The anthropology of power, agency, and morality: The enduring legacy of F. G. Bailey 9781526158260

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The anthropology of power, agency, and morality

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The anthropology of power, agency, and morality The enduring legacy of F. G. Bailey Edited by

Victor C. de Munck and Elisa J. Sobo

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022

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While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 526 158 25 3 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover: Balarama and Jagannath holding bows in their left hands, with Subhadra between them. Oil painting by a painter of Puri, Odisha, ca. 1880/1910. (Wellcome Collection / Public Domain)

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Contents

Contributors Preface – Edward Simpson

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Introduction, or: ‘Yes that’s it!’ – Victor C. de Munck and Elisa J. Sobo 1 Part I: Contributions to the discipline 1 F. G. Bailey’s political anthropology and its malcontents – Felix Girke 2 Morality, truth, and power in F. G. Bailey’s ethnography of politics – Gitika De 3 Politics as theatrical performance and backstage pragmatism: work and legacy of F. G. Bailey – Stanley R. Barrett

21 38

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Part II: Professorial mentoring 4 Leadership influence: an aperture on ‘character’ – Christopher Griffin 5 A personal memory of F. G. Bailey – Gavin Smith 6 Mancunian Realism and Melanesian anthropology – David Lipset

69 85 98

Part III: Individuals in situations 7 Negotiating the gap between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’: older Americans’ strategies – Yohko Tsuji 8 Conundrums of caste, history, and truth: Hindu Nadar identities in urban South India – Sara Dickey 9 The moral guises of injustice: from Bisipara to Aotearoa – Erica Prussing

117 132 149

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Part IV: Rules and roles of conflict 10 The social construction of the Washington Consensus on international trade policy – Robert H. Wade 11 ‘Rules are weapons’: can F. G. Bailey’s toolbox aid our understanding of irrigation bureaucracies? – Namika Raby 12 Politics and administration in the narrow neck of the hourglass: an account of normative and pragmatic rules in Norwegian local politics – Christian Lo 13 Tertius gaudens aut tertium numen? Third-​party roles in conflict and conflict resolution – Kevin Avruch

167 182

198 214

Part V: Social change 14 Tribe, (caste) and nation in the Balkans: contradiction and change in Yugoslavia and Croatia – Mary Kay Gilliland 15 Old boys or a new middle class? Defining leadership through bridge-​actions in a Fijian Pentecostal church – Karen J. Brison 16 ‘The need for enemies’: modernity and malevolence in Tribal India – Andrew Willford Index

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Contributors

Kevin Avruch is the Henry Hart Rice Professor of Conflict Resolution Emeritus and Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution (formerly the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, S-​CAR) at George Mason University, Virginia USA. He was S-​CAR’s Dean from 2013–​19. Among his books are Culture and Conflict Resolution (1998) and Context and Pretext in Conflict Resolution: Culture, Identity, Power and Practice (2013), named Book of the Year by the Conflict Research Society in 2014. Stanley R. Barrett (deceased) was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Guelph, Canada. A self-​ ­proclaimed ‘secondary school dropout and teen-​age rebel’, he wrote that ‘by a stroke of luck I was accepted into a B.A. programme at a respectable university and became so enamoured of higher learning that it evolved into [my] life work.’ His academic interests were divided between in-​depth ethnography and general theory. Most of his original field work was conducted in West Africa and Canada and dealt with institutional inequality. Among his several books are The Rise and Fall of an African Utopia (1977), a study of organized racism and anti-​Semitism in Canada entitled Is God a Racist? (1987), The Rebirth of Anthropological Theory (1984), and Anthropology: A Student’s Guide to Theory and Method (1996 and 2009). Karen J. Brison is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Union College, New York USA. Brison specializes in anthropology of Christianity, childhood, education, and public discourse. Her first research was on village meetings and gossip in the East Sepik province, Papua New Guinea. In 1997, she moved her research site to Rakiraki, Fiji where she studied ceremonial language, cultural identity, religion, and children’s acquisition of social roles through play. In 2005, she began research on urban kinship and on kindergartens in Suva, Fiji. At the same time, she began studying the Harvest Ministry, an independent Pentecostal church based in Suva. She is

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the author of three books, and a co-​edited collection on youth culture, as well as numerous articles. Gitika De is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hindu College, University of Delhi, India. She specializes in political sociology, anthropology of violence, social movements, and anthropology of policy. Her current research projects concern questions of trust and social capital in Indian democracy, politics of social movements and policy-​making, and intellectual history of political sociology during the first three decades of independent India. She has been a Post-​Doctoral Fellow at the Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi and an Associate Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study at Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. Her articles have been published in Contributions to Indian Sociology, Economic and Political Weekly, Indian Anthropologist, and several edited volumes. Sara Dickey is Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College, Maine USA. Dickey’s research has focused on class identities and relations in urban South India; the production, consumption, and circulation of Tamil cinema; fan clubs and politics; mutual interactions of caste and class; and the adoption of dowry in complex societies. One thread throughout this work is the exploration of how social categories, rather than merely originating as products of inequality, themselves produce (and sometimes challenge) systems and structures of inequality. Projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Institute of Indian Studies, and Fulbright-​Hays Group Projects Abroad. She has authored two monographs, Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India (1993) and Living Class in Urban India (2016), and co-​edited two collections, Home and Hegemony: Domestic Service and Identity Politics in South and Southeast Asia (2000) and South Asian Cinemas: Widening the Lens (2011). Mary Kay Gilliland (also published as Mary K. Gilliland Olsen) is Vice President of Academic Affairs at Central Arizona College, US Primary research took place in the former Yugoslavia, Croatia and with Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs in the United States. Also carried out collaborative projects in Asia, including People’s Republic of China (Xinjiang, Western China), Mongolia, and Vietnam. Areas of research interest include culture and social change, gender and ethnic identity, family and intergenerational relationships. Primarily a teaching anthropologist, she has published numerous articles in journals and books, and co-​authored a book. She maintains affiliations with the University of Arizona and the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb, Croatia, where she is a Lifetime Member of the Croatian

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Anthropological Society, and a member of the editorial board for Collegium Antropologicum: The Journal of the Institute for Anthropological Research. Felix Girke is a cultural anthropologist and works as a researcher and international programme coordinator in the department of Business, Cultural, and Legal Studies at HTWG Konstanz –​University of Applied Sciences, Germany. He has extensive research experience in Ethiopia’s lower Omo Valley and urban Myanmar, and has begun working on the Swiss-​German-​ Austrian Lake Constance region. His publications include four (co-​)edited volumes and the monograph The Wheel of Autonomy: Rhetoric and Ethnicity in the Omo Valley (2018), as well as numerous articles and book chapters, especially on fieldwork, politics, cultural heritage, and rhetoric culture theory. He has been a member of the editorial collective of Allegra Lab (allegralaboratory.net) since 2018, and co-​edits the Studies in Rhetoric and Culture book series for Berghahn Books. Christopher Griffin is a retired Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia. His interests include the politics of community, spatial mobility, outsiders, and identity. From 1975 to 1982, he worked in the regional University of the South Pacific in Fiji, resulting in the co-​edited essay collection Fijians in Town (1986), which were written by locals and foreign academics for Island ­readers. Between 1982 and 1987, he worked in London in a young offenders’ prison, and as a warden of a politically charged Romany and Irish Traveller caravan site in an inner-​ city borough. Travellers under the Westway (2008) eventuated. In 1987, he came to Australia to teach at what would become Edith Cowan University. Texts and Violence, Lies & Silence: Anthropologist and Islanders ‘Negotiate the Truth’ (2003) is just one publication stemming from this period. He retired in 2010. David Lipset is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota-​ Twin Cities. His most recent book is Yabar: The Alienations of Murik Men in a Papua New Guinea Modernity (2017). Christian Lo is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Nord University in Bodø, Norway; and Senior Researcher at the Nordland Research Institute (Nordlandsforskning). Lo specializes in governance, local democracy, and the development of welfare services in the Nordic countries. His work appears in both Norwegian and English language peer-​reviewed journals and edited books, and he has recently published When Politics Meets Bureaucracy: Rules, Norms, Conformity and Cheating (2021).

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Victor C. de Munck is Professor of Anthropology at Vilnius University in the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Lithuania. He has conducted field work in Sri Lanka, Macedonia, Lithuania, Russia, and the US His main theoretical contributions are to the study of cultural models. He has conducted both ethnographic and cross-​cultural research using both qualitative and quantitative methods. His most recent books are: Cultural Models (2014) and Romantic Love in America (2019). His 2021 articles include ‘A Prototype Analysis of Cultural and Evolutionary Constructions of Romantic Love’ (Journal of Cognition and Culture), ‘When Cryptotype Meets the Imaginary’ (Modern Folk Devils), and ‘A Cross-​cultural Analysis of Courtship’ (Journal of Globalization Studies). He received a 2021 Lithuanian Research Council grant to study how differing intimate relationship practices affect marriage and fertility decisions in Lithuania. He frequently goes to his office and gazes out of the window. Erica Prussing is Associate Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Community & Behavioral Health at the University of Iowa, USA. Recent and current projects in both the US and Aotearoa/​New Zealand track changing health knowledge politics in an ‘evidence-​based’ era, examine how researcher-​advocates use epidemiological data to promote Indigenous health equity, work to support Indigenous data sovereignty, and examine how to best promote and sustain diversity in scientific professions. She currently serves as a member of the Executive Board of the Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA), and chairs the SMA’s Policy Committee. Prussing has published numerous peer-​reviewed articles in anthropological and interdisciplinary journals. She has also published one book, White Man’s Water: The Politics of Sobriety in a Native American Community (2011) with a second, tentatively entitled Data for Action: Epidemiology, Indigenous Advocacy and Science in the 21st Century, presently under review. Namika Raby is Emerita Faculty at California State University, Long Beach. She was recruited by Michael Cernea, World Bank Sociology Group in 1990 and worked on irrigation management projects in the Philippines. In 2006, she was the invited keynote speaker for the World Water Prize. In 2018, she was a Social Science Research Council Awardee, for the Scholarly Borderlands initiative on climate change in the Indian Ocean. She continues to be active researcher, contributing to the CSULB Media Center on California water issues. She is the author of Kachcheri Bureaucracy in Sri Lanka: The Culture and Politics of Accessibility (1985) and contributor to WATER: Cultures and Ecologies (2006). Gavin Smith is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Visiting Professor at the National

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University of Ireland, Maynooth. His work in South America and Western Europe focuses on the connection between the ways people make a livelihood and their forms of political expression. To this end, his ethnographic work relies on seeing the present as a moment in history and hence seeking to address that history as real rather than as simply constructed, an approach he refers to as historical realism. His works include Livelihood and Resistance: Peasants and the Politics of Land in Peru (1989), Confronting the Present: Towards a Politically Engaged Anthropology (1999); with Susana Narotzky, Immediate Struggles: People, Power and Place in Rural Spain (2006) and Luchas inmediatas: gente, poder y espacio en la España rural (2010), and Intellectuals and (Counter-​)Politics: Essays in Historical Realism (2014). Edward Simpson is Professor of Social Anthropology and Head of Department at SOAS University of London, England. Research focused on anthropology and South Asia has explored the long-​term aftermath of an earthquake in Gujarat, and the thought politics of road building in Madhya Pradesh in India. He is the author of The Political Biography of an Earthquake (2013) and Highways to the End of the World (2021). Between 2010 and 2015, he led a project looking at rural change in India which ‘revisited’ the work and fieldsites of David Pocock, Adrian Mayer, and Freddy Bailey. Elisa (EJ) Sobo is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at San Diego State University, California USA. Recent projects concern healthy schools, vaccination choice, cannabis use for children with intractable epilepsy, and conspiratorial thinking. She is currently part of CommuniVax, a US community-​based pandemic recovery initiative. Past president of the Society for Medical Anthropology, current Section Assembly Convener for the American Anthropological Association, she has published numerous peer-​reviewed journal articles and has authored, co-​authored, and co-​ edited 13 books –​including second editions of both Dynamics of Human Biocultural Diversity: A Unified Approach (2020) and The Cultural Context of Health, Illness, and Medicine (2013). Her work has been featured by NPR, The New York Times, and other news outlets. Prior to joining SDSU, she worked for Children’s Hospital San Diego, and the US Veterans Health Administration. Yohko Tsuji is Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, New York. She carried out major research on ageing in the US and on mortuary rituals and conception of time in Japan. She also conducted fieldwork on social change in Thailand, Taiwan, and China. Her current research in Japan focuses on the family, senescence, and death. It explores how rapid social change makes the traditional family-​based care

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of ageing and death untenable and how people cope with it. Tsuji published multiple articles in scholarly journals and edited volumes. She edited Social Change in Thailand: A. Thomas Kirsch, a Northeastern Village, and Two Families (2010) and authored Through Japanese Eyes: Thirty Years of Studying Aging in America (2020). Robert H. Wade is Professor of Global Political Economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, England. He worked at the Institute of Development Studies (University of Sussex), the World Bank, Princeton University, MIT, and Brown University. He conducted fieldwork in Pitcairn Island, Italy, India, Korea, Taiwan, Iceland, and inside the World Bank, steered by Adam Smith-​type questions about the wealth of nations. His publications include Irrigation and Politics in South Korea (1982), Village Republics: The Economic Conditions of Collective Action in India (1988, 1994, 2007), Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asia’s Industrialization (1990, 2004). He was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought in 2008. Andrew Willford is Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, New York USA. His work characteristically explores aspects of selfhood, identity, and subjectivity within a matrix of power and statecraft. His current research and book-​in-​preparation concerns mental health and psychiatry in India, and he has been recently awarded the Fulbright-​Nehru Distinguished Chair Fellowship for teaching and research in India. His is the author of The Future of Bangalore’s Cosmopolitan Pasts: Civility and Difference in a Global City (2018), Tamils and the Haunting of Justice: History and Recognition in Malaysia’s Plantations (2014), Cage of Freedom: Tamil Identity and the Ethnic Fetish in Malaysia (2006), and co-​editor of Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia (2005) and Clio/​ Anthropos: Exploring the Boundaries between History and Anthropology (2009).

Preface

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Edward Simpson

This festschrift celebrates the intellectual life and influence of the ­anthropologist F.G. Bailey. ‘Freddy’ was a kind and generous man, whose scholarship was enduring and profound. Over the course of his long and productive life, he wrote many books. Along the way, he refined a pithy, distinctive, and direct approach to social truth. This truth was not, it turned out, based on communal nicety or abstract altruism but on the prevalence of lies and deceit. Bailey was particularly fascinated by the construction of stratagems and the accumulation of spoils, exploring these themes first in India and later amid the general politics of everyday life. F. G. Bailey was born in the north of England, educated in Oxford and Manchester, and worked at SOAS and the universities of Sussex (where he founded a new department) and San Diego. Experiences of class, marginality, and the trans-​Atlantic shift play heavily on his intellectual persona and those who came under his influence. Together, the chapters of this volume reflect on his sources of inspiration, how he influenced others, and how his anthropology remains useful in thinking through the present. F. G. Bailey opened a work on the folklore of academic politics with a quote from Lewis Henry Morgan: ‘There is enough, within the limits of the veritable, which is sufficiently remarkable, without entering the domain of fancy to produce a picture’ (Morgan quoted in Bailey 1977, 1). The quote was expedient, to use a Bailey-​ism, because some of the book had been previously delivered as part of a distinguished lecture series named after Morgan at the University of Rochester in 1975. At first sight, Morgan’s words also capture some of the pragmatic spirit of Bailey’s own long and distinguished contribution to the discipline of anthropology, influenced as he was by classics and logic at Oxford, the ‘Manchester School’ of anthropology, and the ‘civility of indifference’ he found to characterize life during an influential stint of fieldwork in eastern India in the 1950s. Bailey’s fieldnotes from his time in India are a textbook execution of a form of anthropology that took conflict, land, and descent to be the heart

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of the matter (‘Mancunian realism’ as described by David Lipset in this volume). Religion became temples, committees, and rights; there is remarkably little about ‘belief’ or other domains of fancy in the many thousands of pages that record what Bailey saw as worthy of note at the time. In later works, he gave words to the view that ‘any factual belief is religious’ (2008, 3), reflecting an ecumenical vision of knowledge as in-​the-​making and equal in its truths as forms of power. Social truth was contingent and based on the effectiveness of individuals and groups to establish their perspective or claims over others. The publication of Morality and Expediency raised hackles and evoked vigorous assent as the workings and personalities of the North American academy were put on public display. In this context, Bailey was, as Alfred Harris the editor of the lecture publication series notes, ‘a highly-​qualified non-​native who had a “nearly perfect” comprehension of the (American) language’ (Bailey 1977). Bailey took a year away from the office after publication to let the hackles and assent subside. Morality and Expediency was also an experimental application with the maturing model of politics that Bailey had developed through the 1950s and 1960s. Bailey was interested, and here his focus exceeded Morgan’s interests which were then focused on the life of Beavers, in the lies and other deceits around which social action is organized. In the case of academic politics, colleagues wore masks and developed façades to disguise actual interests. In this sense, Bailey was interested in make-​believe, hypocrisy, and pretence –​the motivations and aspirations that are unsaid and invisible forms political action. Bailey’s talent as a thinker and writer was to put into words the unspoken. He was interested in things that were not and could not be routinely articulated, and in the collusion and complexities of power and process, university committees, or village feuds. In this, his writing is highly original; an originality that is easily overlooked because to read him is straightforward, the prose is tight and clear –​and far from fanciful. The talent on display in Morality and Expediency –​and in volumes such as The Civility of Indifference (a gloomy and bold retrospective on the fieldwork of the 1950) –​is all the more wonderful when you pause to reflect on the creative endeavour involved in writing-​up, or down, the unspoken. The latter in particular is a masterpiece of description, evoking the rules, parameters, and values that orient social life. I first met Freddy at his home in the hills outside San Diego in 2011. The smell of English-​breakfast bacon wafted on pine fresh California air. He was warm, welcoming, and interested that I was engrossed in the research he had undertaken in India in the 1950s. Flanking the yard outside his house was a workshop and office. In the workshop, he made furniture; in the office, he crafted books, with verve and speed, particularly after retirement.

