Vincent, J. Political Anthropology. Manipulative Strategies

Political Anthropology: Manipulative StrategiesAuthor(s): Joan VincentReviewed work(s):Source: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 7 (1978), pp. 175-194Published by: Annual ReviewsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2155692 .Accessed: 22/10/2012 15:55

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Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 1978. 7:175-94 Copyright 0 1978 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved

POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: *9612

MANIPULATIVE STRATEGIES

Joan Vincent

Department of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027

The approach to the study of politics to be reviewed in this essay is characterized essentially by a focus upon individual actors and their strategies within political arenas. In its earlier formative phase, the approach which, following Cohen (41) we shall call action theory, was associated with a range of theoretical frameworks, among them those built around transactions, symbolic interaction, systems analysis, methodological individualism, game theory, interaction theory, and political clientelism. Today action theory relates most closely to dialectical theory and the general sociology of Marx and Weber (24, 35, 51, 98, 130).

Action theory in political anthropology differs from behavioralism in social psychology and from the behavioral approach in political science, although it has sometimes been confused with both. In these disciplines, analysis begins with the individual and his motives, proceeds to emphasize choice, and concludes by inferring structural limitations from behavior. Action theory in anthropology begins by locating the individual within the framework of both formal and interstitial social organization and then proceeds to the analysis of political action and interaction. Within political anthropology itself, the approach differs from evolutionary and structural anthropology by virtue of its attention to processes, to political formations other than categories and corporate groups and, above all, by its underpin- ning in a particular mode of fieldwork (50, 80, 85) that resulted in a distinctive form of finely grained political ethnography (25, 43, 46, 71, 76, 80, 118).

Deriving explicitly from social anthropology, the action approach within political anthropology developed largely in conjunction with the analysis of

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"social change" in the Third World. In Africa, an emphasis was laid on the contemporary social situation in which political actors met in face-to-face encounters (59, 60, 62). A coherent body of literature developed around the theme of the village headman and the conflict of roles arising out of his intercalary position in the colonial administrative structure (16, 111). In India, the problem of relating the village to its wider administrative and political context, and the task of studying national political parties, elec- tions, and structural change inspired both a comprehensive systems analysis of political action within the nation-state (6-8) and a conceptual tool kit for the elaboration of principles of competitive political behavior in discrete arenas (11-13, 15). In Latin America, where emphasis had long been placed on the national context and historical conditions (126, 127), the marginalization of rural communities and the role of cultural brokers were major interests (128). It was argued that the anthropologist had a "professional license" to study the interstitial (85, 129), supplementary, and parallel structures in complex societies-the peripheral grey areas surrounding Le- nin's strategic heights of sovereign power (129).

From this common concern with the substantive conditions of societal change, two themes emerged which came to dominate this approach within political anthropology: 1. the face-to-face encounters of particular individuals and 2. the particular setting of these encounters within encapsulated or closed communities. Both themes were brought together in Bailey's Strata- gems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics (12). By the 1960s, political anthropology, which had been dominated by the synchronic study of political structures in a state of assumed equilibrium, saw the development of a theory "which could deal with faction, party, and political maneuver" (46, p. 190).

During these years a series of related concepts was developed. Some concerned the political forms generated out of the coalescence of individual actors: among these were quasi-group, action-set, clique, gang, faction, coalition, interest group, and party. Others related to modes of political behavior: choosing, maximizing, decision-making, strategizing, interacting, transacting, manipulating, career-building, spiraling, recruiting, excluding, maneuvering, competing, fighting, dominating, encapsulating. Still others related to the context (both spatial and temporal) of political action: chief among these were event, situation, arena, field, political system, environment, and power structure.

Criticisms that the exploration of political manipulations in such mi- crocosmic settings worked only within the confines of formal sociology (130) were met with the observation that this kind of analysis could equally well be applied to powerful, "high level" groups. It was also argued that political relations are, after all, simply between men and only "alienated

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thinking ... persuades us, fetishistically, that we have relations with reified 'things' or 'forces' " (130). Nevertheless, tensions developed among practitioners between those who considered the multistranded political relations of the locality to form a viable closed system for analysis [beyond which the limits of naivete were reached and analysis left to other disciplines (9)] and those who considered the analysis of a wider political economy necessary even to begin to understand the forms that local level politics took (106, 108, 126-128). At its widest extent this involves viewing encapsulated politics as a reflection of national dependency relations within a global economic system (4, 76, 92, 114, 130).

