Apartheid cartography: the political anthropology and spatial effects of international diplomacy in Bosnia

International diplomacy has been one of a number of practices which have performatively constituted “Bosnia” as a particular place with specific people, so that it could be rendered as a problem requiring a particular solution. Even when, as in the case of the Dayton accords, negotiators claim they have desired the reintegration of Bosnia, their reliance on a powerful set of assumptions about identity, territoriality and politics—a particular political anthropology—has meant the ethnic partition of a complex and heterogeneous society is the common product of the international community's efforts. Paying attention to the role of cartography, this paper explores the apartheid-like logic of international diplomacy's political anthropology, the way this logic overrode non-nationalist options and legitimised exclusivist projects during the war, and considers the conundrum this bequeaths Bosnia in the post-Dayton period as a number of significant local forces seek to overcome division.This article is accompanied by a web-site which presents the relevant maps from the periods of international diplomacy discussed here, along with a further commentary. Referred to in the article as Campbell (1999), this web-site can be accessed at http://www.newcastle.ac.uk/~npol/maps/bosnia     

The Politics of Knowledge: Julian Steward,Leslie White,Melville Herskovits,and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza

Biographies of four important figures in the history of anthropology—Julian Steward, Leslie White, Melville Herskovits, and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza—illustrate that current “public anthropology” has deep historic roots and that anthropology, even subfields that involve the basic sciences, like genetics, are shaped by personal and political experience as much as by intellect. All the biographical subjects discussed here had first-hand experience with racism, fascism, and bigotry, whether in their home or public lives, and resisted those forms of hegemony by fashioning anthropological theories to explain and appreciate human diversity.     

Cora Du Bois,Henrietta Schmerler,and the Role of Women in Mid-Twentieth Century American Anthropology

Cora Du Bois (1903–1991) achieved distinction in anthropology and the U.S. government—including leadership roles in the Office of Strategic Services and the State Department, a professorship at Harvard, and the presidency of the American Anthropological Association. Her contemporary, Henrietta Schmerler (1908–1931), suffered rape and murder while conducting her first summer of ethnographic fieldwork. Despite these stark differences, when taken together, Schmerler’s and Du Bois’s careers and reputations shed light on sexism and homophobia in and around the discipline, changing approaches to fieldwork and cultural analysis, and the political and public contexts of American anthropology in the mid-20th century.     

The intimate dance of diplomacy: in praise of practice

Those who study international relations pay little attention to those who practise them. But the terms of scholarly explanation—the great abstractions of state, interest, power and so on—are always embodied in human representatives, and their interactions mediated through human relationships. The daily experience, lived and felt, of diplomats thus offers a valuable perspective on how international relations work. Two recent studies by Iver Neumann capture this world through an anthropology of the diplomatic tribe. They illuminate the highly distinctive conventions, rituals and symbols of this world, showing how diplomats are recruited and socialized, where and how they perform their roles and how they communicate —and how these practices evolve in the face of social and technological change. Diplomats emerge as indispensable specialists in creating, asserting and agreeing meaning, and diplomatic conduct as a critical variable in explaining international outcomes. Taking the perspective of practice seriously can build a better political science of international relations, balancing first‐person understanding with third‐person explanation, impersonal forces with human stories, and contextual facts with their rhetorical construction. It can also help bridge the gap between theory and practice. This points to an exciting agenda for future research.     

Unstable Bodies: Science,Society, and Visual Work

In recent years increased attention has been paid to both modes and processes of seeing in anthropology. At the same time, the body as the locus of visual practice is increasingly problematized. The works reviewed here are all concerned with making people — and bodies — visible, but are aware of the methodological, moral, and political implications of this. Other common threads include the tension between reproduction and representation, the self-awareness of the seen and seeing body, and the roles of digital and other technologies in rendering bodies visible or, at least, present.     

