Politics is an old topic for anthropology—older than anthropology by far, and hardwired into its very motives and methods. But it is also new. Throughout its history, the modernization of anthropology has periodically been advanced by anthropologists' insights implicitly keyed to democratic movements, responding either directly to crisis or indirectly in the form of theoretical and methodological innovations that only retrospectively periodize paradigmatic change in the discipline around transformative events beyond it. Cultural relativity, historical particularism, structural functionalism, interpretivism, and postmodernism—not to speak of the commitment to field-based ethnography itself—are examples of anthropologists' efforts over time to provide an account of difference that is ethically and politically sustainable in democratic terms. Political anthropology itself, as a subfield, emerged from such efforts; Gledhill (2000) and Vincent (1978, 1990, 2002) provide magisterial syntheses of its postcolonial development in British and US anthropology, as well as its longer and wider historical roots in the discipline. In retrospect, some theoretical horizons at the juncture of ethnography and politics (both of these conceived globally) were so generally transformative that their specific association with world events is now difficult to retrieve. For example, interpretivism emerged directly from the knowledge demands of the Cold War, in the effort to incorporate perspectives from its hotly contested margins (Geertz 1973). And, as the Cold War waned, anthropology's engagement with postmodernism (and the intensity of those debates) may be understood at least in part as a broad response to new forms of liberalism on a global scale (Greenhouse 2012).

Anthropology's formation as a modern discipline in the early twentieth century, on both sides of the Atlantic, was profoundly shaped by its dialogues with philosophical pragmatism (e.g., Dewey [1927] 1954). Today, anthropology continues to show strong traces of that history, with its deeply inscribed methodological emphasis on location as place, individual agency, voice, collective mobilization, organic forms of cooperation across diverse interests and values, culture as resistance, and politics as involving a negotiation of liberty. Significant theoretical and comparative challenges (and, indeed, political challenges) facing the anthropology of politics today would seem to call for a reflexive analysis of the democratic premises in these methodological tenets—since democratic aspiration is neither monolithic nor universal in form and substance.

This entry does not attempt a history of political anthropology or an overview of the field at large (since the former would be too long and the latter is accounted for in the encyclopedia as a whole). Rather, this entry is a preliminary reflexive account, tapping the generative vitality of this part of the discipline and emphasizing the connections between its productivity and its contradictory location—at once the core of the discipline (basic to anthropological notions of society) and its limiting margin (where the commitment to science draws, or is drawn to, commitments of other kinds). This contradiction is unresolved in the discipline at large, and, it is to be hoped, unresolvable. Ethnography is the discipline's strongest and most enduring bond and also the source of its deepest divisions. That this should be the case is evidence of anthropology's exposure to stakes beyond the discipline—and inevitably, perhaps, the politicization of the discipline itself as “culture” has everywhere become a term with political implications. To contemplate the anthropology of politics in global terms is to grasp immediately the intellectual urgency of multilateral exchange among scholarly communities around the world and the impossibility of a singular narrative of the field's genealogy, scope, and aims. Such are the imbrications of circumstance, experience, and insight that brought the modern discipline into being and that continue to be its sustaining sources of renewal. The anthropology of politics troubles generalization for reasons of principle as well as fact—that is, in the political troubles that pervasively defy the very notion of a unified field.

All anthropological approaches to politics share a basis in ethnography and have in common a focus on politics as a social process deeply entwined with everyday life. Some more than others situate those localized accounts in the context of translocal politics—in other words, politics associated with various modalities of transnationalism, advanced capitalism, and the state (among other connective contexts)—or, indeed, as translocal politics. Today, politics has at least a dual profile in anthropological scholarship. In general, anthropologists use the term “politics” as a rubric for the power differentials implicit in all social relationships, along with their symbolic and material expression and social effects. Anthropologists also use the term “politics” to refer to the particular locations, means, and ends of contestation over the form and distribution of authority and accountability. The latter is arguably the older usage, as the discovery (so to speak) of politics as a dimension of social structure was integral to anthropologists' realizations as to the relevance of history, time, and contestation to all communities and institutions—not just the institutions of the West, or urban centers. Anthropologists' attention to coercion, manipulation, controlling access to resources, and other forms of direct domination yielded rich ethnographic accounts of indirect forms of power—for example, as formulated and encoded in social classification, speech, embodiment, and protocols of reciprocity.