This development, too, is bound to have its critics. Yet, as Worsley puts it:

This is not to say that we cannot describe a flower without, every time, having to recite or construct a philosophy of Nature or a theory of biology. It is not to say that we must always study the total macro-structure of a society (a disease that affects Latin American Marxists, for instance). But it is to say that the analysis of situations has always to be informed by an awareness of the world within which situations and encounters are located, and more than that, requires an explicit conceptualization of what that world looks like (130, p.10).

The history of action theory in political anthropology has been of a movement toward a more and more explicit statement of this position.

In the pages that follow we first trace the roots of the action approach and note certain misgivings about it. We then review recent developments in the field and assess the degree to which these misgivings have been laid to rest. Finally, through a consideration of three major themes in the work of action theorists-political leadership, factionalism, and power-brokerage -we suggest certain shifts that have occurred, and are occurring, in the utilization of this approach.

THE ROOTS OF THE APPROACH

The approach to political anthropology through the manipulative ploys of individuals contains its own dialectic: the manipulation of "symbols" and the manipulation of "material resources." Underlying both is what has been called "the Malinowskian impulse": "early programmatic exhortations to record ordinary day to day activities ... and to search for explanations by the way of evident facts of observable behavior before invoking the weight of the past to account for the actions of the present" (50, p. 7).

The roots of the approach may be traced back to the formative influences of Mair, Leach, and Firth in the late 1930s. Completely absent from what is generally taken to be the seminal classic in the field of political an-

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thropology, African Political Systems, published in 1940, action theory is sometimes assumed to have emerged in opposition to the structural-func- tionalism so well represented in that volume (118). In fact, the approach has been traced back by its practitioners (34, 68) to Spencer and Marrett. Thus Marrett is reported as having observed in 1912:

Even where the regime of custom is most absolute, the individual constantly adapts himself to its injunctions, or rather adapts these to his own purposes with more or less conscious and intelligent discrimination. The immobility of custom is, I believe, largely the effect of distance. Look more closely and you will see perpetual modification in process; and, if the underlying dynamic be partly due to physical and quasi-physical causes ... there is likewise at work throughout the will to live, manifesting itself through individuals as they partly compete and partly cooperate one with the other (68, p.31).

For fieldwork training, Marrett, the "office-bound" Oxford don, sent his students (including Max Gluckman) to Malinowski at the London School of Economics, and it was there that the individual-action-oriented approach to politics was formulated. Appearing early in the work of Mair and Leach, it was later given expression by Firth in his 1954 essay, "Social Organisation and Social Change" (54). Not, however, until the publication of Nadel's The Theory of Social Structure in 1957 (86) and Firth's Essays on Social Organisation and Values in 1964 (56) were its theoretical underpinnings made apparent. What strikes one in retrospect is the extent to which both were dialogues with Weber and Marx. Both marked, as major works often do, the end of one era and the beginning of another.

In America, Chapple and Arensberg's delineation of interaction theory was a contemporaneous trend (3, 38) but, whereas the Harvard scholars explored the microsociology of emergent structures and industrial relations, those at the London School of Economics were concerned above all with Third World Societies and social change. Given their expertise in empirical field research, an emphasis on individual choice and action, and strategies of manipulation, the emergence of a distinctive approach within political anthropology now appears almost inevitable. The appointment of Mair as Reader in Applied Anthropology in 1956 (before this she had been Reader in Colonial Administration) gave institutional recognition to the study of complex society, the impact of governmental policies, and social change (80, 92).

From 1934 to the present, Mair has reiterated the necessity of studying individuals within a "constitutional" framework (80). Changes in society imply "changes in the rules that govern social relationships-rules about the ownership of property, the right to exercise authority, the duty to cooperate with particular people in particular circumstances" (79, p. 21). Roles allow players room for maneuver, a freedom of choice which they use to further personal interests. Mair asks what they may be expected to aim


at in the choices they make. Her answer is power, the ability to control the actions of others. It can be obtained both by holding office and by possessing wealth. This is a general phenomenon.

Whatever kind of society we are looking at, we see people facing alternative courses of action and choosing which they will follow. They may be choosing between equally legitimate alternatives; they may decide to break a rule or neglect an obligation and take the consequences, or hope to evade them. They make the choice in accordance with their calculation of relative advantages-one advantage being always that approval of one's neighbors which is gained by conforming to the rules that are generally accepted (79, p. 28).

