A New Look at Actor-Oriented Theory. In the late 1950s and early 1960s some British and American anthropologists, interested in. "politics" but dissatisfied with ...
Herbert S. Lewis l!ni\vr\ii\- of Wisconsin
A New Look at Actor-Oriented Theory In the late 1950s and early 1960s some British and American anthropologists, interested in "politics" but dissatisfied with the then-current approaches to the topic, introduced a new approach which seemed fresh, promising, and had a connection with other major theoretical developments in the field. This "new political anthropology," in contrast to either British structural-functionalist approaches or to American neo-evolutionary ones, began with a new conception of the nature of politics and accorded a particular role to actors, motivated players in the "game of politics" (Bailey). Its practitioners argued against reified and essentialized conceptions of "social structure," "society," and "culture." After just a few years of activity, this general approach was overtaken by events in the wider world, by Vietnam and the Sixties in the U.S, and by "1968" in France. The anthropological study of politics then became dominated by several forms of Marxist anthropology, including those stressing political economy, dependency and world systems theory. On different fronts, the new "actor-oriented" approach lost out to symbolic anthropology, interpretive anthropology, structuralism, and still later, to post-structuralism, postmodernism, critical theory, and the anti-positivist and anti-Enlightenment "turn." Today it is the later approaches that are increasingly being questioned and students, who will be the next generation of anthropologists and social theorists, are looking for something more satisfying. Some of them — and their elders — are reacting positively to the phrase "structure and agency," once again coming to see individuals as motivated actors who can choose, and even "resist," but who must be seen in the context of particular "structures.'' This approach is usually associated with "practice theory," with Bourdieu, Giddens, and Ortner, but 1 want to suggest that there was an interesting and useful literature produced thirty years ago that could contribute to a revitalized approach to some of the major problems of anthropology and social theory. There may be an interesting confluence at the moment between growing interests and sentiment in the field, and an almost forgotten bit of the not-so-distant past. In the remainder of the paper I shall outline some of the main points about the actor-oriented political anthropology of the 1960s and suggest why attention to some of the ideas of that period may be of use as we emerge from the current "moment."
The Rebellion Against "Structure" HIU! Ueificyfion' 111 rough Uie 1950s American anthropoloiiisis were no; no led lor their concern with things political, except for those lied lo the nee-evolutionism and modified Marxism of such writers as Morton Fried, Kric Wolf, Elman Service and Marshall Sahlins. At that time the selfconscious and dominant tradition in the anthropological study of political systems was a British one which had grown out of the ideas of Radcliffe-Brown and his students, most of whom had carried out research on African political systems. (See Fortes and EvansPritchard [1940], and the collections edited by John Middleton and David Tait [1958], and Max Gluckman [1965].) Indeed, from 1940 to 1965 or so, the model derived from Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard was what largely comprised "political anthropology." But how heavily were either of these schools really engaged with things "political"? The American neo-evolutionists were dealing in typologies and conjectured evolutionary trajectories that did not readily translate into ethnographically specific work or produce much field research. Their interest in politics was limited to political economy (cf Lewis & Greenfield 1983). The British anthropologists of the Radcliffe-Brownian persuasion constructed taxonomies and typologies in order to do science. Above all, they concentrated on the (Durkheimian) problem of order, which meant writing in terms of political stability, homeostasis, and the positive functions of political structures and institutions. These political anthropologists had their critics. They were accused of ignoring the political realities around them as the people they studied became members, leaders, or victims of the newly independent states. But although it is true that great political changes were going on in Africa from the early 1950s, it is overly simple to credit the struggles for liberation and the coming of independence for bringing about the "revolution" in political anthropology; there were other theoretical and intellectual roots. In British anthropology, the neglected Malinowskian model began to be reasserted by such former students as Firth, Richards, Kaberry, Mair, Schapera, and, for a while, Leach. Whereas the dominant Radcliffe-Brownian/Durkheimian paradigm so strongly stressed social conformity through jural rules and moral codes, the worlds of Malinowski and his students were full of intelligent, motivated, rule-evading, norm-breaking, obligationavoiding individuals, "as self-seeking and as self-interested as any Christian" (Malinowski 1926). " In his writings beginning in 1940, Leach introduced the element of the individual's reactions and he assumed that men would act in ways to increase their power. Fredrik Barth was the most explicitly political when he portrayed the observed pattern of leadership and power
