hsl actor oriented theory libre

8/12/2019 HSL Actor Oriented Theory Libre

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Herbert S. Lewisl ni\vr\ii\- of Wisconsin

A New Look at Actor-Oriented TheoryIn 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 newapproach which seemed fresh, promising, and had a connection with other major theoreticaldevelopm ents in the field. This "new political anth rop olo gy ," in contrast to either Britishstructural-functionalist approaches or to American neo-evolutionary ones, began with a newconception of the nature of politics and accorded a particular role to actors, motivatedplayers in the "ga m e of politics " (Ba iley). Its practition ers argued against reified andessentialized conceptions of "social structure," "socie ty," and "c ultu re."After just a few years of activity, this general approach was overtaken by events in the widerworld, by Vietnam and the Sixties in the U.S , and by "19 6 8" in Franc e. The anthropologicalstudy of politics then became dominated by several forms of Marxist anthropology,including those stressing political econom y, depend ency and wo rld systems theory. Ondifferent fronts, the new "actor-oriented" approach lost out to symbolic anthropology,interpretive anthropology, structuralism, and still later, to post-structuralism, post-modernism, critical theory, and the anti-positivist and anti-Enlightenm ent "tu rn."Today it is the later approaches that are increasingly b eing qu estioned and studen ts, who willbe the next generation of anthropologists and social theorists, are looking for somethingmore 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 canchoose, 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, andOrtner, but 1 want to suggest that there was an interesting and useful literature producedthirty years ago that could contribute to a revitalized approach to some of the majorproblems of anthrop ology and social theory. There may be an interesting confluence at themoment between growing interests and sentiment in the field, and an almost forgotten bit ofthe not-so-distant past.In the remainder of the paper I shall outline some of the main points about the actor-orientedpolitical anthropology of the 1960s and suggest why attention to some of the ideas of thatperiod may be of use as we emerge from the current "moment."


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The Rebellion Against "Structure" HIU Ueificyfion'111 rough Uie 1950s American anthropoloiiisis were no; no led lor their concern with thinpolitical, except for those liedlo then ee-evolutionism and modified Marxism of such writeras Morton Fried, Kric Wolf, Elman Service and Marshall Sahlins. At that time the selconscious and dominant tradition in the anthropological study of political systems was British onewhich hadgrownout of the ideasof Radcliffe-Brown and his students, mostowhom had carried out research on African political systems. (See Fortes and EvansPritchard [1940],and the collections edited by John Middleton and David Tait [1958],anMax Gluckm an [1965 ].) Indeed, from 1940 to 1965 or so, the model derived fromRadcliffe-Brown, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard was what largely comprised "politicaanthropology."But how heavily were either of these schools really engaged with things "political"? ThAmerican neo-evolutionists were dealing in typologies and conjectured evolutionartrajectories that did not readily translate into ethnographically specific work or producmuch field research. Their interest inpoliticswaslimited topolitical economy(cf Lewis&Greenfield 1983). The British anthropologists of the Radcliffe-Brownian persuasioconstructed taxonomiesandtypologies inorderto doscience. Aboveall, they concentrateon the (Durkheimian) problem of order, which meant writing in terms of political stabilityhomeostasis,and thepositive functions ofpolitical structuresand institutions.These political anthropologists hadtheir critics. They were accused ofignoringthepoliticarealities around themas the people they studied became members, leaders,or victimsof thnewly independent states. Butalthough it is true that great political changes were goingoin Africa from the early 1950s, it is overly simple to credit thestruggles for liberationanthe coming of independence for bringing about the "revolution" in political anthropologythere were other theoretical and intellectual roots.In British anthropology, the neglected Malinowskian model beganto be reasserted bysucformer students as Firth, Richards, Kaberry, Mair, Schapera, and, for a while, LeachWhereas the dom inant Radcliffe-Brown ian/Durkheimian paradigm so strongly stressesocial conformity through jural rules and moral codes, the worlds of Malinowski and hstudents were full of intelligent, motivated, rule-evading, norm-breaking, obligationavoiding individuals, asself-seeking and asself-interested as any Christian" (Malinowsk1926).Inhiswritings beginning in 1940, Leach introduced theelement of the individual's reactionand he assumed that men wouldact in waysto increase their pow er. Fredrik B arthwas thmost explicitly political when he portrayed the observed pattern of leadership and powe