Politics and the Remaking of Anthropology

The anthropology of politics acquired its modern form in the context of the great renovation of anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s, integral to the discipline's dismantling of the idea of primordial “primitive” cultures. In this respect among others, in formerly colonized and colonizing countries, diversely caught in rip tides where transnational, national, and local political movements drove strong crosscurrents, anthropologists took stock of inherited canons and found them wanting in relation to the immediacy of events: movements for independence and nationhood, civil rights and equality, and social security and welfare. Anthropology's self-definition as the study of “primitive societies” has been passé for generations, but it has been slower to change outside the discipline and among the general public (since commonplace usages, in some contexts, yielded euphemisms—e.g., remote cultures, traditional societies, non-Western societies—without otherwise challenging the old category). Within anthropology, the critique of primordialism had sweeping and profound effects in every sector of the discipline.

The restructuring of anthropology was not all of one piece, nor was its impetus entirely contained within the discipline. The Cold War and postcolonial developments were integral to the discipline's shift from its former concerns with governability (e.g., modes of organization and social control) to self-government (e.g., norms, strategies, and authority). Ethnographies detailed local scenarios situated in new contexts of national and international projects of nation building and new forms of international investment in the form of “development” schemes in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The scale and programmatic character of such liberal schema subsequently became critical targets and ready foils for the nuanced specificity of ethnography. But, for anthropologists, the problems with such programs were not just methodological criticisms (such as those between generalizations and specifics); they were more fundamentally a critical engagement with the internationalist aspirations of Euro-American liberalism. Prominent among examples from opposite ends of this era (early and late) would be Clifford Geertz's ethnographic research in Indonesia, as Geertz (e.g., 1973) made explicit the stakes in misreading local political textures, and James Ferguson's (1994) analysis of US development discourse as an “antipolitics machine” in Lesotho.

Theoretical benchmarks in the anthropology of politics reflect the discipline's twentieth- and twenty-first-century historical contexts: wars and resulting displacements, the rise and fall of colonialism, the Cold War and the “war on terrorism,” the globalization of neoliberalism and its alterities, struggles over recognition and the critique of recognition politics, and the end of apartheid in South Africa, as well as the combined intellectual challenges of the collapse of state socialism in Africa, Europe, and the former Soviet Union (see Paley 2002). A new politics of representation was nourished by postcolonial and subaltern studies (Spencer 2007, 3); new attention to globalization and transnationalism followed migrations and new media of communication (see Appadurai 1996). New claims to autonomy and sovereignty proliferated, often in ethnonationalist terms. Anthropologists' studies of these processes concentrated on historical processes of ethnogenesis and minoritization, contributing important new formulations of coloniality, consciousness, hegemony, and agency (Comaroff 1985 and Comaroff and Comaroff 1991 are leading examples). The anthropology of politics has been further engaged by the diverse horizons of structural adjustment, policies of neoliberalization and austerity, international security regimes, and migration (including detention and deportation)—transnational issues explored from the standpoint of localized social effects. Indeed, anthropologists' political ethnographies tend to focus on local situations, where various aspects of globalization (e.g., of capitalism and security) can be seen to turn on microrelations. Overall, ethnographic studies of politics have been integral to the displacement of race and primordialist renderings of ethnicity as rubrics of cultural identity in anthropology, as well as to the collapse of the grand historical narrative that equated modernization with westernization (although such renderings persist in other quarters).

From the standpoint of other social sciences, anthropological ethnography is perhaps above all a lesson in the deceptions of scale—since, for an ethnographer, all social relations are small scale, even if they ultimately aggregate to large-scale (even global) developments. It is this, more than the diversity of political cultures, that makes political anthropology (apparently) difficult to assimilate to other disciplines concerned with politics. Scaling in the cartographic sense is a legal and political process predicated on population and jurisdiction (including national borders). Anthropology's map of the world is composed differently: densely multicentered, overlapping, and networked, making scale more a question of social density than population size or territorial extent.

