countries
over others. In addition, Marxist anthropologists did much research on issues of
resistance and empowerment, which will be also discussed in this section.
Also, anthropological research influenced by feminist critiques has extensively

addressed how social inequality is structured and reproduced through discourses
and practices. They will be briefly address in a third subsection.
Additionally, critiques coming from postcolonial writers also influenced non-Marxist

and non-feminist anthropologists. These anthropologists appropriated critiques that
came from literary criticism and French post-structuralism to engage in debates
about the colonial practices of the discipline. As part of this self-reflection, in first
place, some anthropologists have done interpretative analyses on cultures which
are understood as texts. The development of this approach to culture followed
critiques of the concept of culture and of how the subjects and objects of
anthropological study have been created. Eventually such approaches became part
of a postmodernist movement in anthropology that rejected generalizing theories
and traditional anthropological practices. In second place, some anthropologists
introduced to American anthropology French structuralist and post-stucturalist
philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu, and
their understandings of power. Of significant influence to political anthropology has
been Foucault’s publications on modern forms of government and how knowledge
production is infused by power; and Bourdieu’s discussion of the role of culture and
symbolic factors for reproducing power inequality. In a fourth subsection, I will
explore the contributions and critiques of post-structuralist and postmodernist
15
analyses to anthropological understandings of power and, specifically, Foucault’s
and Bourdieu’s influence to political anthropology.
Nash, June.
1975. Nationalism and Fieldwork. Annual Review of Anthropology 4: 225-245.
1997. When Isms Become Wasms: Structural Functionalism, Marxism,
Feminism, and Postmodernism. Critique of Anthropology 17(1):11-32
Periano, Mariza G.S.
1998. When Anthropology is at Home. Annual Review of
Anthropology.27:105-28.
1. Max Weber: Rational Power in Social Relations
Weber understood power as embedded in social relations rather than merely in

state’s institutions. For him power is practiced among individuals who act rationally
to gain something they want by subjecting others through different means (Weber
1947:152; 1958:55; 1978:5-6; Claessen 1979:8). Such interpretation of power has
proved useful until today, when anthropologists and other social scientists pay
attention to power dynamics at the individual level. However, it has also been
criticized by analyses that pay attention to collective rather than individual actions,
and for his emphasis on rational action (Arens and Karp 1989:xiii-xiv; Emmet 1972).
Some of these critiques argue that power is present not only when subjugation is
exercised or when it is conscious, but power is present as a result of structural
power relations that make possible the potential for subjugation whose exercise is
not always rationalized. Yet, Weber’s conceptualization of power proved useful for
recognizing that power is present at the level of individual interactions rather than
merely on state and institutions, and led to a whole tradition in rational choice
approaches to politics and power (Ledyaev 1997:5-15). Nevertheless, the idea of
individuals as rational actors that make up decisions has not been limited to these
approaches but a whole range of political anthropologists recognize that individuals
are social actors with agency that make rational choices (Claessen 1979:12-15;
Keyes 2002:238; Lewellen 1983:11-12; see also Mitchell 1990 for a critique of power
resistance approaches that carry such assumptions).
Also, for Weber power depended on compelling ideas (traditional, rational or

charismatic) that developed through history and influenced social and political
action (Weber 1978:8), an idea developed in interpretative anthropology of the
1960s (e.g. Geertz 1973:5; Keyes 2002:273). He also discussed how in particular
state power is created and maintained through the use of force and legitimated
claims, an idea mobilized by anthropologists of the state.
16
Arens, W. and Ivan Karp.
1989. Creativity of Power. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution
Press.
Claessen, Henri M.
Mouton Publishers.
Emmet, Dorothy.
1972. Functions, Purpose and Powers. London: Macmillan.
Geertz, Clifford.
1973. The interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic
Books.
Keyes, Charles.
2002 Weber and Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology. 31:233-255.
Ledyaev, Valeri G.
1997. Power: A Conceptual Analysis. New York: Nova Science Publishers Inc.
Lewellen, Ted C.
Mitchell, Timothy.
1990. Everyday Metaphors of Power. Theory and Society. 19:545-577.
Weber, Max
1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Oxford
University Press.
1958 [1946]. From Max Weber. H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills, eds. New York:
Oxford University Press.
1978 [1968]. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology. G.
Roth and C. Wittich, eds. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press.
2. Marx, Marxists and Power: Power, Capital, Ideology
After WWII, many anthropologists acknowledged the importance of the economic

context for understanding power, political action, and inequality (Wolf 1969, 1999).
As political transformations and the effects of Euro-American capitalism,
colonization and Eurocentric knowledge production in producing inequality,
dependency and marginalization became central issues in anthropology, Marxist
texts and perspectives came to influence political anthropology (O’Laughin 1972).
More recently, the topic of capitalism has produced more anthropological articles
than before as it has taken a central place in global politics (Blim 2000). In general,
anthropologists influenced by Marxism have attended to the role of capitalism (at
the levels of production, distribution and/or consumption) in determining or
influencing power structures, organization and dynamics such as class conflicts, and
their articulation with the production and reproduction of inequality. In a sense,
these studies take for granted a relationship between forms of domination and
appropriation of labor, services and goods. However, for anthropologists this
17
relationship is not causal as in some Marxist perspectives but dialectical (Wolf 1999,
2002).
In particular, Marx and Engels’s analysis of capitalism and its contradictions are still
central in theoretical approaches to capitalism, and their argument that the
construction of ideas is restricted by power institutions and material conditions has
influenced many (Harris 1968:231; Roseberry 1997; Wolf 1999, 2002). Marx and
Engels approached the concept of power in relation to the capitalist economic
structure. Those in power—the bourgeoisie—were the ones that controlled
resources and labor, and legitimized themselves within the power structure through
ideologies that deceived the dominated to accept the political economic structure
(Harris 1968; Marx and Engels 1976; Sayer 1989:6; Wolf 1999:31). They saw power
as embodied in dominant classes; however they acknowledged the potentiality of
labor power to reorder the political structure. Therefore, class struggles are the
basis for the political organization and change in the structure of power in a
capitalist society. As mentioned above, anthropologists that employ Marx and
Engels study how power relations are organized or transformed by the penetration
of capitalism in urban and rural settings and broader political and economic
processes such as colonial regimes, postcolonial state formations, the slave trade,
international markets, and capitalist enterprises such as plantations and neoliberal
projects (Roseberry 1988:169; e.g. Mintz 1975, 1985; Roseberry 2002; Wolf 1999,
2002). In addition, their understandings of ‘labor power’ have been used by
anthropologists dealing with class conflicts in capitalist contexts, especially since
the 1960s (e.g. Gluckman and the Manchester school; proletarians and peasants
studies; and gender studies) (e.g. Gluckman 1940; Edelman 2002; Mintz 1974; Wolf
1969).
Classical Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci and Lois Althusser have also contributed
to anthropological theory and approaches with their perspectives on ideologies and
their power to structure and shape social and political circumstances.
Following ideas of Marx and Engels, Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of
hegemonic power (or non-violent modes of control through cultural practices,
ideologies and institutions) to understand the ways dominant classes acquired the
consent of the dominated to stay in power (Forgacs 2000). In contrast with Marx
and Engels, however, he did not see ideologies as the deceitful narratives of the
dominant classes, but he argued that the oppressed also developed ideologies that
opposed or contradicted the hegemonic ideologies, and carried the potential for
social change. Similar to Marx and Engels, he was interested in the role of
intellectuals to maintain or challenge the hegemonic political structure, a topic of
recurrent interest in social and anthropological sciences (e.g. Bourdieu 1994; Boyer
& Lomnitz 2005). Gramsci’s hegemony has led to many anthropological analyses of
power as it has proved useful to explain consent and resistance (Comaroff 1985;
Comaroff & Comaroff 1991; Keesing 1992; Parsons 1963; Scott 1976, 1985, 1990;
Roseberry 1994; Thompson 1963, 1971). Power as absolute domination is here
18
challenged. Yet, many of these writings have been criticized for their romanticizing
of the subordinated and of a pre-capitalist past (Lears 1985; Roseberry 1988).
Althusser’s concept of ‘ideological state apparatus’ also inspired anthropologists

