Festschrift for Jonathan Spencer

Lucia Micheleutti

What has changed in political anthropology since Jonathan Spencer’s (1997) call for a “radically empirical approach to post-colonial politics”? What has been new and exciting? What were the paths not taken? And what are the possible futures?

In hindsight, my contribution primarily addresses the second question: “What were the paths not taken?” Over the past two decades, one of the most noteworthy developments has been the significant growth of “political ethnography.” This approach has not only gained traction within the field of anthropology but has also expanded its influence into disciplines such as political science, geography, social policy, social psychology, and criminology. However, it’s worth noting that this surge in “political ethnography” hasn’t been mirrored by a corresponding rise in political anthropology. I suggest a title for this brief commentary: “Plenty of Political Ethnography but Little Political Anthropology.”

Let me explain. When Jonathan Spencer delivered the now-famous Malinowski Lecture titled “Post-Colonialism and the Political Imagination,” I was in North India, engrossed in my first fieldwork as a part of my PhD. During this time, I conducted a comprehensive ethnographic study of a pastoral-peasant caste, known as the Yadavs. I delved into various aspects of their everyday lives, including kinship and gender practices, notions of personhood, popular religious beliefs, everyday economic activities, and issues related to power dynamics.

By the end of the 1990s, the Yadavs had transformed into one of the most assertive and politically influential caste groups in contemporary India. My research showed that at the heart of this community lay a distinct folk theory of divine kinship which is also the basis of a distinctive folk understanding of democracy. According to this theory, all Indian pastoral castes traced their lineage back to the Yadu dynasty, to which the god Krishna, a cowherder, prince, and warrior, belonged. This unifying myth of Krishna not only explained the origins of the entire Yadav community but also mitigated hierarchical and cultural differences within the caste. Furthermore, Yadav political discourse portrayed Krishna as a democratic-socialist leader and as the “first” advocate for social justice. “We are a caste of politicians” and “politics is in our blood,” Yadavs kept on telling me.

Upon my return from fieldwork, I grappled with the challenge of interpreting some of this material.  I shared my work in progress with my fellow peers during our weekly PhD writing up seminars. The response was largely positive when I presented aspects related to kinship, popular religion, and class and gender dynamics within the community. However, when I ventured into the territory of politics and democracy, I faced a more critical response. Some attendees questioned the anthropological relevance of studying elections and democracy: “Don’t we already know what democracy is?” Troubled, I remember seeking guidance from my supervisor, who suggested I read Jonathan Spencer’s (1997) article.

I vividly recall reading it. My mind literally popped!  In the paper Spencer argues that the modern institutions of government in post-colonial countries have been understudied due to their presumed “transparency” and foreign origin (1997, 14). Accordingly, since “democracy” originates in the West, its interpretation in post-colonial states has been considered essentially like those in the West and hence anthropologically irrelevant and intellectually unchallenging (13).  Yet, the most captivating aspect of the essay, both then and now, is its insightful discussion about representation and people’s sovereignty. This intersection, as the article highlights, is where culture plays a pivotal and central role for the development of an anthropology of democracy.

Today, contemporary political power and legitimacy are predominantly derived from the capacity to act on behalf of “the people.” What piques my anthropological curiosity, and aligns with Spencer’s suggestion, is the intricate construction of this fundamental element of political imagination—the concept of “the people”—and the diverse ways in which this concept and its connection to government manifest across the world.

This is one point at which culture re-enters the political stage, and it is thus a point at which other people’s politics can look the same, because they seem to share the same language of “states,” “governments” and the representation of the people. Nevertheless, they may be extraordinarily different, because there is huge scope for different ways in which to construe the idea of the “people” as well as the idea of “representation” which supposedly binds them to the government (Spencer 1997, 12).

This proposition forcefully challenged the acultural or anti-cultural vision of political anthropology that lingered among anthropologists at the time.  I will now briefly flesh out how this call has only been partially fulfilled.   Over the last two decades, as anthropologists began exploring democracy, formal political institutions, and macropolitical areas of inquiry, debates have certainly shifted from traditional themes of clan, caste, tribe, kinship, and kingship to political phenomena such as elections, populism, nationalism, citizenship, multiculturalism, and media politics. Yet I suggest that the conceptual gulf between the modern and the traditional is proving difficult to overcome. Ongoing work says generally little about how kinship, kingship, myth, sovereignties, and rituals connect and combine with modern forms of governance and their ancillary concepts (like the state, democracy, civil society, governability, authoritarianism etc.).