Leach took a somewhat different tack. As early as 1940 after field research in Kurdistan, he began questioning anthropology's emphasis on social forms: "interest tends to be so exclusively on the abstract concept of social structure, that the co-existence of a formal material structure is sometimes forgotten" (69, p. 47). He concluded that, since "structural pattern affects the interests of different individuals in widely different ways ... there can never be absolute conformity to the cultural norm, indeed the norm itself exists only as a stress of conflicting interests and divergent attitudes" (69, p. 62). In a study often considered a classic, The Political Systems of Highland Burma (70), Leach toyed, like Mair and Firth, with the relationship of "customary" rules to regularities of social behavior. Finally, after a decade of excursions into structuralism, fieldwork in a Singalese village reinstated his earlier materialism leading him to ask once more: "Why should I be looking for some social entity other than the individuals of the community itself?" (71, p. 300).

Few anthropologists have been willing to follow Leach this far. Black, a notable exception (25), surpasses the mentor since Leach, having ultimate recourse to explanations in terms of environmental adaptation, fails to make the materialist dialectic. Leach's model, in all its manifestations, while further establishing choice-making individuals and their purposive actions within political anthropology, remains essentially consensual, equilibriated, and overly concerned with "rational" man.

It was under the cover, as it were, of Firth's formulation of social organization that action theory in political anthropology finally emerged. Thus in 1968 an anonymous reviewer of the field (whom we may take from internal evidence to be Bailey) wrote of a political anthropology that viewed political activity as essentially competitive. "Sometimes referred to as 'social organisation,' he noted, "this is best perceived by considering the actors not to be so many faceless automata, moving to and fro at the behest of structural rules, but as manipulators choosing within a range of possible tactics and asking themselves not only what they ought to do, but also what they can do" (109, pp. 19-20; emphasis added).

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Firth distinguished between two aspects of social action: structure and organization. "The structure provides a framework for action. But circumstances provide always new combinations of factors. Fresh choices open, fresh decisions have to be made, and the results affect the social action of other people in a ripple movement which may go far before it is spent" (56, p. 35). Structure and organization are complementary, standing respec- tively for form and process in social life. Structure involves role-playing; organization involves both roles and more spontaneous, decisive activity which does not follow simply from role-playing. Social organization is ordered activity. The translation of the acts of individuals into the regularities of social process Firth sees as the greatest problem in anthropology- a perception in marked contrast to those who, following Simmel and Durk- heim, consider it to be that of social order.

Many of the ideas crystallized by Firth can be seen to have contributed to the yet amorphous action theory of political anthropology. Processes, contradictions, choices, above all, the purposive goal-oriented actions of individuals, characterized the developing field from the beginning. Here we would note that in the work of all three contributors considered here- Mair, Leach, and Firth-a complementary stress on structure (constitu- tion) and organization was always present. Critics of this view of society point to its tendency to foster a consensual equilibrium model of political society, overly dependent on notions of "rational" man (2). Dangers of "methodological individualism" (77); its tendency to sink into ethnome- thodology (108) and a microsociology devoid of any concept of level (52, 53, 130) have also been noted. Finally, its neglect of history-a result, perhaps, of its initial Malinowskian impulse-has also been remarked. "However much men think and act for themselves, as Marx observed in The Eighteenth Brumaire, they do not make (history) under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past" (130).

The major contribution of this approach for political anthropology, as it developed, lay in its focus on purposive action.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE APPROACH

Out of the beginnings sketched in the previous section there developed in the late 1950s in the work of Bailey (6-15) and Turner (116) and in the early 1960s in the writing of Boissevain (29) and Cohen (39) action theory in political anthropology. From initial field research into economic and political change, they moved toward a more explicit concern with structural principles ordering action [i.e. of systems (7), nongroups (31, 33, 34), "invis- ible organisations" (41), and conflict (1 16)] to comparison and thence to


processual and developmental or historical analysis (13, 35, 40, 117). Their adoption of a common terminology, a fair degree of cross-referencing to each other's work and, above all, their overall impact on political anthropology made for a coherent and incrementally growing body of conceptualization and theory.