interested in understanding the relationship between power and inequality. In his
view, it is through social institutions that individuals in a society learn and acquire
their preferences, values, desires, etc. which reproduce power relations or relations
of production (Sharma & Gupta 2006:46). Individuals are therefore constituted
through ideological practices situated in these institutions (such as the school,
church, family, media, etc) (Althusser 2006; Benton 1991). Similar to Gramsci,
social institutions and ideologies are given a central position in power dynamics, by
determining social practices, the constitution of individual, and maintaining and
reproducing power relations and inequality. These are also sites for struggle
(Sharma and Gupta 2006:46). This concept has been criticized for its denial of
agency but it has been useful for anthropologists interested in the power of
institutions and ideologies for cultural practices (e.g. Bloch 1986) and for state
politics (Sharma & Gupta 2006).
Althusser, Louis
2006 [1971]. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an
Investigation). In
The Anthropology of the State. A Reader. Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta,
eds. pp. 86-111. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Benton, Ted.
1991. Louis Althusser: An Appreciation. Critique of Anthropology 11(2):117-
123.
Blim, Michael.
2000. Capitalisms in Late Modernity. Annual Review of Anthropology 29:25-
38.
Bloch, M.
1986. From Blessing to Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Bourdieu, Pierre.
1994. The Intellectual Field: A World Apart. In In other words: essays towards
a reflexive sociology. Pp. 140-149. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Boyer, Dominic and Claudio Lomnitz.
2005. Intellectuals and Nationalism: Anthropological Engagements. Annual
Review of Anthropology 34:105-20
Comaroff, Jean.
1985. Body of power, spirit of resistance. The Culture and History of a South
African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Comaroff, J. and J. Comaroff
1991. Of Revelation and Revolution. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Edelman, Marc.
Forgacs, David.
19
2000. The Antonio Gramsci Reader. Selected Writings 1916-1935. New York:
New York University Press.
Gluckman, Max.
1940. Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand. New York:
Manchester University Press.
Harris, Marvin.
1968. The Rise of Anthropological Theory. A History of Theories of Culture.
New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company.
Keesing, R.M.
1992. Custom and Confrontation: The Kwaio Struggle for Cultural Autonomy.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lears, J.
1985. The concept of cultural hegemony: Problems and Posibilities. American
Historical Review 90:567-93
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels.
1976. The German Ideology. Collected works, vol. 5. New York: International
Publishers.
Mintz, S. W.
1974. The rural proletariat and the problem of rural proletarian
consciousness. Journal of Peasant Studies 1 :290-325
1975. Worker in the Cane. New York: Norton. 2nd ed.
Viking
Nugent, David
1997. Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual, and Nation in the
Northern Peruvian Andes, 1885–1935. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
2001. Locating Capitalism in Time and Space: Global Restructurings, Politics
and Identity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
O’Laughin, Bridget.
1972. Marxist Approaches in Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology
4: 341-370
Parsons, Talcott.
1963. On the Concept of Political Power. Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society,107:232-262.
Roseberry, William.
1988. Political Economy. Annual Review of Anthropology 17:161-185.
1994. Hegemony and the Language of Contention. In Everyday Forms of
State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico. G.
M. Joseph and D. Nugent, eds. pp.355-366. Durham: Duke University Press.
1997. Marx and Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 26:25-46.
2002. Images of the peasant in the consciousness of the Venezuelan
Proletariat. In The Anthropology of Politics. A Reader in Ethnography, Theory,
and Critique. Joan Vincent, ed. pp.187-202. Massachusetts, Oxford, and
Victoria: Blackwell Publishing.
Sayer, Derek.
1989. Readings from Karl Marx. London and New York: Routledge.
Scott, James C.
1976. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in
Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.
20
1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press.
1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden transcripts. New Haven
and London: Yale University Press.
Sharma, Aradhana & Akhil Gupta, eds.
2006. The Anthropology of the State. A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing.
Thompson, E.P.
1963. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gollancz.
1971. The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.
Past and Present. 50:76-136.
Wolf, Eric R.
1969. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper and Row.
1999. Envisioning Power. Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley, Los
Angeles and London: University of California Press.
2002. Facing Power—Old Insights, Mew questions. In The Anthropology of
Politics. A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique. Joan Vincent, ed.
pp.222-233. Massachusetts, Oxford, and Victoria: Blackwell Publishing.
3. Feminism and Power in Political Anthropology
Feminism and feminist anthropologists have influenced anthropological theory and

practice since the discipline emerged offering a critique to theoretical and practical
assumptions, acknowledging the significance of women in economic, cultural,
political and social dynamics, and offering a feminist perspective on social action
(Nash 1997). Moreover, after WWII, many feminists within and outside anthropology
focused their research on tracing the discourses, histories and practices that create
and reproduce gender inequality in different social contexts (e.g. Collier and
Yanagisako 1989; Gal 2002; Ortner 1974, 1984; Reiter 1975; Rosaldo and Lamphere
1974). Some of these analyses focus on women access to economic aspects (e.g.
Caplan and Bujra 1979; Sacks 1975; Leacock 1986; Young et al 1980), or the
ideological and symbolic practices that construct their roles and social position (e.g.
Ortner 1974). Others also paid attention to the production of knowledge within
anthropology as a source of inequality and oppression for women (Slocum 1979).
After the 1980s, influenced by a wave of interest in politics of representation
derived from postmodernist approaches and colonialism critiques, feminist
anthropologists revised their own assumptions. The category of ‘woman’—just as
the categories of class, race, ethnicity—was challenged in particular because it was
not a bounded category but socially and culturally constructed, and it was
intersected with other categories and roles (class, ethnicity, race, religion,
socioeconomic status, etc.). Furthermore, it was recognized that women’s
experiences were not universal but there were also inequalities among different
women (Sim Hew 2003:14). Also, previous assumptions about a biological
distinction between genders and race were rearticulated as socially constructed,
21
and their naturalization was seen as a socio-political process that could be
anthropologically analyzed by paying attention to power, ideologies and practices.
As a result of feminist anthropologists’ critiques on gender inequality, the role of

power in creating inequality was brought to the forefront in anthropology.
Specifically, they have contributed to political anthropology by producing much
research on identifying the discourses, narratives, practices, and institutions that
construct and reproduce gender—and race, ethnicity, etc.—inequality, and their
effects on social practices and political action.
Feminists and Anthropology
Caplan, Patricia, & Janet M. Bujra

1979. Women united, women divided: Comparative studies of ten
contemporary cultures. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Collier, Jane F. and Sylvia Yanagisako.
1989 Theory in Anthropology since Feminist Practice. Critique of
Anthropology 9(2):27-37.
Gal, Susan.
2002. Between Spech and Silence. In The Anthropology of Politics. A Reader
in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique. Joan Vincent, ed. pp.213-221.
Leacock, Eleanor.
1986. Women, Power, and Authority. In Visibility and Power: Essays on
Women in Society and Development. Leela Dube, Eleanor Leacock, and
Shirley Ardener, eds. pp. 107-35. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Nash, June.
Ortner, Sherry
1974 Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture? In Anthropological Theory.
John McGee and Richard Worms, eds. pp. 402-413. Mountain View, CA:
Mayfield Publishing Company.
1984. Theory of Anthropology since the Sixties. Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 126:126-66.
1996. Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. Boston: Beacon
Press Books.
Reiter, Rayna, ed.
1975. Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Rosaldo, Michelle and Louise Lamphere, eds.
1974. Woman Culture and Society. Standford: Standford University Press.
Sacks, Karen.
1975. Engels revisited: Women and the organization of production and
private property. In Toward an anthropology of women. Rayna Reiter, ed. pp.
211-34. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Sim Hew, Cheng.
2003. Women workers, migration and family in Sarawak. London and New
York: Routledge Curzon
Slocum, Sally
22
1979. Woman, the gatherer: Male bias in Anthropology. In Toward an
anthropology of women. Rayna Reiter, ed. pp. 211-34. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Young, Iris Marion.
1980. Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body
Comportment, Morality, and Spatiality,” Human Studies, 3: 137–56.
4. Power, Post-structuralism, Postmodernism, and the French

Influence
As part of the colonial assessment to anthropology and its practices, French

structuralism and British structural-functionalist approaches went under extensively
critique for being ahistorical and ignoring the colonial context in which much
research was being done. Postcolonial writers and literary criticism were
fundamental to the development of such critique (Nash 1997). The theoretical
reaction to structural functionalism has been loosely termed post-structuralist. Post-
structuralism in anthropology was characterized by the rejection of previous
synchronic and structured models of societies, and by a self-reflection on the
discipline’s practices such as ethnographic fieldwork and the production of
ethnographic texts. Other post-structural anthropologists focused on the
interpretation of cultures as texts (e.g. Geertz 1973). This theoretical reaction
culminated in the postmodernist thinking of the 1980s and 1990s in anthropology
that rejected any generalizing theory and study the constructivist nature of most
ideologies and taken-for-granted ideas. Postmodernist and poststructuralist
perspectives have remained powerful in contemporary anthropological research.
Their main contribution to understanding power is that knowledge production is not
an objective process but a means for maintaining and reproducing social inequality
(Downey & Rogers 1995). Most anthropologists that took this perspective seriously
have engaged in ways to decolonize anthropological practices through new
fieldwork strategies and writing (e.g. Clifford & Marcus 1986; Marcus & Fischer
1986). However, poststructural and postmodernist views on power have been
criticized as some have deemphasized the political economy context, the
importance of class struggles, and the most radicals have minimized the role of
power structures on social practices (e.g. Di Leonardo 1993; Edelman 2002; Nash
1997).
Among the most influential post-structuralists to political anthropology is the French

