Social Anthropology: An Alternative Introduction

242 Pages·1989·1.87 MB·English

by  Angela P. Cheater

Social Anthropology

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Angela P.Cheater

LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published in 1986 by Unwin Hyman Ltd
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any Taylor & Francis or
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Second edition 1989
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© Angela P.Cheater 1986, 1989
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0-203-35948-8 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-37204-2 Adobe e-Reader Format
ISBN 0-415-07885-7 (Print Edition)
Contents

Foreword vii
Author’s Note x

1 Theoretical Underpinnings 1
2 Marginalised Economic Activities in the World System 20
3 Relations of Production in Peasant and Commercial Agriculture 36
4 Industrialisation and Proletarianisation 58
5 Relations of Appropriation in Systems of Exchange 76
6 Ascriptive Social Relations 95
7 Voluntary Social Relations 122
8 The Political Dimension 134
9 Issues of Law and Social Control 155
10 Ideology and Social Control 166
11 Ideology and the State 185

References 201
Indices 209
Subjects 209
Societies 221
Proper names 225

Foreword
Anthropology has proved too useful to be left just to anthropologists. Whether as a
method of research or as a mode of analysis, anthropology has been taken up by both
policy-makers and scholars in other disciplines. Nor is its use limited to developing
countries, though it is there historically that anthropologists’ comparative perspective has
generated its most significant insights into society. Whereas most textbooks on the
subject outline the problems professional anthropologists have tried to solve, this
‘Alternative Introduction’ shows what a reader can do with anthropology and with the
monographs anthropologists have written.
There is a need for a ‘usable anthropology’ consisting of those debates—on models,
theories and the various evidence for them—which people trained in other disciplines can
handle and develop in their own contexts. Most disciplines have at the core certain very
serious arguments over the soundness of their techniques and their sources of
information, over the rightness of limiting the discipline to a particular set of perspectives
and excluding what are, arguably, merely new intellectual fads. A usable anthropology
side-steps these inner, intra-disciplinary wrangles (without denying their importance) and
offers instead the tools of anthropology as toolsand not as some golden key that unlocks
ultimate reality. The pay-off for anthropologists in this lies in seeing what others, in using
anthropology, can transform it into—and so increase the intellectual ‘power’ of the
discipline. It is sensible, then, also to put on display, alongside the latest intellectual
‘technology’, analytical tools that anthropologists now regard as outmoded or inept for
the job, and explain why these tools have proved too blunt to use. Many of these tools
had of course themselves been borrowed by anthropologists from other disciplines and
re-ground (perhaps crudely) for anthropology’s particular purposes; yet who knows
whether another discipline may not hone those same discarded concepts into the sharpest
of scalpels?
The reader, then, is assumed to be a user of anthropology. Any ‘Alternative
Introduction’ needs to be, in computer jargon, user-friendly. Thus most of the texts
quoted are widely available in libraries, and the reader, with access, say, to a good public
or college library will be able to go back to the original study or to the crucial journal
article, and check on how the argument was first developed or follow up the ideas.
Although the arguments analysed are up-to-date, the materials used to illustrate them
need not necessarily be so. Indeed time has usually told whether the original illustration
is valid—and why.
But who are the users? The original users of this approach to the discipline were
Zimbabweans who were demanding a university level training in social anthropology.
Although formally undergraduates, many of them were mature students with years of
experience in industry, the civil service or social work—men and women for whom the
issues mattered, for whom theory was not mere speculation. Over the years they have
helped to shape the arguments in the book as well as its broader outline. Their answers to
the problems posed have been most impressive: for three years (as an external examiner)
I have been reading their examination scripts, and I can vouch for the distinctive quality
of reasoning and response. But the demand has not been confined to the university: in the
first year of publication, the book sold over 400 copies in Zimbabwe.
The Zimbabwean origins of the book mean that the book has a perspective that is
subtly yet sharply different. Unlike the audiences to which most other textbooks are