While all provided finely grained ethnographies, Bailey also contributed a tool kit, as he put it, for general discourse on the principles of routine competitive political action (12). Boissevain presented the field with a tax- onomy of noncorporate political action-sets (34) and recently began to relate the emergence of particular political forms to historical processes of political development (35). Cohen (with a somewhat restricted view of the role of political anthropology) began to delineate informally organized interest groups in complex society which, since they do not operate openly, engage in the manipulation of symbols or "mystification" (41). Turner (with perhaps the most ambitious view of the possibilities of political anthropology) moved from the analysis of phases of processual conflict per se to an analysis of a broad sweep of historical materials within the framework of an anthropological approach (117).

It does not seem necessary to spell out here details of the contributions of these four eminent political anthropologists (nor, given limitations of space, to account for neglect of others). Of the two aspects of manipulation noted in the preceding section-the manipulation of "rules" and of "material resources"-only the former received much consideration. Indeed, so extensive has this been that subtopics may be delineated under "the manipulation of symbols," Cohen's umbrella phrase for "rules, culture, norms, values, myths, and rituals" (41, p. 10). Symbols, as Cohen observes, while they can be said to be "phenomenon sui generis existing in their own right and observed for their own intrinsic values ... are nearly always manipu- lated, consciously or unconsciously, in the struggle for, and maintenance of, power between individuals and groups" (41, p. xi).

Much current attention is focused on the manipulation of legal rules (for reviews see 44, 45, 84). With our brief, we note that Gluckman (63) on the manipulation of judicial processes appears to be better known than Leach (72), suggesting the primacy of situational over positional analysis in the political anthropology of law. The adoption of economist Hirschman's analysis of "exit" and "voice" (66) is paralleled by the work of anthropologists and political scientists influenced by Bailey at Sussex (97, 103) and may be related to a renewed interest in Weber's politics of access and exclu- sion. Leach, on the other hand, notes how the malleability of law preserves the powerful and further incapacitates the underprivileged. The best political ethnography of law remains historian E. P. Thompson's Whigs and Hunters.

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Ethnicity is another current focus for political anthropologists interested in the manipulation of symbols and the presentation of self. Consideration of ethnicity as a social phenomenon to be studied in terms of individual strategies [the approach taken in the Barth (21) and Cohen (42) collections] has given way to analyses of the structuring of ethnicity (121) and the relation of emergent ethnicity to economic and political development (40, 119). This trend reflects the more general movement within action theory away from situational and transactional analysis toward positional and historical frameworks. In the study of ethnicity, too, we observe another characteristic of the field in general: a concern with competitive intraclass phenomena and a neglect of interclass conflict. The literature on the political manipulation of ethnicity is now sufficiently large to call for an indepen- dent review: astute observations on its shortcomings are contained in Hansen (65).

Cohen's own work on the manipulation of symbols attempts to reconcile what he perceives as two opposing camps in social anthropology: action theorists and thought structuralists. Although both camps include established practitioners of the "holistic" study of the interdependence between power relations and symbolic action who can now afford to concentrate on only one variable, Cohen deplores the fact that "their disciples tend to become one-sided and thus lose track of the central problem of the discipline, the dialectical interdependence of power and symbol" (41, pp. 45-46). Those who concur in Cohen's observation on trends may not agree with his prescription. Turner recently presented a model interrelating the manipulation of symbols and the struggle for power which is considerably more embracing (117). It also permits the incorporation of a range of structural elements-position, status, and class-which have been somewhat ne- glected. This study of the Hidalgo insurrection in Mexico (117, pp. 98-155) may. be used to display the working definitions adopted (with a few idiosyn- cratic variations) by scholars working within this genre.

Turner provides an extended case history of the insurrection, a sequence of social dramas (36, 116) taking place in a series of arenas (12, 88, 90, 111, 112) in an expanding socialfield (59, 60, 111, 112). Arenas are frameworks -whether institutionalized or not-which manifestly function as settings for antagonistic interaction aimed at arriving at publicly recognized decision with respect to prizes and values (117, p. 133; 12, 111, 112). Social dramas are units of aharmonic or disharmonic process arising in conflict situations; harmonic processual units are termed social enterprises (117, p. 34-35). A political field, "the totality of relationships between actors oriented to the same prizes or values" (117, p. 127) is constituted by "purposive goal-directed group action, and though it contains both conflict and coalition, collaborative action is very often made to serve the purposes of


contentious action" (117, p. 128). Political fields overlap and interpenetrate: some are organized and purposive; others contain much that is arbitrary and accidental. This important notion allows for the manipulation of the ambiguous so important for successful political action. Turner adds to Bailey's tool kit the concept of the "primary political process" (in the Mexican case, the power of myth) which so influences political behavior that it "acquires a strange processual inevitability over-riding questions of interest, expediency, and even morality, once it gains truly popular sup- port" (1 17, pp. 110-11, 122-23). One is reminded of a bon mot of Elias: "Underlying all intended interactions of human beings is their unintended interdependence" [quoted in (27), p. xxvii].