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Page 51among 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 engagein 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"econom ic m an," assum ing that individuals, in general, act to max imize their self-interest inpolitical situations, and that there are among people "the political equivalent of theentrepreneurs...some individuals who are out to maximize their political utility, and whoknow how to set abou t doing it." Bailey took this them e much further w hen he pu blishedStratagems 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 o f Alan H oward andRoger Keesing on decision m odels. This approach em phasized the choices and actions ofindividuals that result in the outcomes we call cultural patterns or social structure, but itrecognized 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, andassociated with W. Lloyd Warner, G.C. Homans, E. Cha ppie, C M . Aren sberg, and W .F.Whyte. It was also at about this time (ca. 1958) that Max W eber's works on politics,economy, and society began to be cited in anthropology. As Bendix (1984:19) n otes, "In allofhis work, Weber was concerned with the chances of individualism and rational choice in aworld of power struggles, bureaucratic organization and capitalist enterprises which militatesagainst these ch ance s."In 1966, Marc Swartz joined together with Victor Turner and Arthur Tuden to organize andwrite the introduction toPolitical Anthropology, another work that brought goal-seeking anddecision-making to the heart of political anthropology, rejected the myth of "social systems"enforcing compliance among individuals, and directed attention away from abstract totalsystems to the arenas and fields in which politics are carried out.Along with these developments there was a renewed concern with the application of theeconomists' model of "scarcity and choice" to economic life, resulting in a series of articlesquestioning the substantivist school of economic anthropolog y. Articles by Robb ins Bu rlingand Frank Cancian broimht a new level of sophistication to the idea of all humane 'engaged in some degree of maxim izing (or "satisficing") behavior. Th is, in turn, tit with a


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Page 52new approach to exchange (Befu 1977) in social life, fueling a concern with hum ans asmotivated 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 andpolitical behavior of individuals and the groups they form. This was a brief period in whichanthropologists developed a substantial number of new ideas in several areas of concernleade rship , netw orks , patron-client relations, factions, etc. (Vincent 1978). All of these newapproaches dispensed with reified, essentialized, and bounded social and cultural "systems."Action theory, network theory and process theory all built on the interests and motives ofindividual actors.If some works slighted the context ("structure"), this was not a necessary feature of theapproa ch. 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'spoint of view" and as well with "the relationship between codification and praxis, or howforms of understanding arise from experience, and reciprocally how behaviour andexperience are predicated by collective representations" (198 1:12 ; italics mine). It was apioneering anthropological work dealing with the inter-relations of what today is often called"structu re and agenc y." He was dealing with what G.C. Hom ans called "the central problemof the social scienc es...: [h]ow...the behavior of individuals createfs] the characteristics ofgro up s?" (Keesing 1974:91). Reciprocally, how do those understanding s, meanings,principles, rules (culture) guide that behavior?The React ion to the ChangeAs 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 putclass at the center of his analysis of the Pathans w ere cardinal sin s. In the words of JoanVincent (1990:360), Asad's reevaluation "marked the decline of action theory in its severalgu ises." This was probab ly due less to the inherent qualities of his critique than to the factthat an era of Marxist anthropo logy was about to begin (Ferry and Renaut 1990). Even asshe presented her review of political anthropology, Joan Vincent foreshadowed a course thatwould m ove political anthropo logy back into its previous reifications. She concluded herreview emphasizing that, "Political situations and encounters that have long characterizedthis [newer] approach within political anthropology are now meshed with a concern withemergent 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 someanthropologists 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.


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Page 53now, in the 1990s, som ething new seem s to be hap pen ing. The search has begun for

to understand the changing world around us. Toda y peop le all over the world areincreasingly "acting up" and confounding the planners, controllers, predicters. handlers

and to draw upon the ideas, meanings, understandings.patterns that some may still call "cu lture." Perhaps this is one reason for the grow inginterest 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 p ractice as well asstructure.The Problem with Practice Theory as PracticedSherry Ortner proclaimed or predicted the direction of theory in 1984 when she titled asection of her influential paper: "Into the Eigh ties: Prac tice." She tells us that "the re hasbeen growing interest in analysis focused through one or another of a bundle of interrelatedterms: practice, praxis, action, interaction, activity, experien ce, performance. A second, andclosely related bun dle of terms focuses on the doer of all that doing : age nt, actor, person ,self,individual, subjec t." (144) But in her presentation of this new app roach Ortner n eglectsthe developments have outlined above.It is my belief that Leach, Barth and Bailey and others are not considered importantforerunners because their theories in fact gave too much scope to the actors at least in theestimation of current practice theorists. Practice theo ry, as represented by Ortner, Bo urdieu ,and Giddens, retains a heavy burden of the reifications of Marx and Durkheim, avoidsculture 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 structureis supposed to ove rcom e. In Bourdieu's habitus, schemas and resources so powerfullyreproduce one another that even the most cunning or improvisational actions undertaken byagents necessarily reproduce the structure." (15) Gidd ens' complex and voluminou s co rpuslacks what many anthropologists consider, in one way or another, so vital culture: thoseshared meanings and understandings, the principles, recipes, ideas, and values that guidehuman behavior, that give us the basis for perceiving, predicting, judging, and acting(Goodenough 1963). And Ortner, I believe, seriously limits the usefulness of her approa chwhen she tells us, "T he em phasis on the centrality of asymm etry or domination is one of theprimary 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

neutral relations is not 'practice."'


