Stratagems And Spoils: A Social Anthropology Of Politics

271 Pages·2001·53.84 MB·English

by  F.g. Bailey

STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS
AJuoU Jo I J?. Ur. JoAijbJ&I
Caste and «Ae Economic Frontien 1957
fWde, Caste, and Nation, 1960
Folilics and Social Cfta»#j, 1965
Strategems and Spoils, 1st Ed., I960
Gi/te and Poison (ed.), 1971
Debate and Compromise (ed.), 1978
Morality and Expediency, 1977
fie Tactical Uses of Passion, 1983
Humbuggery and Manipulation, 1988
He Prevalence of Deceit, 1991
Tfte Kingdom of Individuals, 1993
Tie Witch-Bunt, 1994
fie Cwility of Indifference, 1996
TAe Need for Enemies, 1998
Treasons, Strategems, and Spoils, 2001
STRATAGEMS
AND SPOILS
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
V^vlXx l/CsXX Lo
Introduction vii
1 A Political System 1
Games, fights and politics, 1
How to play and how to win, 3
How to forecast,7
The environment, 9
Encapsulated political structures, 12
Change, 12
Conclusion, 16
2 A Political Structure 19
Introduction, 19
Prizes and values, 20
Personnel, 23
Leadership, 27
Competition, 28
Control, 30
Conclusion, 32
3 Leaders and Teams 35
Politics as an enterprise—leaders, resources, 35
Hirelings and the faithful, 37
Core and following, 44
Unspecialized groups, 49
Factions, 51
Conclusion, 55
4 The Leader's Tasks 59
Uncertainty and decisions, 59
Judicial tasks, 61
Decisions, 66
• Contents
Consent and command, 70
5 Strong and Weak Leaders 73
Formal and informal leadership, 73
Transactional groups, 75
Dividing the work, 80
Moral teams, 82
Conclusion, 83
6 Contests 86
Politics as disorder, 86
Doladoli, 88
Pakhtouns in conflict, 91
Caste-climbing, 95
Asquith and Lloyd George, 100
Conclusion, 108
7 Control 111
What can go wrong? Ill
Collusion, 121
Authorities, 132
Conclusion, 141
8 Encapsulated Political Structures 144
Encapsulation, 144
A moral crisis, 156
Middlemen, 167
Encapsulation and change, 176
Conclusion, 181
9 Change 186
Introduction, 186
Environment and limited change, 190
Eepetitive change, 193
Adaptive change, 196
Identifying radical change, 202
Manipulated change—the Kond Hills, 211
DeGaulle, Prance and Algeria, 216
10 Postscript 227
References 248
Index 251
In 1963 I watched on television in America an enquiry by a
committee of their Senate into a criminal organization called
mm nostra ('our thing' or 'our affair'), A man named Valachi,
once a member of the organization, had been persuaded to 'sing*,
and for several days a large television audience watched and
listened while he spoke in an unassuming, undramatio, friendly,
indeed almost homely fashion, about the techniques of crime,
about the contests for gang leadership, about violence and about
murder,
The 'Valachi hearings', as they were called, aroused a great
deal of local interest. Much of the crow-examination was re
ported verbatim in the newspapers, especially those parts which
enlivened local history by revealing that it was in the nearby
town that X had arranged for th© murder of Y or that one of
the leaders of co®a nostra (which the newspapers also called the
'Mala') had been a locally resident and apparently respectable
businessman. The television performances gripped their audience
because they showed a contest between Valachi and his cross-
examiners, because they were about Me-and-death struggles for
power in the criminal world, and because they revealed a degree
of organization hi that criminal world, which, although revealed
many times before, continued both to frighten and to fascinate.
The casting too, if one may put it like that, was good: particu
larly striking were Valachi*s patient and good-humoured ex
planations to one of his senatorial inquisitors who appeared to
be slow-witted. Finally there was always the chance that the
msa nostra might silence Valachi by murdering him: it might
even be seen on th© television.
At first sight it is th© history (and possibility) of violence
which fascinates in an affair ike this. But interest was in fact
sustained not by the stories of murders and massacres but by th©
viii Iin&mlwdim
revealed orderliness of the criminal world. Of course one quickly
understands that large scale rackets have to b© run on business
like principles. But beyond this, even when com nmtm leaders
fought and murdered one another to gain supremacy, they
seemed to do so in predictable ways, even, one might say,
according to the rules of their game. Certainly, leaving aside the
question of how consciously the gangsters themselves thought