As anthropologists, Turner notes, we are interested in interdependencies, concatenations of facts, events, relationships, groups, social categories, and so on. When characterizing a political field "relations of likeness such as classes, categories, similar roles, and structural positions" are of prior sociological importance. When successive arenas are to be characterized, systematic interdependencies in local systems of social relations, going from demography, to residential distribution, religious affiliation and genealogi- cal and class structure become significant. Corporate groups, factional quasi-groups and the ego-centered networks of leaders are also important aspects of arena analysis (124, 125).

On the national level, fields, category, class structure, cultural universals, and church, state, sect, and party are the subjects of inquiry. At the regional and township level, arenas, corporate groups, alignments cutting across class boundaries, cultural specificities and patterns of local hierarchies, and factionalisms have greater analytical relevance. The challenge is to grasp, coherently express, and analyze the interdependence of field with arena.

Turner provides a paradigm that moves the anthropologist beyond the confines of transactional analysis and game theory (18). The latter he con- siders "an excellent tool for interpreting some kinds of gentlemanly competition" but "impotent before those social changes that shake the very premises and foundations of the social order" (117, p. 141). Turner concludes with the potent observation that "in historical practice, it is, as Weber would agree, the educated middle classes that in their competition whether violent or peaceful, like to introduce rules to which both parties subscribe. But the politics of class struggle does not go according to com- monly accepted rules" (117, p. 141) -a maxim he proceeds to demonstrate in an analysis of the abortive nineteenth century Mexican insurrection.

The interested reader may care to turn back a few pages to the criticisms leveled against action theory during an earlier phase in its development to see how adequately Turner's framework of analysis sets at rest earlier misgivings about this approach within political anthropology.

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If the contribution of African Political Systems to the study of politics was the delineation, in 1940, of non-State political structures, the contribution of action theory since 1960 has been to delineate forms of competitive political organization. This is as important for the study of parapolitics and the "grey areas" of modem, industrial capitalist and socialist states as it is for the study of encapsulated communities and marginal politics in preindustrial nations. A fear has been expressed that the "microscope" of action theory is "so powerful in disclosing the details of face-to-face political interaction that it is powerless, or out of focus, to reflect the wider structural features of society" (41, p. 41). (This fear would be less well grounded were as much attention paid to the last two chapters of Stratagems and Spoils as to the first seven; or were the contributions of Latin American and European scholars more widely recognized).

In the section that follows, we shall review three core problems in the field of political organization: political leadership and patronage, factionalism, and power-brokerage. This entails making explicit [as Worsley requested (130)] the fact that most work in political anthropology has been done in the rural sectors of Third World countries. Most followed upon, or was concomitant with, the penetration of industrial capitalism into these peripheral regions of an European-dominated political and economic world system.

LEADERSHIP, FACTIONALISM, AND BROKERAGE: CASE STUDIES

An approach within a discipline is well on the way to becoming established when reevaluations of its earliest efforts begin to appear. Barth's early study of the manipulative strategies of power-holders, Political Leadership among the Swat Pathans (17), has been subjected to three such critiques. Although its intellectual ancestry invoked Weber and de Jouvenal, Barth's study epitomized, above all, a transactional approach to politics. His analysis treated what he perceived to be the acephelous political organization of a Swat valley in Pakistan. His argument was, briefly, that against the formal frameworks of society, the network of kinship and locality ties, dyadic relations linked paired individuals in relations of dominance and submis- sion. Primary political groups developed around single leaders who were aligned, along with their followers, into a larger political system. All relationships implying dominance were dyadic and contractual in nature. Polit- ical action was the art of manipulating dyadic relations to create corporate political followings.