Political Anthropology's Emergence as a Subfield

Modern anthropology emerged from political crises over the course of the twentieth century by many paths, in many centers of scholarship. Politics was central to the discipline's intellectual development, but political anthropology as such arguably began with Georges Balandier's landmark Political Anthropology ([1967] 1970). The book speaks directly to the context of those times, and it had immediate impact, as Balandier drew on his African experiences to challenge the theoretical privilege that reserved politics for the political institutions of Western states, and that made states the highest form of social and political organization. In contrast, Balandier called for an ethnography of politics that would almost by definition insist on a break with the idea of politics that prevailed in political science. Balandier's political ethnography began in the acknowledgment of the diversity of politics and forms of political agency at the global peripheries—forms of politics embedded in local forms of sociability, the political constituted in the social. Political Anthropology called for a significant rethinking of anthropology's means and ends, and the anthropology of politics galvanized the transformation of the discipline at large—for Anglophone anthropologists, anticipating by decades the reception of works by Foucault and Bourdieu that, although roughly contemporary with Balandier's work, were translated into English only much later.

In effect, politics did not enter anthropology as a topic so much as it did as an interpretive repertoire, a way of connecting dynamic transformations in the global geopolitical scene to the situations of minority and subaltern communities in their own struggles for survival, subsistence, and recognition. But the map of that path—marked out by a broad dialectical question about the hegemonic effects of state power on the conditions of self-knowledge and social action—did not lead anthropologists immediately into conducting ethnographic research in the domains of government. Indeed, as noted, their interest has tended to follow demands on government rather than issues of governing or governability. To put this another way, anthropologists were drawn to questions of what counts as knowledge, and what counts as legitimate means of knowledge, as indices of power relations—with power, in turn, understood as internalized meanings and not merely the direct effects of coercive force (Corrigan and Sayer 1985). This is a profoundly democratic reading of power, as Laclau and Mouffe all but state in their discussion of hegemony and democracy; they argue—contra what they regard as liberal centrists' appeals for a “democratization of democracy” through consensus—for an “extension of the democratic struggles for equality and liberty to a wider range of social relations” (1985, xv).

Hegemony and the Ethnography of Power

As events of the 1980s and 1990s revolved around profound challenges to state power from above and below (in South Africa, in the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, and in the creation of the European Union, among other developments) anthropologists were pulled—often by the people among whom they worked—into considering new political forms. Important review essays of the time sound a double refrain, ringing the novelty of the moment, its complex challenges to anthropological theorizing about the cultural dimensions of politics, and the politics of culture, as the term “culture” now also circulated as a keyword in popular discourses of rights (Aretxaga 2003; Edelman 2001; Nagengast 1994).

The new interest in Gramscian formulations of hegemony among anthropologists (Lazarus-Black and Hirsch 1994; see also Roseberry 1997) reshaped the ethnography of politics around a critique of liberalism, shifting away from an earlier focus on individual interests and arenas of strategic competition to bring more attention to collective forms of resistance and opposition and to their conditions of possibility in subjectivity, sociability, and discourse (see Nyamnjoh 2013). As Laclau and Mouffe argued influentially, hegemony's effects cannot be cancelled by consensus; rather, hegemony (always present) can be countered only by redirection—that is, by the multiplication and diversification of expressive communities (1985, xiv–xv). Political antagonism, from this perspective, has “the status of an ontology of the social” (xiv; emphasis omitted). The discursive turn in the anthropology of politics had many sources and rationales (Foucault and Bourdieu prominent among them), but Laclau and Mouffe's work is a vivid example of how and why attention to discourse offered anthropologists both a means and an end in the study of politics—that is, taking discourse as an object of study and, aspirationally, as a democratic critique of liberal individualism. Laclau and Mouffe's formulation is born out of the specific geopolitical context of the 1980s and the emergence of a “third way” between liberalism and socialism in Europe, but it is fundamentally about the capillary infrastructure of power (as influentially formulated by Foucault).

The critical implication of discourse (i.e., as an implicit and particular democratic challenge to liberalism) is integral to its methodological relevance in the anthropology of politics. Discourse is not merely speech but the agentive effects of speech in scenarios of contestation. From this perspective, the analytical relevance of discourse inheres in the question of how private knowledge worlds (whether individual or collective) become plural and public through political life—and vice versa. Hegemony unchecked would perpetually defer the moment when political opposition would become the discursive opposition essential to democracy. This is one critical juncture that invites reflexive analysis, since the democratic premise inherent in ethnography of politics at the level of method is not consistently aligned theoretically with the diversity of actually existing democracies and political aspiration in other forms. Be that as it may, any cumulative reading of anthropological political ethnography today challenges the very notion of democracy as a unified Euro-American achievement (see Paley 2008). More fundamentally, it illuminates the ways in which contemporary liberalism conceals its “antipolitics” and sovereign claims to exception within a pervasive discourse of autonomy and individual choice (Agamben 2005; Schmitt [1932] 2007).

