Power is an universal aspect of social interaction, It plays an important part in shaping relations among the members of a group. In a society, some members are more powerful than others; All forms of social interaction involve differences in the relative power of the members to influence one another. In this way, power determines the relations between father and child, employer and employee, politician and a voter and a teacher and student.
Power is commonly seen as the ability to influence the decision making of the other. In turn power influences the behaviour of the other. Major anthropological descriptions of the dynamics and institutions of power have until recently had a markedly Western bias. Thus, other systems of power often have been described as alternatives or variations of those found in Western industrial contexts. An early and important focus of anthropological inquiry concerned so-called “stateless societies.” EVANS-PRITCHARD’s classic study of the Nuer (1940) became the model for such investigation and demonstrated that the forces located in KINSHIP and other social processes obviated any necessary need for the state in the promotion of order. Evans-Pritchard implied that state forms are a potential, given certain historical conditions such as invasion or colonial conquest, of non-state systems.
Early roots:
The concept of power is rooted from such nineteenth-century theorists of social evolution as Sir Henry MAINE (1861), who distinguished societies organized by status and by contract in LAW, and Lewis Henry MORGAN’s (1877) distinction between kinship and territory as the basis for the organization of GOVERNMENT. In addition it owes much to the discussions about the relationships between moral order and SOCIAL ORGANIZATION found in the writings of Emile DURKHEIM (1933), Max WEBER (1968), and Karl Marx (1887). More recent infusions of theory have come from social scientists such as Michel Foucault (1977b), Pierre Bourdieu (1977), and Anthony Giddens (1984), who focus on the structure of POWER in society.
Weber has defined power as, “The probability that one actor(individual or group) within a social relationship in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests”.
According to Sheriff and sheriff, “Power denotes the relative weights of behavior by member in a group structure“.
These definitions show that power is a broad concept. in general it means the ability to get one’ s wishes carried out despite opposition if any.
Type of power:
- Social power – The power, which resides in the status of an individual, is called social behavior. It is also concerned with the process of influencing others by individual’s power of taking decisions and- capacity to influence others. In the family relationship the family members have their power according to their family status.
- Political Power – The functioning of political system depends upon the political power. All the social problems need attention. Government at centre implements and decides the policies and controls all the political activities.
Anthropological approaches to the study of Power:
Anthropologists have given five main approaches to the study of Power in different societies. The approaches are as follows:
- Evolutionary approach:
- Morgan, Maine, Me Lennan and Bachofen proposed evolutionary approach for understanding power and politics in different societies. According to them, power did not exist in the infant stage of human society. But, later men and women became powerful depending upon the historical circumstances. In the long period of time during the development of a human culture system , few individuals could command and exert effective control over the surpluses of the food , materials, and tools on which daily survival depended. However, it was thousands of years later before power based on differential access to resources and hierarchies came to be vital in human life.
- In 1950’s, Julian . H . Steward studied the political systems from evolutionary perspective and concluded that the political systems developed in four stages: Band, Tribe, Chiefdom and State.
- E. Service examined the socio political development and identified four evolutionary levels: Band, Tribe, Chiefdom and state.
- But in 1967 Morton. H. Fried presented an evolutionary scheme of political systems in terms of four levels: Egalitarian society, the stratified society and the state society.
Thus, the evolutionary approach to the study of political life of different societies highlights slow development of political institutions in different stages.
- 2.Consensus Approach:
The propounded of this approach is E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940). According to this approach power is a cultural entity used by social groups to achieve a balance between opposing social groups.
Evans Pritchard studied power and politics among the Nuer of Sudan. The Nuer is – a cluster of several tribes. All tribes are divided into a number of lineage segments. Each tribe has a leader known as “a spokesman of the people ‘. He is a brave and valiant leader. He prevents tribal neighbours from fights and killing and keeps the villages of the tribes at peace.
Every Nuer tribe follows the principle of segmentation and opposition, particular tribal segment are allied to each other in some disputes and then are opposed to each other in different and later disputes , when a Nuer tribe fought a war against traditional enemies like the Dinkas all segments of a tribe unite to fight together in war.
There are also the ‘Priests of the earth‘ otherwise known as ‘leopard skin chief’ for they are always the members of the Nuer “leopard skin lineage”. “Priest of the earth” plays a great role in settling the disputes, they possess considerable power owing to the – number of cattle they receive as payment for their services in dispute arbitration and negotiation, He always stresses balance between Nuer of different segments and different tribes.
The Nuer society is thus relatively stable, it is a system of inter related parts namely segments. Each segment in the system has a function i.e. it contributes something to the continuation of the system, The Nuer segments are balanced against each other so that the structure of the society and the way power is defined in and in making public policy decision will remain unchanged during both internal and external conflicts
3) Dynamic Approach:
E.R.Leach (1964) studied the Kachin tribes of Myanmar and found that the Kachin political organization was not always static and it fluctuated between a state system and a feudal system, and an egalitarian system, it presented a circular model rather than a unilinear model of a political system.