philosopher Michel Foucault. As mentioned above, Foucault’s writings had a huge
impact on anthropological analyses of the 1970s and 1980s in American
anthropology, and his theories on power have been continuously read and used by
political anthropologists. In particular, Foucault’s discussion of the relationship
between power and knowledge, and the role of social institutions (e.g. prison,
school, etc.), discourses (e.g. formation of the truth) and disciplines (through
institutions like psychology, psychiatry, mental cliniques, etc.) in maintaining social
23
order and control, and subjectifying and producing individuals, empathized with the
1970s and 1980s theoretical self-critique of the discipline and practices (Abeles
2009; Foucault 1980). In particular, it was appropriated by non-Marxist
anthropologists of whom Paul Rabinow is considered the most adamant
anthropologist of Foucault’s theories, and the one that introduced Foucault to
American anthropology (Abeles 2009). Yet, this view of power has been also
scrutinized (e.g. Alonso 2005; Sangren 1995).
Foucault was interested in how power is exercised (the ‘art of governing’) and how
to approach politics by deinstitutionalizing and delegalizing them (Foucault 2000).
This view of power as having multiple domains and localities –what he called micro-
powers—is something that political anthropologists have already done with
stateless societies (Abeles 2009:64; see also discussion on Balandier 1970:123-
126). However, he discussed them through analyzing complex societies such as
France, influencing therefore the way power worked in ‘complex societies’— for
instance, as embedded on every day practices (e.g. De Certau 1984).
Also, he coined the concept of governmentality as a distinct modality of state power

in which the state renders a population governable through organized
rationalizations and mechanisms (such as census, surveys, population control, etc.)
and through people self-controlled practices (Burchell et al 1991; Foucault 1991).
This concept opened up much debate in political anthropology. While many political
anthropologists have valued and defended its analytical usefulness to study of
governing processes (e.g. Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Sharma & Gupta 2006; Xavier
Inda 2005), others have extensively criticized it (e.g. Alonso 2005). The concept of
governmentality is also tied with his discussion of the emergence of power
mechanisms (e.g. discipline and surveillance) developed in European modern
nation-states over bodies—what he calls biopower (Foucault 1980, 2003)—a topic
that has been extensively developed in anthropology (e.g. Agamben 1998; Agier
2008; Kleinman et al 1997; Xavier Inda 2005).
Another French scholar that influenced American anthropology during this period
was Pierre Bourdieu. In contrast to Foucault, he theorized about how social
structures and power (class) relations are maintained. In particular, he explored the
impact of aesthetic and cultural taste and cultural, social and economic capital in
forming social fields within the social stratification—what he called ‘symbolic power’
(Bourdieu 1977, 1984; Foster 1986; Swartz 1997). In this sense, social and cultural
practices are crucial for establishing the status or position of individuals and groups
in society (Bourdieu 1977; Dirks, Elley & Ortner 1994:13). Such practices are mostly
done unconsciously (his employment of the concept of habitus) and are internalized
through ‘bodily dispositions’ or are imprinted in objective bodies and spaces
(Boudieu 1977). In other words, contrary to Marxist approaches that focused on the
economic aspect of inequality and in opposition to rational choice theories, he
focused on the impact of internalized symbolic and cultural factors on the formation
and legitimization of power structures (Bourdieu 1994; Reed-Danahay 2002; Swartz
24
1997). Although criticized for its structural determinism and his economist language
for describing culture (e.g. Jenkins 1992; Free 1996:401), anthropologists interested
in how culture produces and maintains inequality and power structures have
mobilized his theory of ‘symbolic power’ and how symbolic power exerts symbolic
violence onto non-dominant classes (Bourdieu 1979; Bourdieu & Passeron 1977;
Free 1996). Also, his analyses of language as symbolic power have been useful for
linguistic anthropologists (Hanks 2005).
Clifford, James and George E. Marcus, eds.

1986. Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Downey, Gary Lee and Juan D. Rogers.
1995. On the Politics of Theorizing in a Postmodern Academy. American
Anthropologist 97(2):269-281
Di Leonardo, Micaela.
1993. What a Difference Political Economy Makes: Feminist Anthropology in
the Postmodern Era, Anthropological Quarterly. 66(2): 76-80.
Edelman, Marc.
Geertz, Clifford.
1973. The interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic
Books.
Marcus, George E. and Michael M. J. Fischer.
1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. An Experimental Moment in the
Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nash, June.
Michel Foucault:
Abeles, Marc.
2009. Foucault and Political Antropology. International Social Science Journal,
59 (191):59-68.
Agamben, Giorgio.
1998. Homo Sacer: sovereign power and bare life. Stanford: Stanford
University Press
Agier, Michel.
2008. On the margins of the word: the refugee experience today. Oxford and
Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers.
Alonso, A.M.
2005. Sovereignty, the Spatial Politics of Security, and Gender: Looking North
and South from the US-Mexico Border. In State Formation. Anthropological
Perspectives. Christina Krohn-Hansen & Knut G. Nustad, eds. Pp. 27-52.
London/Ann Harbor, MI: Pluto Press.
Balandier, Georges.
25
Burchell, Graham, Collin Gordon and Peter Miller, eds.
1991.The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University Of
Chicago Press.
De Certeau, Michel.
1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.
Ferguson. James and Akhil Gupta.
2002. Spatializing states: toward an ethnography of neoliberal
governmentality. American Ethnologist, 29(4): 981-1002.
Foucault, Michel.
1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977.
New York: Pantheon Books.
1991. Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,
pp. 87–104. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press
1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books
USA.
2000 The subject and power. In Power: Essential works of Foucault, 1954-
1984. Vol 3. J. Faubion, eds. New York: New Press.
2003. Society must be defended: lectures at the College de France 1975-
1976. New York: Picador.
Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds.
1997. Social Suffering. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Sangren, P. S.
1995. “Power” against Ideology: A Critique of Foucaultian Usage. Cultural
Anthropology 10(1): 3-40.
Publishing.
Xavier Inda, Jonathan ed.
2005. Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life
Politics. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Bourdieu:
Bourdieu, Pierre.
1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
1979. Symbolic Power. Critique of Anthropology. 4:77-85.
1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London:
Routledge and Keagan Paul.
1992. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press
Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J-C.
1977. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage.
Dirks, Nicholas B., Geoff Eley and Sherry B. Ortner, eds.
1994. Introduction. Culture/power/history: a reader in contemporary social
theory. Pp.3-46. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Foster, Stephen W.
1986. Reading Pierre Bourdieu. Critique f Anthropology. 1(1):103-110.
Free, Anthony.
1996. The Anthropology of Pierre Bourdieu: A Reconsideration. Critique of
Anthropology 16(4):395-416
Hanks, William F.
26
2005. Pierre Bourdieu and the Practices of Language. Annual Review of
Anthropology 34:67-83.
Jenkins, R.
1992. Pierre Bourdieu. London: Routledge.
Ortner, Sherry.
1984. Theory in anthropology since the Sixties. Comparative Studies
in Society And History. 26: 1 26-66
Swartz, David.
1997. Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago/London:
University of Chicago Press.
Reed-Danahay, Deborah.
2002. Remembering Pierre Bourdieu 1930-2002. Anthropological Quarterly 75
(2): 375-380.
C. State Revisited: What is the state?
1. Early anthropological approaches to the state
Political anthropology developed with an interest in ‘primitive’ or ‘simple’ societies,