Culture and the Political Turn

The democracy implication of discourse is protean in a way that potentially extends the field of politics over the entirety of social life, “the political turn” making the topic of democracy (but not its analytical force) conceptually redundant or “banal” for some anthropologists (Spencer 2007, 74–75). Be that as it may, the political turn fostered great ethnographic innovation, as anthropologists sought out key locations of discursive production and contestation from the horizons of the global and the local. Important new literatures emerged at the zones of contact between international or transnational institutions and localized (intersubjective) forms of power, notably in studies of development, migration, and rights claiming. These and related studies greatly advanced anthropologists' understandings of how the agentive aspects of citizenship work through personal and collective self-identities. The democracy implication of discourse was also vivid in new ethnographic studies showing the integral place of violence in political discourse—for example, in vigilantism at the margins of state power or states' efforts to manage their impunity in relation to massive harms and, pervasively in the twenty-first century, in war. These are among the compelling examples of a new political ethnography strongly framed by the democratic premise inherent in the concept of discourse—that is, theorizing personal agency as an implicit demand for legibility and political significance, and conceiving of ethnographic methods as means toward that end. These are also powerful ethnographies demonstrating how arduous are some forms of agency, as people make strenuous efforts under the most challenging circumstances to marshal remedies or relief on their own and others' behalf, through mobilizations of rights or informal networks.

The anthropological concept of culture borrows some of its significance from its implicit resistance to such global metanarratives conflating democracy and capitalism, whether through states or market forms. The concept of agency points to the pragmatics of such resistance.

Agency and Reflexivity in the Anthropology of Politics

Politics remains for anthropology at once a rationale for ethnography and a perpetual challenge at the edge of anthropology's borders with other disciplines as well as with its own conventions, thinking here of the experimental writing by anthropologists working in active conflict zones, pushing ethnographic genres into new voicings for those emergencies and new “aggregations” (Juris 2012). It is this very quality that—over the discipline's history—has made politics and democratic implication theoretically productive as prompts to innovation in anthropology.

The difficulties of defining the terms of a unified anthropology of politics underscore the extent to which politics hovers between subject, object, and method—that is, as a democratic premise wound into the very idea of social science, even as it unwinds from key sectors of policy making and law making. We may not be able to avoid the Möbius strip aspect of democracy's perfusion within the very concept of the social, but this does not cancel the value of ethnographic work; on the contrary, it makes ethnography well suited as a way of accounting for the particular forms of “democracy deficit” that have emerged with the neoliberalization of global capitalism and the global security crisis. Crucial distributions of power directly affecting individuals and communities are no longer taking place through political institutions as such—a situation that is the result of significant depoliticization in relation to representative government. In the absence of political accountability through the traditional forms of party politics, a new politics of accountability is evident in social media, on the streets, and in lawsuits (as will be discussed further). The methodological challenges of political ethnography are part and parcel of the complex fracture lines in politics today. As at other moments of political crisis, current developments seem to be inciting new ethnographic methods and genres.

Politics on the Move

As noted, the locus classicus of political anthropology was in the arenas of local jurisdictions where political authority was constituted, conferred, and contested, and where strategic games of interest were waged in public. The small scale of politics conceived in ethnographic terms such as these focused on local institutions of competition and control (or, rather, competition for control). Political anthropology today has significantly reformulated its scaling practices in theoretical terms, but an enduring convention tends to insert a methodological break (“the field” conceived as local social and political organization) precisely where local interests and mobilizations cease to be local—that is, where they are integral to (and not merely contextualized by) wider interests and networks.

This is not to suggest that local field ethnography is not relevant to contemporary politics (on the contrary) but rather that accounting for those wider interests, strategies, and stakes is likely to involve an expanded sense of “the field” beyond jurisdiction and broader recognition of the value of ethnographic resources associated with that larger ambit (e.g., public and private documents, corporate and public administration archives, news, and social media). Otherwise, it is easy to miss the wider vectors of displacement, expulsion, and engagement that are actively swirling across local landscapes today. Leaving these to prefaces or metanarrative—or to other disciplines altogether—ironically occludes the value of ethnographic knowledge, as it leaves the “big picture” to others. But, as noted in this entry in the discussion of scale, the big picture is not separate or beyond ethnography's scope. The anthropology of politics contributes to contemporary knowledge through its rich repertoires of interrelation—for example, its attention to collective forms of social life, the motility of subjectivities and stakes, networked interests within and beyond institutions, the nuances of power beyond politics, and the power of emotion—and its commitment to the idea of an endless human capacity to imagine new futures.