Page 51 among the Swat Pathans as the result of the search by individuals for power and security. What makes a system go is the individual choices of both leaders and followers, who engage in implicit exchanges with each other, each attempting to enhance his own safety, honor, well-being, esteem, or power (Barth 1959, 1966, 1981). At about the same time F.G. Bailey postulated a "political man" on the analogy of "economic man," assuming that individuals, in general, act to maximize their self-interest in political situations, and that there are among people "the political equivalent of the entrepreneurs...some individuals who are out to maximize their political utility, and who know how to set about doing it." Bailey took this theme much further when he published Stratagems and Spoils in 1969. In America, George Peter Murdock and some of his students, notably Ward Goodenough, began to write against the reification of "cultures" and the myth of cultural integration. These ideas, along with Leach's writings, seem to have led to the works of Alan Howard and Roger Keesing on decision models. This approach emphasized the choices and actions of individuals that result in the outcomes we call cultural patterns or social structure, but it recognized that those choices had to be guided by the social, cultural and material context. Another strand was derived from interaction theory developed in the 1930s at Harvard, and associated with W. Lloyd Warner, G.C. Homans, E. Chappie, CM. Arensberg, and W.F. Whyte. It was also at about this time (ca. 1958) that Max Weber's works on politics, economy, and society began to be cited in anthropology. As Bendix (1984:19) notes, "In all of his work, Weber was concerned with the chances of individualism and rational choice in a world of power struggles, bureaucratic organization and capitalist enterprises which militates against these chances." In 1966, Marc Swartz joined together with Victor Turner and Arthur Tuden to organize and write the introduction to Political Anthropology, another work that brought goal-seeking and decision-making to the heart of political anthropology, rejected the myth of "social systems" enforcing compliance among individuals, and directed attention away from abstract total systems to the arenas and fields in which politics are carried out. Along with these developments there was a renewed concern with the application of the economists' model of "scarcity and choice" to economic life, resulting in a series of articles questioning the substantivist school of economic anthropology. Articles by Robbins Burling and Frank Cancian broimht a new level of sophistication to the idea of all humane «' engaged in some degree of maximizing (or "satisficing") behavior. This, in turn, tit with a
Page 52 new approach to exchange (Befu 1977) in social life, fueling a concern with humans as motivated actors, engaging in exchanges and goal-seeking behavior in various realms of life. Thus there was a convergence of several lines of thought, focussing on the economic and political behavior of individuals and the groups they form. This was a brief period in which anthropologists developed a substantial number of new ideas in several areas of concern: leadership, networks, patron-client relations, factions, etc. (Vincent 1978). All of these new approaches dispensed with reified, essentialized, and bounded social and cultural "systems." Action theory, network theory and process theory all built on the interests and motives of individual actors. If some works slighted the context ("structure"), this was not a necessary feature of the approach. In his work, Models of Social Organization, Barth was concerned with the "concrete life situation...of the actor as the essential context for his act," with the "actor's point of view" and as well with "the relationship between codification and praxis, or how forms of understanding arise from experience, and reciprocally how behaviour and experience are predicated by collective representations" (1981:12; italics mine). It was a pioneering anthropological work dealing with the inter-relations of what today is often called "structure and agency." He was dealing with what G.C. Homans called "the central problem of the social sciences...: [h]ow...the behavior of individuals createfs] the characteristics of groups?" (Keesing 1974:91). Reciprocally, how do those understandings, meanings, principles, rules (culture) guide that behavior? The Reaction to the Change As soon as these new ideas appeared, they had their critics, of course. For Talal Asad, Barth's "methodological individualism," his use of a "market model," and his failure to put class at the center of his analysis of the Pathans were cardinal sins. In the words of Joan Vincent (1990:360), Asad's reevaluation "marked the decline of action theory in its several guises." This was probably due less to the inherent qualities of his critique than to the fact that an era of Marxist anthropology was about to begin (Ferry and Renaut 1990). Even as she presented her review of political anthropology, Joan Vincent foreshadowed a course that would move political anthropology back into its previous reifications. She concluded her review emphasizing that, "Political situations and encounters that have long characterized this [newer] approach within political anthropology are now meshed with a concern with emergent relations of domination and exploitation within a modern world system" (1978; italics added). By the middle nnd late ll)70s there was a growing tendency for some anthropologists and social theorists to produce a mirror image of the earlier anthropology, one that imagined a hegemonic order rather than a reified neutral or beneficent order.