Paine's criticism (94), a comment from within the fold of transactional- ism, was of Barth's general model of society (20) and its neglect of power


as a variable of exchange. Attention to the different contexts of power, dependent upon the positions of actors in the power structure, could lead to a perception of the strategies of underdogs as well as the powerful. Paine also comments on the "market philosophy" and "normative morality" of transactional theory.

Ahmed's critique (2) is also launched, although in a different sense, from within since he represents one of those specters that haunt the anthropologist, a "native" of the society being studied. Ahmed's monograph attempts to restore to political ethnography the Swat state. He maintains that Barth's work is ethnocentric in its reliance on the notion of "social contract" and related concepts central to the understanding of Western democratic capitalist society but inapplicable to preindustrial Swat. Ahmed argues further that Barth's work was reductionist and synecdochic-Swat man being seen through the eyes of the Khan. He also comments on the short duration of Barth's field research (in Swat and elsewhere) and his "thin" ethnographic data-a not inconsequential matter since action theory rests on high caliber political ethnography.

Asad (5) lays bare the theoretical assumptions underlying Barth's model of politics in Swat (18). It consists of:

a number of closely interconnected theoretical elements: (1) rules (legal, moral and prudential); (2) individual motivations (specific purposes and general strategies); (3) the formation of fluid interest groups through multiple dyadic transactions (as in a free market place); (4) the systematic compulsion to expand one's control of resources in order to survive (as in a self-regulating capitalist system); (5) a dynamic equilibrium underlying the concrete manifestations of political strength and weakness (5, p. 80).

To the question "Who defines and applies the rules of the game?" the answer, for Asad, is clearly a dominant class of landowners who exploit the landless. The agrarian class structure is the fundamental political fact. Opportunities and disabilities are structured by an individual's class position. Small landowners are being progressively eliminated; the class structure, based on the ownership of land, is revealed in the historical process of polarization.

Asad's own study (4) of the Kababish Arabs of the Sudan, where a princely dynasty dominates and exploits a mass of pastoralists, is an ad- vance on the "consensual model" of Barth and his fellow transactionalists. It arrives at the rather unhappy conclusion, however, that although political relationships are based on domination and exploitation, the subordinate majority simply do not see it as such-and so the contradiction is sustained. Asad does not explore mechanisms of mystification (25, 41, 51); nor does he sufficiently appreciate, as both Marx (82) and Black (25) have remarked, the extent to which particular circumstances have shaped the particular

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persons with whom he is concerned. The Kababish princely dynasty arose in direct response to colonial pressures and was maintained in a familiar manner, as Wolf has pointed out in a more general analysis (129) as a tool of central government policy.

Black's own work on Luristan (25) demonstrates how local leaders ma- nipulate their structural position to control the masses while at the same time profiting from privileged access to scarce resources. Questioning the tenacious legend that Middle Eastern societies are basically egalitarian, Black suggests that this "myth was inadvertently created in the first instance (or at very least fostered) by a number of British-trained anthropologists who, carried away by their enthusiasm for unraveling social structure in the abstract, remained relatively insensitive to the analytical potential in structural studies of quantitative data gathered in the related domains of ecology and economics" (25, pp. 617-618; cf 50, 80, 86). The materialist view that the social structure is primarily a set of practical rules for organizing human beings to exploit a particular range of resources by means of a given technology permits Black to demonstrate how 3 percent of the Luri maintain themselves as an elite excluding others from access to scarce resources. "Luristan presents a perfect marxist paradigm of capitalist exploitation" (25, p. 628).

The difficulties in the way of challenging an "establishment" of this nature has been demonstrated by Dalton (47) in a study of political brokerage in the Sawknah oasis. In the face of challenges from younger, technolog- ically oriented men, long established "tribal" groupings maintained themselves in power through coercive sanctions reinforced by patronage allocations from the Libyan government. A reexamination of other studies of local level leadership (19, 30, 57, 75, 91, 102, 106, 110, 114, 115, 119) might lend itself to similar conclusions. [For an interesting Latin American development see Dennis (49).]

A large body of literature revolves around competition for followers (23, 28, 30), the study of patron-client relations, and clientelism (37, 104, 123). Again a distinction is to be observed between those who emphasize the reciprocal and transactional nature of such relations (17, 19, 93, 101) and those who emphasize positional attributes and lopsidedness (26, 67, 71, 72, 79, 80, 129). Again there is apparent, too, a shift in focus from the "particular persons"-patrons, clients, brokers- to the "particular circumstances" under which factionalism occurs.

