Free Essays - Essays
Political Swat Barth
Assess Barth's Theory of Transactionalism
In this book, such a paradigm of political experience not only tells us something important about the traditional political situation in Swat, it is also the basis of a trenchant criticism of views prevailing at the time when Barth wrote...It reveals that a quest for personal advantage could flourish in a traditional setting.” (Meeker 1980 : 684)
It is important to distinguish, when discussing Political Leadership among Swat Pathans (1959), between its effectiveness as an ethnographic account, and its role as a work of theory. Barth’s later works were written when he had further developed his method with the support of the ‘Bergen school’, which included other Scandinavian ethnologists and continental authors such as Robert Paine.
F. G. Bailey, in 1960, affirmed in his review for Man (p. 188), that “Barth’s book is a monograph and not a work of theory”. However, Barth’s 1959 article Segmentary Opposition and the Theory of Games: A Study of Pathan Organisation forms a “case study of unilineal descent and political organisation among Yusufzai Pathans [which] exemplifies a pattern, not previously described in the literature, of deriving corporate political groups from a ramifying unilineal descent charter.” (p. 19)
Barth’s transactionalism, as a form of methodological individualism, developed in a general movement away from the dominant Durkheimian models of Radcliffe-Brown and Fortes. In a return to more Malinowskian traditions, authors including Bailey, Barth and Paine explored the ways in which cultural actors manipulate social rules so as to maximise their own profit. In addition, there was a growing need for anthropologists to account for change in societies which were increasingly exposed to a strongly Western, global political social model, rather than remaining static, as some theories would have had them.
In his 1959 ethnography, Barth shows that the strategic choices of individuals significantly determine the political hierarchy, the latter which recognises the contractual right of individuals and thus demands that leaders consistently prove their status-worthiness. “In this respect the political life of Swat resembles that of Western societies” (Barth 1959a : 2).
In moving away from the structural functionalist model, Barth took a decisive step in his proposition that the bases of the society were united by a solidarity based on “individual strategic choices”, rather than by the mechanical solidarity elaborated by Evans-Pritchard and Fortes in Africa.
The authority system...is built up and maintained through the exercise of a continual series of individual choices. (Barth 1959a : 2)
You can get expert help with your essays right now. Find out more...Criticism
It is a saddening, but no doubt common, experience to see one’s analyses made banal and one’s points of view reduced to simple stereotypes. It is perhaps even more distressing to be attributed a web of trivial and fundamental errors and omissions which one has not committed.
(Barth, correspondence in Dupree 1977 : 516)
While much praised, Barth has had his fair share of able critics. In 1972, Talal Asad delivered a class-oriented polemic of Barth’s Pathans, insisting that the landlords exploited their tenants consistently, and that the author suffered from the “illusion of consent” in attributing free contractuality to their exchanges. Four years later, Akbar S. Ahmed wrote Millennium and Charisma among Pathans, arguing that Barth suffered from a “khan’s-eye view”, again proclaiming that the reality of Swat society involved far less ‘free choice’ than Barth would have us believe, people’s lives instead being shaped strongly by “a matrix of interacting and largely fixed social patterns” (cited in Dupree 1977 : 514).
As did Asad, Dupree praises Barth as an “indefatigable fieldworker and imaginative theorist” (1977 : 514); but Ahmed, he points out, was well qualified to document Barth’s ‘Norwegian entrepreneur bias’, not least since his wife is the grand daughter of the late Wali of Swat. “What Barth observes from the outside, Ahmed explores from the inside” (Charpenter, C. J. correspondence in ibid. : 516).
Louis Dupree’s 1976 article was republished in Current Anthropology in 1977, appended by correspondences from Barth and others interested in the debate. They address the issues raised by Dupree, especially that “there is a great distance between Barth’s model and the Swati ethnography as he (Ahmed) saw it in 1974” (Pettigrew J., correspondence in Dupree 1977). Pettigrew goes on to make an engaging point, to counter this, that “the issue is instead whether the models we use yield adequate information about societal processes” (ibid.).
Somewhat later, in a review of Barth’s Selected Essays (1981), Ian Prattis is keen to point out Barth’s inability adequately to account for social change, and is of the belief that Barth is “opposed to grand conceptual schemes in general and to the direction taken by 1950s social anthropology in particular” (Prattis 1983 : 103). Barthing Up the Wrong Tree shows that “Barth missed out crucial variables (power, intrinsic value) and claimed too much for the power of transactions to integrate social systems” (ibid. : 108). However, Prattis was concerned with the author’s output of two decades, while I am interested more specifically with his initial formulation of transactionalism, especially as exemplified in Political Leadership among Swat Pathans of 1959.
