BOOK REVIEW

John MiddletonYale University

Vincent, Joan. Anthropology and Politics: Visions, Traditions, and Trends. Tucson:University of Arizona Press, 1990.

I was invited to comment on this book some years after the usual reviews had been published.When I sat down to read it, I did not know what to expect I have never met Joan Vincent butI know of her reputation as a political anthropologist and like her work on the Teso. I havenow learned much from reading the book and am grateful to her for making me rethink theaims and methods of studying the forms and patterns of government. This is a good book ofa kind that has long been needed. It is especially welcome in light of the recent proliferationof course offerings at the margins of the discipline, blurring social anthropology around theedges.

Joan Vincent's book tries to get us back onto a path with a recognizable and recognized goal.Wisely, she has limited her account of the discipline to its core: the comparative study offorms and processes of the conceptualization and exercise of power and authority in humansocieties. She redefines and clarifies the anthropology of government and law by searchingfor the historical contexts of its development, and by questioning its basic problems, aims,and methods.

Having made her career in both Britain and the United States, Vincent has a wide view of thesubject. She shows strong personal preferences for the work of particular people,universities, departments, and "schools": Columbia, Chicago, and the London School ofEconomics (she studied at all three) are "in," "Oxbridge" is not. Her likes and dislikes allowthe reader to interpret her comments: this paradoxically makes her narrative both morepersonal and more interesting. I can agree with much of what she writes. But I disagree withparts of it from my own interpretations of the work of some of the anthropologists shediscusses.

The book has two parts, each with three chapters. There are also voluminous and interestingendnotes and a good bibliography. Vincent aims to present this history in narrative form as asequence of linked events that unfold as a coherent whole, surely a standard procedure. Thechallenge of this enterprise is to present the motivations, aims, and methods of those whoshaped the events as the actors themselves perceived them and to show the links between

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external historical events and the intentions, acts, and expressions of anthropologists.Vincent explicitly limits her narrative to events and developments in British and NorthAmerican anthropology.

Vincent couches her account of political anthropology's development in the context of the"anthropology of politics." This is not a new notion but it correctly enables her to to give apattern to this field, and it determines the organization of the book. The "anthropology ofpolitics" (the subject of the first part of the book) is deemed to have characterized theanthropological study of government and law until the World War II era when the morespecialized field of "political anthropology" (the subject of the book's second part) came intofashion. She writes: "one of the arguments of this study is that the objective world fashionsthe anthropology of politics as much as anthropology constructs and reconstructs the world inwhich its practitioners find themselves" (63). Also, "...[the book's] main contention is thatthe anthropological study of politics is itself an historical process" (1). While Vincent is notthe first to note that research, analysis, and teaching reflect the intellectual and other demandsmade by the wider society, she deserves praise for realizing the complexities and pressures ofhistorical forces and for avoiding simplifications such as those made by the critics of"colonial ethnography."

Vincent divides her history into six periods: First, 1879-1897, when ethnography began in theUnited States with anthropologists moving to the "frontier" with the Bureau of AmericanEthnology; second, 1897-1918, the period of imperial wards and the attitudinal shift fromhopes of progress to need for social order (83), which she suggests led to theprofessionalization and development of the discipline as a university subject; third, 1919-1939, the decline of Britain and the rise of the USA and USSR as world powers that led to thegrowth of new interest in Africa and MesoAmerica; fourth, 1940-1953, the aftermath ofWorld War II and the sudden and final growth of "colonial ethnography"; fifth, 1954-1973,the ending of European imperialism, the Vietnam War, and the widening of anthropologicalinterest beyond particular "tribal" studies to peasants and women; and sixth, 1974 to thepresent, the period of crisis in anthropology and attempts to consolidate it Despite someoverly rigid dating in the historical outlines that begin each chapter, this is the best attempt todate to place the history of political and legal anthropology in a concise historical setting andto ascertain its developmental pattern beneath the whims, likes, and dislikes of selectedanthropologists.