Several studies have been made of what political entrepreneurs can do with the manipulation of symbols and material resources; this has been recognized as a promising avenue of advancement for action theory (41, 81, 109). Paine has made a useful distinction between "big men" and "patrons"


(93), in my own work seen to be a matter of institutionalization (119). The "big man" concept was excellently delineated by Sahlins (100) and Oliver (91). Historical analyses suggest the emergence of patron-client relations in Europe with the breakup of the Roman Empire, near anarchy producing feudalism. Mair has suggested the emergence of African clientelism with insecurity (80). Ahmed's work suggests that feudalism might better have approximated political reality in Swat than Barth's dyadic contract (17). The most creative step in recent years has been the questioning of the conditions under which patronage, regional elites, and coalitions emerge and maintain themselves (105). Not insignificant has been the perception that the community-nation matrix is less useful than a transnational matrix in this analysis (106).

The authority of a local patron or big man is derived from personal powers; leadership is a creation of followership (100). Around himself, as he competes, he gathers a following, structurally, a faction. Since the acquisition of spoils involves the manipulation of resources, flexibility is required; factions tend to be quasi-groups or coalitions whose members are recruited on diverse principles (26, 32, 33, 34, 55, 58, 83, 87-90). What must not be lost sight of, however, is the power of the faction leader, despite an egalitarian ethos, and his disproportionate profit from greater access to scarce resources.

Although the literature indicates that factions are ephemeral, the leadership of successive factions remains in the hands of the same families. Atten- tion to processes of consolidation of power shifts the focus from individual actors to families. "Differential access to resources ... leads to differences in the capacity for maneuver, a differential capacity which is, in turn, reflected in differential patterns of marriage choice" (129). Families, not individuals, are the units of class analysis.

Factions emerge when the environment provides some new kind of political resource which existing groups cannot exploit (12, 37, 87). Often they align themselves along the lines of historically derived cleavages and so may be viewed as "processes which participate in movement in time" (51). These are global processes. For example: an increase in intravillage factionalism since independence has been noted throughout the Indian subcontinent. Robinson's striking monograph (99) describes how, with independence, leaders in a Sri Lanka village lost access to urban powerholders. The vac- uum was filled by political party factions (cf 23, 89; 34, 75). Alignments followed the divisions within the rural population that had developed during the previous century: the wealthy supported the "capitalist" party, the underprivileged, the opposition. Subsequently the village was dismembered by revolution. The adoption by village youths of Maoist goals revealed both

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the extent of State penetration into the countryside, accompanied by the increased marginalization of the village, and the availability of global political forces for adoption and manipulation.

Factionalism is an intraclass phenomenon (37) and not necessarily the most important organizing feature of the arenas in which it is to be found (89). Real power resides elsewhere. Factionalism thus appears as an emergent phenomenon accompanying the marginalization of rural communities during certain phases in the development of State capitalism and the global economy.

The study of brokerage brings out developments in action theory most clearly. Paine's review (93) of writings of Mediterraneanists and Meso- americanists, along with contributions on the Canadian Arctic, accentuates purposive action: the acquisition of access to, and control of, resources not otherwise available. Appreciating that analysis must be intersubjective, cross-cultural, and developmental (130), Boissevain's Friends of Friends (34) provides a primer.

The earliest work on brokers by Wolf (126-128) and Geertz (61) focused on individuals who connected local with national affairs. Multifaceted careers were related to the changing political economy of the locality, region, and state (1, 70, 73, 107, 110, 120). Brokers were usually located in small towns-as were the marginal men of Paine's volume (93), Euro-Canadian missionaries, storekeepers, and officials "in-between" and "on-the-edge-of" overlapping structures, located at the frontier of economic expansion (6).

The antagonism of town and country (the small town a node in a field of tensions generated by emergent contradictions) has been the subject of several studies (36, 92, 96, 114, 122). One that adopts dialectical theory to capture this phase in the transformation of Third World societies is Bond's analysis of a Zambian rural center. Dialectical theories insist on the reality of conflict without reconciliation. Only they, it has been argued, "take seriously ... power, violence, decision. Other models provide for 'happen- ings'; but not for actions, decisions or victories" (78, p. 57). At one level Bond's ethnography analyzes local competition between an established elite and the "New Men" who challenge it. At another level it explores the rural population's increasing subordination and dependency on new national political elites.