Anthropology, ‘Native Schooling’ and Maori: the Politics of ‘Cultural Adaptation’ Policies

This paper examines three policies of ‘cultural adaptation’ formulated in colonial contexts in the 1920s and 1930s — that of the British Colonial Office for education in Africa, that of the New Zealand Native Schools and that of Maori leaders. While clearly inter-related, these policies were developed and promoted by their respective proponents to serve widely different political goals. Particularly significant is the role played by anthropology in that context. Proponents of all three policies looked to anthropologists for insights and scientific validation of their political agendas. Anthropologists, in turn, not only accepted this role but, particularly in the case of the British Colonial education policy, actively claimed it, involving themselves in the processes of colonial control.     

The “State Idea” in Theory and Practice

Recent anthropology of the state is influenced by sociology's cultural turn—taking up “the state idea” as situated meaning. The works reviewed here pursue the state's idea of itself—in two cases through state projects of extreme social and cultural engineering, in two as a comparative problem. Notwithstanding differences of purpose and approach, the authors evince tacit points of convergence around the state as a form of modernism, as a function of elite interests, and as a localized process of depoliticization, associating dissent with cultural authenticity. The essay relates these points to western state nationalism and current ethnographies of political subjectivity.     

Structural history and political economy: The contact encounter in hawai'i and Samoa

The relationship between cultures in place and exogenous political‐economic forces is the driving concern of contemporary historical anthropology. The prevailing discourse has moved from the phraseology of “world system” and Western “impacts” to a concern with local/global intersections. Culturalist and political economy analyses have been viewed as conflicting perspectives in historical analysis, the former emphasizing indigenous symbolic structures and models of action, the latter focusing on modes of incorporation into the world economy. The two perspectives converge in studies of local points of articulation with capitalism. An examination of the differential outcomes of Western contact in Hawai'i and Samoa demonstrates that a complex order of determinations is at work in contact encounters, as indigenous cultural and political structures dialectically interact with particular agents of colonialism.     

Culture and Politics,Behavior and Biology: Seeking Synthesis among Fragmentary Anthropological Perspectives on Hunter-Gatherers

Hunter-gatherers define humanity's Pleistocene evolutionary past. Yet, hunter-gatherer societies in the 20th–21st centuries are examples par excellence of cultural marginalization, domination, and resilience. This review of six recent works on hunter-gatherers—spanning Paleolithic archaeology, bioarchaeology, behavioral ecology, and cultural anthropology—underscores that human forager diversity can be explained neither by culturally embedded political processes nor by ecologically situated evolutionary factors alone. Yet, theoretical bridging frameworks remain elusive, with a narrowing but persistent culture-biology divide. Recent developments in evolutionary life-history theory provide a robust biocultural foundation for understanding human sociality and the symbolic constitution of embodied cultural practice.     

Initiative resistance: The welfare state

So long as the main forces holding together the postwar welfare state remained in place, the range of significant social policy options was only marginal or incremental. In that context the history of Australian political culture was plausibly construed as a utilitarian, pragmatic affair lacking significant contests of ideas, dogmas or principles. This paper examines the origins of this historiography in the birth of political science in the 1950s and suggests that the end of the cold war and the destabilising of the welfare state has exposed the limits of its serviceability. A larger appreciation of the history of Australian political thought—once associated with the theme of ‘initiative and resistance'—needs to be recovered, especially if political scientists are to make a more creative contribution to the now fundamental social policy debates over the role of the state in the economy.     

