JONATHAN SPENCER

If we look at the Indian context, Political Anthropology is more relevant than Political
Sociology, hence the work of Jonathan Spencer is worth mentioning. He gives us an insight
into political anthropology’s highs and lows, and its eventual decline because of the limited
attention it gave to politics. His article on post colonialism considers the rise and fall of political
anthropology in the context of the global shift from colonial to post-colonial rule. Classical
political anthropology peaked in the 1960s and has remained obstinately out of fashion ever
since, not least because of the narrow, a cultural view of politics associated with it. Neither
recent anthropological interest in power, nor more broad theoretical attention to the issue of post-
colonialism, seem to have helped bring the phenomenon of post-colonial politics into clearer
theoretical light. Taking its cue from Malinowski's late interest in questions of transculturation,
the article argues for the gains of a radically empirical approach to post-colonial politics, an
approach which would acknowledge the diversity of post-colonial experience and the
unpredictable contours of what different people take politics to be. The article uses recent
anthropological examples from South Asia, concentrating on issues of democracy and
representation, to illustrate what such an approach might look like. This article considers the rise
and fall of political anthropology in the context of the global shift from colonial to post-colonial
rule. Classical political anthropology peaked in the 1960s and has remained obstinately out of
fashion ever since, not least because of the narrow, a cultural view of politics associated with it.
Neither recent anthropological interest in power, nor more broad theoretical attention to the issue
of post-colonialism, seem to have helped bring the phenomenon of post-colonial politics into
clearer theoretical light. Taking its cue from Malinowski's late interest in questions of
transculturation, the article argues for the gains of a radically empirical approach to post-colonial
politics, an approach which would acknowledge the diversity of post-colonial experience and the
unpredictable contours of what different people take politics to be. The article uses recent
anthropological examples from South Asia, concentrating on issues of democracy and
representation, to illustrate what such an approach might look like. One part of his argument
concerns the way in which the political structure of the colonial rule shaped the social
imagination of both colonizer and colonized, leaving behind a vocabulary of social types and
political possibilities, which continues to haunt us 30/40/50 years later. What was left behind
after the flags were lowered and the new leaders sworn in was not just a lingering nostalgia for
the Royal family or a passionate commitment to the 19th century British team sports, all are
features of the post-colonial landscape. What was left behind were a set of institutions – police,
courts, legal codes, schools, clinics, a civil service usually accompanied by a basic political
vocabulary founded on a number of linked ideas: these include the legitimacy of the post-
colonial nation state as an ideal framework for political life, a legitimacy usually justified by
some appeal to the virtues of representative democracy, thus involving the sovereignty of some
collective entity known as ‘the people’, whose political will is properly expressed by its chosen
representatives. He was primarily interested in cultural implications of democracy, in south Asia.