In the decades since the modern classics of the cultural turn appeared in the mid-1980s, neoliberalism has become mainstream as a theory of national government, leaving in its wake a restructured political and economic landscape and a pervasive resignification of debt that is today (especially after the global financial crisis of 2008) the context for much ethnography of politics. The mainstreaming of neoliberalism as an approach to government and governance was in some countries valorized with electoral results; however, even in the United States (where neoliberalism was ultimately popular with electorates), the electoral “face” of neoliberalism came only belatedly, after public administrations at federal, state, and local levels had become committed by the executive and/or legislative branches of government to modes of financialization that relied heavily on private contractors (“outsourcing”) and disembedding crucial forms of social services (“entitlements”) from state administration. In the United States, privatization began at the federal level, in sectors of government charged with providing direct services to the poor and other dependent and vulnerable populations. With the electoral mandate for neoliberal reform, federal contracts with private providers increasingly held the providers contractually to efficiency measures. Accountability shifted to private providers as well.

The term “democracy deficit” refers to the foreclosure of opportunities for public involvement in decisions affecting even their most direct relationships with state agencies, in those contexts where the decisions to privatize, the selection of providers, and the contracts between government agency and providers are not subject to political checks. They are for the most part the result of executive actions (i.e., by administrators in executive agencies). Other countries have also privatized government functions, and, while some countries have imposed checks on privatization through their courts or legislatures (e.g., Israel's ban on private prisons), it remains largely the case that formerly key areas of citizens' political mobilization (e.g., government services and entitlements) are no longer in the political domain, even if access, at least for citizens, is to some degree supported by legal rights. Where such political displacements occur, they are relevant in highly material ways to personal circumstances and the organization of personal social fields (i.e., they are not merely the context of personal circumstances).

The growth of the administrative agencies and the implications for politics (in the United States and elsewhere) are only part of the larger picture of political displacement as seen from local ground. Another horizon passes through the numerous international tariff agreements that establish multilateral “free trade zones.” These agreements, too, are negotiated and settled between national executive agencies (the United States emulates parliamentary systems in providing the president with “fast-track” powers in the trade area, leaving the political branch of government with a straight up or down vote on the agreement). Trade disputes in such contexts are handled by multilateral panels outside national legal and political bodies, or, in some contexts, by the World Trade Organization.

International trade agreements deliver their social effects not only through shareholders, management, and pricing for consumers but also through active mediations by the local authorities who arrange concessions and set up labor conditions on both sides of the trading partners' borders. Such political locations have not yet drawn the ethnographic attention they deserve, as they are crucial nodes in contemporary political life. Some trade agreements have provided favorable contexts for establishing export manufacturing zones—undercutting unions and collective bargaining, and making a competitive economic advantage out of low wages and benefits in the poorer countries. Anthropologists have shown that in such situations, where alternative waged employment is scarce or nonexistent, workers are subject to direct and indirect forms of coercion, and may face physical and social risks without significant recourse or prospect of remediation. In major sectors of offshore production for branded industries (such as electronics at the high end or apparel at the low end), supply chains are established by series of contracts tethered at one end to the labor laws and concession agreements in the host country, and at the other end to standards set by the industry, retailers, or private standard-setting organizations. The politics of such agreements are of immediate relevance to millions of workers around the world—often themselves displaced into urban zones where factories and workshops are located—not only in terms of how such agreements provide for workers' physical safety and basic rights but also as the legal basis for protests, strikes, and other labor actions (including litigation). Workers are not passive in such circumstances. Supply chains function as transnational social and political locations, developing their own mechanisms of organization, mobilization, networked solidarity, and collective action.