in terms of right and wrong conduct within their own world,
the manoeuvres in which they engaged were capable of being
analysed. Indeed, for a tantahzingly brief moment, there ap
peared on the television screen charts which showed the process
by which one leader replaced another.
Hose charts, of which I had no more than a glimpse and have
never seen again, started this book. After looking at them for a
few seconds, and taking in the pattern of competitive interaction
which they pictured, I had the strongest of feelings that I had
seen them before. At first I thought they might have been in a
newspaper report of an earlier day's hearings; but this was not
so. Then I realized that while I had not seen those particular
charts before, I was familiar with the pattern of interaction which
they described. Not long before I had been arguing about it with
some of my colleagues and with students: it was a pattern of
contests for leadership described by a Norwegian anthropologist,
Fredrik Barth, writing about the Swat Pathans, who live near
the north-western frontier of Pakistan. The people of Swat and
the criminals of the American mm nostra arranged their violent
successions in broadly the same fashion.
So what? What does it matter to any civilized person if they
do? What conceivable benefit, intellectual or otherwise, can be
got out of knowing a fact like that? The behaviour of murderous
ruffians, whether they belong in the backward mountain vast-
nesses of Asia or in the barbarous enclaves that remain in our
civilized societies of the west, may be of use to the world of
entertainment, but it has nothing to do with the world of science
and learning. Social anthropology, it seems, picks on the exotic
and the eccentric and the deviant and the aberrant: it cannot
deal with the normal and the usual. The subject is, as one par
ticularly obtuse critic said, merely barbarology: and my implied
excitement at discovering the Pathans behaved like the cma
nostra gangsters would have confirmed him in this view.
Introduction ix
But that view is wrong. It is wrong in point of fact because
we anthropologists are interested also—indeed, many of-us
primarily—in our own 'civilized* society. The reader will ind
that the tram of thought started by the Valaehi hearing and the
Swat Pathans led m© also to thinking of villages where I had
lived in India, to my colleagues* descriptions of life in rural
Britain and rural America, to Harold Nieolson fighting an
election in pre-war Britain, to the manoeuvrings of Asquith and
Lloyd George in the autumn of 1018, to General de Gaulle and
the colons of Algeria, and—constantly—to what goes on around
me hi the university. It is true that I am deeply interested in
the behaviour of 'exotic' peoples like the Indian villagers among
whom I lived (in faet they Ive hard-headed and relatively
humdrum lives): but this is because by understanding what they
do and what they think and why they think that way, I can
better understand what goes on in all societies, our own in
cluded. In this book the ideas tend to arise out of 'anthropolo
gists* societies' (Indian villagers or the wild Pathans), because
it is on those societies that I have cut my analytic teeth: but I
will have failed if the reader remains unconvinced that just the
same patterns of political competition can be perceived alike in
the behaviour of Valaehi*s associates, Indian villagers, univer
sity committee-men, General de Gaulle, and that most civilized
of men Herbert Henry, Lord Oxford and Asquith. Beneath the
contextual variations and cultural differences, political behavi
our reveals structural regularities.
The view that exotic societies are somehow unfitted for
serious study is not only disproved by the fact that anthro
pologists do study them and with profit: it is also a distasteful
view—even an evil view. To believe this is to believe that your
own culture and your own society—people like you-—are cer
tainly superior to other kinds of people if not unique. Unhappily
every society makes these kinds of discriminations, ranging
from full members alowed to bear responsibility and to com
mand the corresponding privileges down to categories of people
who are defined as scarcely human at all. It is not easy to extri
cate oneself from this assumption. It comes so readily to judge
as good and bad, sensible and ridiculous, admirable and con-
temptible the customs and values of our society as against the
customs of another society. But the truth is that one wmat first