The first three chapters discuss the "anthropology of politics" from the work of Maine,Morgan, and the ethnologists of the Bureau of the American Indian (Powell, Dorsey,Mooney, and others) until the outbreak of World War II. Vincent sets the period clearly inthe context of British and American industrialization, imperialism, and emigration. She

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shows how early studies of law, government, and warfare led to Radcliffe-Brown's work;less is here said about Malinowski although, unlike Radcliffe-Brown, he is consistentlypraised. Vincent selects few non-British and non-American influences other than Marx andEngels, Durkheim and Weber, omitting Robertson Smith, Frazer, de Coulanges, Mauss, orVan Gennep.

The second part of the book, focused on "political anthropology," is less clearly argued thanthe first The sections on the development of legal anthropology are narratively balanced.Vincent rescues some important, often overlooked writers: Nieboer, Holsti, Hobhouse,Wheeler and Ginsburg (all but Holsti necessary reading at Oxford under Evans-Pritchard).She rightly pays attention to people who have been influential (albeit some through self-marketing rather than scholarly ability) and it is comforting to find Foucault summarilydismissed.

At the conclusion of the second part, I found mat I wanted to read more on the links between"political anthropology" and other anthropological fields such as "religious anthropology" or"anthropology of gender"; the proliferation of undergraduate teaching that entailed thesplitting up study areas into pedagogically manageable pieces; and the acceptance of thedemands of new interest-groups and newly claimed political identities external toanthropology as a discipline, originating in the United States with its idiosyncratic notions ofrace, class, and gender. Too, I would have liked to have had her pay more attention to thepolitical significance of myth, symbol, and ritual and discussed at greater length the work ofBenedict, Mead, Seligman, Srinivas, Steiner, Dumont, Balandier, and L^vi-Strauss.

The next three sections present what are, to my mind, three historical or interpretiveweaknesses that affect the book's main argument The first is that colonial impact was notuniform throughout the African continent. In the colonial period, as today, southern Africahad long been a heavily industrialized region while the remainder of sub-Saharan Africa wasnot The Copperbelt of what was then Northern Rhodesia and the Katanga was an extensionof highly industrialized South Africa. It drew on a wide catchment area for its labor; itinfluenced colonial governments to regard "progress" and "development" as linkednecessarily to foreign investment and industrialization; it changed irrevocably the nature,structures, organizations, and values of the peoples affected not only as labor migrants but aspeasant farmers, laborers, and consumers. Gluckman understood the anthropologicalsignificance of these historical and social changes and wrote about "tribesman" and"townsman," the peasants and proletarians that Central Americanists later discovered asobjects of study. Gluckman, and others such as Balandier, did indeed change the emphasis ofAfrican ethnography.

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But elsewhere Africa was different, certainly until the 1970s. In the 1920s and 1930s, whenEvans-Pritchard went to study the Azande and the Nuer they had not been comparablyaffected by industrialization. They had changed, as recent accounts by Douglas Johnson andSharon Hutchinson show clearly, but not as radically. Evans-Pritchard, who was trained asan historian, knew the context of South Africa and he found that Nuer descent groups werestill structurally central, despite the notorious aerial bombing of their villages. He as well asothers, should, I think, have made the colonial context more explicit in their writings, butthey did not ignore it.

Oxford and Manchester are best understood at this time as complementary parts of a singledisciplinary enterprise. Gluckman and Evans-Pritchard worked closely together, and bothsaw themselves as "descended" directly and immediately from Radcliffe-Brown. Choosingto follow his approach, not Malinowski's, in their African research, they emphasized"structure" rather than "culture." Both were functionalists in that they regarded functionalismas a useful method for research (but, as Gellner has written, it was never a theory of society).

The unit of study, and the definition of its boundaries, was problematic for them. They werewell aware that "boundaries" were arbitrary; Meyer Fortes had defined the unit of study as"social field" (the phrase is wrongly attributed by Vincent to Emrys Peters on p. 22).Nonetheless, having to delimit boundaries for purposes of research, they took eithergeographical ones (networks of oases for the Sanusi), indigenous political units and colonialadministrative units (Gluckman's Zululand), labor catchment areas (the Copperbelt), orlinguistic units, the boundaries recognized by the people themselves. They did so becausethose were the existing units that were recognized by their groups' members at the time.Where this was no longer so, as with the Copperbelt peoples, they studied wider fields ofinteraction. Gluckman and Evans-Pritchard were not in methodological conflict, butcomplementary in their efforts to understand an ever-changing Africa. The "objective" worlddetermined the aim and method of the ethnography being done in Africa at that time. Thekey lay in the processes of industrialization, of establishment of white settler regions, andalso, a point Vincent misses, in the definitions of "tribes" originally made by missionarieswho had reduced local languages to writing.