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There were boxes of fieldnotes and albums of photographs from the 1950s, a period that retained great significance in his memory and intellectual style. Time is generally unkind to academic writing, as debates, concerns, and terms are quickly outdated by the rush to produce new ideas. For many academics, the relationships formed by collegiality, teaching and supervision are the enduring elements –​these can be seen in the warm and grateful contributions to this volume. While Bailey’s furniture might not be preserved for posterity for either its grace or ergonomic receptiveness, he donated his fieldwork archive from India to the School of Oriental and African Studies. These are catalogued online as the F. G. Bailey Papers. This donation was brave and characteristic of an open mind and generous spirit. These notes are an excellent demonstration of the working of a practical and curious fieldworker who is trying to establish what is what in an uncertain terrain. Visiting the house in which Bailey lived in India and sitting on the balcony where his children played as he typed notes, I learned that he is still remembered fondly and actively in the village. He entered the consciousness of the place and, in turn, became part of the unspoken rules through which people there would relate to one another in time. For those interested in F. G. Bailey, the germs of later academic ideas are on display in those early fieldnotes. More generally, the notes offer a fascinating and high-​resolution view of newly independent rural India, where democracy, cash, and government were new realities. Bailey leaves us all his notes and with that an invitation to be as fancy as we wish with the veritable.

References Bailey, F. G. 1977. Morality and Expediency: The Folklore of Academic Politics. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. Bailey, F. G. 2008. God-​Botherers and Other True Believers: Gandhi, Hitler and the Religious Right. New York: Berghahn.

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Introduction, or: ‘Yes that’s it!’

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Victor C. de Munck and Elisa J. Sobo Let us begin by asking, ‘Why honour F. G. Bailey with a festschrift?’ The answer is simple: the man’s masterful anthropological work remains a template for good ethnography – the kind that leads to theoretical insights into the nature of what humans want and do. Bailey accomplished this by examining the context of social interactions in daily life and by extrapolating from the micro-​contexts of individual interactions to the macro-​context of culture as a dynamic system comprising the interplay of normative and pragmatic rules. This is no mean feat. It was not easy to journey into the Orissa (now Odisha) mountains and study the macro-​abstractions of village culture in Bisipara (now Bisipada) as they were played out by actual people in social situations. Within such situations people behave, at least through Bailey’s lenses, as moral actors adhering to cultural practices signifying normative values, while at the same time being motivated by instrumental and desired personal ends. This is the basic paradigm for everyday life in Bailey’s Bisipara; and it appears to be the basic paradigm for everyday life most anywhere in the world. On the surface, the Bailey method for doing research seems straightforward: Learn the language, become familiar with the history ­ of the nation and community, get to know the community by living there for an extended period of time, acquire trust by being a pleasant, sociable, and honest person. In the field, Bailey, as most anthropologists, listened to social interactions with an ear to rhetorical strategies, symbolic, and material exchanges, and the motives people keep below deck. Then, following the Manchester School schema, Bailey compared cases to capture collective structures and processes, including the ways collective systems change over time. When Bailey writes, people come to life as irascible, rational, demanding, deceitful, honourable beings. People, situations, and analyses populate the text front and centre. Theory, methods, and pointers to macro-​processes and structures are almost invisibly reticulated in Bailey’s ethnographic texts. This is the genius of the man. Much has changed in anthropology and the world in the 70 years since Bailey first set off for India. Yet the often-​ ­confounding enmeshment of individual and collective, human attention to social exchanges, and the social forces that breed both collective divisiveness and discontent, remain ever present.

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For these reasons, Bailey remains an important figure in contemporary anthropology. Our introduction provides a general processual account of Bailey’s work and its development. In following Bailey’s own strategy for composing texts, we begin by considering the world(s) of anthropology he was embedded in from his formative years at Manchester to his 1950s fieldwork, and the transitional period at University of Sussex in the 1960s where he helped to develop the first anthropology programme, to his early 1970s move to the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), where he retired in 1997. We do not discuss his personal life, in part because he would not have wished us to do so. It is an interesting phenomenon that Bailey lived two academic lives –​ the first in England at Manchester and Sussex, and the second in the US at UCSD. Bailey is undoubtedly as influential a Manchester figure as Turner and Mitchell, yet (as we will see) he is seldom mentioned in historical accounts of the Manchester School. In the US he is perhaps best known for his theoretical works, particularly his masterpiece on politics, Stratagems and Spoils. While Bailey had an interest in cognitive anthropology in England, his interest became keener at UCSD, which had a strong psych-​anthro faculty that included Roy D’Andrade, the dean of US cognitive anthropology. The influence of cognitive anthropology is particularly marked in his later (post-​1975) writings. Nevertheless, most all of Bailey’s prominent work is based on fieldwork undertaken while he was at Manchester University. To understand how Bailey conducted his research and developed his theory one therefore needs to go back to Max Gluckman and the Manchester school. But before beginning this undertaking it is essential to point out that neither editor is a political anthropologist; Victor is a cognitive anthropologist and Elisa a medical anthropologist. So our introduction is in no way a compendium on political anthropology. What we both find remarkable is that while it appears relatively easy to follow in Bailey’s footsteps by focusing on case studies and describing the actions of real people interacting in specific conflictual situations, it remains a ridiculously difficult task in actuality – the academic equivalent to climbing Mount Everest. Only virtuosos manage this trek. For most ethnographers, the attempt comes up short: inscribed interactions are stilted; individuals become tokens representing normative processes or beliefs; emotions and strategies come across as mechanical. Obscure academese substitutes for the raw uttered reflections of informants. In contrast, the very silky ease of reading Bailey’s texts or listening to his lectures is reminiscent of Gluckman’s reputed response to Turner’s seminar on ritual at Manchester: him nodding repeatedly, ‘Yes that’s it’. When listening to or reading Bailey we, likewise, have found ourselves nodding, ‘Yes that’s it’. It is this sense of the man, as someone who could so seamlessly translate

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the wisdom and humanity experienced in the field into compelling, not to mention enlightening and influential, lectures and texts, that has been so inspiring in our discipline.

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The Manchester School Before turning to Baily’s post-​doctoral years, we must discuss the Manchester school at some length. First, it is here where many of his ideas incubated. Second, to understand Bailey’s interest in conflict and case studies fully one must look to Max Gluckman, the leader of the Manchester School. Third, except for Kempny’s 2005 essay there are, to our knowledge, few writings that discuss Bailey as a member of the Manchester school. Gordon’s (2018) biography of Gluckman only mentions Bailey in passing (he is neither indexed nor cited). The excellent volume on the Manchester School by Evens and Handleman (2006) only mentions Bailey as a citation. The most recent book on the Manchester School, by Werbner (2020), an original member of the school, does not mention Bailey at all, though it has chapters devoted to Colson, Mitchell, Epstein, and Turner.

Beginnings: from Africa to England The Manchester School had its beginnings in South Central Africa. This is where its most well-​known methodological contribution to anthropology was developed by Max Gluckman –​the extended (or situational) case study. It is also where most of the first generation of Manchester School PhD students went for their research. The Rhodes-​Livingston Institute (RLI) was founded in 1938 in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). In the 1930s Darryl Forde was instrumental in creating an ongoing ‘African Ethnographic Atlas’ and one goal of the institute was to continue to build on this with new ethnographies. The RLI’s first Director was Godfrey Wilson who had been working there with his wife since the early 1930s. Max Gluckman came in 1939 and shortly thereafter, after quite a bit of competition and some luck, he became the director of the institute, a post he held from 1941–​47. Of the work done at RLI, Gordon writes, Gluckman and his colleagues, faced with the fluid actualities of daily life, emphasized social process with all its uncertainties, conflicts, and ambiguities. This necessitated innovative fieldwork techniques, later termed extended case studies or situational analysis, as they followed cases, or more accurately ‘events,’ examining their (historical) sequences and consequences. (2018, 1)

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The training was aimed at capturing the agency present in the various sociocultural groups living in the British colonial region (which included Zambia where the RLI was located). The Indigenous social groups were perceived to be organized as loose acephalous ‘tribes’ undergoing rapid change, and the principles of their loose organizations needed to be discovered through ethnographic research. The extended case study emerged out of this emphasis. In 1947 Gluckman returned to England to form and lead the new anthropology programme at Manchester University. He never returned to Africa (more of which, later).

Gluckman and the Manchester School Gluckman was one of those larger-​than-​life figures who, with boundless energy, both inspired many and repelled some for his over-​the-​top alpha male displays (e.g., Worsley, Schneider). In his renowned seminars, fuelled by beer and boisterous repartee, Gluckman or his students provided their latest extended case study, and all were enjoined to offer their own analysis or comments on the presenter’s talk. Researchers from Oxford, Cambridge, and London were also frequent participants. Indeed, anthropology flourished at Manchester under Gluckman’s guidance. The School produced a wide array of well-​respected, innovative scholars, many of whom are now important figures in the history of anthropology (e.g., Elizabeth Bott, Elizabeth Colson, Ronald Frankenberg, Bruce Kapferer, J. Clyde Mitchell, Victor Turner). Bailey recalled, in an interview by Marian Kempny (2003): So, those people were there. As I recall them, our seminars were rarely addressed directly to theory alone – to Durkheim’s ideas, or Spencer’s ideas, or whatever. They usually began with a case and the theory was drawn from that. Theoretical discussions arose from the context of particular events that took place in the Central Africa or India, or wherever. There were, however, some theoretical assumptions that guided these discussions. One of them was dissatisfaction with the Radcliffe-​Brownian structural functionalism that came out of Oxford. (2003, 1)

The extended case study It was in the bustling atmosphere of Manchester that Bailey acquired the rudiments of his ethnographic craft, the extended case study, which he developed into a template that many recognize as unparallelled for conducting fieldwork and analysing social interactions. Van Binsbergen (2007, 18) convincingly argues that the ‘localizing strategy’ of the case study does not

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diminish its scientific importance as one cannot generalize from an arbitrary sample of one or a few case studies to the many. He wrote,

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On the contrary, the social order is nothing but the ensemble of all such concrete interactions. It is in concrete cases that the fundamental contradictions and the inbuilt conflicts of the social texture come to the fore –​the abstract structural principles only exist in and through the agency that is acted out in these concrete cases. (van Binsbergen 2007, 56)

The extended case study is the jewel in the crown of the Manchester School’s achievements. Perhaps it is to social anthropology what Stratagems and Spoils is to political anthropology –​a punctuated leap beyond what theoretically preceded it. Until the 1970s, one could argue that the extended case study was the method of choice in social anthropology, which by then was very concerned with agency. Gluckman outlined three kinds of case studies: the ‘apt illustration, the social situation and the extended case study’ (2006, 28). We outline them below and discuss the challenge to generalization that, as Gluckman also noted, they pose (see also Mitchell 2006). An ‘apt illustration’ depicts a typical feature of some social organization and what it does, thus connecting concept to action. For instance, we can observe a blue-​collar worker arriving on the job in the morning saying ‘hello’ to their peers; ‘good morning sir’ or ‘ma’am’ to those of higher occupational status; and ‘hey asshole’ to his/​her/their close friends. This apt illustration can be used to illuminate a theory on rules for linguistic code switching depending on social status. More complicated is the ‘social situation’ or situational analysis. Gluckman’s famous 1940 article, ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand’, is considered a model for this sort of analysis (which may also be referred to as an extended case study). It is a five-​page article and will startle any contemporary anthropologist due to its bare bones and informal simplicity. It is also surprisingly modern: Gluckman includes himself in the text as the protagonist. The article concerns the official opening of a bridge across a river. Among those assembled for the opening are European settler groups of administrators, residents, and merchants. There are also Zulu groups: local leaders, colonial employees, musicians, labourers, and people who came to watch. Gluckman moves freely between these groups, indicating both the extent of his social network and his easy access to the different cultural and social worlds in the area. In so doing, he does not code switch between Indigenous and settler groups, symbolizing, as intended, their cultural and social equality. More subtly, without Gluckman stating it, he displays, a bit like Jan Steen does in paintings, the various groups that comprise the social tapestry of the region.

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In Bailey’s work, the extended case study is best illustrated by The Witch-​Hunt. The book centres around a low caste man, Tuta, who has acquired wealth (a class-​marker) beyond his caste station (he is a Dhobi, or washerman). He is accused of killing a young woman through sorcery by the panchayat (the local leaders). The narrative is built around the various machinations of the agents and Tuta’s threat to use the Indian state’s regional court to determine his guilt. Through all the back and forth, what is at stake is which political system (the new national or the traditional local one) will enact a mutually agreed on final judgement. Bailey describes a collocation of events that break in waves on the social and moral firmament of the village. At the end, the stolid traditional system holds sway, but we see the morphogenic emergence (Archer 2001) of a new political arena and system. This is the generalizing power of the extended case study in full display. If Gluckman were to hear Bailey speak of The Witch-​Hunt (there are many other examples of course) we imagine he would be nodding his head muttering as in seminar, ‘Yes that’s it, Bailey’s got it’. He would have been pleased, too, that Bailey does not entangle himself in a cultural analysis in this text. Mitchell (2006, 28) writes that ‘[the] case study is essentially heuristic; it reflects in the events portrayed features which may be construed as a manifestation of some general abstract theoretical principle’. That the case study remains the single most relied upon method in anthropology reflects the core actions by which anthropologists conduct research and how they come to know what they know. Unfortunately, except for technological advances (recorders, cell phones, tablets, qualitative data analysis programmes, etc.) there has been no apparent advance in the case study method itself. The three types of case studies and details on how to apply them remain as mapped by the Manchester School. What Bailey did was to expand on the methodology, producing a toolkit, set of instructions, and apt illustrations for how to use these tools to study political motives and actions. While the method appears a deceptively straightforward process, it also requires a capacity to listen, observe, and connect the dots to build a case – skills much like those needed for masterful carpentry, a craft in which Bailey had in fact, by an uncle, been trained.

The colonial question There are many facets to the colonial question and a festschrift introduction is not the place to go into much detail. However, one cannot ignore contemporary criticism regarding anthropology’s colonialist history when considering the contributions of a key scholar of the immediate postcolonial legacy.