which were stateless or with political systems other than the ‘modern state’
(Claessen 1979:10-11). Therefore, much of the early political anthropology
literature on the state was on its origins and development. In particular, early
cultural materialists and Marxist anthropologists were interested in the emergence
of states. The former theorized the rise of states by looking at its relationship with
economic and ecological factors, applying an evolutionary approach (e.g. Steward
1949, Sahlins 1958, Service 1975; Fried 1967; see discussion in Claessen 1979:15-
19). They distinguished the state from other political systems as the legitimation
and employment of coercion for the production of surplus, among other factors
(population increase, conquest, property, etc.). Marxist anthropologists of this
period, on the other hand, understood that it is the economic structure what
determines or shapes the formation of specific socio-political relations and
institutions—in particular private property and class relations (Claessen 1979:18-
20).
Also, specially influential to early anthropological studies on the state was the
publication of African Political Systems, which opened up interest in the study of
African states among British structural-functionalists during the 1950s and 1960s
(Claessen 1979:11). In general, they distinguished state from stateless societies as
those societies that have central authority. As structural-functionalists, their
emphasis was on the connections between states or political systems and other
aspects of society, such as the economy (e.g. Schapera 1956) or kinship (e.g. Mair
1962). However, these anthropologists rejected the state as an object of study since
it was considered a fiction or ideological construction, a notion that was
subsequently developed in anthropology (Krohn-Hansen & Nustad 2005:4-5). This
rejection delayed anthropological approaches to the state as a unit of study.
27
In addition, after the independence of most European former colonies during the
1940s and 1950s, some political anthropologists produced ethnographies in which
the state’s relation with local politics was made visible, especially during the
national state formations that were developing in most of the former colonial
territories (e.g. Wolf 1982, Roseberry 1989). Local groups’ politics at home and
overseas started to be studied in relation to larger settings, including their
relationship with the state, bureaucracies and the market (e.g. peasant studies,
ecological anthropology, political economy, etc.). Beside these studies, however,
the state as an object of study was absent from much ethnographies until the
1990s, and was discussed only as a precondition for capitalist production and
national formation (Dombrowsky & Marcus 2008; Krohn-Hansen & Nustad 2005:3;
Leacock 1972; Wolf 1962), “as a model for political organization or as a negative
other” (Abrams 1988; Krohn-Hansen & Nustad 2005:3).
Abrams, P.
1988. Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State. Journal of Historical
Sociology 1(1):58-89.
Claessen, Henri M.
Mouton Publishers.
Dombrowsky, Kirk & Anthony Marcus.
2008. Editorial: Beyond the Backdrop of the State? Dialectical Anthropology
32:1-5.
Fortes, Meyer and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, eds.
1940. African Political Systems. London and New York: International African
Institute.
Fried, Morton H.
1967. The Evolution of Political Society. New York: Random House.
Krohn-Hansen, Christina & Knut G. Nustad, eds.
2005. Introduction. In State Formation. Anthropological Perspectives. Pp. 3-
26. London/Ann Harbor, MI: Pluto Press.
Leacock, Eleanor.
1972. Introduction. In Origins of the Family, Private Property, the State.F.
Engels and E. Leacock, eds. New York: International Publishers.
Mair, Lucy.
1962. Primitive Government. Harmondworth: Pelican Books.
Roseberry, Wiliam.
1989. Anthropologies and Histories: Essay in Culture, History and Political
Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Sahlins, Marshal.
1958. Social Stratification in Polynesia. Seattle: University of Washington
Press.
Schapera, I.
1956. Government and Politics in Tribal Society. London: Watts.
Service, Elman R.
1975. Evolution of the State and Civilization. New York: Norton.
Steward, Julian H.
28
1949. Cultural Causality and Law. American Anthropologist 51:1-25.
Wolf, Eric.
1962. Sons of the Shacking Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
2. State as a object of anthropological study
By the 1980s, the Enlightenment preconception of the state as the main source of
power, political struggle, domination and authority was challenged by post-
structuralist and postmodern perspectives on domination (e.g. Foucault 1991, 1995;
Krohn-Hansen & Nustad 2005:3). In particular, Foucault insisted on abandoning the
centrality of the state to focus on the multiple forms of power or forms of
domination through which modern states reproduce—i.e. governmentality.
Moreover, by the 1990s, globalization literature argued that the state was
disappearing or vanishing (e.g. Appadurai 1993, 1996; Hannerz 1996; Kearney
1995; Ong 2002; Tsing 2000). On the one hand, state-like power was deployed by
actors that were outside of the nation-states –i.e. governance—such as guerrilla
groups, private corporations, transnational organizations, and narcotraffickers (Asad
2004; Ferguson 1990; Gupta 1998; Hale 2002; Hallinan 2001; Steinmetz 1999;
Troulliot 2001; see discussion in Aretxaga 2003 and Sharma & Gupta 2006). On the
other, state’s economic and political borders, its territoriality and sovereignty were
challenged by an increased transnationalism and migration, which also questioned
the state’s role with citizens and non-citizens (Asad 2004; Sharma & Gupta 2006). In
this context, the state was considered by some anthropologists as irrelevant.
Yet, it is during this period that the state takes a central stage in ethnographies. In
first place, the number of states has increased in the last 20 years and the desire of
some groups for forming independent states has become more intense (Aretxaga
2003). In addition, the presence of states are not disappearing but are becoming
more palpable, as they get involved in transforming local political, economic and
social conditions for attracting foreign investment and the implementation of
structural adjustment programs. This requires the state’s use of violence and
surveillance over outsiders and immigrants (Donnan and Wilson 1999) and over its
own citizens, making state power more visible (Aretxaga 2003). Moreover, even
transnational associations and organizations (such as the European Union, non-
profit organizations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) require
the state to exert their power (Krohn-Hansen & Nustad 2005). In this context, not
only it is now argued that the state has not disappeared (Aretxaga 2003; Comaroff
& Comaroff 2000; Trouillot 2001), but it is now seen compatible with globalization
processes (Aretxaga 2003). As a result, defining the concept of the state has
become important in anthropology.
Defining the state has not been a simple matter for anthropologists, though. In first
place, distinguishing the state as something separated from society has been so
29
difficult that some political scientists have either abandoned the state as an object
of study or narrow its definition (Mitchell 1991) while many anthropologists have
questioned the validity of such distinction (Abrams 1988; Alonso 1995; Bayart 1994;
Foucault 1980; Mitchell 1999; Nugent 1997; Trouillot 2001). This has led to a
definition of the state not as a coherent entity but as a construct produced through
institutional mechanisms, political processes and political encounters or struggles,
which create the effect of something called the state as different from society
(Abrams 1988; Aretxaga 2003; Brown 1995; Mitchell 1991; Trouillot 2001). In other
words, the notion of the state masks or encompasses an uncoordinated and
contradictory ensemble of discourses, institutions, practices and concrete political
struggles (Krohn-Hansen & Nustad 2005; Sharma & Gupta 2006). As mentioned
above, such notion of the state was already discussed by Fortes and Evans-
Pritchard (1940). However, contemporary anthropologists of the state do not see
this as a problem for its study but as a clue of the nature of the state (Mitchell
1991). Their focus, therefore, has been on the state effects and its producers (e.g.
Gupta 2006; Mitchell 1999; Sharma & Gupta 2006).
In addition, defining states as the holders of power, and as those institutions that
control and maintain social order over a delimited territory and its peoples through
various ways (as in Weber, Durkheim, Marx and Engels, Gramsci, etc) has also
proven problematic since there can be a wide variety of socio-political systems that
can be called states (see discussion in Balandier 1970:123-157). Classifying the
diversity of these political forms or distinguishing among themselves has been a
difficult enterprise. Some historical sociologists have, however, attempted to
distinguish ‘modern’ states from previous historical state formations in terms of
their strategies and technologies, and their impact on everyday life (e.g. Giddens
1985, Foucault 1991; Hall 1985, Mann 1986; discussed in Gledhill 2000:15-18). Yet,
these perspectives have been considered Eurocentric (Krohn-Hansen & Nustad
2005). Anthropologists, on the other hand, have explored the development of
‘modern’ states in relation to the emergence of nationalist narratives, colonialism
and capitalist expansion and the development of a set of techniques of domination
(Krohn-Hansen & Nustad 2005). Yet, even the joined dichotomy of nation-state has
been shown to be unstable and ambiguous (Aretxaga 2003; Trouillot 1990) and
such generalizations are problematic as they disguise the concrete historical
specificities in the formation of states (Krohn-Hansen & Nustad 2005).
In this way, contemporary anthropologists of the state have focused on exploring