It seems generally accepted that perhaps Barth was inaccurate in his portrayal of the Swat valley. Mark Slobin is willing to agree with this, but believes that his critics “swing the pendulum a bit too far in the opposite direction by attempting to invalidate Barth’s concept of strategic interaction” (Dupree 1977 : 517). In replying to Dupree however, the author has his own position to defend, and seems unwilling to admit, twenty years after the fieldwork was done, that he got it wrong by relying too heavily on the landowners.
Dupree seems to accept the imputation that most of my “respondents” were khans - implying, quite apart from the untruth of the intended criticism, a method so foreign to my procedures in the field that I should have thought any reading of the monograph would reveal its baselessness. (ibid. : 516)
Barth has been criticised for never giving a concrete example of tenants actively switching allegiances but, despite this and the divergent analysis of Ahmed in 1976, it seems hard to believe that he would have allowed himself so completely to be laid under the thrall of the powerful, as if to fall prey to the same demons as Dumont in his analysis of caste in Hindu society.
Barth’s explicit thanks to H. R. H. the Wali of Swat in the 1959 Preface, as well as his later role in producing that man’s autobiography The Last Wali of Swat in 1981, do point to a love affair with the Pakhtun class as a whole, but it seems significant to heed Pettigrew’s caution about mistaking theory for ethnography: “Being abstract in nature, it cannot be criticised simply because it does not fit empirical reality” (Pettigrew in ibid. : 517).
Several critics, such as Bahram Tavakolliam, are of the belief that Barth’s Swat has been “largely denuded of empirical support” (ibid.). There are perhaps, various mistakes in Political Organisation which may suggest a need to adjust the transactional theory, but which do not efface its significance as an alternative to structuralism and as a tool with which to confidently explore new material, exemplified by Robert Paine’s 1967 work on gossip.
There appears to be no hard and fast consensus on Barth’s value, save that he broke new, significant ground at the time, and that he inspired a generation to explore avenues beyond the structuralist paradigm. Scattered throughout the refutations and reformulations of his work are numerous words of praise for the Norwegian, who studied under Edmund Leach at the LSE.
Fredrik Barth is usually considered an eminent critic of structural-functionalism and a thorough realist about the role of political conflict in shaping cultural and social institutions. (Meeker 1980 : 684)
Find out how our expert essay writers can help you with your work...Modernity In The Mountains
Many of the politically active individuals in Swat clearly recognise the distinction between private and group advantage, and when faced with a choice they tend to consider the former rather than the latter. (Barth 1959 : 2)
That an individualistic, ego-based social structure (apparently the product of Greek rationalism and Enlightenment thought) could flourish in a ‘traditional’ society, not only goes against Durkheimian notions of solidarity, it also goes a long way in the social sciences’ task of dismissing the cultural assumptions they helped to create. What is more,
analysis in terms of the strategic bases for the solidarity of groups...the relation between descent charters and actual political organisations, exemplified in the present essay, would seem to be particularly useful in the study of the larger, more complex societies. (Barth 1959b : 20)
If Barth’s picture of the patron : client relation is given credence, then interdependence, rather than exploitation, would seem to lie at the structural heart of the society: the tenants require their landlords’ protection from hunger and exploitation, which is achieved largely via the locus of the men’s house. By convincing free individuals to lend him their support at crucial moments, the landlord is able to withstand the onslaught of his political rivals, often his close agnatic collaterals.
This form of solidarity is clearly not Durkheim’s mechanical form, but rather is achieved through the exercise of agency as possessed by individuals within different strata of society. It is not unlike the ‘political marketplace’ of Western societies, in which goods and services are exchanged for status and power.
“In Political Leadership, the polity emerges as the summation of the multiple decisions of individuals, all of whom are concerned primarily with their own personal advantage. A system of authority and the alignment of groups are the product of an unseen hand at work in a sort of political marketplace. Thus a moral vision is reconstituted around the pursuit of self-interest.”