addressed, the readers of ‘An Alternative Introduction’ could recognize their own
mothers and fathers amidst the societies being analysed: ‘other cultures’ were not
something remote or exotic but familiarly real and living, changing and above all
changeable. The hardships of life are hardships experienced; and with that experience
comes the urgent necessity to change the context that made that experience normal.
‘Development’, in this situation, is not a subject to be studied theoretically and then
applied to others; for the ‘others’ are our own families, and include our elders whom we
cannot—should not—boss around bureaucratically. Thus students with little personal
experience outside school life nonetheless recognize the reality behind the abstractions.
A usable anthropology is not a luxury. In a land like Zimbabwe where independence
has only recently been won after much fighting and divisiveness, the mistakes that have
bedevilled other new nations must be avoided at all costs. Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania,
with over twenty-five years of independence behind them already, have seen the recent
economic and political difficulties wreak havoc on their people’s hopes; so too, after
forty years, India or Burma. But those same conditions have had dramatic effects on
particular European communities too—indeed, the growth of anthropology applied to the
developed world has been as exciting as anywhere. What we are witnessing is, once
again, the transfer of Third World-developed analytical skills back to the so-called First
World. For centuries Islamic, Indian and Chinese cultures have continued to nurture
European technology, thought and aesthetics. In anthropology ‘An Alternative
Introduction’ is a significant instance of this counter-flow from Africa, of intellectual
‘relevant technology’.
Anthropology offers more than a well-labelled shelf of alternative social systems—
most of which, as it happens, are usually shown to have failed or been flawed in one way
or another. Critical though anthropology has to be, it has also to be constructive. Its tools
are those not just of the pathologist dissecting what is dead or diseased but of the
surgeon, too, mending and patching, keeping the traumatized alive. For there is a
common danger that criticism of both the present and past is so total that any attempt at
making the existing systems work better becomes inconceivable. A consequence of such
a destructively critical climate is change for its own sake—a kind of ‘coup’ mentality. In
the Nigerian context, for example, social scientists have begun to favour what I would
call ‘green field’ planning—that is, they urge replacing the existing constitutional,
economic, bureaucratic or educational system (or whatever else is apparently not
functioning well) with another system picked off the planners’ shelf and transplanting
that new system as if it were to take root in a completely fresh social ‘site’. When the
new transplant withers, another is tried; but harvest never comes.
The impending challenge facing anthropologists—or rather the policy-makers whom
anthropologists help to train—is formulating ways of predicting social outcomes.
Explication of the past has been very fashionable in recent anthropology, just as earlier
the norm had been the modelling of contemporary (yet closed off) social structures. But
neither ultimately is adequate. ‘Social-scientifically sophisticated “just-so” stories’ may
be an unfair description of anthropologists’ attempts to analyse past societies, but surely
studying the past is a cop-out for anthropologists, whose forte has always uniquely been
fieldwork. Were anthropologists, instead, to become ‘accountable’ for the accuracy of
their analyses (whether presentist or predictive), the tenor of the discipline would alter
drastically. The expert consultant who advises on this particular project or on that policy
rarely has to live with the consequences of his advice: imagine the shock of such an
expert if he were suddenly to find that not only had he to do the work himself, but he had
to fund himself and his family from the proceeds (if any).
The problem, as ever, is how even to begin to control for all the apparently extraneous
factors that will affect the outcome; ‘chance’, ‘bad luck’, for example, may scarcely be an
adequate explanation or excuse, even where policy-making is seen as something akin to
gambling. Nonetheless anthropologists need to have their place (just as economists have)
in the teamwork involved in predictive social science, in Europe as elsewhere; and they
need, too, to have their analytical language understood. Social Anthropology: An
Alternative Introductionaims to make such understanding possible. Furthermore, if there
is anywhere where such a predictive anthropology is likely to be developed, it will be I
think in a society like Zimbabwe’s—and possibly by users brought up on this Alternative
Introduction’.
Murray Last
University College London