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Many anthropologists have criticized British Anthropologists who worked during the colonial period as being ‘handmaidens’ to the colonial administration. Certainly Edward Evan Evans-​Pritchard’s (E-​P) work was funded by colonial administrators, and used by them. However, three arguments have been made to recast this ‘handmaiden’s tale’: one is that anthropologists, pre-​Gluckman, lacked an adequate level of theory for engaging with the loose social structures of the groups they studied to do any damage. Second, most of the anthropologists, including E-​P, Godfrey Wilson, and of course Gluckman, were explicitly and actively anti-​colonialists. Gluckman himself was banned from conducting research in Zambia (Rhodesia) for 17 years (until independence) because of his anti-​colonial stance (Kapferer 2006, 120). Third, Manchester School members were trained to explicitly avoid using the term ‘primitive’ to describe the ‘tribal’ people they studied, and instructed to portray them in terms of social complexity, values, intellectual acuity, and basic humanity as coeval with European society. Support for the colonial critique against the Manchester School and its RLI research centre comes from Gluckman’s default presumption that all the African groups studied were ‘tribes’ (Crehan 1997). New anthropologist arrivals to the RLI were given RLI index cards for how to conduct research and then sent to a ‘tribe’ on their own, and meant to come back with a treatise on their social structure. Gluckman describes a tribal society as follows: By ‘tribal society’ I mean the kind of community which was once described by the term ‘primitive society’, a term now rightly rejected. Others call this type of community ‘pre-​literate’ or ‘pre-​industrial’. These are appropriate terms, but I prefer ‘tribal’, since ‘tribe’ was used to describe most of the communities of Europe, virtually up to feudal times. And forms of social organization akin to those communities, are what I am dealing with. Basic to a tribal society is the egalitarian economy, with relatively simple tools to produce and primary goods to consume. The powerful and wealthy use their might and goods to support dependents; for they are unable to raise their own standard of living with the materials available. (Gluckman 1965, xxiv)

This statement does not eradicate the connotative resonances of ‘tribal’; it also seems to contradict itself: on the one hand there is an egalitarian economy and on the other ‘the powerful and wealthy’ act to support ‘dependents’ who lack materials for subsistence. Gluckman seems to be, as the saying goes, talking from both sides of his mouth. Crehan does duly note, however, that there are vast sociopolitical differences across different groups that are not initially observable without long-​term ethnography.

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Introduction

Even though Gluckman is expressly anti-​colonial and rejects cultural evolutionary rankings as legitimate means for cross-​cultural analysis, he does appear to take his own entitled status for granted. For instance, in the aforementioned and infamous article popularly known as ‘The Bridge’, it is clearly his male, colonial status that allows him to move, seemingly effortlessly between the colonial and Indigenous groups of various status to conduct his research. Though he includes his own movements in the essay, he is never reflexive about them. Notwithstanding, all anthropologists who conduct field work are in privileged positions, taking advantage of their inherent entitlements as University-​ based researchers. Further, most fieldwork funding for academics – indeed, most academic anthropological employment itself – comes from the state (most of our authors and we ourselves are, in the end, government employees; this does not, in itself, make us its minions). Contemporary reality aside, Bailey differs in many ways from most others in the first cohort of what Manchester locals might call ‘Mancunian’ anthropologists. First, as is obvious in the title of his book Tribe, Caste and Nation, Bailey identifies three distinct Indian non-​colonial social identities. Second, he worked in the new State of India, in postcolonial times; and while recognized as being British and hence ‘powerful’ he clearly did not move freely and unreflexively through intra-​or intervillage groups (about this he was reflexive, for instance once noting in class how he accompanied a government office to a new village and villagers came initially to him to address their grievances). His fieldwork was mostly sedentary and rural. He portrayed his interlocutors as specifically human: he gives not a hint of ‘noble savage’ or anything generically ‘tribal’ about the culture even when he is working among the Konds (overtly known then as a ‘tribal’ group). It is the case that most first-​generation Manchester School researchers worked in Northern Rhodesia which only became independent in 1964 as the nation of Zambia, but not Bailey. He conducted his fieldwork in a specifically postcolonial India, already then building its own future.

Main contributions of the Manchester school The key contributions of the Manchester school can be bulleted as follows: • Structures exist only as an academic ‘imaginary’ unless they are ‘brought to life in concrete acts by concrete actors’ (van Binsbergen 2007: 17). • Gluckman’s short but seminal article ‘The Bridge’ is considered a ‘gateway article’ (Gordon 2018: 1) to ethnographic research in general and in colonial situations in particular. • Anthropologists do not study cultures as snapshots: social change is a constant.

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• Individual members of a society should not be regarded as tokens, nor should behaviours or rituals be regarded as normative representations without first having extensive knowledge of the social group. • Social systems consist of events and processes manifest and inferred in social interactions. • A case study extends across time, space, and people and must logically cohere as a unified sequence of events that is purposive and has a predicated outcome. • The ethnographer must be linguistically competent, and must observe and participate in local activities. • Idiographic (i.e. local) theory is inferred from case studies and an analyses of a set of accumulated case studies may be viewed as the basis for postulating hypotheses for nomothetic theory building. • Agency or an action-​oriented approach refers to the ability of an individual to improvise and act in ways distinct from the normative expectations associated with a social situation. • Given the focus on local level social process and emphasis on agency, implied is the notion that local agents could determine their own life course and affect local political systems even under late or postcolonial state rule: future outcomes are understood as based on present-​day choices, which, in turn entails that one person or a small group can effect change.

Bailey and the extended case study Bailey analyses behaviour with an eye to the circumstances against which political contestants choose particular tactical displays of passion combined with normative reasoning to make their point and, in the process, defeat their adversaries. He looks too for the means by which politicians deceive under the cover of a publicly shared truth, or ‘saving lie’. The persons engaged in social interactions are not as Bailey once said ‘automata’, acting on the behest of programmatic rules, but engaged, intelligent participants in various games, with vested interests. Passing situations through the mills of analysis, Bailey shows in them universal aspects of human nature (i.e., being moral, having deontic obligations and rights, practicing deception), his attention trained on the dialectic between individual as actor (or agent) and social systems or structures, as manifest in norms that constrain behaviour and institutions that enforce those constraints. The focus is humans (traditionally, men) engaged in political interactions. It is true that when engaging in description or analysis the author recreates and simplifies what happened. Agency is imputed to actors through the perceptive capacities of the author. The Manchester school offered a way out by taking for granted the ontological status of the case study.

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Introduction

The problem passed over in this equation is the limits of the case study as an analytical tool. The contemporary anthropological perspective casts goings-​on in the world as deeply interconnected; it sees culture as fluid and malleable. Human interaction, from this vantage, does not allow itself to be so easily shoehorned into a case study presentation. Compounding this is the fact that social technological change is occurring today at a faster rate than our social and cultural systems, much less individuals, can adaptively handle, as present debates regarding and crises stemming from environmental degradation, structural racism, political polarization, and pandemic viral (and related conspiratorial) flows expose. Nonetheless, the extended case study method remains critical for micro-​ level analysis and for building theory. It continues to provide an important theoretical lens and method for studying local networks of interaction by foregrounding humans and their choices over a deterministic view of the systems humans have created.

Bailey’s shifting interests over time Bailey wrote, in Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership, ‘It is astonishing how much patent falsehood there is in life’ (1988, 3). Revealing falsehood, most often disguised as truth, seems to be the autochthonous furnace that fuelled Bailey’s quest to uncover deceit among those who seek or wield power. Bailey looked into the political world with a pragmatic yet fully humanistic gaze, never seeing the individual as stand-​ in for the group. His writings on the relationship between politicians in competitive positions expose, in a non-​partisan way sorely lacking in the current moment, how self-​interest is cleverly re-​conceived in the idiom of public interest. Bailey expressed this position, honed over time, through 17 books, six of which expressly concerned his ethnographic research in and around the village of Bisipara (now Bisipada) in the northern state of Orissa (now Odisha), in India. The first three of these were written shortly after his dissertation fieldwork in the middle of the 1950s, the latter, 30-​plus years later. The difference in the titles is noteworthy:

The early years 1. Caste and the Economic Frontier: A Village in Highland Orissa, 1957 2. Politics and Social Change in Orissa, 1959 3. Tribe, Caste, and Nation: A Study of Political Activity and Political Change in Highland Orissa, 1960

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The later years

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4. The Prevalence of Deceit, 1991 5. The Kingdom of Individuals: An Essay on Self-Respect and Social Obligation, 1993 6. The Witch-​Hunt, or, The Triumph of Morality, 1994 The early books showcase Bailey engaging in field work and using the extended case study method. Of these books, Tribe, Caste and Nation is his masterpiece; it remains among the best ethnographies ever written. Its title and those of the books leading up to it speak of social entities and processes: caste, economics, village, tribe, nation, politics, and change. The titles for the later books come from another world, so to speak. The social as entity has disappeared, replaced by socio-​moral concerns: deceit, individuals, self-​respect, social obligations, witch-​hunts, and morality.

Ethnography to ethnology The difference between these two trios is driven by a shift from ethnography to ethnology. The first trio is concerned with ethnographic description and inferences that rely on Bailey’s acquired cultural competency and ability to apprehend the emic strategies of village (and state) political actors. In the second three books Bailey broadens his ethnographic gaze to include cross-​cultural patterns that imply universal features of political systems. For instance, in The Witch-​Hunt Bailey compares the failed Dukakis presidential campaign with the unsuccessful attempt of an ‘Untouchable’ named Tuta to raise his caste status. Both were falsely accused of actions indirectly related to murder: in the Dukakis case the furloughing of Willie Horton from prison, and Tuta was falsely accused of killing a village woman by sorcery (see also Barrett 1984).

Culture, cognition, and intersubjectivity in the political arena Despite Bailey’s focus on the truths extant in political contests, his work can be distinguished from that of Foucault, Geertz, Appadurai, or most theorists regarded by contemporary anthropologists now in that he identifies himself as an empiricist and his work as scientific. He recognizes the inherent subjectivism of all depictions and explanations of human actions, without reversing the gaze onto himself or by claiming to know what is in people’s hearts and minds (motives). He avoids the latter by considering not just what people say they are doing but also what they actually do, as well

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as how others who are meant to be persuaded interpret those actions (see Bailey 2008, 12). And he accomplishes the former by identifying that there is a hard, natural reality out there and that, for our actions to do what they are intended to do, we must acknowledge and adapt to that reality. Our common ability to do so leads to what Bailey refers to as ­intersubjectivity – an agreement to see things the same way. Bailey writes: people can still disagree about what an experience means; therefore, experience itself can only be validated through intersubjectivity; experience has to be pinned down by the meaning given to it. Experience must have a public character; that is, it must be intersubjective. In short ‘Scientific objectivity can be described as the intersubjectivity of scientific method’. (Bailey 2001, 25; citing Popper 1966, ii, 217–​18)

In other words, objectivity is based on collective ideas that people agree on and these ideas then are objectively accessible, since when stated they have the intended consequence. Bailey offers anthropologists an escape from the trap of subjectivity without rejecting the reality of subjectivity nor our ability to find common ground. Still, Felix Girke notes that Bailey has made an ‘Exkurs zur kognitiven Anthropologie’ (Girke 2002, 44). For one thing, Bailey himself writes that ‘a social system is not a material reality that exists independently of any mind. Social structure and social process have to do with mental things, with ideas’ (Bailey 2001, 25; italics in original). Girke cites Bailey’s concern with norms as well as the rules that govern the use of those norms. From one point of view, the proper way to study society is to ascertain the rules which people expect themselves and others to follow when they interact. These rules are connected: some reinforce others, while to follow one rule can also be to break another. Nonetheless, rules are meant to guide and constrain behaviour along normatively designed cultural tracks. What is important is that rules are mental guidelines that are shared, but also manipulated for instrumental ends by individuals – including of course politicians. Ward Goodenough defined culture in a purely cognitive manner as the rules that define appropriate behaviour in specific contexts. This definition has near axiomatic status among cognitive anthropologists and remains even up to today a radical one because it moves culture to the mind (as knowledge). Intersubjectivity relies on what Bailey’s UCSD colleague Roy D’Andrade referred to as ‘third order knowing’ (1995). This means that I know the rules for appropriate behaviour when entering a classroom to teach, and I also know that the students know those rules and I know they know that I know those rules. Given his position at UCSD and his open inquisitive nature, it may have been inevitable that Bailey would make the excursion into cognitive

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anthropology that Girke flagged. Yet few anthropologists trained outside the subfield of cognitive anthropology – perhaps particularly those trained in the British Social Anthropological tradition – would make such a foray, preferring instead, at the time, Geertz’s complete rejection of the psychological. Undoubtedly, in bucking the trend, Bailey was influenced by the presence of Mel Spiro, Roy D’Andade, Ted Schwartz, and Gananath Obeyesekere –​all of whom were at UCSD when he arrived. That said, despite working for the last few decades in a department brought together around psychological anthropology, Bailey did not buy into the type of fieldwork that cognitive anthropologists then preferred – which was limited to the study of decision-​making processes, and the development of paradigmatic models of various cultural categories, particularly kinship, but also diseases, plants, and emotions. Bailey was ultimately interested in life itself on the grand stages in which humans enacted their desires and contested with one another. Bailey wrote, ‘I feel uneasy when faced with any analysis which does not allow man a central role as an entrepreneur’ (1969a, 18). He was not interested in dissecting butterflies, but in understanding the patterns of their flight.

Playing to strengths As Felix Girke in Chapter 2 notes, the Bailey toolkit has been criticized as failing to attend to political economy, using case studies as a source for making universalist claims, paying too little heed to postcolonial subjectivity, and having an unreflective confidence in the accuracy of ethnographic accounts, much less an analysis – criticisms that we in part addressed above. But perhaps most importantly, it offers us a method for both accommodating and understanding human agency in a way that does not undercut the importance of structure. Herbert Lewis (1993) wrote of the 1990s that Something new seems to be happening. The search has begun for new ways to understand the changing world around us. Today people all over the world are increasingly ‘acting up’ and confounding the planners, controllers, predictors. Handlers showing at once the ability to act and to draw upon the ideas, meanings, understandings. patterns – that some may still call ‘culture.’ Perhaps this is one reason for the growing interest in a new view of choice-​making actors.

And in the new millennium, the focus on choice has only grown. We see its current culmination for instance in the ‘vaccine choice’ rhetoric, itself not too far from the heels of school choice, reproductive choice, consumer choice, and so on. Accordingly, action fandom in scholarly circles has risen

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Introduction

further, now encompassing notions of ‘desire’ and ‘potentiality’ and with an eye to the generative aspects of human interaction, even in the face of structurally foreclosed options. This is one reason Foucault has been eclipsed by Deleuze (and Guttari) in recent decades citation-​wise. Yet much anthropological writing today has broken free from the mooring of ethnographic fact. In part for this reason, ethnographic work nowadays tends to be ‘problem oriented’ rather than ‘holistic’. Such texts often lack consistency in terms of organization and voice. Beyond being topical, they are overly concerned with the place and purpose of the anthropologist. In this, paradoxically, the focus is returned to dominant forces that shape and constrain human behaviour – except instead of structure those forces are ideological, and hegemonically elitist. The field is less confident, less stable, more fragmented, and mostly anti-​scientific in its approach to data collection or analysis. The preferred form of expression is often abstruse. Bailey is none of those things. His ethnographies are holistic; his conclusions, based on careful analysis with humbly minimal self-​reflection regarding his own biases and subjective positionality vis-​à-​vis the field. Baily writes with what he called, in 2008, ‘the clear and simple English prose that was taught to me seventy years ago’, lamenting that this does not appeal to those who prefer texts ‘as dense and impenetrable as a thicket of brambles’ or assume that ‘ideas can only be meaningful when their meaning is obscure’ (p. 6). Given both the turbulent politicization of life not just in the US and England but globally, and the anthropological turn to empiricism and ethnography as evidenced in the present body of theory and works related to practice, agency, and power in everyday life, Bailey’s straightforward approach not only has resonance, but has much to contribute.