These are just examples. The democracy deficit points to a more general ethnographic issue of relevance to the anthropology of politics, in that it refocuses attention on the role of states and state agencies in contexts where states have been relatively neglected or ignored ethnographically. States are crucial locations in global capitalism, as partners, concessionaires, regulators, and adjudicators (roles that entail their own intragovernmental politics). States bring key agencies to bear in the making of conditions that directly affect the transnationalization of labor, including authorizing multinational corporations to regulate themselves, thereby making workplaces into political locations where people's rights as citizens are filtered by private governance mechanisms. In effect, in such circumstances, the states involved in offshoring their manufacturing capacity are also offshoring regulation and politics—as it is the host states (not the home countries of multinational firms or retailers) that are pressed (sometimes with threats of sanctions) to regulate working conditions and enforce supplier contracts and their standards. While consumer actions may insist on imbuing the “top” of the corporate chain with responsibility, legal responsibility remains with the contracting parties—unless a politics of reform accumulates sufficient heft to change the terms (as has happened, for example, in the case of the European and US retailers' mobilizations supporting worker safety in the ready-made garment industry in Bangladesh, and in Liberia, where pressures to strengthen protections against coerced labor through legislation followed a failed alien torts claim in the US courts). In this new transnational landscape, political activism is forming around state accountability for working conditions in the private sector; their political forum is often in national courts.

Privatization and manufacturing for the export trade are prominent contexts where state action displaces politics horizontally into the transnational private sector, and where political mobilizations push back through state channels. States are crucial mediators in these dynamics—for example, in court rulings on such matters as extraterritorial application of human rights law and extraterritorial enforcement of contracts, as well as more technical matters involving intra- and intergovernmental powers (among other things). But states are also relevant locally, not just through the effects of rulings and political decisions taken elsewhere but also through the complex connective tissue of social security or its lack (access to jobs, credit, police protection, energy and water, and health care, among other things). In themselves, these are not unaccustomed ethnographic locations for anthropologists, but they are more usually construed as economic relations than political ones. Yet it is states, not corporations alone, that have made labor—broadly speaking—the primary political relation in global capitalism.

Anthropologists have engaged these issues with studies of the intra- and intergovernmental politics of executive power, the relationship of globalization to national and local democratic movements, the politics of humanitarianism and nongovernmental organizations, the emergence of self-help movements (e.g., for squatters' rights, microcredit, and other mobilizations seeking access to services), the intricacies of class-based and ethnic cooperation in social movements, patron–client relations and their imbrications with national political parties, maquiladoras (export zone factories built up after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement), and the politics of kinship at the margins of capitalism (e.g., child labor)—among other situations.

Anthropologists have also studied workplaces and neighborhoods living in poverty, and where the persistent precarity of labor (before and after 2008) has revised the social compact in intimate terms, as the meanings of gender, generation, ethnicity, religion, and nationality are remade through work and (un)employability. Ethnographic studies show new political movements—some formal, some highly informal—asserting themselves in a discourse of moral community explicitly mobilized as a critical check on managerial means and ends. Such movements are not only local. Ethnographies inspired by recent events suggest the emergence of a diverse politics of unemployability (i.e., challenging the state policies that contribute to job scarcity) and unliveable wages now gathering visible force in Europe, North Africa, the United States, and elsewhere, with electoral successes for populist movements of the right and left in Europe and the United States. In some contexts (in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere), xenophobic political movements are also gaining ground, as their leaders posit immigrants as contributing to the under- and unemployment of native-born citizens. The simultaneous extension of the political spectrum to the right and the left is a source of strain, and the politics of politics (so to speak) is itself taking new local forms, as some anthropological accounts (e.g., of partisan mobilization and digital citizenship) have shown.

Emergent Issues

As noted at the outset, anthropologists have brought two main perspectives to their studies of politics. On the one hand, anthropologists look for politics in the constitution of power, its differentials, and differential effects approached as questions of identity, subjectivity, and agency. On the other hand, anthropologists look for politics in political institutions, as questions of contested authority, accountability, and interest. The latter perspective has the longer genealogy as political anthropology (as such), given the classic emphasis on social structure, ritual, norms, and conflict in anthropological ethnography. But the former is arguably more prevalent today, given its multiple theoretical sources within and beyond the discipline (e.g., in Marxism, feminism, subaltern studies, and cultural studies) and the current vitality of sociocultural anthropology around issues of personhood, emergent cultural forms, and ontologies.