Thus, according to E.R.Leach, an ideal political system is a stable system but in reality it is an unstable system moving like a pendulum from one extreme to another extreme. in other words, a political system is a dynamic system. A dynamic approach alone will be of help to understand the real political system in practical situations.
4) Conflict Approach:
a) Wax Glickman (1955) proposed a conflict approach to the study of politics. He studied the politics of Zulu in Africa. The Zulu society consists of several segmented lineages, which are in opposition to each other. Whenever there is a conflict between the segmented lineages, the relations between the segmented lineages undergo some changes. However, when there is no conflict but peace among the segmented lineages, the political order will be in a steady state or equilibrium, The Zulu political system undergoes alternative phases of changes, equilibrium and change peace, conflict and peace.
Thus, conflict approach depicts reality than ideal state of a political system.
b) Kenneth E.Otterbein (1973) presents a conflict approach of power and politics. He explains that every society is continually undergoing change It displays disagreement and conflict and that every element in the structure of a society contributes to its disintegration, he says politics system is based on coercion of some members within the society.
Thus, conflict approach deals with the ways in which different individuals and groups mobilize support and use power to achieve variety of public goals –
5) Transactional Approach:
After the mid-1960’s, political anthropologists like Fredrick Barth and Fredrick Bailey developed the transactional approach to an understanding of the ways humans use power and practice politics. The approach emphasizes the ways individuals use power rather than the ways social groups use power.
Fredrick Barth (1959), based his ethnographic study on the Yusufzal pathan or Surat Pathan of northern Pakistan, which focused upon the ways specific individuals made political choices over a period of time. He proposed that a society with many social groups maintained a balance or unity. It was not because such groups used political power to strive for a sense of unity but because particular individuals, within groups, possessed power based on differential access to scarce resources and were seeking to improve their personal power by making alliances with other powerful persons and by following specific strategies and plans to seek political advantages that would bring improved material benefits to them as individuals, Such actions by powerful individuals create conditions of political cohesion and stability among the different segments of the society.
Fredrick Bailey and his colleagues have followed the same approach in the study of power and politics in a wide variety of cultural settings, from contemporary India to a number of European cultures, and have highlighted ‘very effectively the ways that informal as well as formal , personal strategies from the maximum use of power are effective political devices. The ways that individual motivations in seeking to make alliances with other powerful persons are important political factors.
Thus, the transactional approach emphasizes on the individual using Power, rather than competing social groups using power, to achieve social stability and cohesion in a society.
Further Reading on the Power
Power and inequality:
While most anthropological analyses of power have investigated social stratification and hierarchy, some have looked at forms of social organization which assure that power is not individually concentrated, as in the industrial collectives or collectives not organized within state societies. Just as Marx was preoccupied with the question of how labourers came to give up their labour power, anthropologists have studied historically, and prehistorically, the question of how individuals might have come to dominate groups and how one group might have come to dominate another. Archaeological theorizing of inequality has been accompanied with methodological innovations in studying relational power over time (McGuire and Paynter 1991).Social theorists Max Weber and Émile Durkheim influenced anthropological conceptualization of bureaucratic power in state societies and the perpetuation of institutional authority. Anthropological studies of social movements and state-making, and of national policy, have furthered conceptualization of institutional power and the rituals of its replication. Legal anthropologists, too, have studied cross-culturally the different systems through which power is legitimized, enforced, and contested.
Studies on institutional power:
Anthropologists undertaking studies of institutional power must engage the debates formulated within sociology about structure and agency. C. Wright Mills (1956) argued influentially that social stratification and hierarchy are forcefully maintained by the ‘power elite’, those who, between themselves, mobilize the power to transcend ‘ordinary’ social environments and make decisions that pertain to the lives of people they will never meet, in nations they might never visit. This kind of structural analysis can be seen, for example, in anthropological studies of the itinerant power of transnational corporations. Class analysis has been used by anthropologists to study inequality in many social contexts, not all of them industrialized (see, again, McGuire and Paynter 1991). Anthropologists have also argued that class analysis has its limits, especially in contexts where exploitation is multidirectional, and have been drawn to reformulations of historical materialism, as in Giddens’s theory of structuration—in which ‘power is regarded as generated in and through the reproduction of structures of domination’ (Giddens 1981:4), across time and space, whether those structures of domination rely on the allocation of material resources (as emphasized by Marx) or on, for example, information and surveillance.