The collection Accordingly, for this festschrift, we did not ask contributors to ‘follow in the master’s footsteps’; rather we saw them from a Mancunian perspective: as engaged in their own work with theoretical positions that might be close to or far removed from Bailey’s. However, we see in the varied contributions some re-​occurring regularities. These are: a focus on human beings in social situations, the appreciation of a finely honed ethnographic sensibility, and an approach that builds from the bottom up or in parts but always in relation to a theoretical blueprint for the whole, be it in an assistant living home, a forest, church meetings, a conference circuit, or any other situation where people declaim a position in the local and national power structures. The festschrift begins with a series of appraisals of Professor Bailey’s oeuvre. Felix Girke and Gitika De provide uniquely sturdy and insightful

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examinations of his contributions to Indian studies and political science and explore how these contributions serve as foundations or springboards for contemporary anthropologists. Stanley Barrett reviews Bailey’s works with an eye to changes in his perspective over time on the suitability of positivism for explaining our complex and disorderly world. Bailey himself regarded Barrett’s coverage as the authoritative summation – so much so that he requested Barrett write his obituary (Barrett did, in 2020; although given Bailey’s stature it was one of many). Part II focuses on Bailey’s impact as a mentor. The Sussex years are central to the chapters by Christopher Griffin and Gavin Smith. Of particular interest is how Bailey inculcated in students the capacity for attending, both in terms of data collection and data analysis, to the activities that make up the stream of ordinary life. We also see some exploration of the ways Bailey’s position as a core member of the Manchester School rubbed off, or not, on those he mentored. David Lipset’s piece examines how well the agency-​first, structure-​second position of the Mancunian school extended into the anthropology of Melanesia in the 1970s. Individuals also are the focus of Part III, but here they are the subjects of the research. Yohko Tsuji aims the ethnographic lens at how people negotiate age-​related norms in the US Sara Dickey discusses a group that has moved from being one of the lowest and poorest castes in South India to one of the wealthiest, and what their articulation with contemporary Indian urban life tells us. The ethnographic site for Prussing’s chapter is the public health conference circuit for Aotearoa (in English, New Zealand), and her focus is on negotiations meant to counter the marginalization of Māori health concerns. Part IV tracks the pragmatic thread of the Mancunians and Bailey as it weaves through the study of politics at work at three different social and political scales: the global level, through Robert Wade’s analysis of the World Bank; the national level, through Namika Raby’s work in the agricultural development realm; and at the local level, in the works of Christian Lo considering the political push-​pull between politicians and bureaucratic administrators, and in this the ‘street bureaucracy’ (Vike 2018) – that is, the everyday bureaucracy that we all deal with. Kevin Avruch’s chapter works at an interstitial level, bringing together Bailey’s ‘third party’ prototypes with what we know today about how mediators function in the world of disputes, and highlighting their never-​neutral vantages. Chapters in the last part focus on social change, paying homage both to Bailey’s initial fieldwork focus but also his revisitation – that is, his twin trilogies. The first trio was written in close proximity to his time in the field, with the aim of describing his findings directly; the second, written decades later – in a move that went against the grain of anthropology’s majority definition of what counts as ethnography – reflects on ‘what happened’, with contemporary hindsight. Mary Kay Gilliland examines change in the former

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Introduction

country of Yugoslavia, particularly as regards gender, largely via the lenses offered in Bailey’s masterpiece, Tribe, Caste, and Nation and his 1990s revisioning of ethnic strife in The Civility of Indifference; Karen Brison discusses the push for change in Fiji by a new, entrepreneurial churchgoing class in terms of the former book’s ‘bridge actions’. In the final chapter of this festschrift, Andrew Wilford explores the ‘need for enemies’ in ‘tribal’ India, investigating the relationship between illness and inequality, sequencing Bailey’s analytic purview with that of Jacques Derrida to illuminate the embodied malevolence that has accompanied modernization.

Moving forward It has been our pleasure to explore F. G. Bailey’s legacy in this collection. Among his gifts, one standout is Bailey’s uncommonly excellent prose. His social analyses are resonant with the same succinct bite of one of his favourite playwrights, Henrik Ibsen. A second gift is Bailey’s analytical capacity to see actions with a laser-​like directness – his Socratic capacity to draw the salient connections in political actions, particularly between adversaries. A third gift is his attention to political strategies that, when enacted, sway in a dialectical fulcrum between self-​interest and the public good. By paying attention to what people did, and to the how, where, when, and why of their actions, Bailey developed a one-​of-​a-​kind toolkit of concepts and methods for the analysis of political actors in political arenas. These three gifts taken together made him a master ethnographer as well as ethnologist – an expositor of the universal principles that govern social life. Bailey’s approach provides a highly effective means and map for doing anthropology, whatever the cultural setting may be. Indeed, as the diversity of topics covered in this volume helps show, Professor Bailey would have taken little pleasure in being remembered as a self-​cloning supervisor – or as the kind of ‘great tall tree that has nothing growing under it’ (Kempny 2003, 8). Bailey’s contributions towered, but in a generative way. His perspective – his paradigm – remains broadly relevant, and his ever-​helpful toolkit retains an appreciated utility in these contentious times. Although anthropology mourns his loss, F. G. Bailey’s legacy endures.

References Archer, M. 2001. Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1969. Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Bailey, F. G. 1988. Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bailey, F. G. 2001. Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils. How Leaders Make Practical Use of Beliefs and Values. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Bailey, F. G. 2008. God-​Botherers and Other True Believers: Religion, Diseducation, and Politics. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Barrett, S. 1984. The Rebirth of Anthropological Theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Barrett, S. 2020. F. G. Bailey. Anthropology News website, 13 November. van Binsbergen, W. 2007. ‘Manchester as the Birth Place of Modern Agency Research: The Manchester School Explained from the Perspective of Evans-​ Pritchard’s Book The Nuer.’ In Strength Beyond Structure, edited by M. de Bruijn, R. van Dijk, and J. H. Gewald, 16–​61. Leiden: Brill. Crehan, K. 1997. The Fractured Community: Landscapes of Power and Gender in Rural Zambia. Berkeley: University of California Press. D’Andrade, R. G. 1995. The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evens, T. M. S. and D. Handelman, eds. 2006. The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Girke, F. 2002. ‘Die theoretischen Entwicklungen im Werk von F. G. Bailey. Handlung, Politik und Rhetorik.’ Working Papers of the Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien 8, University of Mainz. https://​www.ifeas.uni-​mainz.de/​files/​ 2019/​07/​Girke.pdf accessed 17/​08/​2021. Gluckman, M. [1940] 1958. ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand.’ Journal of Bantu Studies 14: 1–​30, 147–​74. Gluckman, M. 2006. ‘Ethnographic Data in British Social Anthropology.’ In The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis. An Anthropology, edited by T. M. S. Evens and D. Handelman, 13–22. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Gordon, R. J. 2018. The Enigma of Max Gluckman: The Ethnographic Life of a ‘Luckyman’ in Africa. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kapferer, B. 2006. ‘Situations, Crisis, and the Anthropology of the Concrete: The Contribution of Max Gluckman.’ In The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology, edited by T. M. S. Evens, and D. Handelman, 118–​58. London: Berghahn. Kempny, M. 2003. ‘Interview with F. G. Bailey.’ Archival Material from Wenner-​ Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Kempny, M. 2005. ‘History of the Manchester “School” and the Extended-​case Method.’ Social Analysis 49(3): 144–​65. Lewis, H. 1993. ‘A New Look at Actor-​ oriented Theory.’ Political and Legal Anthropology Review 16(3): 49–​56. DOI: 10.1525/​pol.1993.16.3.49. Mitchell, J. C. 2006. ‘Case and Situation Analysis.’ In The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology edited by T. M. S. Evens, and D. Handelman, 16–​44. London: Berghahn. Vike, H. 2018. Politics and Bureaucracy in the Norwegian Welfare State: An Anthropological Approach. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Werbner, R. 2020. The Manchester School, Colonial and Postcolonial Transformations. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Part I

Contributions to the discipline

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F. G. Bailey’s political anthropology and its malcontents Felix Girke The hedgehog and the fox Me a hedgehog? I try not to be, but who am I to know? I do have an uncomfortable feeling that I have been saying the same thing over and over again for the last forty years. (FGB, email to the author, September 2001)

To discuss the oeuvre of Bailey seems an impossible task within the space of a short book chapter, and yet not. Recently and usefully, his writings were split into three periods by Stanley Barrett, who speaks of an early ‘Indian phase’, ‘the transactional model’ phase, and a final focus on ‘anthropology at home’ (Barrett 2020a). Barrett nevertheless finds red threads and clear lines of development spanning publications over half a century –​in my reading, best summarized as ever-​growing methodological refinements in how the central sociological concern of structure and agency is to be approached. And this is the way in which Bailey’s above-​cited reference to Isaiah Berlin’s parable about the one-​idea hedgehog and the many-​ideas fox that Bailey mentioned in several publications proves helpful: Bailey’s work, to me, has a clearly defined core, which might make him appear as a hedgehog (even to himself), but methodologically, and in terms of his thinking, he remains a fox, and to read his books and papers reveals them to be a curiosity-​driven, restlessly ever-​adapting, diligent, and didactical but never dogmatic effort to approach one central problem of the discipline from different angles. This problem, broadly, is competitive social interaction and its normative as well as pragmatic aspects, which makes up a lion’s share of what people do, and thus –​provocatively speaking –​ought to lie at the centre of anthropological work, or at least that which is grounded in empirical fieldwork.

My passage to Bailey Throughout 2001, I was reading the work of F. G. Bailey. My adviser, Professor Ivo Strecker, had suggested that I write my MA thesis on the theoretical development in Bailey’s writing (Girke 2002), as he had seemed a

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key thinker for the elaboration of rhetoric culture theory, a key effort of Strecker’s team at the University of Mainz at the time (see Meyer, Girke and Mokrzan 2016). It was only when I was nearly done with writing that I managed to go ‘into the field’: F. G. Bailey accepted my request to let me visit him and pick his mind –​‘talk shop’, as he called it. In early October 2001, I flew to San Diego, and drove up into the hills where Bailey lived, having been graciously invited to stay with him and his wife for a couple of days. When we got down to talk, I found myself oddly unprepared: while I had read most of what he had ever written, I was too inexperienced still to make the most of this encounter. Nevertheless, the visit went well: we kept corresponding over the years on matters both personal and academic. I cherished these emails, especially as the years passed. His comment that ‘old age is not for wimps’ (Email, August 2009) soon entered my family’s internal idiom. Although throughout my career I have greatly profited from my MA thesis work, I never refined it for another dedicated publication. This festschrift allows me to return to the numerous half-​finished drafts and data-​stuffed folders that have languished on a succession of computers. I have long wanted to sum up what it is that I did learn from him, illustrated by way of other commentators who found their reading of Bailey less profitable.

Everything I need to know about political anthropology I learned from F. G. Bailey At the conference of the European Association for Social Anthropology (EASA) in 2014, I gave a paper entitled ‘Everything I need to know about political anthropology I learned from F. G. Bailey’ in Panel 018 on ‘What to do with “old” anthropology? Zeitgeist, knowledge, and time’. I took aim at the subtitle of the panel: What was the role of zeitgeist in our appreciation of somebody’s work? I argued that growing or lessening appreciation of an author is not solely dependent on some abstract quality of their work –​much of it is a question of ‘fit’, something rarely analysed well enough so that we can convincingly reconstruct why one theorist is still cited, but another is not. The uncertainty of one’s intellectual legacy is a challenge some boldly confront by training as many acolytes in their personal tradition as possible. Bailey neither encouraged nor would have condoned a cult of personality.1 So his work itself was up against a discipline that began to neglect monographs in favour of journal articles, and the zeitgeist –​specifically, a felt shift in his very own subfield: at the time, I called out the contrast between ‘political anthropology’ and the ‘anthropology of politics’, also put into apt words by Bjorn Thomassen:

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Anthropology has become increasingly political, even politicized, exactly in the same period as the established subcategory of the discipline, political anthropology, has faded away, and exactly as many works carried out under this category were either deconstructed or pushed into oblivion –​mostly the latter. (Thomassen 2008: 263)

This view spoke to me, as I felt that Bailey’s work had been pushed aside indeed (rather than deconstructed), just as much as that of many of his contemporaries –​quite unfairly and needlessly. Where did they go, the references to Bailey, Abner Cohen, Frankenberg, Boissevain, Gulliver, even Gluckman in the studies we read? Some contemporaries saved themselves from a like fate by texts simply too big to ignore (e.g., Barth 1969; Turner 1974). Thomassen blames a shift in sensibilities, in interests, in zeitgeist: the generation of political anthropologists that was still lauded in the 1970s and 1980s for their interactional or transactional innovations that overcame whatever remained of structural functionalism (as per Vincent 1978), was effectively discarded. The ‘running intellectual battleground’ and even ‘guerrilla warfare’ that marked political anthropology then (Vincent 1990, 20), is too shifting to stabilize here for a comprehensive criticism. But one relevant trend was that the political anthropology of the time, having recently been liberated from having tribes without rulers as its main object, failed to fully embrace the focus on political action that had begun to emerge. Instead, it again fixed on an object. As Joan Vincent put it, ‘the only true political unit of study was the seat of power and sovereignty: the state’ (Vincent 1990, 347). With poststructuralism, ‘power’ and ‘hegemony’ became other prime concerns, leaving behind nitty-​gritty situational analyses and mid-​range, or ‘minimalist’, as Vincent also called it, interactional theory. Simultaneously, when (pace Easton [1959]) political anthropology, or rather –​specifically –​the anthropology of politics came into its own, ‘the politics of …’ became an overly common term as everything came to be seen as political. Thomassen suggested that this ‘politics of’-​format in effect relates to an explicit or implicit use of discourse analysis, a thematic focus on discursive power and discursive practices by means of which concrete phenomena are unmasked and heavily criticized. This very often involves a critical stance towards centralized or institutionalized forms of power and modes of representation from the vantage point of peripheries. (2008, 264)

This suggests changes in theoretical preference as much as in ­positionality –​ and also a shift away from the actions of situated individuals towards both more abstract conceptual concerns, and towards evaluative rather than merely descriptive or explanatory analyses.2 For me, then, the point stands that what Vincent infelicitously named ‘manipulative strategies’ (1978) in political anthropology has been short-​changed by disciplinary history.

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For reasons that are maybe most simply summed up as ‘poststructuralism’, this field of work went on to be ignored rather than being properly engaged with. Stratagems and Spoils, with a prescient attention to nuance, had been subtitled A Social Anthropology of Politics: rightly so, as it did cordon off a field of politics through methodology, rather than some tentative attempt to identify the political as a separate empirical field. To reiterate: the difference between political anthropology and the anthropology of politics is that the former was mostly a methodological innovation, whereas the latter delineated an ever-​expanding field of study. And even if the anthropology of politics seems to have carried the day, this also means that the toolkit Bailey developed (and much of the writing of his peers) can still be useful for identifying, describing, and analysing political action –​in whatever arena.