the historical processes of formation and transformation of states through political
discourses and struggles, practices, institutions, performances, daily encounters
with state officials, symbols and representations that affect everyday life (Sharma &
Gupta 2006; Joseph & Nugent 1994).
On the other hand, many anthropologists of the state have been paying attention to
the role of cultural forms, symbols, rituals, and meaning in state-building processes
30
(Krohn-Hansen & Nustad 2005; Steinmetz 1999; Hansen & Stepputat 2001; Paley
2002; Das & Poole 2004). This interest in the role of symbolic life in constituting and
building states is part of a cultural movement in anthropology since the 1960s
(Krohn-Hansen & Nustad 2005). Although all studies are varied and their
approaches and theoretical perspectives are very diverse—influenced, for instance
by Gramsci, Foucault, Said, Geertz, among others—their common concern is to
understand how categories, meanings and worldviews are fashioned and reshaped
by the social actors involved in state-building (e.g. Geertz 1980, 2004; Kapferer
1988; Herzfeld 1992; Trouillot 1990; Wolf 1991), and, therefore, how state
formations are cultural processes in themselves (see discussion in Krohn-Hansen &
Nustad 2005).
Finally, there has been an interest in understanding the processes of the formation
of governable (Scott 1998, Baitenmann 2005; Shore 2005) and ungovernable
subjects (e.g. Alonso 2005; Aretxaga 2003; Sayer 1991), their gendered biases (e.g.
Alonso 2005; Brown 2006) and, therefore, how state building and maintaining
processes are violent, marginalizing and oppressive (e.g. Alonso 2005; Aretxaga
2000, 2003; Daniel 1996; Das 1996; Feldman 1991; Friedman 2003; Mintz 1985;
Taussig 1987).
Abrams, P.
1988. Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State. Journal of Historical
Sociology 1(1):58-89.
Alonso, A.M.
1995. Thread of Blood. Arizona: University of Arizona Press.
2005. Sovereignty, the Spatial Politics of Security, and Gender: Looking North
and South from the US-Mexico Border. In State Formation. Anthropological
Asad, Talal.
2004. Where Are the Margins of the State? In Anthropology in the Margins of
the State, Veena Das and Deborah Poole, eds. Pp. 279-88. Santa Fe: SAR
Press.
Aretxaga, Begoña.
2000. A Fictional Reality: Paramilitary Death Aquads and the Construction of
State Terror in Spain. In Death Squads: The Antrhopology of State Terror. J.A.
Sluka, ed. pp.47-69. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
2003. Maddening States. Annual Review of Anthropology 32:393-410.
Appadurai, A.
1993. Patriotism and its Futures. Public Culture. 5:411-29.
1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Baitenmann, Helga.
2005. Counting on State Subjects: State Formation and Citizenship in
Twentieth-Century Mexico. In State Formation. Anthropological Perspectives.
Christina Krohn-Hansen & Knut G. Nustad, eds. Pp.171-194. London/Ann
Harbor, MI: Pluto Press.
31
Balandier, Georges.
Bayart, J. F.
1994. Finishing with the Idea of the Third World. Journal of Human Rights.
1(3):283-303.
Brown, Wendy.
1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ:
2006. Finding the Man in the State. In The Anthropology of the State. A
Reader. Aradhana Sharma & Akhil Gupta, eds. pp. 187-210. Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing.
Comaroff, Jean & John Comaroff.
2000. Millenial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming. Public Culture
12:291-343.
Daniel, E.V.
1996. Charred Lullabies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Das, V.
1996. Sexual Violence, discursive formations and the state. Economic and
political weekly 31:2411-25.
Das, V. & D. Poole, eds.
2004. Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Santa Fe, NM: School of
American Research Press.
Donnan, Hastings and Thomas M. Wilson, eds.
1999. Introduction: Borders, Nations and States. In Borders: frontiers of
identity, nation and state. Pp.1-18. Oxford and New York: Berg.
Feldman, A.
1991. Formations of Violence. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago
Press.
Ferguson, J.
1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and
Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Foucault, Michel.
1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977.
New York: Pantheon Books.
1991. Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, pp. 87–104. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press
1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books
USA.
Friedman, Jonathan, ed.
2003. Globalization, the State, and Violence. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira
Press.
Geertz, Clifford.
1980. Negara: the Theater State in Nineteenth-Century bali. Princeton, NJ:
2004. What is a state if not sovereign? Reflections on Politics in Complicated
Places. Current Anthropology 45(5):577-93.
Giddens, Anthony.
1985. The Nation State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gledhill, John.
32
2000. Power and its Disguises. Anthropological Perspectives on Politics, 2nd
ed. London, Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press.
Gupta, Akhil.
1998. Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2006. Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics,
and the Imagined State. In The Anthropology of the State. A Reader.
Aradhana Sharma & Akhil Gupta, eds. pp. 211-242. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing.
Hale, C.R.
2002. Does multiculturalism menace? Governance, cultural rights and the
politics of identity in Guatemala. Journal of Latin American Studies 34:485-
524.
Hall, John.
1985. Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the West.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Hallinan, J.T.
2001. Going Up the river. Travels in a Prison Nation. New York: Random
House.
Hannerz, U.
1996. Transnational Connections. New York: Routledge
Hansen, Thomas Blom & Fin Stepputat, eds.
2001. States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial
State. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press
Herzfeld, M.
1992. The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of
Western Bureaucracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Joseph, G.M. and D. Nugent
1994. Everyday Forms of State Formation. Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press.
Kapferer, B.
1988. Legends of People, Myths of State. Washington, DC and London:
Smithsonian Institution Press.
Kearney, M.
1995. The local and the global: the anthropology of globalization and
transnationalism. Annual Review of Anthropology 24:547-65.
Krohn-Hansen, Christina & Knut G. Nustad, eds.
2005. Introduction. In State Formation. Anthropological Perspectives. Pp. 3-
26. London/Ann Harbor, MI: Pluto Press.
Mann, Michael
1986. The Sources of Social Power: A History of Power from the Beginning to
A.D. 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mintz, Sydney
Viking
Mitchell, Timothy
1991. The limits of the state: beyond statist approaches and their critics.
American Political Science Review. 85(1):77-96.
33
1999. Society, Economy, and the State Effect. In State/Culture. State-
Formation after the cultural turn. G. Steinmetz, ed. pp. 76-97. Ithaca, New
York and London: Cornell University Press.
Nugent, David.
1997. Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual, and Nation in the
Northern Peruvian Andes, 1885-1935. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Ong, Aihwa.
2002. Flexible Citizenship among Chinese Cosmopolitans. In The
Anthropology of Politics. A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique. Joan
Vincent, ed. pp. 338-355. Massachusetts, Oxford, and Victoria: Blackwell
Publishing.
Paley, J.
2002. Toward an anthropology of democracy. Annual Review of Anthropology
31:469-96.
Sayer, D.
1991. Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and Weber. London:
Routledge.
Scott, J.C.
1998. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
Publishing.
Shore, Chris.
2005. The state of the state in Europe, or ‘What is the European Union that
Anthropologists should be Mindful of It? In State Formation. Anthropological
Steinmetz, George, ed.
1999. State/Culture. State-Formation after the cultural turn. Ithaca, New York
and London: Cornell University Press.
Taussig, M.
1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and
Healing. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press.
Troulliot, M.R.
1990. Haiti: State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. New
York: Monthly Review Press.
2001. The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization. Current
Anthropology 42(1):125-38.
Tsing, A.
2000. The global situation. Cultural Anthropology 15:327-60
Wolf, Eric, ed.
1991. Religious Regimes and State Formation. Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press.
VI. Collective Political Action
As mentioned above, political anthropologists have been always interested in local

political struggles and contestation and their intersections with broader social,
political, cultural, economic and ideological structures and processes such as the
34
state-formations and state politics, plantations, colonialism, imperialism,
globalization, national identification projects, etc. Making political movements and
collective action an object of anthropological study in itself, however, occurred very
late. In other social sciences, collective action became an object of study after the
political upheavals around the world that characterized the 1960s. In particular, the
1960s political turmoil on the First World—antiwar movements, student revolts, civil
rights movements, and political mobilization to favor women, the elderly,
homosexuals, the disabled and other kinds of minorities—brought to the forefront
the need for social scientists to study collective action in largely democratic
societies. They were interested in understanding why and how non-class-based
collective action emerged and organized. Anthropologists, however, remained
absent of such debates as their research focused on the Third World urban poor,
religious groups and ethnic minorities on topics such as decolonization, national or
labor revolution. Therefore, most of the theoretical perspectives on collective action
developed outside of anthropology—i.e. sociology and political sciences.
During the 1960s, existing theories on collective action (e.g. Marxist explanations
on class conflicts, Totalitarianism theories—e.g. Arendt 1951—and Functionalist
understandings of collective behavior—e.g. Park 1967) were considered not useful
to explain the 1960s turmoil in democratic and affluent countries. To explain them,
Olson (1965), an economist in the U.S., suggested that collective action was the
summation of individual rational strategic decisions based on sanctions and
incentives (Edelman 2001). His view contradicted previous theories of the
irrationality of activists—i.e. breakdown theory—and set up a U.S. theoretical
approach to collective action based on rational choice.
By the 1970s, two theoretical perspectives developed in the social sciences:

‘resource mobilization’ in the U.S., and identity politics or New Social Movements
(NSMs) in Europe. In first place, with the premise that social actors involved in
collective action were rational, American social scientists focused on how interest
groups mobilized resources and channeled dissatisfaction to form organizations for
changing state policy (e.g. Cohen 1985; see Edelman 2001 for full discussion). In
their view, the success of the groups depended on their strategies for mobilizing
resources and support; so they focused on sanctions and rewards. For this reason,
they ignored collective action that had few resources such as the urban poor, those
groups that took risks which endangered the participants, and forms of disorganized
resistance. They also ignored how feelings of solidarity and sharing experience were
also rewards for participation. During the 1980s, a variant to this model emerged—
the political process approach—that theorized ‘social movements’ in relation to the
state politics (e.g. Shorter & Tilly 1974; Tarrow 1998; Tilly 1984). They argued that
their success depended on the opportunities and threats to the group, and on how
repressive or facilitative the state was. This theoretical perspective also ignored the
role of identity and culture in movement formation and practices.
35
In contrast to resource mobilization and political process theory, European social
scientists were interested on why non-class-based ‘social movements’ emerged.
Influenced by Marx, Weber and Habermas (1981), they focused on how the socio-
political crisis of postmodernity and postindustrial society produced new identities
other than class which organized as they were dissatisfied with their ways of life
(e.g. Laclau & Mouffe 1985; Melucci 1989; Touraine 1985). Therefore, they were
more interested on distinguishing ‘new social movements’ from working-class
organizations, which they understood as ‘older’ forms of collective action, and
focused their research on cultural and identity struggles to specify difference, which
they saw as the distinguishing feature of the new movements. However, they
ignored right wing social movements, and deemphasized the role of class and class
inequality in movement organization.
This theoretical perspective was extensively applied in Latin America (e.g. Alvarez
et al 1998; Escobar & Alvarez 1992) because of the intellectual connections of Latin
Americanists with European NSMs theories (Edelman 2001; Gledhill 2000). NSM
theory also appealed Latin American intellectuals’ ideals of liberal civil society
(Davis 1999). However, the Latin American experience—authoritarian regimes and
the democratization of states, regional oppositional struggles, indigenous
movements, peasant struggles, minorities, urban poor, Christian communities,
democratization and human rights, and street children—was very different than the
European, which forced NSMs theorists to reconsider their approaches. In particular,
politico-economic inequality and the state were reconsidered as key determinants
of collective action (Edelman 2001). Also, peasant movements and struggles have
been a central focus of research for many Latin American social scientists for their
centrality in opposition politics—for instance, opposition to national politics and to
neoliberal capitalist projects (e.g. Paré 1994; Edelman 1998, 1999; Houtzager &
Kurtz 2000; Pereira 1997; Stephen 1997). Yet, those Latin Americanists that applied
NSM theory gave little attention to this research and to right wing movements
(Edelman 2001).
On their part, anthropologists interested in political change during the 1960s and
1970s focused on national and decolonization revolutions in the Third World, and
the role of workers, peasants, Indians, etc. in shaping these struggles (e.g. Comaroff
1985; Paige 1975; Popkin 1979; Scott 1976; Wolf 1969; read Skocpol 1979 and
Stern 1987). However, it was clear by the 1980s that such revolutions did not bring
the social transformations that they promised. In particular, Marxist anthropologists
interested in capitalist transformations on peasants observed that these did not
bring worker-class revolution. As a result, the topic of everyday forms of resistance
rather than organized collective action took a central stage in anthropological
research (e.g. Scott 1990; Comaroff 1985; read also Sivaramakrishnan 2005 and
Fox & Starn 1997). Even though the concept of resistance have been extensively
scrutinized (e.g. Brown 1996; Hollander & Einwohner 2004), resistance studies in
anthropology were fundamental for the anthropological theorization on collective
36
action since they showed how counter-hegemonic or dissent practices and
ideologies were present in the absence of organized collective action.
Yet, it was not until the 1990s—in a context of increased global governance, the
implementations of neoliberal capitalist projects, increased transnationalism,
democratization in Latin America, indigenous and grassroots movements, etc—that
collective action theory infused anthropological research (e.g. Schneider 1995;
Collier 1994; Harvey 1998; Nash 1997; Alvarez et al 1998; Escobar & Alvarez 1992).
Particularly influential in anthropology has been New Social Movements and identity
politics theory as anthropologists have been more interested on the cultural aspects
of social movements and of collective action and the role of identity or identities in
their formation and practices (see below bibliography on cultural and identity
politics). However, they also emphasized the role of broader political and economic
processes—including the local state politics, transnational organizations, non-
governmental organizations, the market, etc—in the formation and practices of
collective action groups (see below bibliography on globalization and
transnationalism, and on struggles against the state). In addition, feminist
anthropologists have been very productive in showing the multiple contexts,
histories and multiple mobilizations of identity of women collective actions (see
below bibliography on feminist anthropologists). Moreover, there has been an
anthropological interest in Right Wing and Fundamentalist movements that needs
acknowledgement (see bibliography below).
In general, anthropologists have contributed to collective action theory by