Old anthropology had its apprehension with the political for various reasons; one was that the
political was understood as opposed to culture. Political philosophers also argued that different
traditions or cultures will have different senses of what might be construed as political.
Traditional political sociology stresses on Absolute separation between political and the cultural
and on observation rather than interpretation, behavior rather than values. In the 1960s, political
philosopher like Charles Taylor launched an attack on this kind of political science. They
exposed the incoherence of the separation of political facts from political values, of political
behavior from its interpretation, emphasizing the embeddedness of all observers in particular
political traditions and arguing that difference traditions or cultures will have difference senses of
what might be construed as political. In Britain too, in the 1970s, the richness and complexity of
actually existing politics had been reduced by anthropologists to the micro-study of instrumental
behavior, as the discipline divided between what Cohen called the ‘action theorists’ and the
‘thought structuralists’. However, some anthropologists were an exception like Clifford Geertz
who took note of the cultural implications of nationalism, decolonization and ‘transcultural’ mass
politics. On one hand, Geertz was unusual in acknowledging the cultural implication of
decolonization, the new states were going through a period of ‘disorientation’, searching for a
new symbolic framework in terms of which to formulate, think about and react to political
problems. Or in his later essays, he refers to the transition from colonial to post-colonial as a
‘sort of social changing of the mind’ or ‘conceptual dislocation’ affecting the most familiar
frames of moral and intellectual perception. The integrative revolution, Geertz analyses the
politics of the post-colonial world in terms of two opposing forces: the pull of ‘primordial
attachments’ versus the virtue of ‘civil sentiments’ – on the one side the imperatives of blood and
belonging, ethnicity, language and race and on the other the sanitized attractions of a modern
state. ‘Civil’ is essentially defined as the absence of the primordial; as societies become properly
modern, ‘to an increasing degree national unity is maintained not by calls to blood and land but
by vague, intermittent and routine allegiance to a civil state. Anthropologists have turned their
attention to the politics of the post-colonial world; they have continued to work within this
framework, concentrating above all on the peculiarities of what is presented as primordial. Post
1960s and 1970s, with the emergence of Marxist, symbolic anthropology, feminist anthropology
and post-modernism. Between them, they have contributed a much more sophisticated approach
to culture and cultural difference and a heightened awareness of the quotidian workings of
power. The notion of politics needs to be reworked along the two axis of horizontal and vertical.
The horizontal implies the uncertainty as politics seeps through areas of life where theoretically
it has no proper place and vertical uncertainty induced by the cultural elasticity of the notion of
‘representation’ which is central to the modern political projects. Spencer moves forward with a
case study about Sri Lankan politics, which shows how politics and culture are related and how
politics is present in everyday life. He observed the election process in a village in Sri Lanka.
The winning side contented themselves with dancing in the street and parading around the
village. He observed that in this village everyone was involved and seemed to share a fascination
with politics. The political permeated the texture of everyday life. The domain of the political in
this place expanded into areas of life: a case of spirit possession, dispute about buffaloes and
marital breakup and these all were explained as the routine product of what people called
politics. The main point being that mass politics, which was never focused on before in the
discipline, presented people with a new possibility, the creation of a bounded and structured
social arena where people could work through local tensions and differences, while seeking the
good things and social standing that follow from access to the state. By this example, Spencer

Implies the importance of tracking the political, from mass rallies to village arguments and in
some cases into houses and families, through the particularity of every day practice.

Spencer’s work also covers the concept of representation. He talks about how people and the
masses are represented in different societies and political systems, giving weight to
representation as an important part of the discipline. Spencer first talks about the study of
Richard Burghart in Nepal, where kings have clung on despite constant pressure from the
outside. His idea of the nation-state is a coherent, bounded entity whose sovereignty could be
represented as the will of the entity called “the people''. The king was forced to incorporate the
people as part of the body politic, where the sovereign represented the public domain. However,
sometime later, political parties also came into the public picture. Bernard Cohn’s work also
mentions a similar situation, where the officials had to decide about the nature of colonial rule
between Feudal model, where the intermediary between the Queen and Indian subjects would be
a member of native aristocracy or Representative model, where society could be subdivided into
communities with a collective interest, which would be brought to the attention of the
government by a representative. Cohn’s actual focus was on the link between the representative
and those who are represented. Raymond Williams too elaborated on the topic of representation
and said that the link between representative and represented maybe of two kinds. One is Link of
Common Substance where fathers and kings may think of themselves as embodying those they
are said. To represent. Second is a Contractual link where the representative is only temporarily
mandated to put forward the views of those he/she represents. The idea of representation has also
been connected to other areas of popular culture and representation – movies and their heroes
and villains, which can be seen from the example of MG Ramachandran, a Tamil actor, turned
politician, who used the institutional structure of his fan clubs as a political base.

Spencer’s whole discussion is to shed light on the importance of politics and political structures,
both during and after colonialism. He feels that the writers should connect post cultural
approaches to power with issues of mass politics. He argues for a kind of anthropology that
would dissolve the certainties of some kinds of modern social inquiry in the unexpectedness of
actually existing politics. Ethnographers will have travel on foot, replying on the natives for
directions.