The toolkit A summary of his political anthropology3 must start with the fact that F. G. Bailey was interested in people, understood as actors who have projects, and who face resistance or competition in their pursuit of these projects. I believe he found such situations endlessly fascinating. He could tell that his actors had projects by attending to what they did, rather than by believing what they said. ‘How people get things done or fail in the attempt’ was his useful shorthand for the political process. As a heuristic to cordon off and isolate such instances of trying to ‘get things done’ when they occur in a basically orderly manner, he introduced the term ‘arena’, a lasting conceptual legacy. But the word ‘orderly’ itself is to be understood from the perspective of the actors, not the observer: order is not some abstract quality. Instead, Bailey means that the competitors in the arena need to be able to make sense of what others do, that they need to share a communicative idiom and some basic rules that govern intelligibility as well as the mutually accepted boundaries of the competition. Politics in the arena have other aspects as well. There are the allies, followers, opponents, and there is, especially, an audience: ‘Everybody involved in politics, myself included, speaks with an eye to an audience, to persuade, rather than always and only to convey the truth’ (Bailey 1998, 7). Getting things done is much facilitated by either direct support or tacit acceptance. Bailey’s classification of the audience to dyadic struggles into four types shows the abstract transcultural potential of the model (compare Avruch, this volume). The tertius numen is the ‘sublime third party’ who is the final adjudicator, but cannot compete over resources themselves (like a

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classical referee, or God). Tertius luctans is the ‘fighting third’ who involves themselves in the conflict dyad rather than remaining outside the fray, and somewhat related, tertius gaudens, the ‘laughing third’, profits from others’ struggles. This ascription can switch, as when a judge becomes partial, so the diagnosis is again not abstract, but a concern of the actors and as such an aspect of the debate, that is, intrinsic to politics. The fourth and final audience is the tertius dolens, the ‘suffering third’, who sees themselves maligned as a self-​interested luctans, when in fact this party aspires to be seen as neutral numen. This attention to the ‘figure of the third’ signifies that Bailey’s approach is fundamentally performative: political actions are not simply practical tasks, they are social in that they are enacted with an audience in mind. Or, put differently: an audience will often seek the intent (or meaning) behind actions, taking them as enacted in the service of somebody’s interests. Beyond the audience, for something to qualify as political, there must be a shared communicative idiom, and there must be some rules, some limits, some constraints to what the contestants can do to each other; Bailey rather clearly exempts anomic brawls from the realm of politics. Initially, he identified two basic kinds of rules. Normative rules, which are public in that people would agree that they should be obeyed, set broad ethical limits to possible actions, and are thus reproducible guides to conduct. They are largely used to justify actions to a broader public. Pragmatic rules are more private and normatively neutral; they help in winning a political debate even without what would publicly be condemned as cheating, or by cheating without getting caught. Pragmatic rules are adaptive, and should not be understood to determine the behaviour of people. There are usually multiple rules, even contradictory rules available within one arena, and Bailey emphasizes dynamic aspects of pragmatic rules becoming normative rules over time (or even quickly). Actors are rule-​aware, but retain their agency and can manipulate rules. A shared rule-​set is central to the notion of the arena, and especially normative rules lead an active social life in the form of claims. This differentiated understanding of rules echoes a saying I was taught as an undergraduate: ‘We should study what people say they do, what they say they should do, and what they actually do’ –​viz, seek to make sense of actions and the different ways people explain, rationalize, justify, and in general make them intelligible. In Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils, a departure from the early model –​a departure that already can be gleaned from other in-​between publications –​ is made explicit: while Bailey still speaks of ‘normative’ and ‘strategic’ rules (the latter a subset of ‘pragmatic’ rules), he collapses the distinction for

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methodological reasons. Now, rules for him are relevant as actors’ interpretations of what is going on, and not in how they inform decisions –​the shift is fundamental:

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The neat analytic distinction … is blurred in practice because allocating any particular action to one or another category is a matter of opinion and the allocation can serve as a weapon. In that case rules are not guides to action but rhetorical tools to justify or condemn actions. (2001b, 115)

There is no indication that Bailey lost interest in the practical ways of politicking. But now, he is no longer an observer trying to get at the reasons for people’s choices; much rather, he fundamentally cares about how other actors in the arena do the interpreting, and whether something will be explained by reference to expediency or morality becomes an empirical question. This must be understood as a central aspect of Bailey’s model of politics. Mere behaviour is the subject of ethology; to make sense of and justify action –​ that is politics. Moreover, the moves people make in debates and struggles –​their efforts to get things done –​are communicative. They are always grounded in some reference to an ‘ought’ or an ‘is’, in the form of a moral or an empirical claim. The ‘claim’ is the atom, the most elementary term in Bailey’s toolkit –​the smallest empirical unit of politics, if you will. Claims are opposed by counter-​claims, until eventually one side gives in or fails to match or discredit a claim, or the audience –​a tertius –​declares a winner. To observe claims in their social setting leads us to a larger unit, the ‘language of claims’: the repertoire of acceptable arguments in a certain arena. To elucidate a language of claims as what enables actors to argue their choices is one of the central tasks of the political ethnographer.4 Similar to symbolic interactionalism, Bailey’s tools primarily work with those elements actually present in the situation as far as the actors are concerned. He also cautions against psychologizing, and from seeing or implying that unseen forces are at work. We never know what people think. Still, there is a touch of cognitive anthropology here as well, because while classification is at stake, it is not fixed in the mind. But, through claims and counter-​claims, classificatory statements are the object and means of the political struggle itself. In effect, Bailey inquires into how people word their world, and his analyses (re-​)construct a grammar of values and categories. The wordings, the choices from among various available languages of claims (or from the bestiary of political forms), the efforts to win over audiences and woo followers, all these, as they occur in political struggles, eventually led Bailey to explicitly embrace rhetorical analysis. The ‘later Bailey’ has recognized that political action is always, and centrally, a persuasive process; informed by the rhetorical turn in the

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humanities, he continues to refine and rearticulate his toolkit. The persuasion he cares about cannot be a ‘persuasion of’ –​for, after all, how would we know that somebody was truly convinced of an is or an ought? –​but a ‘persuasion that’: I persuade others to not issue counter-​claims to my claim. What matters is that at the end of a debate, only one version publicly stands, and such a will-​driven process of swaying an audience is the very essence of rhetoric (compare Girke/​Meyer 2011). Whether our claim stands because we make the audience laugh, because our opponent cannot make a counter-​ argument, or because we present the better appeal to shared symbols is an empirical question; but at some point, debate will have to stop, because things need to get done. It is then that we have arrived at ‘the definition of the situation’. The phrase is not his, but he owns it well; I quote from The Saving Lie at length: The phrase defining the situation presupposes a plurality of structures in competition with one another and assumes an adversarial encounter in which one person tries to foist his or her definition onto another and so stabilize their relationship. Foist suggests the nature of the encounter: it is not simple homo homini lupus. Its mode of persuasion is somewhat less than naked force; ego and alter already have enough in common to let them communicate; so there is at least a modicum of civility. But neither is the encounter necessarily sweet reason; foist retains a sufficient whiff of nastiness to make clear that defining a situation is not an occasion when both parties want only the ‘truth’ (even if they say so); they have axes to grind. When someone successfully ‘defines the situation’ for me, I agree, like it or not, whether I believe what has been said or not, to behave in accordance with whatever conventions the definition stipulates. That agreement structures the situation. (Bailey 2003, 135)

This is always the preliminary end to a situation –​somebody gets to define it. The interesting revelation here is the new relation between agency and structure offered: Bailey stipulates that the alternative structures available are not only resources or constraints, but they are actually the spoil of the stratagem. The right to impose them is the prize over which people struggle. Bailey compared his approach to Goffman’s. Goffman’s players want to keep the game and rules intact; Bailey’s players are out to decide what the game will be, or in fact, retroactively declare what it has been.5 But power is not a central element for Bailey’s model, largely because it is an abstraction, in itself a shorthand explanation for the outcome of an ­encounter. To call someone or something powerful is to say they can regularly impose definitions of the situation, often by non-​symbolic means, such as a threat of immediate violence. Is this still usefully seen as political? Bailey at times jokes about a handgun being a ‘persuader’, and it is –​just not a very interesting one, as handguns constrain debate and argument, and render it unnecessary to sway an audience to decide a struggle.

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One of the final aspects of the model, the ‘saving lie’, is articulated in Bailey’s eponymous book: people are invested in social arrangements, in imagined communities or normative rules or other fictions, and react very badly when these are contested, as it threatens to question their very identities, having to justify what lies at the basis of their self-​understanding or self-​esteem. The saving lies are how we naturalize these social arrangements and remove them from contestation. They are central in struggles over the definition of the situation, as we will defend them vigorously rather than entertain the notion that things as we have come to accept them are possibly flawed, unjust, or hypocritical. Political struggles, then, will often reveal people’s saving lies as that which cannot be negotiated. A far from privileged role in the model is assigned to the field of emotion. For Bailey, affective displays matter in how they can contribute (among other elements) to define situations. The added capacity they bring to the arena is that they can ‘seal’ a position by side-​lining the argument, prioritizing pathos over logos, as it were. If emotions can be made to matter, compromise becomes less likely, and the effect of such displays on an audience can be hard to match with words alone. Methodologically, that leaves us with displays of emotion understood, more or less, as rhetorical: even the most heartfelt emotions still need to be communicated effectively to matter in a situation. That alone is enough to subsume them under the umbrella of claims. What are the rules, then, both pragmatic and normative, governing displays of emotion? What are culturally relevant frames and repertoires? Attending to such questions is how Bailey suggests we can best understand the role emotions play in the political field, while remaining prudently agnostic about their truth values. In summary, Bailey looks at the sequence of events in an encounter, the play of claim and counter-​claim, assessing how they were resolved towards a definition of the situation that legitimizes a certain result. Actors need to plausibly reference rules in order to sway an audience and/​or gain ­supporters. This is a model for social action, for competitive interaction, for practical politics. It is modular and synthetic, adaptable, and sensitive to cultural particularities, without imbuing these with undue ontological weight. It puts human agency front and centre, but recognizes that people feel constraints. Rather than deducing or declaring such constraints, stumbling over how ‘structure’ prevents us from exerting our ‘agency’, it empirically focuses situated and positional actors to analyse the reception of claims by an audience in an arena. We are put in the actors’ shoes. Here it is worthwhile to highlight the timespan of Bailey’s work. Above, I have referred to Tribe, Caste, and Nation (1960), Stratagems and Spoils (1969), Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils (2001) and The Saving Lie (2003). God-​Botherers and Other True Believers, which discussed how religion

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(including secular religion) allows to seal political positions, came out in 2008. Bailey expanded and refined his model over the decades, but in histories of political anthropology, Stratagems and Spoils is usually the last, possibly only work discussed, even as it was just an early draft of what was to come. And so, having pigeonholed him, the discipline moved on. But are languages of claims not the bread-​and-​butter of anthropology? It is the focus on claims, especially, that not only sets Bailey apart from many of his contemporaries and the training that produced his academic persona in the first place, but which makes his approach so compatible with our contemporary sensitivity to context, nuance, and the unsaid behind the said: like the antagonists in the arena themselves, like the ‘thirds’, like the audiences witnessing the struggle for whose endorsement the principals are vying, the anthropologist themself is tasked to elicit wider frames of cultural reference, situational allusions, personal ties, and all other factors that play into the goings-​on. Nonetheless, Bailey’s modest and especially parsimonious middle-​range model has fallen by the wayside. And in favour of what? Further, what concretely is here to disagree with? In his review of Stratagems and Spoils, Herbert Lewis was ambivalent, both finding the writing ‘more graceful and interesting than social science standard’ and being daunted by ‘extensive vocabulary that the reader must assimilate but which he won’t encounter in other works on the same subject’ (1970, 1102). Little did he know at the time of the future productivity of F. G. Bailey, the way that Bailey’s terms would seep into portions of the literature even unattributed, and how obscure anthropological vocabulary in general would get after 1970. After my EASA presentation in 2014, one of the convenors playfully asked if there was anything I didn’t like about FGB’s work. I was hard-​pressed to answer. There is a coherence here, ambitious and yet modest. This is a methodology that simply does what it is supposed to do. I responded with something vague. Bailey offered a methodologically consistent and coherent vocabulary to treat social action, and an appropriate response to his offer would have been to become fox-​like ourselves and add ever more angles of attack by which to crack the question of what is going on when people struggle over concrete prizes and about the way such struggles should be organized. So while this model seems eminently inoffensive, there has been both (to me surprising) indifference and discontent.

Criticism over the decades FGB rarely made an effort to endorse or denigrate other authors’ theoretical platforms in his writing (some acerbic book reviews are exceptions), much

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preferring to take on public and/​or historical figures. Barrett has the right of it when he notes ‘rarely does [FGB] debate the contributions of his colleagues’ (2020a) –​to me, Bailey once wrote ‘my wife says that when I read other people’s books, I grind my teeth; and when I read my own I have a seraphic smile on my face’ (FGB, Email, Dec. 2001). Still, especially The Saving Lie has a noteworthy thread of argument in which FGB takes the time to set one record straight: Over Chapters 4–​6 (2003, 67–​123) he gets into the nitty-​gritty of E. Leach’s and E. E. Evans-​ Pritchard’s writings to work through some assumptions of what structural functionalism really was. These are, of course, people he knew personally; he demonstrates that even Evans-​Pritchard (pace Leach’s statements to the contrary) assumed that the seeming stability of social structures came about not through unseen forces, but through people’s preferences and choices –​ society being a moral rather than a natural system: ‘The avowed ideational nature of the concept structure, as Evans-​ Pritchard used it, sometimes went unnoticed, and critics complained that equilibrium models gave a false impression that the societies themselves were in reality stable’ (Bailey 2003, 96). Even then, there surely was nobody around to thank (or laud) him for his efforts to clarify what ‘equilibrium models’ in structural functionalism really stood for. But here is where Steve Reyna is amiss in his statement that ‘Bailey is not very interested in truth’ (Reyna 2004, 266). He was; he just never found it to have as much impact as one might hope. He cites Oxenstierna’s ‘nescis, mi fili, quantillae ratione mundus regatur’ [Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?] early on in The Tactical Uses of Passion (1985, 11), and I believe elsewhere again, and he remained fascinated by how people manage to make their own truths stick. At the same time, his mid-​range theorizing with its clear focus and self-​ imposed limits of applicability (e.g., the situation, the rules of a struggle) hardly seems an obstacle or challenge to theoretical or methodological dogma. But even as I was hard-​pressed at EASA to articulate a worthwhile fundamental criticism, this came more easily to others. Below, I assess in due brevity critiques as articulated by the ‘malcontents’ Jonathan Spencer, Sydel Silverman, and Georg Pfeffer.

Order and truth One complaint against Bailey begins with saying that in Stratagems and Spoils, he was ‘continuing a line of argument traceable back to Fortes and Evans-​Pritchard’ (Spencer 2007, 151) – a line that was all about ‘order’, that is, ‘order as a pattern or regularity –​in institutional form, political behaviour

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or political process’ (Spencer 2007, 151). Such a search for the abstract is, for Jonathan Spencer, an anachronism and a relic of an old political anthropology that ‘ran out of steam’ in the 1970s –​an expression that captures how difficult it is to pin down a zeitgeist. He goes on to oppose that political anthropology to a new anthropology of politics, ‘more concerned with the analysis of substantively political topics like nationalism, sovereignty and citizenship’ (2007, 152), which did supersede the former, to Spencer’s seeming satisfaction. It should be clear by now that reducing Bailey solely to the impactful Stratagems and Spoils (1969, republished as 2001a) is tenuous; still, Spencer is trying to make a point about disciplinary history, about what it says about Bailey and his generation that they were trying to find formal, structural, abstract order, or reason even in conflict, war, and chaos. His challenge, effectively, is that to search for regularities as a methodological principle allows the anthropologist to maintain a safe distance, a detachment from entanglements –​unlike the new anthropology of politics that is ‘politically committed’ and seeks engagement (2007, 152), and be it at the cost of clarity. But to denounce the old political anthropology as predicated on ‘a certain kind of worldview which categorized people in certain places (primitives, tribals, the Indigenous, the colonized) into a space which was believed to be institutionally pre-​political’ (2007, 152) seems defamatory. Bailey himself, already in his revealingly titled Tribe, Caste, and Nation (1960), showed that political forms not only succeed one another in the longue durée, but that it is normal for such ‘structures’ to exist simultaneously and in overlap, with people using them as resources for their own struggles. Bailey’s search for orderliness, as becomes clear if one reads beyond Stratagems and Spoils, is ever further refined, fox-​like, towards tools that trace how people seek to find orderliness, and even define situations just to make them tractable: order is the actors’ concern. This is a far cry from the scientistic perspective Spencer attributes to him. That Bailey rarely involves his writerly ego into struggles encountered in fieldwork is true, and that he imagines his readers as equally dispassionate –​Spencer’s ‘taken-​for-​granted self-​image of anthropological readers as an interpretive community’ (2007, 153) –​is a fair point, but hardly detracts from the analytic capacity of the toolkit.