producing in-depth ethnographic and historically contextualized studies of social
movements, collective action, different forms of dissent, and disorganized
resistance. They have shown how similar and disparate alliances are forged; how
social movements’ actions clash among themselves; how multiple discourses,
cultural representations and identities are mobilized by the same groups; the
continuous importance of class struggles and nationalism in contemporary politics;
the importance of politico-economic inequality and state politics to understand their
formation and practices; how changes in international and national or regional
policies influence their practices and objectives; the impact of the market, internet,
states and bureaucracies; among other aspects (Edelman 2001).
Alvarez, SE, E. Dagnino, Arturo Escobar, eds.
1998. Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American

Social Movements. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Arendt, H.
1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Brown, Michael F.
1996. On Resisting Resistance. American Anthropologist, 98(4): 729-735.
Cohen, JL.
37
1985. Strategy or Identity: new theoretical paradigms and contemporary
social movements. Social Research 52(4):663-716.
Collier, GA.
1994. Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas. Oakland, CA:
Institute fo Food and Developemtn Policy.
Comaroff, Jean.
1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South
African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Davis, DE.
1999. The power of distance: retheorizing social movements in Latin America.

Theory and Society. 28(4):585-638.
Edelman, Marc.
1998. Transnational peasant politics in Central America. Latin Am. Res. Rev.
33(3):49–86
1999. Peasants Against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica.
Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press
2001. Social Movements: changing Paradigms and Forms of Politics. Annual
Review of Antropology 30:285-317.
Escobar A, Alvarez SE, eds.
1992. The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy,
and Democracy. Boulder, CO: Westview
Fox, Richard G. and Orin Starn, eds.
1997. Introduction. In Between Resistance and Revolution. Cultural Politics

and Social Protest. Pp. 1-16. New Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers
University Press.
Gledhill J.
2000. Power and its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics.
London: Pluto Press. 2nd. ed.
Habermas, Jurgen.
1981. New Social Movements. Telos. 49: 33-37.
Harvey N.
1998. The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press
Hollander, Jocelyn A. and Rachel L. Einwohner.
2004. Conceptualizing Resistance. Sociological Forum, 19(4):533-544.
Houtzager PP, Kurtz MJ.

2000. The institutional roots of popular mobilization: state transformation and
rural politics in Brazil and Chile, 1960–1995. Comparative Studies
In Society And History 42(2):394–424
Laclau E, Mouffe C.
1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic
Politics. London: Verso
38
Melucci A.
1989. Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in
Contemporary Society. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press
Nash J.
1997. The fiesta of the word: the Zapatista uprising and radical democracy in
Mexico. American Anthropologist 99(2):261–74
Olson, Jr., M.
1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Paige, Jeffrey.
1975. Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the

Uncerdeveloped World. New York: Free Press.
Paré L.
1994. Algunas reflexiones metodológicas sobre el análisis de los movimientos
sociales en el campo. Revista mexicana de sociología 61(2):15–24
Park, RE.
1967. On Social Control and Collective Behavior: Selected Papers. RH Turner,

ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pereira AW.
1997. The End of the Peasantry: The Rural Labor Movement in Northeast
Brazil, 1961–1988. Pittsburgh: Univ. Pittsburgh Press
Popkin, Samule.
1979. The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in

Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schneider CL.
1995. Shantytown Protest in Pinochet’s Chile. Philadelphia:Temple Univ. Press
Scott, James.
1976. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: rebellion and Subsistence in
Southeast Asia. New have: Yale University Press.
1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance:Hidden Transcripts. New Haven,
CT: Yale Univ. Press.
Shorter E, Tilly C.
1974. Strikes in France 1830–1968. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press
Sivaramakrishnan, K.
2005. Some Intellectual Genealogies for the Concept of Everyday Resistance.
American Anthropologist, 107(3):346–355,
Skocpol, Theda.
1979. What Makes Peasants Revolutionary? Comparative Politics 14(3):35-75.
Stephen L.
1997.Women and SocialMovements in Latin America: Power from Below.
Austin: Univ. Texas Press
Stern, Steve J, ed.
39
1987. Resistance, rebellion, and Counsciousness in the Andean Peasant
World, 18th-20th Centuries. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Tarrow S.
1998. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. 2nd ed.
Tilly, Charles.
1984. Social Movements and National Politics. In Statemaking and Social
Movements: Essays in History and Theory, Charles Bright and Susan Harding,
eds. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 297-319.
Touraine, Alain.
1985. An Introduction to the Study of Social Movements. Social Research
52(4): 749-787.
Wolf, Eric.
1969. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper & Row.
Cultural and Identity Politics of Collective Action
Cohen, Jean.
1985. Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary
Social Movements. Social Research. 52(4): 663-716.
Escobar, Arturo.
1992a. Culture, Economics, and Politics in Latin American Social Movements
Theory and Research. In The Making of Social Movements in Latin America:
Identity, Strategy, and Democracy. Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez, eds.
pp. 62-85. Boulder: Westview Press.
1992b. Culture, Practice and Politics: Anthropology and the Study of Social
Movements. Critique of Anthropology. 12(4):395-432.
1997. Cultural Politics and Biological Diversity. State, Capital, and Social
Movements in the Pacific Coast of Colombia. In Between Resistance and
Revolution. Cultural Politics and Social Protest. Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn,
eds. Pp.40-64. New Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers University Press.
Ginsburg, Faye.
1997. “From Little Things, Big Things Grow” Indigenous Media and Cultural
Activism. In Between Resistance and Revolution. Cultural Politics and Social
Protest. Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn, eds. Pp.118-144. New Brunswick, New
Jersey, London: Rutgers University Press.
Hale, Charles R.
1994. Between Che Guevara and the Pachamama: Mestizos, Indians and
Identity Politics in the Anti-quincentenary Campaign. Critique of
Anthropology. 14(1): 9-39.
Hendricks, Janet.
1991. Symbolic Counterhegemony among the Ecuadorian Shuar. In Nation-
States and Indians in Latin America Greg Urban and Joel Sherzer, eds. pp. 53-
71. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Kasmir, Sharryn.
2005. Activism and Class Identity: the Saturno Auto Factory Case. In Social
Movements. An Anthropological Reader, June Nash, ed. pp. 78-95. Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishing.
40
Nash, June.
1995. The Reassertion of Indigenous Identity: Mayan responses to State
Intervention in Chiapas. Latin American Research Review 30:7-41.
1997. The fiesta of the word: the Zapatista uprising and radical democracy in
Mexico. American Anthropologist 99(2):261-74.
Ota, Yoshinobu.
1997. Appropriating Media, Resisting Power. Representations of Hybrid
Identities in Okinawan Popular Culture. In Between Resistance and
Revolution. Cultural Politics and Social Protest. Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn,
eds. Pp.145-170. New Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers University
Press.
Pratt, Jeff.
2003. Class, Nation, and Identity. The Anthropology of Political Movements.
London/ Streling, Virginia: Pluto Press.
Shantz, Jeffrey.
2000. A Post-Sorelian Theory of Social Movement Unity: Social Myth
Reconfigured in the Work of Laclau and Mouffe. Dialectical Anthropology. 25:
89-108.
Stephen, Lynn.
2005. Gender, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity. In Social Movements.
An Anthropological Reader, June Nash, ed. pp.66-77. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing.
Strobele-Gregor, J.
1994. From Indio to Mestizo...to Indio: New Indianist Movements in Bolivia.
Latin American Perspectives. 21: 106-123.
Struggles against the State
Abelmann, Nancy.
1997. Reorganizing and Recapturing Dissent in 1990s South Korea. The Case
of the Farmers. In Between Resistance and Revolution. Cultural Politics and
Social Protest. Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn, eds. Pp.250-276. New
Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers University Press.
Albro, Robert.
2005. “The Water is Ours, Carajo!” Deep Citizenship in Bolivia’s water War. In
Social Movements. An Anthropological Reader June Nash, ed. pp. 249-271.
Malden, MA:Blackwell Publishing..
Collier, GA.
1994. Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas. Oakland, CA:
Institute fo Food and Developemtn Policy.
Degregori, Carlos Iván.

