Power And Its Disguises - Second Edition Anthropological Perspectives on Politics

by Gledhill, John

• ISBN13: 9780745316864
• ISBN10: 0745316867
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-07-20
• Publisher: Pluto Press

Summary

In this fully updated edition of Power and Its Disguises, John Gledhill explores both the complexities of local situations and the power relations that shape the global order. He shows how historically informed anthropological perspectives can contribute to debates about democratisation by incorporating a 'view from below' and revealing forces that shape power relations behind the formal facade of state institutions. Examples are drawn from Brazil, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia, India, Mexico, Peru, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Sri Lanka, amongst others.

Author Biography

John Gledhill is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. He is the co-managing editor of the journal Critique of Anthropology.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Edition	vii
Locating the political: a political anthropology for today	1	(22)
How not to use the West as a point of departure	8	(7)
The distinctiveness of the modern state	15	(3)
Wider implications of historical discontinuity	18	(2)
Political anthropology reconstituted	20	(3)
The origins and limits of coercive power: the anthropology of stateless societies	23	(22)
The externalization of the political as the negation of power	27	(5)
Sexual politics in stateless societies	32	(6)
Civilization, mother of barbarism	38	(3)
`Stateless societies' under the modern state	41	(4)
From hierarchy to surveillance: the politics of agrarian civilizations and the rise of the Western national state	45	(22)
Political systems in theories of European development	48	(3)
A specifically European dynamic?	51	(7)
Agarian civilization outside Europe	58	(9)
The political anthropology of colonialism: a study of domination and resistance	67	(25)
Structural-functionalist political anthropology as a child of its time	69	(2)
The colonial process as an object of analysis	71	(6)
Cracks in the structures: the anthropology of resistance	77	(15)
Post-colonial states: legacies of history and pressures of modernity	92	(35)
Regime variation in post-independence Africa	94	(6)
Deep politics: the state and civil society	100	(3)
Power relations in the shadow state	103	(2)
`Democratization' in Latin America	105	(5)
Mexico: democratization versus the shadow state and militarization	110	(9)
Indigenous peoples and the state in Mexico and Guatemala	119	(8)
From macro-structure to micro-process: anthropological analysis of political practice	127	(26)
Getting at structure through events	130	(5)
Politics as the activity of `political men'	135	(3)
The autonomy of the political field and its symbolic practices	138	(11)
Insidious strategies of power	149	(4)
Political process and `global disorder': perspectives on contemporary conflict and violence	153	(31)
Expanding capitalism, declining empires	154	(7)
Cultural globalization and power relations	161	(6)
From the fantasies of `Senderology' to the roots of political violence in Peru	167	(10)
Sri Lanka: constructing new orders through violence	177	(7)
Society against the modern state? The politics of social movements	184	(30)
Social movements theory: the need for scepticism	185	(11)
Alternative modernities	196	(3)
Cultural politics and political constructions of culture	199	(6)
Popular politics and the politicization of gender	205	(9)
Anthropology and politics: commitment, responsibility and the academy	214	(29)
The politics of anthropological knowledge production: some initial dilemmas	215	(6)
Acting on the basis of knowledge	221	(6)
Commitment at the grassroots	227	(7)
From knowledge to wisdom?	234	(4)
Power and its disguises	238	(5)
Bibliography	243	(16)
Index	259