Against Bailey’s politics Another person who criticized Bailey was Sydel Silverman in her challenge against ‘Bailey’s politics’ in the Journal of Peasant Studies (1974/​75). She had then not yet had the opportunity to see Bailey’s work develop over

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the decades –​and, when pressed by Creed (1999) about her intervention 25 years before, seemed to sidestep the question: GC:  Another piece that I wanted to ask about was your [1974] ‘Bailey’s Politics.’ What was it about F. G. Bailey’s [1969] work that provoked you? SS:  During 1973–​74, when I was on sabbatical in England, I was writing a review of the set of books that he wrote and edited with a number of his students. He laid out a view of politics as a game, made up of teams with goals and rules of sportsmanship, fair play, and the like. While I was writing the review, I watched a television documentary on the Palio of Siena, which I was familiar with, of course. In the course of the documentary the mayor of Siena said to the BBC reporter, ‘You British believe in sportsmanship; you think the best man wins. But in the Palio it’s not the best man who wins; the man who wins is the one who comes in first.’ That resonated for me as a truth of how, to a great extent, politics works in that area of Italy. Fair play doesn’t have anything to do with it. This retrospective is considerably less intricate than the original critique, but it is of course interesting that the notion that ‘fair play’ was central in Bailey’s work is what stuck with her. Her 1974/​75 paper, a detailed discussion/​review of Stratagems and Spoils as well as the two edited volumes Gifts and Poison (1971) and Debate and Compromise (1973), focusing on reputation management and struggles over innovation in European alpine villages respectively, offers much food for thought. I concentrate on a subset of points. For one, Silverman’s resentment toward Bailey (and his students) for daring to enter the European field in these texts is tangible. The chapters are likened to ‘term papers’ and the contributors said to lack preparation (1974/​75, 114); she contends that Bailey’s ‘illusion that Europe is easy to understand encourages his students to make facile generalizations; worse, it violates the richness, subtlety, and variation of the cultural material’ (1974/​75, 115). She also rejects Bailey’s use of terminology inspired by cognitive anthropology (1974/​75, 112 and 115–​16); expresses frustration that Bailey assigns ‘the major problems –​the most critical causes’ of political struggle (i.e., macro-​phenomena) to the ‘environment’ within which his arenas occur (1974/75, 112 and 115–16); and, relevant for my discussion of the ‘toolkit’, she denies that his tools are, in fact, that: ‘his “tools” are merely a series of definitions’ (1974/​75, 113); they do not allow us to test hypotheses, for example. She sees in the toolkit merely a means to add an unnecessary layer of abstraction to the rich ethnographic tapestry. She demands attention to ‘political systems’ and ‘the distribution of power’, rather than attention to specific stratagems, which to her seem incidental. Against Bailey’s inquiries

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into why a person makes the choices they make (and how they justify this), she raises ‘the basic problem: to what extent is choice possible, and why?’ (1974/​75, 120). This, clearly, is not just disgruntlement of a Europeanist resenting casual encroachment; there are clearly very different visions about what anthropology is and what should be at stake here, in a way prefiguring later discussions about interpretivism, hermeneutics, and re-​description vs. explanatory approaches. Bailey might well have agreed with Silverman’s complaint that rather than ‘reducing as much as possible the area of indeterminacy, [his approach] takes our inability to predict human behaviour as its point of departure’ (1974/75, 120), but to him, this would have been an expression of methodological prudence. As mentioned above, the notion of getting inside people’s heads was anathema for him. Rather than ‘real’ reasons for action, potentially unknown to the actors, his was the field of the public, of negotiation, of justification, of persuasion, of argument, rather than unseen forces accessible only to the analyst. Analyses focused on micro-​interactions will of course have limited utility to those bent on critiquing a political system; but they can have immense value for everybody else engaged in grounded, agonistic interactions. Silverman also of course fundamentally misunderstood Bailey’s interest in fair play: he never thought that fair play was in the nature of political competition, not even in Britain. Much rather, fair play, as one instance of normative rules, was ever only one way of making your claim stick. And if, as a rhetorical move, it might have had little traction in the Palio from her example, this only means that ‘Bailey’s politics’ could have traced a different language of claims through which actors justify their moves and sway audiences.

Kond or won’t? Finally, I want to briefly pick up on the latent and antagonistic relationship between Bailey and Georg Pfeffer.6 Reading Pfeffer’s 2016 comparison of Bailey’s work and that of the German researcher Niggemeyer,7 a contemporary with a very different style of fieldwork and writing, right on the heels of revisiting Silverman’s account, is eye-​opening: Clearly, Bailey is a behaviourist. He studies actions or social roles demanding actions. Observed behaviour is his topic … For present purposes, I will add that Bailey pays little attention to different worlds of meaning … Whatever he conceives as the rationality of people he describes is in line with his own rationality. Values do not differ. The Kond, their clients, immigrant lowlanders and the ethnographer himself seem to share the same principles, which are always materialistic in kind and always induce them to act in one way rather than another. In assuming such a universality of value-​ideas, the author is in

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a position to argue why either the Kond or others, given a specific situation, behave in a certain manner. In the style of the Manchester school, Bailey selects, presents and debates extended case studies of individual actors to explain the causes of their respective behaviour within a general setting. His scholarly aim is to advance such causal explanations convincingly. (Pfeffer 2016, 95)

For the sake of his comparison, Pfeffer focused on Bailey’s earlier work exclusively; still, that he identifies Bailey’s interest to be in causal explanation, whereas Sidel Silverman writing about the Stratagems and Spoils and the two subsequent edited volumes finds that precisely this is lacking, points to fundamental disagreements about the relation of description and a­ nalysis. Bailey certainly is no ‘behaviourist’, as Pfeffer suggested, who assumes that environment determines the actions of people or conditions them even. One might be excused for considering him a ‘behaviouralist’ who pursues some variation of methodological individualism to, after all, explain choices. But this is not where Bailey takes his toolkit at all. To decline inquiry into genuine motivations, thoughts, or feelings, similarly to how behaviour(al)ists might treat this matter, still leads him to an essentially intersubjective perspective on action-​as-​interaction, much closer to ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionalism, for example, than the game-​theoretical camp he was earlier assigned to. Rather than assuming identical ‘value-​ideas’, Bailey understands that ‘human action in any society is similar because, all cultural particularities aside, social actors strive to achieve their (culturally defined) aims’ (Berger 2012, 330). This is a methodological principle, not an empiricist claim. Bailey’s refined toolkit puts us in the shoes of participants in the struggles we observe, in that we, like them, try to make sense of claims, of others’ attempts to define situations, of professed interests –​and all this works perfectly well without making the leap from the results of situated interpretation to some ulterior reality. Pfeffer, struggling with Bailey’s contributions to South Asian studies especially in the Kondmals, fails to see the methodological and theoretical forest for the regionalist trees.

The problem of the ‘claim’ As should be clear, I believe that Bailey’s work continues to have relevance. However, the deck is stacked against him today. The reason for that can be tied to ‘the claim’. To reiterate, briefly: I see claims as the atom of the toolkit –​people, in interaction, proffer understandings of how the world is or should be, who they or others are (with the concomitant host of status rules, relationships, etc. this entails), which rules should govern the current situation, how a given suggestion should be responded to, what sentiments

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should be recognized, which social taxonomies should apply, and so on. Claims follow a cultural grammar; they are interlinked; certain claims work together, others fail to convince. When people issue claims, they surely hope to affect their rivals, but Bailey recognizes that direct persuasion of an opponent is rare and elusive. Hence, many or even most claims are directed at an audience, as in the many cases of ‘leaders’ who want to sway ‘­followers’, or at a public that decides about the outcome of the struggle. Claims can also change the environment –​to skillfully foist a certain innovative claim on an audience might give this claim more weight in the future, by way of precedent. Claims are issued as if they were, somehow, genuinely meant; to reveal others’ claims as hypocritical or insincere will likely undermine them –​excepting the case of irony, of course, which serves to directly undermine the opponent. Claims can have massive ramifications, or end up as an incident of petty one-​upmanship. Actors do not know, truly, if ­others’ claims are genuine –​and neither do we. Claims are always evidence of choice: much could be claimed, but only certain arguments are selected, and in that sense, claims form the basis of politics. This focus on claims is methodologically reasonable: we do not know what people are thinking; all we have, in terms of data, are claims. But Bailey’s modest methodological self-​restraint is inconvenient in the age of worlds (and not world views), of ontologies (rather than performances), and subjectivities (rather than palaestral struggles): specifically regarding identity propositions, to treat expressions as claims while remaining agnostic about their potential truth value (and remaining agnostic about inner essences in general) is provocative and goes against the grain of many current anthropological sensibilities. Today, talk of claims and the definition of the situation might sound dangerously close to ‘framing’, to illegitimate ways to influence people rather than a normal mode of interaction. Even persuasion itself –​trying to get people to agree to things they would not have agreed to before –​can be seen as a threat and a form of violence if one overly elevates an authentic inner self. That readers today will understand a paper title like Joan Vincent’s ‘manipulative strategies’ as a neutral descriptor would be a bold assumption. I do not, then, expect FGB’s work to make a big comeback in textbooks of political anthropology (or: the anthropology of politics) anytime soon. But I am certain that every now and then, a young scholar will come across his writing, start reading, and once in the field –​when exposed to the agon of everyday life, what with its pettiness, sophistication, complexity, ephemerality, ethos, pathos, logos, and genius –​will be quite persuaded by the simple complexity of the toolkit and the winking scholarly fox who wrote it. I know that I was, when immersed in the fullness of face-​to-​face life on Ethiopia’s Omo River.

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Notes 1 Commenting on Bailey’s limited impact on anthropology, Ivo Strecker stated with some resignation: ‘If people read you with practical benefit, that’s not going to make you famous’ (pers. communication). 2 This debate is picked up among others by Postero and Elinoff (2019). 3 Much of the following comes from 1969’s Stratagems and Spoils, but many of the notions are further developed in some later publication. See Girke (2002) for a broader overview. 4 In 1960, F. G. Bailey described the workings of Tribe, Caste, and Nation as, in nuce, languages of claims, well before introducing this more refined vocabulary. He called them ‘alignments’, as something people align themselves with (1960: 269–​70). This train of thought led to Stratagems and Spoils and onwards. 5 I discuss this juxtaposition in detail elsewhere (Girke 2018: 42–​3). 6 See Hardenberg/​Berger’s obituary (2020) for an overview of Pfeffer’s life and work. The latent antagonism is reflected here too: the authors mention Tribe, Caste, and Nation (1960) as well as Caste and the Economic Frontier (1957) as stuck in ‘familiar political-​economic contexts’, whereas Pfeffer was inquiring into the unknown (2020: 338). In Bailey’s reading (2001c), however, Pfeffer’s research programme reflected a ‘totality-​itch’, indicating hedgehog-​ness. 7 A direct ‘spat’ between Pfeffer and Bailey and the ‘acrimonious’ relationship between these academic ‘silverbacks’ in general is discussed by Edward Simpson (2016, 205, 208–​12).

References Bailey, F. G. 1957. Caste and the Economic Frontier (CEF). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1960. Tribe, Caste, Nation. A Study of Political Activity and Political Change in Highland Orissa. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1985. The Tactical Uses of Passion. An Essay on Power, Reason, and Reality. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1998. The Need for Enemies. A Bestiary of Political Forms. Ithaca: Cornell. Bailey, F. G. 2001a [1969]. Stratagems and Spoils. A Social Anthropology of Politics (Classic Reissue). Boulder: Westview. Bailey, F. G. 2001b. Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils. How Leaders Make Practical Use of Beliefs and Values. Boulder: Westview. Bailey, F. G. 2001c. ‘The Totality-​Itch. A Commentary on Dr. Pfeffer’s View of Kond Society.’ Unpublished manuscript, 15 p. Bailey, F. G. 2003. The Saving Lie. Truth and Method in the Social Sciences. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bailey, F. G. 2009. ‘The Palaestral Aspect of Rhetoric.’ In Culture, Rhetoric and the Vicissitudes of Life. Studies in Rhetoric and Culture 2, edited by M. Carrithers, 107–​20. Oxford, New York: Berghahn.

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Barrett, S. R. 2020a. ‘Politics as Theatrical Performance and Backstage Pragmatism: Work and Legacy of F. G. Bailey.’ Bérose –​Encyclopédot etingnale des histoires de l’anthropologie. Paris. https://​www.berose.fr/​article1853.html?lang=​en Barth, F. 1969. ‘Introduction.’ In Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social 38. Prospect Organisation of Cultural Difference, edited by F. Barth, 9–​ Heights: Waveland. Berger, P. 2012. ‘Theory and Ethnography in the Modern Anthropology of India.’ 57. https://​doi.org/​ HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 2: 325–​ 10.14318/​hau2.2.017 Creed, G. W. 1999. ‘An Interview with Sydel Silverman.’ Current Anthropology 40, no. 5: 699–​712. https://​doi.org/​10.1086/​300089 Easton, D. 1959. ‘Political Anthropology.’ Biannual Review of Anthropology 1: 210–​62. Girke, F. 2002. Die theoretischen Entwicklungen im Werk von F. G. Bailey. Handlung, Politik und Rhetorik. Working Papers of the Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien 8, University of Mainz. www.ifeas.uni-​mainz.de/​files/​2019/​07/​ Girke.pdf Girke, F. 2018. The Wheel of Autonomy. Rhetoric and Ethnicity in the Omo Valley. Oxford, New York: Berghahn. Girke, F. and C. Meyer. 2011. ‘Introduction.’ In The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture. Studies in Rhetoric and Culture 4, edited by C. Meyer and F. Girke, 1–​32. Oxford, New York: Berghahn. Hardenberg, R. and P. Berger. 2020. ‘Georg Pfeffer (1943–​ 2020).’ Paideuma 66: 331–​45. Lewis, H. S. 1970: ‘Stratagems and Spoils (Book Review).’ American Anthropologist N.S. 72, no. 5: 1101–​03. Meyer, C., F. Girke and M. Mokrzan. 2016. ‘Rhetoric culture theory.’ Oxford Bibliographies. DOI: 10.1093/​obo/​9780199766567–​0157 Pfeffer, G. 2016. ‘ “Old” British versus “Old” German Anthropology: the Kond Case in Orisha.’ Paideuma 62: 91–​111. Postero, N. and E. Elinoff. 2019. ‘Introduction: A Return to Politics.’ Anthropological Theory 19, no. 1: 3–​28. Reyna, S. 2004. ‘Review of “The Saving Lie: Truth and Method in the Social Sciences.” ’ Journal of Anthropological Research 60, no. 2: 264–​66. Silverman, S. 1975/​ 75. ‘Bailey’s Politics.’ The Journal of Peasant Studies 2, no. 1: 111–​20. Simpson, E. 2016. ‘On the Making of Ark Royal.’ In The Future of the Rural World? India’s Villages 1950–​2015, edited by E. Simpson and A. Tilche. London: SOAS. https://​digital.soas.ac.uk/​content/​AA/​00/​00/​03/​08/​00002/​PDF_​DualPage.pdf Spencer, J. 2007. ‘Anthropological Order and Political Disorder.’ In Order and Disorder. Anthropological Perspectives, edited by K. von Benda-​Beckmann and F. Pirie, 150–​65. New York, Oxford: Berghahn. Thomassen, B. 2008. ‘What Kind of Political Anthropology?’ International Political Anthropology 1, no. 2: 263–​74. Turner, V. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Vincent, J. 1978. ‘Political Anthropology: Manipulative Strategies.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 7: 175–​94. Vincent, J. 1990. Anthropology and Politics. Visions, Traditions, and Trends. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

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Morality, truth, and power in F. G. Bailey’s ethnography of politics Gitika De Introduction Frederick George Bailey was one of the central figures of the Manchester school of British social anthropology,1 who had carried out ethnographic studies of politics in early postcolonial India. He deployed the insights of these studies to advance several theoretical and methodological formulations and produced a vocabulary for the comparative analyses of politics, represented, most importantly in his Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics (1969b). This chapter traces F. G. Bailey’s varied oeuvre to arrive at three enduring and intertwined aspects in his ethnography of politics: morality, truth, and power. Focusing mainly on his political ethnographies of Orissa in India, as well as his comparative studies, I attempt to show how Bailey’s paradigm helps us navigate universal principles of social life in specific cultural contexts and political practices. The chapter is divided into three thematic parts: the first outlines the vocabulary of political analysis generated by Bailey’s ethnographic studies of Orissa villages in the 1950s and the comparative significance of that vocabulary in understanding power and politics both generally and in specific times and geographical contexts; the second traces the idea of morality in political practice and how Bailey’s paradigm made sense of the essentially contingent nature of our moral values vis-​à-​vis expediency and pragmatic politics; and the third extends the analysis to show how the theoretical and methodological impetus of Bailey’s model of political analysis grapples with the question of true-​beliefs or ideologies in a chaotic social and political universe.

