Transactionalism Analysis of Political Processes

Transactionalism Analysis of Political ProcessesPolitical hit BarthAssess Barths surmise of TransactionalismIn this book, such a paradigm of policy-making give birth non only tells us something important ab pop the traditional governmental berth in Swat, it is also the basis of a trenchant criticism of views overriding at the time when Barth wroteIt reveals that a quest for personal advantage could vaunting in a traditional setting. (Meeker 1980 684)It is important to distinguish, when discussing Political leading among Swat Pathans (1959), between its effectiveness as an ethnographic account, and its role as a construct of theory. Barths recentr works were written when he had provided developed his method with the support of the Bergen school, which included other Scandinavian ethnologists and continental composes such as Robert Paine.F. G. Bailey, in 1960, affirmed in his check over for Man (p. 188), that Barths book is a monograph and not a work of theory. However, Barths 1959 article Segmentary Opposition and the Theory of Games A survey of Pathan Organisation phases a case study of unilineal descent and political makeup among Yusufzai Pathans which exemplifies a pattern, not previously described in the literature, of deriving corporeal political groups from a ramifying unilineal descent charter. (p. 19)Barths transactionalism, as a form of methodological individualism, developed in a general movement off from the dominant Durkheimian models of Radcliffe-Br testify and Fortes. In a return to more Malinowskian traditions, authors including Bailey, Barth and Paine explored the ways in which cultural actors manipulate mixer rules so as to maximise their own profit. In addition, there was a growing need for anthropologists to account for budge in societies which were increasingly exposed to a strongly Western, global political social model, or else than remaining static, as some theories would have had them.In his 1959 ethnography, Bart h shows that the strategic choices of individuals significantly determine the political hierarchy, the latter which recognises the contractual aright 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 geomorphologic functionalist model, Barth took a decisive step in his proposition that the bases of the society were joined by a solidarity based on individual strategic choices, rather than by the mechanical solidarity elaborated by Evans-Pritchard and Fortes in Africa.The authority systemis strengthened up and maintained through the exercise of a continual serial publication of individual choices. (Barth 1959a 2)CriticismIt is a saddening, alone no doubt common, experience to see ones analyses made banal and ones points of view reduced to simple stereotypes. It is perhaps even more no-good 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 adequate critics. In 1972, Talal Asad delivered a class-oriented polemic of Barths 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 millenary and Charisma among Pathans, arguing that Barth suffered from a khans-eye view, again proclaiming that the pragmatism of Swat society involved far less free choice than Barth would have us believe, peoples lives instead being cause 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 Barths Norwegian enter priser 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 Duprees 1976 article was republished in original 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 Barths 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.). close to later, in a review of Barths Selected Essays (1981), Ian Prattis is keen to point out Barths inability adequately to account for social change, and is of the belief that Barth is remote to grand conceptual schemes in general and to the direction tak en by 1950s social anthropology in particular (Prattis 1983 103). Barthing Up the Wrong channelise shows that Barth missed out crucial variables ( force out, intrinsic value) and claimed too much for the power of transactions to integrate social systems (ibid. 108). However, Prattis was concerned with the authors payoff 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.