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Page >1ConclusionTo deal with the wide open world we inhabit, we must be more aware of the variations, thindividuality, the inventiveness, the imitntiveness, the motivations and the perceptions oindividuals. The realities are confoun ding the verities of the essen tialists, typo logists ansys tem s-bu ilders . And yet it is not all just total random ness and anarchy either. If we loowe can see tendencies, processes, probabilities, patterns, within a world of variation ancha nce . To understand this , there is reason to attend toboth the shared meanings and idea("culture " or "structure") and the motives, skills, perceptions, passions, etc. of individuals. suggest there has been an interesting but neglected approach, within the field oanthropology, that deals with "structure," and "agency," and offers another angle oapproach to action and process for those who are looking for new solutions in the 1990s.

Note1. Obv iously this very brief and selective overview , tailored to the needs of my argument, is in no way aattempt at a com prehens ive picture of the history of "anthropology and p olitics." Joan Vincent's massive anlearned work by that title is the place to look for that (1990).

ReferencesAsad, Talal1972 "M arket Model, Class Structure and Consen t: A Reconsideration of Swat Political Organization

Man 7:74-94.Bailey, F.G.1969 Stratagems and Spoils New York: .Schoclcen Boo ks.Barth, Frcdrik1959 Political Leadership Among Swat Puthans. London: Athlone.1966 "Mod els of Social Organ ization," Royal Anthropological Institute (Occasional Paper No. 23).1981 l"M od els ' R econsidered," in Process and Form in Social Life: Selected Essays of Fredrik Barth, VoI. Lond on: Kegan Paul.Befu, Harumi1977 "Social Exchan ge."Annual Review of Anthropology 6.255-81Rcndix. ReinhardI'JN'-l "P rol ivi ie What M.i\ Weber Mc.ius to M e'' " in \fu\ H'chi-r's Political Sociology, R.M GlassrnanV M urvar. cds. Woslport.C1 Greenw ood l'rcs>B;>:mlicii. l'tcrrc1''77 (hithncofa'/hei'ivofPrat-ticf ("ambru.V.i.- Canirridt:c Un iversit) I'rcs s.


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Page 55Burling, Robbins1962 Maximization Theories and the Study of Economic Anthropology, American Anthropologist64:802-821.Cancian, Frank1966 Maximization as Norm, Strategy, and Theory: A Comm ent on Programmatic Statements in Econom icAnthropology, American Anthropologist68: 465-70.Epstein, A .L.

1992 Scenes from African Urban Life: Collected Copperbelt Papers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress.Ferry, Luc & Alain Rcnaut1990 French Philosophy of the Sixties. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.Firth, Raymond1964 Essayson Social Organization and Values. London: Athlone.Fortes, Meyer & E.E. Evans-Pritchard1940 African Political Systems. London: Oxford University Press.Fox, Richard G.1985 Lions of the Punjab: Culture in theMaking Berkeley: University o f California Press.Giddens, Anthony1976 New Rules of SociologicalMethod London: Hutchinson.1979 Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley& Los Angeles: University of California Press.Gluckman, Max1965 Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society. Chicago: Aldine.Goodenough, Ward1956 "Residential Rules," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 12: 22-37.1963 Cooperation in Change. New York: Russell Sage.Keesing, Roger M.1967 Statistical and Decision Models of Social Structure: A Kw aio Case. Ethnology6: -16.1974 Theories of Culture, Annual Review of Anthropology3:73-97.Lasswell, Harold1936 Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Leach, E.R.1940 Social and Economic Organization ofth Rowanduz Kurds, Monographs on Social Anthropology No3 London School of Econ omics. London: Lund, Humphries.1954 Political Systems of Highland urma(2nd ed., 1965). Boston: Beacon.1961 PulEliya: A Village in Ceylon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Lewis, Herbert S.1974 Leaders and Followers: Som e Anthropological Perspectives, Addison-Wesley Module inAnthropology No. 50.Lewis, Herbert S. & Sidney M. Greenfield1983 Anthropology and the Revolution of the State. A Critical Review and an Alternate Formulation,Anthropology 7:1-16.Malinowski, Bronislaw1926 Crime andCustomin Savage Society. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner.Middleton, John & David Tait1958 Tribes Without Rulers: Studies in African Segmentary Systems. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Murdock, George Peter1972 "Anthropology's Mytho logy," Procee dings of the Roya l Anthro pological Institute of Grea t Britainand Ireland or 1971. LondonOriricr. Sherry1984 Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties, Comp arative S tudies in Society andHistory 26 126-66


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Page 56Roscoe, Paul1993 "Pra ctice and Political Cen tralizatio n: A New Approach to Political Evo lution,"Current Anthropolog34:111-140.Scwcll W illiam H. Jr.1992 "A Theory of Structu re: Duality, Age ncy, and Transform ation," American Journal of Sociology 98:29.Swartz, Marc J., Victor W. Turner & Arthur Tuden1966 Political Anthrop ology. Chicago: Aldine.1993 "Un war ranted A ssum ptio ns, Restricted Analy sis, and the Need for an Inclusive View of Polit icsPoLAR 16:59-64.Vincent, Joan1978 "Political Anthropo logy: Manipulative Strategies,"Annual Review of Anthropology 7: 175-94.1990 Anthropology and Politics: Visions, Traditions, and Trends. Tucso n: University of Arizona Press.

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