British judicial engagement and the juridification of the armed forces

Although the law has always been a major reference point in the conduct of war, little scholarly attention has focused on the transformative effect of recent legal challenges, judicial rulings and inquiries on the armed forces themselves, notably the 2011 Gage Inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa and the Philip Inquiry into the Mull of Kintyre helicopter disaster. Despite this, the impact has been significant in the ways it has transformed the governance regime of British armed forces and the professional autonomy of the military. This article conceptualizes the impact of law on the armed forces as ‘juridification’. In applying this concept, this article analyses the implications of this for the culture, conduct and organization of the British armed forces. It argues that juridification closes a civil–military relations gap between society on the one hand and the armed forces on the other. As important, juridification also brings with it permanent instability because of the inevitable conflicts that arise from the replacement of an old order based on authority, to a new military system based on rights. Thus the effects of juridification are not just a liminal moment—a transitory dislocation from established structures and the reversal of existing hierarchies—followed by the creation of a permanent new order. Rather, juridification has initiated an era of instability that is characterized by the absence of any permanent settlement of authority and rights in the governance of the armed forces. This has significant implications for the armed forces and their professional autonomy and the social, political and legal context in which armed forces have to operate.     

The Heroic Image of the Warrior in the First World War

Abstract

Sun Tzu asserts that true success is not winning every battle fought, but subduing the enemy’s will without fighting at all. The author asserts that the U.S. planning efforts for post-WWII Japan from 1942 to 1945 reveal a unique period where military and political planners actively pursued a greater understanding of the role an enemy’s will-to-fight plays in conflict. The historical record reveals an iterative — and often heated — discourse among experts in diplomacy, governance, political culture, anthropology, and military intelligence. Consequently, Allied commanders entertained and ultimately executed a war plan for the occupation of Japan with fewer forces and less fighting than called for by the alternative plan for invasion. The fundamental difference in the two plans — an assumed effect that safeguarding the Imperial Institution would have on the Japanese people’s will-to-fight. In the end, meaningful discourse enabled Allies to target the enemy’s will separately from their means, enabling conditions where subduing the Japanese will required the Allies not to fight.     

Resistance and the City

The mass demonstrations that took place in 2011 in major cities worldwide, dubbed here Contemporary Metropolitan Protest (CMP), varied in terms of the issues tackled and the political efficacy attained, but featured similarities in style, mobilization patterns and the use of traditional and social media. The similarities explain the tendency among commentators and researchers to treat CMP as a coherent category. The variation, on the other hand, raises questions about conceptual and theoretical idioms used so far in the analysis of CMP. The article begins by scrutinizing “resistance”—an idiom introduced to anthropology in the 1980s to theorize peasant response to metropolitan policies—and its recent emergence in the depiction and analysis of CMP. Highlighting the strengths and limitations of the term, I use the rise and fall of CMP in Tel Aviv in 2011 and 2012 as an example of how the implicit logic of aggression and response, so central to earlier employment of the notion of resistance, can be hijacked by defensive regimes that seek to delegitimize and criminalize critique, thus forcing CMP to decline and implode.     

From the “Good Tradition” to Religion on Some Basic Aspects of Religious Conversion in Early Medieval Tibet and the Comparative Central Eurasian Context

What Western academic literature described as ethnic or cultural Tibet in fact implies something composite and processually constructed: Tibet then often appears as a typical example for explanations of collective identity (and ethnicity). Such approaches increasingly are applied in present-day anthropology and historical studies, highlighting the historical conditions and the politically, socially and ideationally constructed features of identity. In Tibet, identity-building was strongly related to the spread of Buddhism. The new religion was introduced in the time of the Tibetan Empire (seventh to ninth century), but it was only its later spread (from the eleventh century) that led to the effective, all-embracing establishment of Buddhism in the Highlands. It was interlinked with regionally different forms of political manifestations—the founding of Buddhist kingdoms at the periphery and the emergence of monastic hegemonies in the central regions. These developments correlated with processes of conversion, which in its narrative model is described as an act of conquest, taming and civilizing the physical universe and which in theory actually never ends. Apart from considering current anthropological discussions of the phenomenon of religious conversion, this paper will include a comparative view of the history of Christianization in early medieval Europe (especially in Western Europe—the Frankish kingdom and the barbarian zones North of the Rhine and the Danube, fifth to tenth century). Inter alia this also raises questions about the initial social forces and interests promoting the new religion's adoption, and to what extent formal similarities with the Tibetan case are ascertainable in Europe.     