Power, process, and practice Bailey undertook his ethnographic works in Orissa of early 1950s, in the historical context of a fledgling democracy within the reigning intellectual current of modernization theory. To that extent, his pioneering studies of

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politics in India were part of a tradition of understanding newly independent states in a comparative perspective, and the political transitions and transformations that each of these were undergoing. The task was to understand ‘through the comparative analysis of new nations, principles that underlie their social and political development’, with the assumption that ‘the new nations are engaged in a form of social change that makes nation building and material development simultaneous political problems’ (Geertz 1963, v). Bailey’s Orissa ethnographies were part of this defined moment in the emergence of political sociology of postcolonial societies. Thus the substantive concern of these studies was to analyse the changes brought about by colonial political and administrative apparatuses in a ‘traditional’ social organization. However, the theoretical and methodological import of his work went much beyond this avowed empirical concern. One of his objectives in these studies had also been to identify how political action – accounts of ideas, beliefs, and arguments from particular situations – when translated into conceptualizations and abstractions, generate a vocabulary of political analysis with specific ideas about ‘human nature’ and ‘political man’. Beginning in the early 1950s Bailey wrote three ethnographies of politics based on his fieldwork in the eastern Indian state of Orissa.2 Here he generated concepts and models of enduring significance for analysing state-​ ­society relations in newly emerging postcolonial societies. Be it the relationship between village and the modern world of mercantile economy (in Caste and the Economic Frontier 1958), or the relationship between primordial identities and the norms of the national polity (in Tribe, Caste and Nation 1960), or the relationship between ‘parliamentary democracy and the older traditional forms of social and political organization’ (in Politics and Social Change 1963, vii), this theme of the articulation between the ‘given’ and ‘emerging’ is the guiding thread of these studies. Analyses in the three monographs proposes a schema to understand how colonial institutions have been transforming the extant social and political organization of Indian society, through an investigation of the relationship between institutional politics of political parties, patterns of governance, and the rich context of everyday politics, characterized mainly by the dynamic interaction between social hierarchies and the modern state. For Bailey, politics constitutes an orderly competition within discrete encapsulated boundaries among teams bound by rules of politicking. This concept of politics and attendant notions of act, rules, and arenas are part of the toolkit for processual political analysis that he advocated. His notion of politics as ‘orderly competition’, guided by a set of rules of competition, led him to distinguish between situations which are political by the logic of orderly competition and situations where action ceases to be political and

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becomes merely administrative in the absence of competition, and actions where ‘competitors do not agree upon rules and institutions … and resort to violence’ (Bailey 1963, 223). It is the rules of political engagement that define ‘arenas’ of political competition. The rules include legal rules and statutes as well as customs and conventions. Analytically, a political structure is ‘a set of rules for regulating competition’ (Bailey 1969b, 1).These rules are of two distinctive kinds – normative and pragmatic – the former ‘are very general guides to conduct; they are used to judge particular actions ethically right or wrong; and within a particular political structure they can be used to justify publicly a course of conduct’ (Bailey 1969b, 5); the ­latter consist of ‘tactics and maneuvers as likely to be the most efficient’; and therefore they are ‘normatively neutral’ (Bailey 1969b, 5–6). The normative rules are the ‘public face’ of politics; the pragmatic rules are its ‘private wisdom’ – ranging from ‘rules of “gamesmanship” (how to win without actually cheating) to rules which advise on how to win by cheating without being disqualified’ (Bailey 1969b, 5–​6). These are rules internal to a political structure. Processes, contradictions, choices, and, above all, the purposive goal-​oriented action was the staple of the realist analysis of politics undertaken by Bailey. Such analysis called attention to ‘practical politicking’ that sought to uncover not only how ideologies are perceived in actual political contestations but how political power is ultimately achieved by strategies, tactics, and manipulations. In the context of Bisipara, Bailey showed how morality of political positions is seen as vested in individual politicians, and judgements of political choices manifested in votes is determined by such considerations as contiguity of caste, village, or kin identities. Thus, the story of Bisipara brings out most clearly that what the villager sees most directly in politics is the nearest politician and that his acceptance of the new institutions as legitimate does not rest only on the efficiency with which they work, but also on moral judgments about the persons associated with the new institutions. (Bailey 1963, 68)

The processual element in Bailey’s political ethnography is brought out in his discussion of several themes –​the nature of traditional leadership and continuities within a new mode of administration and new rules of the game; the transformation of caste understood as a category with common attributes (jati) into its modern form of caste associations (a group defined by interaction), leading to much wider forms of social stratification; and the organizational bases of political parties in terms of ‘movement’ elements and ‘machine’ elements. These transformations, in Bailey’s argument, show the interrelationship between political change and social change. For instance, one of the ways in which the institutional structures of representative government sought to influence traditional social units was by innovations such

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as creating new groups and new ways of communicating with those groups. Bailey persuasively argues that the old structure of allegiances has only remained as sentiment and was reactivated in the new form of democratic action, such as processions and hunger strikes, and new men have emerged in politics alongside traditional chiefs, such as schoolmasters, caste leaders, and petty businessmen. Similarly, the formation of caste associations as horizontal groupings also facilitated politicians with an effective means of getting votes, as caste provides the politician ‘with a ready-​made moral element on which he can draw to form associations, without the members of those associations calculating at every step what they are going to get out of it’ (Bailey 1963, 135). Bailey’s observation that caste associations ‘may become, for a time, a main organizing factor and a main cleavage in the new political system’ (Bailey 1963, 134) would seem rather commonplace in contemporary India, but in highlighting the moral element of caste, he had signalled the enduring significance that caste would have in the Indian political landscape. Besides the utilization of caste associations during elections, parliamentary politics in India also necessitated that ‘small, parochial, and elusive’ groups within traditional society are politically persuaded. Bailey contends that the politician’s task was to create a new group in the form of the political party, thus making a distinction between the ‘movement’ and ‘machine’ elements of political parties. The fact that parties essentially exhibited both movement and machine elements, Bailey argues, demonstrates that politics is not sustained essentially and at all times by moral fervour alone, and party as a political machine gives rise to intermediaries such as brokers, touters, bosses, and agitators – ‘a network of key individuals, hierarchically organized, but undisciplined and unstable’ (Bailey 1963, 152). Bailey’s theoretical paradigm thus contributed in delineating forms of competitive political organization in complex societies. This theoretical legacy is equally adept at illuminating the political processes of transitional societies and fully realized modern political orders. Action theory in anthropology, inaugurated and sharpened as a paradigm by Bailey, generated a set of related concepts –​on political forms, generated out of the coalescence of individual actors, such as clique, gang, faction, coalition, interest group, and the political party; on modes of political behaviour, such as decision-​making, strategizing, transacting, manipulating, manoeuvring, competing, persuading; and the context of political action (both spatial and temporal), such as event, situation, arena, field, environment, power structure. In such an analysis, seemingly incompatible political phenomena such as the Mafia in Italy, the politics of the dominant Swat Pathans in Pakistan, caste politics in an Indian village, and American presidential elections, exhibited a common set of principles. In fact, the most

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enduring aspect of Bailey’s contribution to the anthropological analysis of politics is the conceptual toolkit that he had generated, which facilitated comparison across spatial and temporal contexts.3 The fundamental insight in Bailey’s ethnography of politics is to show the mundaneness of power, in contexts and situations that are least likely to be deemed political. Bailey addressed this issue in his analysis of caste dispute in an Orissa village between the clean castes and the untouchable caste, the Pans, by arguing that the ‘case’ was a ‘tea-​cup affair. As history, it is nothing: but it has its value as a microcosm in which can be seen some of the political processes which occur in arenas from the tea-​cup to the ocean’ (Bailey 1969b, 166, emphasis added). The extended-​case method and situational analysis have been consistently utilized in Bailey’s diverse body of work, beginning with the Orissa ethnographies, and later in his mature and nuanced methodological writings on the anthropological enterprise, the nature of truth in politics, and in comparative analyses of political behaviour.4 The first task of a sociological analysis of politics which deploys the extended-​case method is to circumscribe both empirically and analytically events that can be called political. In his ethnographic field in Orissa, Bailey circumscribed his field so that he could locate individuals within contexts which involve several different kinds of interests – domestic, political, economic, ritual, and so on. To do this, he studied the social hinterland of each village, the relation between politics and descent in the ‘small region, the dispersal of castes through the region and the institution of caste councils, and possibly even the system of extinct, small Orissa kingdoms’ (Bailey in Gluckman 1964). Political analyses involved delineating a political structure and the encapsulating structure, where it was the latter which acted as the independent variable in deciding outcomes in a political competition. In his study of two village disputes in Orissa in 1958, where the outcomes of the disputes varied even though the circumstances of the dispute were identical, Bailey’s analysis shows that it was in the differential relationships of the villages with its environment or encapsulating structures that the solution to the puzzle lay. The two disputes were identical as both were between the clean caste and the Pans (or Panos) in the two villages of Bisipara and Baderi respectively, the internal social structures being almost identical in the two cases.5 However, the Bisipara Pans wanted a revolution and the Baderi Pans did not. In order to explain this, Bailey took into account the relationships the villagers had with persons and groups outside the village, and which are not part of the village structure; as well as the institutions which do not belong within the village system, such as the police, political parties and the district administration; in short, the encapsulating structures. Situational analysis as demonstrated in Bailey’s ethnographies of politics abstracts specific situations from reality to understand the contingency of

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rules and practices within political communities.6 This can be understood through the ways in which two political structures interact in varying circumstances in terms of political resources and political roles that each of the structures have at their command. Political resources, Bailey’s term is prizes, are determined by the internal rules of a political structure as well as the external environment. In a village political structure normative rules of who can compete for which prize is determined by village criteria of honour and purity. However, because political structure of the village was not an isolated entity, the Pans in turn employed what is a normative rule in the encapsulating structure to subvert the village normative rule. ‘All that [the Pans] could see was a resource in the environment, available to them but not the clean castes’ (Bailey 1969b, 162) at the beginning of the dispute, without intending to withdraw from participating in the village political structure. Thus, what was seen as a pragmatic rule within the village political structure – of not making use of political resources outside the village – was a perfectly justifiable normative rule outside it, and by resorting to resources in the environment, the Pans succeeded in effecting a breach. The breach to the normative political structure of the village, however, was not an attempt to overthrow the caste system altogether; it did not question the fundamental role of caste in village politics, wanting only to rewrite the ‘small print’ so as to give themselves a more exalted position. They were out to amend the code, not to put a different one in its place. (Bailey 2001, 199)

There are not only new prizes, but new ways of winning them, and it is only through a processual analysis of cases extended through time that the relations of encapsulation and the changes within political structures are visible. It also brings into relief that through time, encapsulated structures may disappear and merge with the encapsulating structures but this can happen if one watches long enough [then] out of the many different ways in which the players are changing their tactics or resisting change a few general patterns emerge: patterns of resistance; patterns of change that come about from seized opportunities; and over all a slow drift towards uniformity, as the minor arenas lose their distinctiveness and become the same as, or one with the main arena. (Bailey in Gluckman 1964, 154)

It is significant to note here that uniformity also signals that the relations of encapsulation demand that the rules of politics flow both ways, and one is not morally superior to the other. Thus Bailey’s enterprise is to find out the rules which regulate political combats, both in particular cultures and cross-​culturally; but he is categorical about imputing moral judgements to individual action, arguing instead that ‘our business is not to sort out the

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good men from the bad men but to distinguish between effective and ineffective tactics and to say why they are so’ (Bailey 1969b, xii). Every political structure has rules for recruiting personnel, based on compatibility between political roles and roles which exist in other structures, or between two sets of political roles (women were excluded from public affairs in many cultures because of their domestic role which was seen to be incompatible with a political role). Here, the notion of arenas and political fields become important analytical tools to understand the diverse groups involved in political activity in a series of interactions. Political arena is where competition takes place within generally agreed upon ‘rules of the game’; political field, where conflict takes place over what the rules should be.7 In Orissa, when the Pans aspired for political roles outside the village political structure, they were in effect entering another arena where political goods were defined in quite a different way from the honour-​purity symbols of the village structure. Subsequently in the process, the access to new kinds of resource – getting elected to office – was seen to be advantageous by the clean caste men too, and they turned their ambitions outward and found allies in the Pans who in the village were their enemies. Thus a pragmatic move by the Pans acquires a normative status when seeking political office outside the village arena changes the rules of the game. A pragmatic bargaining posture is achieved which entails some recognition ‘that what is usually done … [is] the normal thing to do, and in time the normal thing becomes the right thing. Continued pragmatic interactions … begin to achieve normative status’ (Bailey 1969b, 174).

Morality, contingency, pragmatism The question of political morality and the constitution of political selves also figure prominently in Bailey’s oeuvre of political anthropology. In tune with his processual analysis of politics, Bailey understood political morality and political selves not as normative judgements of action and personhood, but constituted by social location and the contingencies of political purpose. Questions of morality and political selfhood thus became questions of practice and situated creativity, best envisioned as aspects of the societal processes rather than as essences of societies and cultures. For Bailey, morality is at the cusp of public morality and private wisdom. In his 1994 monograph, The Witch-​Hunt or The Triumph of Morality, Bailey concludes that the story of the witch-​hunt, even if the actions of the main characters were ‘selfishly motivated, their result was the public good (that is, the orthodox version of it)’ (Bailey 1994, 205; emphasis added). This episode had frustrated Bailey, as he could not fathom what was actually going on behind

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the plainly visible structural reality. The outcome of the witch-​hunt which restored the normative hierarchical order of the village thus led Bailey to settle for a rationalization that made sense contingently: ‘the witch-​hunt made one thing very clear: it paid (both the victims and the victimizers) to behave as if they believed in the customary moral order’ (Bailey 1994, 206; emphasis added). Further, morality was constituted both as a higher virtue as well as situationally, as the case may be. As ‘ideal types’, a leader-​follower group is moral insofar as the group serves the same moral cause and there is some equivalence between them – ‘if the leader lives extravagantly, he must also be seen to be extravagantly generous’ (Bailey 1969b, 43); if the followers are merely ‘hirelings’, the group is unlikely to possess a moral core, it is merely a transactional group. In actual relationships, however, the relationship between leaders and followers is likely to have both the moral and the transactional element, and a processual analysis of politics is more interested in charting the rise and fall of these two elements, balanced against one another: and there have been several anthropological studies which show how rituals which symbolize and reinforce common religious values are performed when men are beginning to show too much concern for their own personal interests and to quarrel with one another over the distribution of material benefits. (Bailey 1969b, 44)

Moral leadership in political groups is a matter of manipulating symbols. A successful leader is one who can monopolize symbols, either by denying their ‘use to subordinates and rivals’, or by pronouncing ‘the symbol worthless’ (Bailey 1969b, 83). Bailey draws his instance from the Indian caste system, where there are elaborate ways of ritual disqualification, thereby marking ‘more and more degraded positions in the hierarchy’; on the other hand, when a lower caste person makes a claim to a higher caste symbol, the latter itself is pronounced as inauthentic and therefore unworthy of bestowing a higher status. Morality is therefore not a matter of reason, and a political leader who appeals to morality is merely taking recourse to rhetoric. Bailey argues, rhetoric is deliberately constructed to persuade and often to mislead. The prime purpose is … to create attitudes … The politician who claims to speak for the people and to have their interests at heart, and who talks of his humble home and his honest and industrious parents, is using rhetoric. (Bailey 1993, 58–​59)

In Bailey’s pragmatic view of politics with a clear emphasis on practice, ‘the ultimate truths of morality cannot be defended by reason; the appropriate weapons are persuasion, assertion, or force. In short, the “truth” of moral questions is not discovered but negotiated or enforced’ (Bailey 2003, 196; emphasis added).