 I will briefly illustrate this point by sketching work conducted on caste and politics and on the anthropology of democracy in India.[1] In contemporary political ethnographies, caste remains still largely studied as an electoral cleavage and an instrument of mobilization. Very rarely “caste sovereignty” and how different castes do politics and think about politics—beyond and within the state—are objects of study. Often it has been left out how caste, kinship, and ideas of personhood shape how people rule and view the link between themselves and their leaders.  However, research informants keep on referring to blood metaphors, kinship, and notions of embodiment to render their political strategies and decisions and their modes of governance legitimate.[2]   How do we understand claims such as “to rule is in our blood”? How do we understand “embodiment-based representation” in which the representative encompasses the represented and identifies with it (with or without electorate mandate)?

I argue that to answer this anthropological question we need to follow Spencer’s call for an anthropology of democracy and representation.  And to do that we need to know what is happening to “caste and politics” in the normative spheres of kinship, kingship, and “the person” (rather than only “the people”). We need to collect ethnographies of elections, politicians, protests, meetings, and parliaments but simultaneously we also need to know about how kinship (lineages, clans, and biradaris) connects and combines with contemporary systems of governance. We need to collect data on “caste sovereignties” as well as “individual personal sovereignties.” It is precisely by exploring “democracy” in areas which are not thought of as political per se that it is possible to bring back culture in anthropological discussions of modern politics. Yet this type of work is difficult to find. In the specific case of caste and politics, when we need information on the morphology of caste, contemporary scholars often must look at the work of colonial ethnologists or the monographs of village studies conducted in 1950s and 1960s. This lack of engagement may suggest that there is a general reluctance to engage with different cultural understandings of power and their implications, particularly when these blur the political/kin(g)ship/religious distinction in the realm of political modernity. Yet I do not think this is the case. I rather suggest that the persistence of these analytical discontinuities results from the way political anthropological research is largely conducted today.   Much of the present work on politics and the state is not grounded in earlier canons of long-term participant observation and holistic ethnography.

In the anthropology of democracy, for example, there is a focus on the production of “political ethnographies” on the technologies of democracy (like elections) or in exploring the gaps between the promises and the on-the-ground achievements of democracy. Crucially such “political ethnographies” are produced both by anthropologists and increasingly by non-anthropologists. Political ethnography has indeed become very popular outside anthropology.  Sitting in research funding committees as a reviewer, what I am witnessing is a clear pattern: political ethnography is booming in other social science. However, this ethnographic work remains often linked to prescribed political concepts such as the state, nationhood, and democracy and it tends to focus on explicit political activities.[3] Much attention is devoted to explore how caste, ethnicity, and indigeneity have become part of democratic experimentations and populist nationalisms and/or are mobilized as electoral cleavages. Less is said about how their kin(g)ship polities shape the way they govern when they gain democratic sovereignty; how processes of “vernacularisation of democracy” produce new hierarchies, inclusions, exclusions, and charismatic leaderships across the world. It is in this context that Spencer’s call for a “radically empirical approach to post-colonial politics” (and, I would add, to politics in general) is still an incredibly current and exciting research agenda to be further pursued.

Lucia Michelutti is Professor of Anthropology at University College London (UCL). She writes on issues of democracy, popular politics, authority and leadership and on crime, mafia and violence in South Asia (North India) and Latin America (Venezuela). She is the author of The Vernacularisation of Democracy (Routledge, 2008); co-author of Mafia Raj (Stanford UP, 2018); co-editor of Wild East (UCL Press, 2019) and the special issue Brigands (Terrain, 2021).  She is currently the PI of the ERC funded project ‘Anthropologies of Extortion’ (2021-2026).

Notes

[1] See Michelutti (2019) for a review of the existing literature.

[2] On blood, substance, and relationality, see Carsten (2011).

[3] It remains to be systematically studied how and why anthropologists are abandoning the holistic ethnographic canons when they study politics. Funding limitations and time constraints can certainly make it challenging to conduct long-term, immersive fieldwork, which is a hallmark of holistic ethnography. Many anthropologists now face pressure to produce results more quickly, leading to shorter-term and more focused research projects. Anthropologists also tend to engage with multiple field sites, making it logistically challenging to maintain long term engagement with a single community.

Works Cited

 Carsten, J. 2011. “Substance and Relationality: Blood in Contexts.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 19–35.

Michelutti, L. 2019. “Caste and the Anthropology of Democracy.” In Critical Themes in Indian Sociology, edited by Y. Srivastava, & J. Abraham, 195-208. Thousand Oaks, CA:  Sage.

Spencer, J. 1997. “Post-Colonialism and the Political Imagination.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3 (1): 1–19.