The emergence of rural capitalism (95, 119, 122) and the actions of manipulative elites invite more attention to material resources [cf Leys (74)]. Thoden van Velzen, who earlier described Tanzanian kulacks and levellers (113), recently studied a coalition of civil servants and wealthy farmers who raked off national investment funds intended for agricultural development (114). A similar occurrence at the international level was analyzed by Gonzalez in the Dominican Republic (64). There the Develop-


ment Association served as an arena in which a committee of powerful men with multifaceted careers exploited relations with AID and with their local clients for their own advancement. This example of the marginalization of the poor by power brokers within their own society illustrates, too, the usefulness of small group analysis within the setting of the global economy.

Long (76), who analyzes the circumstances under which different types of broker emerge in Peru to occupy strategic positions between local, national, and regional economies, suggests that an "actor-oriented perspec- tive" and detailed case studies are required to complement "dependency theory" which in itself is insensitive to class analysis [cf Worsley (130)]. Insight can be obtained into the mechanisms by which economic surplus is extracted and the extent to which it is invested in local production. Bois- sevain also appreciates the need to shift gears in action theory in order to analyze political relationships and processes beyond the community at regional, national, and supranational levels (35). Although the study of forces and movement in and between fields characteristic of action theory [as in the work of Turner (117), Bond (36), and Long (76)] goes a long way toward this, Europeanists, Boissevain notes, have increasingly "had to become historians" (35, p. 15; cf 48). They turn now to "theoretical para- digms in which economic, political and historical elements are given greater prominence" (35, p. 15). Boissevain nominates Marx and Elias; elsewhere, as we have seen, Weber's insights are increasingly utilized.

An interesting study over time of postindependence brokerage in the Republic of Ireland (22, 35) indicates how parochial politics have come to re-encapsulate rural communities in a manner not unique, Bax suggests, to Ireland. Elsewhere in Europe as the welfare state develops, more political fields are created in which brokers can operate. Class consciousness flourishes. Historical depth thus adds to perceptions of the frequency and salience of brokerage.

This is even more evident from Blok's historical account of the violent peasant entrepreneurs of Sicily, 1860-1960 (27). The emergence of the Mafia is related to State efforts to check landlordism and emancipate the peasantry. Upwardly mobile themselves, they combine with landowners and local notables to hold others in check-by violence. Blok treats modes of production in Sicily and the rise and fall of specific interest groups; the penetration of market forces and the encapsulating nation-state. He also makes extensive use of Bailey's conceptual tool kit. One reviewer has com- mented most aptly:

It is worth noting the conceptual eclecticism of Blok's analysis: although prefaced with tantalizing extracts from Marx and Barrington Moore, the author draws freely from F. G. Bailey (the broker model, the encapsulating state, leaders, followers and resources) Norbert Elias (the process of state formation) Eric Wolf (approaches to patron-client

190 VINCENT

relations and peasant revolutions) and others. This range of sources ... is worth noting since there are those who insist that, for example, Marx and Bailey cannot both be right at the same time-indeed such a view is increasingly the topic ofjournal articles... (75a,

p. 339).

At such a point this review of action theory in political anthropology- an approach through the analysis of individual actors and their strategies in political arenas-most honestly rests in the lap of Marx, Bailey, and the dialectic. We have seen how in the various phases of its development, the action approach within political anthropology has moved from the study of the manipulative strategies of a rather narrow range of political actors (i.e. the men in the middle) to a greater clarification of the particular circumstances within which they operate. This has opened the door to regional, national, and transnational inquiries to supplement those long made into politics at the local level. This widening of the arena has, in turn, fostered the further development of fields analysis and the adoption of an analytical unit which is made up not of the interaction of localized individuals alone but also of men in movement and of actions and enterprises which are dependent for their success on operations across space and over consid- erable periods of time. Political situations and encounters that have long characterized this approach within political anthropology are now meshed with a concern with emergent relations of domination and exploitation within a modem world system. The immediate way ahead surely lies in the fleshing out of interdependencies between intraclass and interclass political action. This in itself will lead the field into the observation and analysis of political occurrences under more and more varied circumstances and over greater lengths of time.

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Vincent, J. Political Anthropology. Manipulative Strategies