Ebook: Power and its disguises. Anthropological Perspectives on Politics

Preface to the Second Edition vii
1. Locating the political: a political anthropology for today 1
How not to use the West as a point of departure 8
The distinctiveness of the modern state 15
Wider implications of historical discontinuity 18
Political anthropology reconstituted 20
2. The origins and limits of coercive power: the
anthropology of stateless societies 23
The externalization of the political as the negation of power 27
Sexual politics in stateless societies 32
Civilization, mother of barbarism 38
‘Stateless societies’ under the modern state 41
3. From hierarchy to surveillance: the politics of agrarian
civilizations and the rise of the Western national state 45
Political systems in theories of European development 48
A specifically European dynamic? 51
Agrarian civilization outside Europe 58
4. The political anthropology of colonialism: a study of
domination and resistance 67
Structural-functionalist political anthropology as a child
of its time 69
The colonial process as an object of analysis 71
Cracks in the structures: the anthropology of resistance 77
5. Post-colonial states: legacies of history and pressures of
modernity 92
Regime variation in post-independence Africa 94
Deep politics: the state and civil society 100
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Power relations in the shadow state 103
‘Democratization’ in Latin America 105
Mexico: democratization versus the shadow state and
militarization 110
Indigenous peoples and the state in Mexico and Guatemala 119
6. From macro-structure to micro-process:
anthropological analysis of political practice 127
Getting at structure through events 130
Politics as the activity of ‘political men’ 135
The autonomy of the political field and its symbolic practices 138
Insidious strategies of power 149
7. Political process and ‘global disorder’: perspectives
on contemporary conflict and violence 153
Expanding capitalism, declining empires 154
Cultural globalization and power relations161
From the fantasies of ‘Senderology’ to the roots of political
violence in Peru 167
Sri Lanka: constructing new orders through violence 177
8. Society against the modern state? The politics of social
movements 184
Social movements theory: the need for scepticism 185
Alternative modernities196
Cultural politics and political constructions of culture 199
Popular politics and the politicization of gender 205
9. Anthropology and politics: commitment, responsibility
and the academy 214
The politics of anthropological knowledge production: some
initial dilemmas215
Acting on the basis of knowledge 221
Commitment at the grassroots 227
From knowledge to wisdom? 234
Power and its disguises 238
Bibliography 243
Index 259