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Politics Past, Politics Present Some notes on the uses of anthropology in understanding the new states

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Clifford Geertz
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Extract

In recent years, the main meeting ground of the various branches of learning which in some uncertain way make up the social sciences has been the study of the so-called Third World: the forming nations and tottering states of Asia, Africa and Latin America. In this enigmatical setting, anthropology, sociology, political science, history, economics, psychology, as well as that oldest of our disciplines, soothsaying, have found themselves in the unfamiliar position of dealing severally with essentially the same body of data.

Type
Research Article
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , May 1967 , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1967

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References

(1) Sutton, F. X., Representation and the Nature of Political Systems, Comparative Studies in Society and History, II (1959), 1–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

(2) Wittfogel, K., Oriental Despotism (New Haven 1957).Google Scholar

(3) For a representative example of this line of thought, see Southall, A., Alur Society (Cambridge 1954).Google Scholar

(4) Coulburn, R., ed., Feudalism in History (Princeton 1956)Google Scholar, presents a useful review of such studies. For M. Bloch, see his Feudal Society (Chicago 1961).Google Scholar

(5) Eisenstadt, S. M., The Political Systems of Empires (New York 1963)Google Scholar; Polanyi, K., Arensberg, C., and Pearson, H., eds., Trade and Markets in Early Empires (Glencoe 1957).Google Scholar

(6) For a survey and examination of such work, see Braidwood, R. and Willey, G., Courses toward Urban Life (New York 1962)Google Scholar. See also, Adams, R. M., The Evolution of Urban Society (New York/Chicago 1966).Google Scholar

(7) Heine-Geldern, R., Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia, Far Eastern Quarterly, II (1942), 15–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

(8) Swellengrebel, J. L., “Introduction” in Swellengrebel, J. L. et al. , Bali: Life, Thought and Ritual (The Hague/Bandung 1960).Google Scholar

(9) Korn, V. E., Het Adatrecht van Bali2 (s'Gravenhage 1932), p. 440.Google Scholar

(10) On the Shilluk, Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan (Oxford 1948)Google Scholar. The Maya discussion is more scattered and still developing, but for a recent summary, see Willey, G., “Mesoamerica”Google Scholarin Braidwood, and Willey, , op. cit. pp. 84–101.Google Scholar

(11) I have developped this conception of ideology further and gone into the Indonesian case more generally in “Ideology as a Cultural System” in Apter, D., ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York 1960), pp. 47–76.Google Scholar

* This paper, a synopsis of one part of a work in progress on the traditional tate in Indonesia, was delivered at the Sociology and Anthropology section of the Sixth World Congress of Sociology, held at Évian, September, 1966.