Anthropology S Politics

This Handbook engages the reader in the major debates, approaches, methodologies, and explanatory frames within political anthropology. Examining the shifting borders of a moving field of enquiry, it illustrates disciplinary paradigm shifts, the role of humans in political structures, ethnographies of the political, and global processes. Reflecting the variety of directions that surround political anthropology today, this volume will be essential reading to understanding the interactions of humans within political frames in a globalising world.

U.S. involvement in the Middle East has brought the region into the media spotlight and made it a hot topic in American college classrooms. At the same time, anthropology—a discipline committed to on-the-ground research about everyday lives and social worlds—has increasingly been criticized as "useless" or "biased" by right-wing forces. What happens when the two concerns meet, when such accusations target the researchers and research of a region so central to U.S. military interests? This book is the first academic study to shed critical light on the political and economic pressures that shape how U.S. scholars research and teach about the Middle East. Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar show how Middle East politics and U.S. gender and race hierarchies affect scholars across their careers—from the first decisions to conduct research in the tumultuous region, to ongoing politicized pressures from colleagues, students, and outside groups, to hurdles in sharing expertise with the public. They detail how academia, even within anthropology, an assumed "liberal" discipline, is infused with sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionist obstruction of any criticism of the Israeli state. Anthropology's Politics offers a complex portrait of how academic politics ultimately hinders the education of U.S. students and potentially limits the public's access to critical knowledge about the Middle East.

This Companion offers an unprecedented overview of anthropology’s unique contribution to the study of politics. Explores the key concepts and issues of our time - from AIDS, globalization, displacement, and militarization, to identity politics and beyond Each chapter reflects on concepts and issues that have shaped the anthropology of politics and concludes with thoughts on and challenges for the way ahead Anthropology’s distinctive genre, ethnography, lies at the heart of this volume

U.S. involvement in the Middle East has brought the region into the media spotlight and made it a hot topic in American college classrooms. At the same time, anthropology—a discipline committed to on-the-ground research about everyday lives and social worlds—has increasingly been criticized as "useless" or "biased" by right-wing forces. What happens when the two concerns meet, when such accusations target the researchers and research of a region so central to U.S. military interests? This book is the first academic study to shed critical light on the political and economic pressures that shape how U.S. scholars research and teach about the Middle East. Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar show how Middle East politics and U.S. gender and race hierarchies affect scholars across their careers—from the first decisions to conduct research in the tumultuous region, to ongoing politicized pressures from colleagues, students, and outside groups, to hurdles in sharing expertise with the public. They detail how academia, even within anthropology, an assumed "liberal" discipline, is infused with sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionist obstruction of any criticism of the Israeli state. Anthropology's Politics offers a complex portrait of how academic politics ultimately hinders the education of U.S. students and potentially limits the public's access to critical knowledge about the Middle East.

In considering how anthropologists have chosen to look at and write about politics, Joan Vincent contends that the anthropological study of politics is itself a historical process. Intended not only as a representation but also as a reinterpretation, her study arises from questioning accepted views and unexamined assumptions. This wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary work is a critical review of the anthropological study of politics in the English-speaking world from 1879 to the present, a counterpoint of text and context that describes for each of three eras both what anthropologists have said about politics and the national and international events that have shaped their interests and concerns. It is also an account of how intellectual, social, and political conditions influenced the discipline by conditioning both anthropological inquiry and the avenues of research supported by universities and governments. Finally, it is a study of the politics of anthropology itself, examining the survival of theses or schools of thought and the influence of certain individuals and departments.

The field of political anthropology is complicated by a breadth and depth of interests that include every kind of ethnographically and historically represented political community, and nearly every kind of recorded political practice, behavior, and organization. To make sense of this array of information, political anthropologists examine political topics and issues in the context of research paradigms that include structural-functionalism, pro-cessualism, political economy, political evolution, and, arguably, post-modernism. In Political Anthropology, Donald V. Kurtz examines how anthropologists think about politics, political organizations, and problems fundamental to political anthropology. He explores the ideas with which they address universal political concerns, the paradigms that direct political research by anthropologists, and political topics of special interest.

There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policy making has progressively reached into the structure and fabric of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into systems of governance themselves, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth. This volume argues that policies are not simply coercive, constraining or confined to static texts; rather, they are productive, continually contested and able to create new social and semantic spaces and new sets of relations. Anthropologists do not stand outside or above systems of governance but are themselves subject to the rhetoric and rationalities of policy. The analyses of policy worlds presented by the contributors to this volume open up new possibilities for understanding systems of knowledge and power and the positioning of academics within them.

Politics: a static network of structural and functional models? Is it a "given" set of rules, statuses and procedures? Or a dynamic process, a continuum related to the past as well as to the present and continually influenced by pressures within and outside of a society? Taking the latter view of the nature of political behavior, the editors of Political Anthropology here present an original compilation of papers that thoroughly assess contemporary anthropological research and theory on political phenomena and explore the sources and maintenance of political power. One of the aims of this book is to take tentative steps toward resolving the developing crisis by investigating the structure of political action revealed in empirical data. Within the general framework of political dynamics the book uses processes such as decision making, the judicial process, the disturbance and settlement of policy issues, the application of sanctions, and the outcome of disputes among other things. These items will find their places as components of phases in the major sequence. Investigating societies from Africa to Alaska, politics is shown to be a global phenomenon--a "human process of action" centering on the conflict between the "common good" and "interests of groups," and on the resolution or extension of that conflict by the religious, structural, sociocultural, and psychological pressures within and external to a social grouping. Essential reading for anyone concerned with the nature of political process, Political Anthropology presents a fresh, important and comprehensive overview of the "wind of change" currently abroad in the study of political behavior.