Theorizing the City: Recent Research in Urban Anthropology

Half of the world's population now lives in cities. This number is expected to grow to two-thirds in the next fifty years. And yet, it is only recently that anthropologists have begun to take urban contexts seriously as fieldwork sites. In this article, I analyze three recent volumes on urban anthropology which each propose a distinctive theoretical and methodological approach to the study of the city. I suggest that there is a fine line to be drawn between urban determinism—the suggestion that the city is the pivotal force in shaping individual lives, a perspective that ignores both human agencies and the complexities of causality—and anthropology which relegates the city to mere context, ethnographies that, almost by chance take place in urban contexts but say little about the realities of city life. The texts examined share two features in common: firstly, they are most effective when they, through close ethnographic or archival engagement, show the complexity and variation in urban contexts; and secondly, each text displays an absolute commitment to ethnographic fieldwork as a powerful tool to understand the lived experience of the urban. As a commitment to long-term participant observation is the sine qua non of our discipline, my central question is whether “urban anthropology,” is not just anthropology after all?     

Culture and Power in the Anthropology of Japan

Though Japan anthropology since the 1970s has been characterized as outside mainstream anthropological currents, recent work reflects broader disciplinary debates about the relation between culture and power. The four books under review, spanning the archaeology, history, ethnography, and political science of Japan, illustrate different ways of synthesizing cultural and political perspectives. Yet, to varying degrees, they all move beyond an undifferentiated, ahistorical, and depoliticized view of culture to embrace complexity, variability, conflict, and change. In so doing, they raise important questions about knowledge construction across the subfields of anthropology and its uneasy relationship with nationalist and essentialist discourses.     

Introduction

The eolith debate mirrors the development and demise of evolutionist anthropology in Britain between 1880 and 1940. This paper traces the connections between some of the key protagonists in the controversy, especially those associated with the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford. The evolutionist pre-occupation of early Oxford anthropology with the continuity between archaeology and ethnology is shown to be linked to an interest in the Eolithic controversy, and these concerns persisted into a second generation as evolutionism was marginalized and prehistoric archaeology matured. Although the eolith debate finally floundered in the debris of the “epistemic rupture” between the world of Victorian evolutionism and late twentieth-century anthropology, some of its technical pre-occupations—particularly in relation to what we would now call ethnographic analogies and in terms of the techniques for distinguishing artefacts from geofacts—persist and are very much current issues.     

Kingdoms of the Cameroon Grassfields

The three volumes considered here offer significant contributions to studies of African kingship and contribute to an emergent political anthropology of the Grassfields. Each adopts an approach on a sliding scale of emphasis on evidence and interpretation. Fardon takes a strongly evidence-based approach, reflecting recent methodological concerns in anthropology, which invites challenge and dialogue. Warnier presents an innovative methodological paradigm which emphasizes interpretation through observation of human action in engagement with material culture. Argenti takes the view that slave raiding underpins state formation and masquerades, and presents his own interpretations in that light. His approach resonates strongly with contemporary moral concerns about the Atlantic slave trade but lacks historical evidence.     

Culture as a variable in comparative politics: A review of some recent literature

Bringing culture into the analysis remains a problem for comparative political science. The notion is too vague and elusive — we are reluctant to evoke that amorphous mass of beliefs, institutions and actions which comprise the political culture of any nation when trying to compare policy processes. Only when the interplay of familiar political variables fails to correlate is culture introduced as an explanation of last resort

Recent work seeks more rigour for a cultural variable. Drawing on the anthropology of Mary Douglas and the public policy of Aaron Wildav‐sky, ‘cultural theory’ argues that groups fashion their world in limited and predictable ways. Regime, belief and economy are subsumed by more fundamental choices about the organisation of collective life. Culture is people sharing values which justify social relations.

This paper sketches the premises and findings of cultural theory. It suggests some possibilities for comparative research — and the problems of testing this ambitious reformulation of political culture.