(Meeker 1980 : 685)
In expanding on transactionalism, it may be worthwhile to examine the means by which a society oriented around the self-interest of individuals, if subjected to a rapid change in constitution, may prevent the disintegration of the Barthian ‘frameworks’ which serve to maintain it.
And since today, in the north-western frontier province of Pakistan, “[law and order] is totally absent, and Swat is intensely poor in political point of view (sic)” (Balala, A. K. 2002), it would be interesting to examine the causes for this decline in terms of global politics, local politics and their interactions.
The postmodernist critiques of transactionalist models as too reificatory assess the subjectivist theory in terms of its moral and political implications for the individual in society, occasionally investigating the character of Meeker’s ‘unseen hand’. Barth’s Swat solidarity rests on the assumption of “a sovereign landowning class,” as Asad says, and regardless of whether Barth was right in his observation that “at all events [the Swat tenant] is free to take any kind of available contract he likes” (Barth 1959a : 43), the importance of Barth’s model in yielding sufficient information about societal processes lies in the widely recognisable forms of contractual exchange between leaders and their followers which define society.
Bibliography
Asad, T. 1972. Market Model, Class Structure and Consent: A Reconsideration of Swat Political Organisation. Man. 7, 1 : 74 – 94
Bailey, F. 1960. Book Review of Barth, F. 1959a. in Man. 60 : 188
- 1982. Book Review of Barth, F. 1981. Selected Essays of Fredrik Barth. in American Ethnologist. 9, 3 : 584 - 585
Balala, A. K. 2002. The Charming Swat. Maqsood, Lahore
Barnard, A. & J. Spencer. 1996. Encyclopaedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Routledge, London
Barth, F. 1956. Ecologic Relationships of Ethnic Groups in Swat, North Pakistan. American Anthropologist. 58, 6 : 1079 - 1089
- 1959a. Political Leadership among Swat Pathans. Athlone Press, London
- 1959b. Segmentary Opposition and the Theory of Games: A Study of Pathan Organisation. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 89, 1 : 5 – 21
- 1966. Models of Social Organisation. Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper 23.
- 1967. On the Study of Social Change. American Anthropologist. 69, 6 : 661 - 669
- 1972. Analytical Dimensions in the Comparison of Social Organisation. American Anthropologist. 74 : 207 – 220
- 1992. Towards greater naturalism in conceptualising societies. in Kuper, A. (ed.) Conceptualising Society. Routledge, London
Caroe, O. 1960. Book Review of Barth, F. 1959a. in International Affairs. 36, 2 : 267 - 268
Conversi, D. 1995 Reassessing current theories of nationalism. Nationalism as boundary maintenance and creation. Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict. 1, 1 : 73 - 85
Dupree, L. 1977. On Two Views of the Swat Pushtun. Current Anthropology. 18, 3 : 514 - 518
von Führer-Heimendorf, C. 1959. Book Review of Barth, F. 1959a. in Bulletin of the School of African and Oriental Studies. 23, 3 : 603 - 604
Homans, G. C. 1967a. Review of Barth, F. 1966. Models of Social Organisation. Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper 23. in Man 2, 2 : 316
- 1967b. Review of Barth, F. 1966. Models of Social Organisation. Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper 23. in American Anthropologist 69 : 386
Ingold, T. 1977. Review of Paine, R. 1974. Second Thoughts About Barth’s Models. Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper 32. in Man 12, 1 : 200 - 201
Krader, L. 1961. Book Review of Barth, F. 1959a in American Anthropologist. 63 : 1122 - 1123
Lindholm, C. T. 1986a. Book Review. The Last Wali of Swat. 1985. Barth, F. in Journal of Asian Studies. 86 : 872 – 873
- 1986b. Book Review. The Last Wali of Swat. 1985. Barth, F. in Ethnohistory. 33, 4 : 462 - 463
McLeish, K. 1995. A Guide to Human Thought. Bloomsbury : London
Meeker, M. The Twilight of a South Asian Heroic Age: A Rereading of Barth’s Study of Swat. Man. 15, 4 : 682 - 701
Nielsen, F. S. & K. H. Partapuoli. www.anthrobase.com
Prattis, I. 1983. Barthing up the Wrong Tree. American Anthropologist. 85, 1 : 103- 109
Ward, B. E. 1967. Review of Barth, F. 1966. Models of Social Organisation. in Man 2, 2 : 316
We provide a professional essay writing service that thousands of our customers use as an effective way of improving their grades, improving their research and saving them lots of time.