Vincent's final chapter is based on the reasonable assumption that the "narrow" (should it notbe "deep"?) analyses of "political anthropology" are giving way to a return of the originaland wider field of "anthropology of politics." This is a sanguine and appealing analysiswhich, unfortunately, I think is incorrect.

The anthropologists committed to the "anthropology of politics" prior to the World War II erabelieved that studies of government lay at the heart of social anthropology but that

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government could not be understood through political science concepts that were Eurocentric,inapposite, and inexact as applied to anthropological societies, and too general for thesensitive analysis and comparison of the complexities of real small-scale governmentsystems. The anthropology of politics, they perceived, lacked a sense of structure andprocess to inform ethnographic detail; it was mired in the "theoretical stagnation" thatVincent rightly deplores (388). Functionalism, derided by some, was a method that theyfound worked. They were at heart historians concerned with process, the other side of"structure'1—each making the other intelligible.

These pioneer anthropologists of politics were concerned with the acquisition and proper useof accurate ethnographic detail. They aimed to write ethnography as well as Malinowski, thejournalistic genius, while using it to describe patterns and structures, as Radcliffe-Brown did.The global analyses then coming into vogue (and owing much to the historicism of Marx andthe evolutionism of Engels, both well understood by Evans-Pritchard and Gluckman) lackedthe reliable ethnographic detail necessary to make them useful. When enough ethnographicdetail later became available, it was often ignored by the people who produced the globalstudies. The skill lies not in easy generalizations, but in perceiving and defining the detailand nuances that alone provide us with material for hypotheses that refer to actual societies inall their complexity.

A final question that I have for Vincent is: Can we really successfully divide up the study ofgovernment and law into "political anthropology" and the "anthropology of politics"? Aren'tthese Eurocentric definitions of social interaction and process? As Vincent recognizes, theformalist/substantivist battles have always been with us, in all disciplines of study. But fewother cultures or languages posit these categories and boundaries. This is a very old and stillfundamental anthropological problem that deserves more discussion.

Vincent finds Marxist-influenced anthropology and feminist anthropology to be particularlyimportant. But, like functionalism, these are methods of research, not principles of society,nor, by themselves, programs of study. Of more importance are peasant and "subaltern"studies, the observation of society from the ground upwards. Vincent rightly gives these sub-fields long and useful discussion. She considers them new developments, "confrontingcapital" (399), and bringing the anthropological study of law and government to finalfruition. But both approaches were arguably also present in the pre-World War IIanthropology of politics era, as peasant studies—witness, for example, the work of Firth, andSrinivas and others. Is "subaltern" merely a newly coined term for an old understanding?

Vincent also does not mention another important development which bridges those headings:the study of the centrality of identity and ethnicity to politics. This approach gained

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momentum in France, for example, in the work of Georges Balandier. The Vietnamese-French anthropologist Georges Condominas has urged future ethnographers to becomehistorians of the "different ethnic communities of reunified nations."

And, is Vincent's original "anthropology of politics" returning? To my mind, what ishappening now is not a return to the "anthropology of politics" but a mere proliferation ofinterests, concerns, and areas of popularity that do not compose a single disciplinaryapproach or method. It could be that the proliferation of narrow fields, as evidenced by theAAA Newsletter and the AAA Guide to Graduate Departments, simply reflects the hostilitiesbetween elements of present-day capitalist society and is, as Vincent shows, also reflected inthe antagonisms and jealousies between departments and "schools" of anthropology. Onefears that, blinkered by concentrating on political interest struggles outside the intellectualarena, we are witnessing not a return to a purer and more effective single anthropology butthe final and destructive politicization and fragmentation of the very discipline itself.