Colonial influence over the anthropology of power
Colonial process has considerable influence over anthropology of power. While colonial political structures gave rise to early anthropological studies of the distribution of power through political systems, they also stimulated a variety of intriguing critiques, led most notably in anthropology by Asad (1973) and those in his collection, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Writers outside anthropology greatly influenced the way many anthropologists have conceptualized power and powerlessness, whether between colonizers and colonized or within societies as similar power relations, racialized, have been enacted. Colonial and neo-colonial relations between nations became a useful trope for anthropologists seeking to critique institutional power and the discipline of anthropology’s epistemological role in perpetuating institutionalized power relations. Colonial critiques made more obvious, for example, the ways in which ‘observers’ assigned themselves the power to summarize others’ experience (and that power was reinforced through institutional resources and legitimacy), and the ‘observed,’ as encapsulated in those analyses anyway, were without the power to define themselves or assert autonomy in many other ways. A ‘reinvented’ or ‘decolonized’ anthropology was envisioned as work done by anthropologists with diverse ethnic, class, and political identities on not only traditional topics, but also, as Nader put it (in Hymes 1969), ‘studying up’: to really learn how those who held institutional power did so, and to use that knowledge to address—rather than simply document—social inequalities.
Concept of Hegemony in anthropology and power:
Hegemony, the concept of totalizing power (in which the state and/or a popular majority dominate, through every means, ‘civil society’) articulated by Gramsci (1971), provided anthropologists with a way to think about pervasive institutionalized power. The Subaltern Studies group (Guha and Spivak 1988), worked through a critical deconstruction of colonial historiography to recognize the powerful ways in which colonial subjects had been left without a voice in strategic discussions of their dentity, resources, and future. Earlier, as anthropologists in the US and in France rethought the political role of intellectuals in reaction to their nations’ protracted war in Vietnam, the concept of hegemony became a way to think about how the state did indeed have agency, through a militarized institutional apparatus, to repress—ideologically, socially, and physically– those citizens who held contradictory views about state actions. That was also a time when, in anthropology, theories of resistance took their cue from political movements.
Foucaultian influence over anthropology of power:
The social theorist who has most shaped anthropologists’ recent discussions of power is Michel Foucault (1980), although not all those writings influenced by him reproduce Foucault’s views of power.‘Power in the substantive sense, “le” pouvoir, doesn’t exist…power means…a more-or-less organised, hierarchical, co-ordinated cluster of relations’ (1980:198), despite the fact that it ‘is never localised here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity’ (1980:98), never alienable or transferable. Foucault rejects what he calls the juridical/liberal/economic view of power as ‘that concrete power which every individual holds, and whose partial or total cession enables political power or sovereignty to be established’ (1980:88). Yet he sometimes reifies power as beyond individual or even collective control: ‘the impression that power weakens and vacillates…is…mistaken; power can retreat…reorganise its forces, invest itself elsewhere’ (1980:56).In contrast to the binary views of power articulated by so many, whether cast in terms of gendered power relations focusing on patriarchy and those oppressed by it, or domination and resistance, Foucault saw power as being produced and reproduced through constant social interaction, from many different directions. He countered arguments about power as constituted through structural positions between individuals or social classes with arguments about power as being problematic, contested, and requiring constant, disciplined persuasion to convince those construed as powerless of their powerlessness and those construed as powerful of their powerfulness. Although he wrote about institutional sites as important for reproducing power relations, Foucault (1981:93) described power as ‘not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society’. Influenced by Foucault’s analysis, Kondo (1990:307) stated in her ethnography of the crafting of identity in Japan that power is ‘creative, coercive, and coextensive with meaning’. A view of power as not simply embedded in structural relations—maintained by force of one kind or another—but also as constituted through language and everyday practice (Bourdieu 1991) engendered many ethnographies exploring the specific, historicized ways in which power has been constructed and challenged in different social contexts (cf. Comaroff 1985). Foucault’s work has drawn anthropological attention to the relational aspects of power, with a concentration on the contexts of actions and interpretations, and away from structural control of resources by individuals with fairly static institutional authority. Some critics of Foucault think that attention has strayed, in the late 1980s and 1990s, too far from structural power; some feminist theorists, for example, have argued that Foucault and other writers of postmodern social criticism have—while meaning to eliminate ‘big stories’—replaced binary structural models of power which have been useful for theorizing oppression (especially by those working to understand the social mechanism of their own disempowerment) with a less useful totalizing model of overdetermination (e.g. power is everywhere, thus what social site does one go about working to transform?). They also argue that, once again, the ‘powerless’ have not been left space, or agency, in the discussion to articulate their own theories of power. (This, of course, has continued to happen despite the actions of any social theorist.) The historical focus that Foucault brought to his discussion of the disciplining of bodies and minds through hospitals, prisons, courts, and schools, has had its effect in medical, legal, and educational anthropology, or at least coincided with trends in these and other areas of anthropological study, as more anthropologists have turned from synchronic ethnographic studies to diachronic discussions of social institutions. For example, Emily Martin’s comparative study of birthing practices (1987) demonstrates the institutional ways in which women are empowered or disempowered in relation to control of their own bodies and actions. Anthropologists have been informed, also, by researchers working in sociology and other disciplines on collective—or participatory—research strategies that challenge the epistemological leverage of an ‘expert,’ whether the researcher or some other person asserting ‘legitimate authority’ in a social setting, and recentre the ‘subjects’ of study as those with the power to legitimize research design and documentation.