The modern social science era of political anthropology came to an end in the late 1960s when new concerns and new voices entered the discipline. By this time six paradigms had emerged and co-existed successfully within the subfield: neo-evolutionism, cultural historical theory, political economy, *structuralism, action theory and processual theory.
In the context of Third World political struggles, decolonization and the recognition of new nations, a mounting critique of new forms of imperialism and neo-imperialism (sometimes called economic imperialism) confronted the sub field. The Vietnam War (1965–73) was the catalyst for Kathleen Gough who spoke out (literally, in a radio broadcast from California) calling for the anthropological study of imperialism, revolutions and counter-revolutions. Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) launched critical analysis of the problematic relationship of anthropology to British colonialism. †Pierre Bourdieu used the vast legacy of French colonial scholarship to examine descriptive accounts for systematic relations, seeing what was left out, reading the silences in more orthodox Algerian ethnography.
Political economy again came to the fore with one of its more radical forms, *Marxism, gaining ground in the analysis of Third World politics. A new revisionist †structural Marxism directed attention to political forms ranging from the *household and lineage to the colonial and post-colonial worlds of uneven exchange, dependency and underdevelopment. Much of this analysis was contributed by scholars working in francophone North and West Africa but, given the range of its subject matter, the paradigm quickly spread.
It was not uncontested. Reaction stimulated another of anthropology’s recurrent moves towards history. Intellectual rapprochement with historiographic British Marxism, and particularly the work of E.P.Thompson, reinforced political anthropology’s engagement with agency and process. A parallel concern centred around peasant *resistance, labour movements and crises in *capitalism in Africa and Latin America (Cooper, Isaacman, Mallon, Roseberry and Stern 1993). Neglect of historical conditions, *class and competing interests in what was called in this para-digm (following Wallerstein) the periphery of the modern world system drew some criticism. One of the most exciting trends was developed by historians of *South Asia under the rubric †‘Subaltern Studies’. Historians along with anthropologists and literary critics began to dismantle the sub continent’s imperial historiography in an attempt to recover the political activities of subordinated groups. The leading anthropological voice was that of Bernard Cohn, whose studies of power relations in colonial India stimulated the anthropology of politics into further rethinking imperialism, *nationalism, peasant insurgency, class and *gender. The invention of tradition became a resonant theme as did the imposition of colonial rule and the transformation of the political economy. Historical explanations began to replace those of the sociologist and economist in the new anthropology of politics.
The relative salience of global and local politics divided political economy from interpretive theory. The former was characterized as Euro-centric, the latter as apolitical; practitioners of both denied these charges. Eric Wolfs Europe and the People without History (1982) became the key text of global, historical political economy; †Geertz’s Local Knowledge (1983) asserted the interpretive paradigm with a particularly strong (and long) chapter on fact and law in comparative perspective. An attempt was made to reintroduce practice theory but a trend towards history in both camps rendered this reversion to social science methodology a non-starter.
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