One might imagine that these perspectives readily converge, or might even be one and the same; however, so far, they converge most readily from the more institutional side, judging from exciting new ethnographic work on and in bureaucracies, corporate form, media, finance, and legal technique from the standpoint of their diverse political subjectivities. Given the multiple displacements of politics, and anthropology's relative lack of engagement with states as ethnographic locations, it is not surprising if ethnographies of power construed as subjectivities do not as readily speak ethnographically to actually existing politics, since politics edits the social fields of power, making recognition selective. However, here, too, there are exceptions, as anthropologists courageously follow new political subjectivities where they find them, into the streets and fields of war—for example, in scholarship on Occupy, on Ferguson, on the so-called Arab Spring and its many seasons, on militarisms and drones, in resistance to state occupations, and in other scenarios of accountability. It is noteworthy that many of these studies appear in newsletters, blogs, and experimental venues such as open-access digital publications—evidence of an appetite for speedy and unmediated exchange and perhaps hinting, too, that the supply of innovative ethnographic genres exceeds the available space of the more established venues.

For now—these promising ventures notwithstanding—it remains the case that the main approaches to the anthropology of politics (i.e., political subjectivity and political action) have been combined more readily outside the state sphere than in relation to states and their corporate extensions or counterparts. The previous discussion suggests the extent to which states, law, and regulation are ripe for ethnographic reconsideration—with a fresh sense of problem—in the anthropology of politics. The contribution of the “cultural turn” a generation ago yielded a rich ethnography of power while in a sense dematerializing the state—that is, formulating state power as an interior sensibility rather than as the directly coercive effect of an organized entity (in the Weberian sense). For cultural studies scholars, this provided a solution to the question of the state's contradictory (seemingly) incorporeal quality, bringing probing attention to “stateness” in discourse and its subjective effects as “a cultural revolution” (to borrow from the title of Corrigan and Sayer 1985). For anthropologists, too, the formulation of states as discursive formations provided a solution to the conceptual dilemmas of states' apparent immateriality or social distance. But today we see that states are integral to experience, with highly corporeal effects (on workers, migrants, prisoners, detainees, protesters, and all of us), and that state action may be central to the phenomenology of social reproduction in highly personal terms (Hall 1985).

Anthropologists—by disciplinary inclination predisposed to emphasize localized self-regulatory processes—have tended to treat state institutions (including legal institutions) as external to the everyday, in effect following regulation into the private sector when the neoliberalization of government moved it there. But, as neoliberalism reaches its limiting conditions (including but not limited to the resurgence of community-based politics), states are relevant to politics in ways that are likely to engage anthropologists again—for example, in grassroots political challenges to austerity policies, in low wages, in a lack of jobs, in the selective empowerments or disempowerments of particular legislation or court decisions, in governmental surveillance practices, and in police use of force (among other current examples). The discussions in this and other entries in this encyclopedia suggest additional projects and prospects.

Since the 1970s, the anthropology of politics has been vibrant, and political anthropology has become a lively subfield of sociocultural anthropology. In the United States, political and legal anthropology share a section of the American Anthropological Association (Association for Political and Legal Anthropology) and a journal (Political and Legal Anthropology Review); the American Anthropological Association also hosts a new section on the anthropology of policy and a number of interest groups relevant to politics, broadly speaking. These organizations draw an international membership, and there are many communities of anthropological scholars engaged with politics around the world, besides. As in the past, broadening the conversation across political fields is essential to the development of the discipline and its claims to relevance. Anthropology is indeed relevant to scholars and others interested in politics wherever history—past, present, or future—asks to be rewritten.

SEE ALSO: Activism; Anthropology: Scope of the Discipline; Barth, Fredrik (1928–2016); Biopolitics; Blat; Censorship; Chiefs and Chiefdoms; Citizenship; Civil Society; Clash of Civilizations, The, Anthropology and; Conflict and Security; Counterinsurgency; Cultural Brokers; Cultural Politics; Detention; Diplomacy and International Relations; Dispossession; Elites, Anthropological Study of; Empowerment and Community Participation; Finance; Functionalism; Governance; Indigeneity in Anthropology; Indigenous and Local Knowledge and Science: From Validation to Knowledge Coproduction; Interethnic Friction; Jazz; Law and Anthropology; Militarization; Moral Economy; Multiculturalism; Nongovernmental Organizations; Paternalism; Peacekeeping; Poland, Anthropology in; Policy, Anthropology and; Political Discourse; Politics of Recognition; Power, Anthropological Approaches to; Privatization; Redistribution; Research Traditions on Law in Anglo‐American Anthropology; Resistance; Rural Development; Sahlins, Marshall (b. 1930); Sovereignty; States; State Formation; States: Transnationalism; Structural Functionalism; Transnationalism; Transparency; Tribe; United Kingdom, Anthropology in; Urbanism; Vigilantism; Violence and Warfare; Wolf, Eric (1923–99)