Page 53 But now, in the 1990s, something new seems to be happening. The search has begun for new ways to understand the changing world around us. Today people all over the world are increasingly "acting up" and confounding the planners, controllers, predicters. handlers showing at once the ability to act and to draw upon the ideas, meanings, understandings. patterns — that some may still call "culture." Perhaps this is one reason for the growing interest in a new view of choice-making actors, and for the interest in the works of Ortner. Giddens, and Bourdieu. They explicitly write in terms of agency and practice as well as structure. The Problem with Practice Theory as Practiced Sherry Ortner proclaimed or predicted the direction of theory in 1984 when she titled a section of her influential paper: "Into the Eighties: Practice." She tells us that "there has been growing interest in analysis focused through one or another of a bundle of interrelated terms: practice, praxis, action, interaction, activity, experience, performance. A second, and closely related bundle of terms focuses on the doer of all that doing: agent, actor, person, self, individual, subject." (144) But in her presentation of this new approach Ortner neglects the developments 1 have outlined above. It is my belief that Leach, Barth and Bailey and others are not considered important forerunners because their theories in fact gave too much scope to the actors — at least in the estimation of current practice theorists. Practice theory, as represented by Ortner, Bourdieu, and Giddens, retains a heavy burden of the reifications of Marx and Durkheim, avoids culture and emphasizes domination. Bourdieu's habitus, in the words of William Sewell (1992), "retains precisely the agent-proof quality that the concept of the duality of structure is supposed to overcome. In Bourdieu's habitus, schemas and resources so powerfully reproduce one another that even the most cunning or improvisational actions undertaken by agents necessarily reproduce the structure." (15) Giddens' complex and voluminous corpus lacks what many anthropologists consider, in one way or another, so vital — culture: those shared meanings and understandings, the principles, recipes, ideas, and values that guide human behavior, that give us the basis for perceiving, predicting, judging, and acting (Goodenough 1963). And Ortner, I believe, seriously limits the usefulness of her approach when she tells us, "The emphasis on the centrality of asymmetry or domination is one of the primary elements distinguishing current practice theories from older theories of social action, interaction, and transaction. Thus human activity regarded as taking place in a world of politically neutral relations is not 'practice."'
Page >1 Conclusion To deal with the wide open world we inhabit, we must be more aware of the variations, the individuality, the inventiveness, the imitntiveness, the motivations and the perceptions of individuals. The realities are confounding the verities of the essentialists, typologists and systems-builders. And yet it is not all just total randomness and anarchy either. If we look, we can see tendencies, processes, probabilities, patterns, within a world of variation and chance. To understand this, there is reason to attend to both the shared meanings and ideas ("culture" or "structure") and the motives, skills, perceptions, passions, etc. of individuals. I suggest there has been an interesting but neglected approach, within the field of anthropology, that deals with "structure," and "agency," and offers another angle of approach to action and process for those who are looking for new solutions in the 1990s.
Note 1. Obviously this very brief and selective overview, tailored to the needs of my argument, is in no way an attempt at a comprehensive picture of the history of "anthropology and politics." Joan Vincent's massive and learned work by that title is the place to look for that (1990).
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