1999. Reaping the Whirlwind: the Rondas Campesinas and the Defeat of
Sendero Luminoso in Ayacucho. In Societies of Fear: The Legacy of Civil War,
Violence and Terror in Latin America. Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt, eds. pp.
63-87. London: Zed Books.
Moore, Donald.
2006. Suffering for Territory. Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe. Durham &
London: Duke University Press.
41
Postero, Nancy Grey.
2007. Now we are citizens. Indigenous Politics in Postmulticultural Bolivia.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Starn, Orin.
1997. Villagers at Arms. War and Counterrevolution in Peru’s Andes. In
Between Resistance and Revolution. Cultural Politics and Social Protest.
Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn, eds. Pp.223-249. New Brunswick, New Jersey,
London: Rutgers University Press.
1999. Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Globalization and Transnationalism
Appadurai, Arjun.
2000. Grassroots globalization and the research imagination. Public Culture
12(1):1-19.
Cunningham, H.
1999. The ethnography of transnational social activism: understanding the
global as local practice. American Ethnologist 26(3):583-604.
Doane, Molly.
2005. The Resilience of Nationalism in a Global Era: Megaprojetcs in Mexico’s
South. In Social Movements. An Anthropological Reader June Nash, ed. pp.
187-202. Malden, MA:Blackwell Publishing.
Ferradas, Carmen. 1998. Power in the Southern Cone borderlands: an anthropology
of development practice. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
Fox, Richard G.
1997. Passage from India. In Between Resistance and Revolution. Cultural
Politics and Social Protest. Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn, eds. Pp.65-82. New
Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers University Press.
Grimes, Kimberly M.
2005. Changing the Rules of Trade with Global Partnership: The Fair Trade
Movement. In Social Movements. An Anthropological Reader June Nash, ed.
pp. 237-248. Malden, MA:Blackwell Publishing.
Kirsch, Max.
2005. The Politics of Place: Legislation, Civil Society and the “Restoration” of
the Florida Everglades. In Social Movements. An Anthropological Reader June
Nash, ed. pp. 203-215. Malden, MA:Blackwell Publishing.
Nash, June.
1992. Interpreting Social Movements: Bolivian Resistance to Economic
Conditions Imposed by the International Monetary Fund. American
Ethnologist. 275-293.
2005. Defying Deterritorialization: Autonomy Movements against
Gobalization. In Social Movements. An Anthropological Reader June Nash, ed.
pp. 177-186. Malden, MA:Blackwell Publishing.
Sylvain, Renee.
2005. “Land, Water and Truth”: San Identity and Global Indigenism. In Social
Movements. An Anthropological Reader June Nash, ed. pp. 216-233. Malden,
MA:Blackwell Publishing.
42
Feminist Collective Action
Aretxaga Begoña.
1997. Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in
Northern Ireland. Princeton University Press.
Safa, Helen I.
1990. Women’s Social Movements in Latin America. Gender and Society. 4(3):
354-369.
Susser, Ida. 2005. From the Cosmopolitan to the Personal: Women’s Mobilization to
Combat HIV/AIDS. In Social Movements. An Anthropological Reader June
Nash, ed. pp. 272-284. Malden, MA:Blackwell Publishing.
Simonian, Ligia T.L.
2005. Political Organization among Indigenous Women of the Brazilian State
of Roraima: Constraints and Prospects. In Social Movements. An
Anthropological Reader June Nash, ed. pp. 285-303. Malden, MA:Blackwell
Publishing.
Reddy, Deepa S.
2005. At Home in the World: Women’s Activism in Hyderabad, India. In Social
Right Wing and Fundamentalist Collective Action
Bowie, Katherine.
2005. The State and the Right Wing: The Village Scout Movement in Thailand.
In Social Movements. An Anthropological Reader June Nash, ed. pp. 46-65.
Malden, MA:Blackwell Publishing.
Edwards, David B.
2005. Print Islam: Media and Religious Revolution in Afghanistan. In Social
Toth, James.
2005. Local Islam gone Global: The Roots of Religious Militancy in Egypt and
its Transnational Transformation. In Social Movements. An Anthropological
Reader June Nash, ed. pp. 117-145. Malden, MA:Blackwell Publishing.
VII. Puerto Rico and Political Anthropology
In contrast with Latin America, most research on politics, power and state formation
on the island has been the work of social, political scientists and historians (e.g.
Baver 1993; Benitez-Nazario 2001; Cubano-Iguina 2006; Falk 1986; Grosfoguel
2003; Heine 1993; Melendez et al 1993; Mendez 1997; Morris 1995; Negrón-
Muntaner 2007; Quintero 1978; Santiago-Valles 1994; Suarez-Findlay 1999). They
have also been the most interested on studying social protests, labor, students and
religious organizations, and other forms of collective political action or ‘resistance’
in Puerto Rico (e.g. Barreto 2002; Bosque-Perez et al 2006; Caban 1984; Caceres
43
2007; Cotto 1993; Diaz 2006; Galvin 1976, 1979; Garcia-Colon 2006; Gonzalez-Cruz
1998, 2008; Jimenez-Munoz 1994-1995; Lopez 1987; Mergal 1993; Quintero-Rivera
1983; Santiago-Rivera 1993; Santiago-Valles et al 2004; Torres 1998; Villaronga
2004). This has also been the case in the Caribbean (Slocum & Thomas 2003:561).
The political issues on which political anthropologists have centered on the island
and the Puerto Rican Diaspora are cultural and identity politics (e.g. Davila 1997,
1999, 2004; Duany 2002; Godreau 2002; Hernandez-Hiraldo 2006; Lauria 1964;
Quintero-Rivera 1987; Ramos-Zayas 2004; Susser 1997; Urciouli 1996), nationalism
on the island and overseas (e.g. Duany 1996, 2002; Ramos-Zayas 2003; Urciouli
2003) and capitalist and welfare socio-economic transformations on urban and rural
communities and labor (e.g. Buitrago 1973; Garcia-Colon 2006; Mintz 1960, 1974,
1978, 2001; Perez 2005b; Ramirez 1972, 1973; Safa 1974; Steward et al. 1956).
Others have focused on issues of migration and transnationalism (Cobas et al 1997;
Duany 1992; Duany et al 1995, 2006; Perez 2002; Perez 2005a) consumption and
tourism (e.g. Davila 1997) in the context of neoliberal capitalist transformations.
However, political movements or actions coming from students, labor, religious and
communal organizations, and social protests against state’s decisions over a wide
range of different matters have been understudied by anthropologists (e.g. Bonilla
2009; Bonilla & Boglio-Martinez 2010; McCaffrey 2002, 2006), even though they
have been the most visible and continuous groups of opposition to state politics
throughout the 20th century up until now. The emphasis on identity politics,
nationalism and capitalism on the island has to do with the central stage the
colonial status of the island has for political anthropologists to understand local
politics. In this sense, McCaffrey’s (2002, 2006) research has fitted right with the
continuous literature on local political action under United States imperialism, as
she explored the development of local activism to expulse the U.S. Marine from
Vieques, Puerto Rico. Yet, labor unions, students’ organizations, and less visible
forms of political activism in search of local reforms frame their critiques to state
politics in terms of class, nationalism and the ‘problem of colonialism.’ In this sense,
they propel bursts of social protests by setting up and distributing antagonist
narratives to the state practices and decisions, even when they support political
leaders. In particular, labor, students and religious politics have been the most
influential forces behind much dissent and support of government politics in the
island. Therefore, such political struggles and dissent require anthropological
attention in Puerto Rico.
Barreto, Amilcar Antonio.

2002. Vieques, the Navy, and Puerto Rican Politics. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida.
Baver, Sherrie.
1993. The Political Economy of Colonialism. The State and Industrialization
in Puerto Rico. Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger.
Benitez-Nazario, Jorge.
44
2001. Reflexiones en torno a la Cultura Politica de los Puertorriquenos
(entre consideraciones teoricas y la evidencia empirica). San Juan, PR:
Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena.
Bonilla, Yarimar
2009. October 26. Jobs and Justice in the Caribbean: Taking to the Streets
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Bonilla, Yarimar and Rafael Boglio-Martinez.
2010. Puerto Rico in Crisis: Government Workers Battle Neoliberal Reform.
NACLA Report on the Americas 43(1):6-8.
Bosque-Perez, Ramon and Jose Javier Colon Morera, eds.
2006. Puerto Rico under Colonial Rule. Political Persecution and the Quest for
Human Rights. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Buitrago Ortiz, Carlos.
1973. Esperanza: An ethnographic study of a peasant community in Puerto
Rico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Cabán, P.A.
1984. Industrialization, the Colonial State, and Working Class Organizations in
Puerto Rico. Latin American Perspectives 11(3):149-172.
2002. Puerto Rico State Formation in a Colonial Context. Caribbean Studies,
30:170 - 215.
Caceres, Jetsabe.
2007. The Social Movement Struggle in Puerto Rico: the cases of Vieques
and the Puerto Rico Telephone Company. Paper presented at Conference
Northeastern Political Science Association.
Cobas, Josh A. and Jorge Duany.
1997. Cubans in Puerto Rico: Ethnic Economy and Cultural Identity.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Cotto, Liliana.
1993. The Rescate Movement: An Alternative Way of Doing Politics. In
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Melendez and Edgardo Melendez, eds. pp. 119-130. Boston, MA: South End
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Cubano Iguina, Astrid.
2006. Rituals of Violence in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico: Individual
Conflict, Gender, and the Law. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Dávila, Arlene M.
1997. Sponsored Identities. Cultural Politics in Puerto Rico. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.
1999. Crafting Culture: Selling and Contesting Authenticity in Puerto Rico’s
Informal Economy. Studies in Latin American Popular Culture. 18:159-161.
2004. Barrio Dreams. Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and the Neoliberal City
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Diaz, Jean.
2006. Struggle and Change in Puerto Rico. Expecting Democracy. Latin
American Perspectives. 33(1):9-22.
Duany, Jorge.
1992. In Search of a Better Life: Perspectives on Migration from the
Caribbean. The Latin American Anthropology Review 4(2):79-80.
45
1996. Imagining the Puerto Rican Nation: Recent Works on Cultural
Identity. Latin American Research Review 31(3):248-267.
2002. The Puerto Rican Nation on the move: Identities on the island and in
the United States. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North
Carolina Press.
2005. Colonial Migrants: Recent Work on Puerto Ricans on and off the
Island. New West Indian Guide 79(3-4): 273-279
Duany, Jorge, Luisa Hernandez Angueira and Cesar A. Rey.
1995. El Barrio Gandul: Economía subterránea y migración
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1986. The Political Status of Puerto Rico. Lexington, MA and Toronto:
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Galvin, Miles Eugene.
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Garcia-Colon, Ismael.
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65.
Godreau, Isar.
2002. Changing Space, Making Race: Distance, Nostalgia, and the
Folklorization of Blackness in Puerto Rico. Identities 9(3):281-304.
González-Cruz, Michael.
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Colonial State, 1898 to the Present. Latin American Perspectives, 25(5): 7-26.
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Grosfoguel, Ramón.
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Heine, Jorge.
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Hernandez-Hiraldo, Samiri.
2006. “If God were Black and from Loiza”: Managing Identities in a Puerto
Rican Seaside Town. Latin American Perspectives 33:66-82.
Jimenez-Munoz, Gladys M.
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de Estudios Puertorriquenos VII(1): 96-106
Lauria, Antonio.
1964. “Respeto,” “Relajo,” and Inter-Personal Relations in Puerto Rico.
Anthropological Quarterly 37(2):53-67.
Lopez, Alfredo.
46
1987. Dona Licha’s Island. Modern Colonialism in Puerto Rico. Boston, MA:
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McCaffrey, Katherine T.
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2006. Social Struggle against the U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico: Two
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Melendez, Edwin and Edgardo Melendez,eds.
1993. Colonial Dilemma. Critical Perspective on Contemporary Puerto Rico.
Boston, MA: South End Press.
Mendez, Jose Luis.
1997. Entre el Limbo y le Consenso. El Dilema de Puerto Rico para el
Proximo Siglo. San Juan: Ediciones Milenio.
Mergal, Margarita.
1993. Puerto Rican Feminism at a Crossroad: Challenges at the Turn of the
Century. In Colonial Dilemma. Critical Perspective on Contemporary Puerto
Rico. Edwin Melendez and Edgardo Melendez, eds. pp. 131-142. Boston, MA:
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Mintz, Sidney W.
I960. Worker in the Cane. A Puerto Rican Life History. New Haven: Yale
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1974. Caribbean Transformations. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.
1978. The role of Puerto Rico in modern social science . Revista
Interamericana 8:5-16
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Morris, Nancy.
1995. Puerto Rico. Culture, Politics and Identity. Westport, Connecticut and
London: Praeger.
Negrón-Muntaner, Frances, eds.
2007. None of the Above. Puerto Rican in the Global Era. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Pérez, Marvette.
2002. The Political ‘Flying Bus’: Nationalism, identity, status, citizenship and
Puerto Ricans. Critique of Anthropology 22(3):305–322
Perez Gainesville, Ricardo.
2005a. Unbound Households: Trajectories of Labor, Migration, and
Transnational Livelihoods in (and from) Southern Puerto Rico. In Migration
and Economy: Global and Local Dynamics, Lillian Trager, ed. pp. 49-75.
Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
2005b. The State and Small-Scale Fisheries in Puerto Rico. FL:
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Quintero-Rivera, AG.
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Huracan.
1983. Socialist and Cigarmaker: Artisans' Proletarianization in the Making of
the Puerto Rican Working Class. Latin American Perspectives. 10: 19-38.
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Ramirez, Rafael L.
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Ramos-Zayas, Ana Y.
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2004. Implicit Social Knowledge, Cultural Capital, and "Authenticity" among
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Safa, Helen I.
1974. The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico: A Study in Development and Inequality.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Santiago-Rivera, Carlos Ala.
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Edgardo Melendez, eds. pp. 143-156. Boston, MA: South End Press.
Santiago-Valles, Kelvin A.
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Santiago-Valles, Kelvin and Gladys M. Jimenez-Munoz.
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States, 1945-2000. In The Columbia History of Latinos in the United States,
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Steward, Julian H., Robert A. Manners, Eric R. Wolf, Elena Padilla Seda, Sidney W.
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Political Anthropology Bibliography Surey M.

Political anthropology is a specialized subfield within anthropology, whose central

Politics, however, were a concern previous to this period among anthropologists,

After WWII, severe challenges to traditional understandings of politics and power

1) different approaches and conceptualizations of politics

2) the concept of power, which became central in political anthropology after

This section discusses the contributions of the founding fathers of political

A. Early American Anthropology and the Origins of the State

The purpose of this subsection is to acknowledge some early attempts in American

Besides these early discussions, an interest in understanding the development of

B. Emergence of Political Anthropology: Period of 1940-

After WWII, a series of crises in the world challenged traditional understandings of

In addition, some anthropologists have paid attention to politics by giving a central

Whereas structural-functionalists tried to explain the permanent character and

The critiques of anthropologists attending to politics as intentional and manipulative

2. Political Economy Approaches

In general, political economy anthropologists have focused on how the modes,

3. Politics and Culture

After much debate in anthropology between cultural and political approaches to

Álvarez Sonia E., Evelyn Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds.

B. Power and Inequality: Identifying power, and its intersections

Understandings of power among social scientists have revolved around

After WWII, power and inequality became central to anthropological analyses. As

Also, anthropological research influenced by feminist critiques has extensively

Additionally, critiques coming from postcolonial writers also influenced non-Marxist

1. Max Weber: Rational Power in Social Relations

Weber understood power as embedded in social relations rather than merely in

Also, for Weber power depended on compelling ideas (traditional, rational or

2. Marx, Marxists and Power: Power, Capital, Ideology

After WWII, many anthropologists acknowledged the importance of the economic

Althusser’s concept of ‘ideological state apparatus’ also inspired anthropologists

3. Feminism and Power in Political Anthropology

Feminism and feminist anthropologists have influenced anthropological theory and

As a result of feminist anthropologists’ critiques on gender inequality, the role of

Feminists and Anthropology

Caplan, Patricia, & Janet M. Bujra

4. Power, Post-structuralism, Postmodernism, and the French

As part of the colonial assessment to anthropology and its practices, French

Among the most influential post-structuralists to political anthropology is the French

Also, he coined the concept of governmentality as a distinct modality of state power

Clifford, James and George E. Marcus, eds.

C. State Revisited: What is the state?

1. Early anthropological approaches to the state

Political anthropology developed with an interest in ‘primitive’ or ‘simple’ societies,

2. State as a object of anthropological study

In this way, contemporary anthropologists of the state have focused on exploring

VI. Collective Political Action

As mentioned above, political anthropologists have been always interested in local

By the 1970s, two theoretical perspectives developed in the social sciences:

In general, anthropologists have contributed to collective action theory by

Alvarez, SE, E. Dagnino, Arturo Escobar, eds.

1998. Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American

1996. On Resisting Resistance. American Anthropologist, 98(4): 729-735.

1999. The power of distance: retheorizing social movements in Latin America.

1997. Introduction. In Between Resistance and Revolution. Cultural Politics

2004. Conceptualizing Resistance. Sociological Forum, 19(4):533-544.

Houtzager PP, Kurtz MJ.

1975. Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the

1967. On Social Control and Collective Behavior: Selected Papers. RH Turner,

1979. The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in

1979. What Makes Peasants Revolutionary? Comparative Politics 14(3):35-75.

Cultural and Identity Politics of Collective Action

Struggles against the State