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The obverse of morality is expediency – utility or self-​interest, as against what is right and just. In The Civility of Indifference (1996), Bailey analyses the contradiction between expediency and morality, among other things, through the idea of Swaraj and the Harijan movement in India. Swaraj (self-​rule) was up to and beyond 1947 an idea marked with moral fervour symbolizing freedom, and conjuring an ‘imagined world, a one-​dimensional world with everything clearly marked as good or evil’ (Bailey 1996, 132); post-​1947, and in the 1950s during his fieldwork, Bailey found a transformed world where Swaraj had lost its earlier moral meaning because once freedom had been attained, people had to unwrap the bundle labeled ‘freedom’ and decide what, of the many things it contained, they really wanted … because members of what once had been a united team fighting against the imperialists now found themselves in an arena where former comrades fought against each other. (Bailey 1996, 133)

What was once a matter of morality, then, had transformed itself into practical concerns of political competition and political expediency, signalling the contingent and indeterminate nature of moral truths. In a similar fashion, the Harijan movement demonstrated the contradictions between the force of a moral nomenclature (as the ‘Children of God’) and a pragmatic piece of legislation used for political ends. The Harijan inspector in Bisipara was ‘concerned at best with due process’, and Gandhi’s vision of how the world ought to work had to rely on ‘external force … pushed by politicians and government’ (Bailey 1996, 128–​34). Thus, Bailey’s argument shows while individual moral visions have their own place, often morality is differentially interpreted, and in most cases, there ‘is the mingling of a moral self with a tactical self’ (Bailey 1983, 223). The heart of the matter, as he argues, is to understand the relationship between the two. At the level of their basic meaning, an action cannot be characterized as both tactical and moral; but, as Bailey argues, the two selves might co-​exist as ‘percentages’, so to speak, of a relationship between people, as in the case of ambivalence’ (Bailey 1983, 223). What a person chooses to project is what a person gets identified with – a tactical self could only be effective under the cover of a moral self, and because the latter is a cover, those who are persuaded to accept the cover also accept ‘apparently only one single uncomplicated self’ (Bailey 1983, 223). This is, once again, a remarkable display of Bailey’s ability to processually understand not only how morality is manifested in individual action, but also how moralities change and that the effectiveness of morality is a function of strategizing and manipulating. What we have outlined above begs the question: if the game of politics is all about manipulation, strategies, tactics and treason, is there any way to arrive at the truth of political statements? Bailey’s problematic is to unearth

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how orderliness or more appropriately, the façade of orderliness becomes possible in social and political life. In a sense, all his analytical statements beginning with the 1969 classic Stratagems and Spoils is geared towards arriving at the startling truth, usually misrecognized, that social life is possible because we participate in collusive lying on the normative codes ‘because it is simple, clear, unambiguous, and reassuring’ (Bailey 2001, 207).

Rhetoric, make-​believe, truth Bailey’s India material amply demonstrates that in outlining the political landscape of early postcolonial India, Bailey firmly anchored himself in a clear-​cut pragmatic view of politics based on the understanding of purposive action and refused to succumb to any culturological explanations that sought to mobilize civilizational essences. He firmly discounts the ideological over-​ determination of individual action and emphasizes the primacy of observed behaviour over any statement of values. He submits that no society can be understood only as an internally coherent set of ideas, for it is people who hold ideas and the anthropologists’ job is to ask who holds what ideas and why. He notes that even Louis Dumont in his Homo Hierarchicus: Caste System and Its Implications (1970), the locus classicus on holism acknowledges that ‘it is necessary to maintain a close connection to observed behaviour, for we are too much exposed in that case to gross misunderstanding, if we do not give full weight to the control through “what actually happens” ’. For Bailey, the people of Orissa whom he studied ‘were calculators, pragmatists, quotidian thinkers, in the habit of working out consequences when they made decisions’ (Bailey 1968, xii). In this sense, it may be argued that to characterize a whole society in terms of overarching ideologies does violence to an understanding of individual intentions and purposes, decisions and choices and individual’s capability for self-​development.8 Bailey’s steadfast focus on manipulation, strategizing, and manoeuvring in political practices led him to demonstrate conclusively that whether in politics or our social interactions, ‘there is not much incontestable truth: mostly there are choices’ (Bailey 1994, 204). In his later ethnographies based on his Orissa fieldwork of the 1950s we witness his analysis acquiring a contingent character: ‘In principle I should have been able to find out the truth about events (as distinct from motivations), but, as has been obvious, I am not at all sure about the details of what really went on in Bisipara in 1953’ (Bailey 1994, 206). However, this was no postmodern turn in Bailey’s analysis, but an acknowledgement that truth is what is established through persuasion by the force of rhetoric, putting in place a ‘hegemonic lie’ (Bailey 1991, 82), a lie that holds sway until overturned by another.

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Clearly Bailey’s analytical model is best suited to understand the everydayness of politics, which decries ‘passionate politics’ or ideological and revolutionary politics as beyond the purview of the quintessentially p ­ olitical –​a criticism that Bailey in his later writings has addressed, continuing to be faithful to a pragmatic view of politics. In contrasting pragmatic politics with true belief or ideology, Bailey settles the conundrum by arguing that every true belief also has a pragmatic element: when people compromise over matters of principle they have re-​examined a true belief (an ideology) and factored it into a set of preferences. Once that is done, the guiding light is no longer only the true belief (socialism, Indian independence, Oriya nationalism, nonviolence, social and economic justice, and so forth) but also pragmatism itself, the principle that requires one to monitor an ideal to see how far (or in what alternative forms) it can be realized, and to find out what will be the costs of doing so. (Bailey 1998, 205; emphasis in original)

Thus, pragmatism itself contains the kernel of a true belief being reasonable, when ‘pragmatism can become itself a moral absolute, a design for living that is intrinsically valued’ (Bailey 1998, 206). Thus, for Bailey, ideology or true belief does not consist of principles and values, but is so constructed because the sender makes no assumptions that he has any grounds in common with his audience, on which he can construct a rational argument. Rather he relies upon a series of assertions, in slogan form, invoking principles which are so general as to be considered universal. In other words, the ideology is meant to establish attitudes in the hearer. (Bailey 1969a, 15–​16)

This was prescient in the 1960s and anticipated contemporary realities in India and elsewhere, which underlines Bailey’s penchant for generating generalist principles capable of explaining why and how ideologies hold sway on believers. The pragmatic notion of politics also forms the basis of Bailey’s idea of the ‘political’ and consequently of human nature. The pragmatist is seen as an opportunist, an unprincipled person, an amoral, self-​concerned man, who by compromising and strategizing lacks the ‘need for enemies’, the basis of any true belief or ideology. In Orissa, the Pans and the clean castes avoided prolonged conflict ‘long enough to let it interfere with the serious business of getting the fields cultivated’ (Bailey 1969b, 162). For Bailey, ‘the human habit (what we call second nature) lies somewhere between indifference (“not my business”) and moderation’ (Bailey 1998, 211), and here we see Bailey engaging with the Hobbesian question: how is society possible, in a context of uncertainty and a struggle for power. Bailey’s answer would be by manipulating, by strategizing, by compromising, in other words, through practice. As an anthropologist who believes in being true to the discipline, Bailey had summed up what was originally intended by Max Gluckman,

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the master, to develop not only how ethnography has to be done but also a practice of ethnographic practice; in other words, how do we arrive at the truth? ‘Truth is whatever is the case, whatever is reality’ (Bailey 2003, 199), to which must be added the question of power, both in understanding politics just as in understanding the truth claims of a science: the question of ‘who benefits’? What counts as ‘truth’ in our social and political lives as well as our grand totalizing theories is the need for certainty and security in ‘one-​sided fictions or saving lies’ (Bailey 2003). Even when the Panos in Bisipara were challenging the normative order of the village, they were doing so as political citizens of an independent state, but ‘their goal was public power, the right to have a say in determining what normative design would regulate village affairs’ (Bailey 2001, 201; emphasis in original), the normative order of caste hierarchy providing the fiction of an ordered world never to be overthrown. The history of lower caste or dalit-​bahujan movements in India serve to show how Bailey understood a fundamental truth about Indian society, namely, the idea of citizenship is invoked notionally for pragmatic purposes but substantively, it is the primordial identities of caste, ethnicity and gender that continue to maintain the saving lie. Thus, for Bailey, the saving lie is the necessary veneer that makes social life possible. In politics, the normative ideal needs to be preserved and deviations need to be kept out of sight: the knowledge that money and muscle power wins elections must at all times be hidden behind the normative façade of ‘free and fair elections’ through universal adult franchise. Truth in politics, for Bailey, ‘has many versions’ determined ultimately ‘by the strategies that politicians use to make and unmake competing definitions of truth’ (Bailey 2001, 208). Bailey’s vocabulary of political analysis was shared by a like-​minded group of anthropologists writing about new nations in the 1950s and 1960s, in what was termed as action theory, through the pioneering scholarship of Lucy Mair, Edmund Leach, Raymond Firth, and S. F. Nadel.9 Although those contexts have greatly altered now, Bailey kept on revising and fine-​ tuning his positions as he moved along, remaining loyal to the authenticity of his original Orissa ethnographies, but asking newer methodological and empirical questions to understand why people behaved in the way they did. More importantly, we live in a world where even the most coercive of the oppressions seem to be routine and mundane, as are the resistances and everyday defiances. In all situations, manipulation, tactics, treasons, and strategies have acquired an unprecedented salience.10 Perhaps it is worthwhile to look back at F. G. Bailey’s oeuvre not only for unearthing the mundaneness of grand political narratives, but also to seek how resistance to power can be achieved by fashioning new rules of the game – a ‘steady, incremental change’ (Joas 1993, 7), that defines what is quintessentially political.

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Notes 1 The eponymous Manchester ‘school’ of British social anthropology arose in the 1950s, with a close-​knit group of anthropologists and sociologists who worked around Max Gluckman. In contrast to the reigning theoretical paradigm of that period, structural-​functionalism, they emphasized on the precariousness of the notion of stability, and instead focused attention on the processual and situational dimensions of societies. Micro-​processes in small localities were given more significance in their analyses and equilibrium was treated as unstable and transitory. F. G. Bailey was among the first generation of anthropologists of the Manchester ‘school’ or Manchester ‘circle’ in social anthropology that had evolved around the Department of Social Anthropology and Sociology of the Victoria University of Manchester. Bailey, one of the earliest members of the ‘school’, focusing on India, heralded the Machiavellian moment in political anthropological analysis, taking up ‘the routine of political strategizing, manipulation, and the advancement of interests’ (Vincent 1990, 338, emphasis in original). 2 See Bailey 1958; Bailey 1960; and Bailey 1963. 3 See Bailey 1969b. 4 See Bailey 2003; Bailey 1973. 5 In Bisipara, the dispute arose when the Pans demanded to enter the village temple as their legal right. Upon being prevented by the clean castes, the Pans called the police to ensure that their legal right be enforced. In Baderi, ‘half an hour’s walk from Bisipara’ (Bailey in Gluckman 1964: 55), the dispute between the Pans and the Konds (who held an analogous position to that of the clean castes in Bisipara) broke out when the Pans were humiliated during a wedding feast by a Kond. This resulted in the Konds resolving to impose an ‘economic “lock-​ out” ’ of the Pans where their services were sought to be boycotted, but in actuality, the resolution had come to nothing and the Pans never went out of job (see Bailey in Gluckman, 1964). 6 For Bailey, a political community is the widest group in which competition for valued ends is controlled. Beyond this point the rules do not apply and politics is not so much a competition as a fight, in which the objective is not to defeat the opposition in an orderly contest (where there is agreement about how to play and what to play for), ‘but to destroy one “game” and establish a different set of rules’ (Bailey 1969b, 1). 7 Here, it may be noticed that there are considerable overlaps in Bailey’s terminological and thereby conceptual framework –​political structure, political community, and political field are cases in point. However, in later developments of the paradigm of action theory, the empirical contexts associated with the different analytical categories helped clarify levels of analysis. Victor Turner has noted that when characterizing a political field, ‘relations of likeness such as classes, categories, similar roles, and structural positions are of prior sociological importance. When successive arenas are to be characterized, systematic interdependencies in local systems of social relations, going from demography, to

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residential distribution, religious affiliation and genealogical and class structure become significant’ (quoted in Vincent 1978, 183). 8 The core of a pragmatist social theory is the notion that human ‘creative action’ is ‘always embedded in a situation’, i.e. on the human being’s ‘situated freedom’, argues Hans Joas. Although critics view this notion as a mere adaptation to circumstances, Joas argues that ‘this accusation fails to perceive the antideterministic thrust of the pragmatists’, which also draws attention to the constituted nature of society where actors bring ‘something objectively new into the world’ through creatively confronting situations (Joas 1993, 4). 9 See, for a masterful survey of the field of anthropology, Vincent 1990, especially ­chapter 5. 10 Whether in coups, revolutions, or diplomacy, stratagems, tactics and manipulations play a central role, and even the grand ideological battles are covertly fought on the strength of these mundane, routine idioms of doing politics. In a recent article Slavoj Zizek narrates incidents from western political history to show how discretion, compromise, and tact were often used to strike deals where the real motives of the protagonists remained hidden from public discourse. Zizek argues: ‘Insofar as one can reconstruct the events today, it appears that the happy outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis, too, was managed through tact, the polite rituals of pretended ignorance. Kennedy’s stroke of genius was to pretend that a letter had not arrived, a stratagem that worked only because the sender (Khruschev) went along with it.’ For the fascinating account of the whole story of intrigue and manipulation, see Zizek 2011, 16, emphasis added.

References Bailey, F. G. 1958. Caste and the Economic Frontier. Bombay: Oxford University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1960. Tribe, Caste and Nation. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1963. Politics and Social Change: Orissa in 1959. California: University of California Press. Bailey, F. G. 1964. ‘Two Villages in Orissa.’ In Closed Systems and Open Minds, edited by M. Gluckman. London: Oliver & Boyd. Bailey, F. G. 1969a. ‘Political Statements.’ Contributions to Indian Sociology 3(1): 1–16. Bailey, F. G. 1969b. Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bailey, F. G. 1973. Debate and Compromise: The Politics of Innovation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bailey, F. G. 1983. The Tactical Uses of Passion. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1991. The Prevalence of Deceit. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1993. The Kingdom of Individuals. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1994. A Witch-​Hunt in an Indian Village or, the Triumph of Morality. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1996. The Civility of Indifference. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1998. The Need for Enemies. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.

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Bailey, F. G. 2001. Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils. Boulder: Westview Press. Bailey, F. G. 2003. The Saving Lie. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dumont, L. 1970. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Geertz, C. 1963. Old Societies and New States. New Delhi: Amerind Publishing Co. Gluckman, M. ed. 1964. Closed Systems and Open Minds: The Limits of Naivety in Social Anthropology. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. Joas, H. 1993. Pragmatism and Social Theory. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Vincent, J. 1978. ‘Political Anthropology: Manipulative Strategies.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 7: 175–​94. Vincent, J. 1990. Anthropology and Politics. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. Zizek, S. 2011. ‘Tact in the Age of Wikileaks.’ New York: Harper’s Magazine.

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Politics as theatrical performance and backstage pragmatism: work and legacy of F. G. Bailey Stanley R. Barrett Bailey launched his career in the 1950s with an ambitious ethnographic project in India out of which emerged three splendid monographs. ­ Eventually he published 15 additional books, all of them concerned with political anthropology. Following the Indian phase his interests turned in two directions. One was towards anthropology at home, reflecting his perspective that the discipline has no geographical or cultural boundaries. The other direction was towards general theoretical issues. With the publication of Stratagems and Spoils (1969), Bailey was recognized as a key figure in what became known as the transactional or agency model. Yet his crowning achievement may well have been his exceptional analytic capacity to penetrate the public rhetoric of politicians, and to decode (often with imaginative cross-​cultural comparisons) the play of power embedded in everyday life. Frederick George Bailey (1924–​2020) was born into a lower-​middle-​class family in Liverpool. He went up to Oxford to study Classics on an Open Scholarship in 1942. It was at Oxford where he became aware that (like the Beatles) he spoke a working-​class Liverpool dialect called ‘Scouse’, which eventually gave way to a standard BBC accent. As in the case of so many of his generation, the Second World War intervened. In 1943 he left Oxford to join the British Army, seeing action in France in 1944, and participating in the Allied Occupation of Germany in 1945. The following year he was back at Oxford. After graduating with an MA B.Litt. in 1950, he enrolled as a PhD candidate in social anthropology under the supervision of Max Gluckman at Manchester University, at the time probably the leading centre of anthropology in Britain. He received his PhD in 1955 and soon joined the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. In 1964 he founded the anthropology programme at the University of Sussex. In 1971 he accepted a position as Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at San Diego, where in 1995 he became Professor Emeritus and continued to publish books at a pace that must have rendered his younger colleagues breathless.

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This chapter will focus primarily on the following: the author’s Indian phase; his groundbreaking work in Stratagems and Spoils (1969); his eventual turn to anthropology at home best represented by Morality and Expediency (1977); two theoretically-​oriented volumes, Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils (2001a) and The Saving Lie (2003), that were published towards the end of his career; and his final book, an inquiry into the interaction between power and religion in God-​Botherers and Other True Believers (2008).1

Indian phase The Indian research programme focused first on a village, then on a region, and finally on the modern system of representative democracy. Along the way tribe, caste, the version of the mercantile economy introduced by British colonialism, and the administrative machinery of the modern state were treated as interdependent but contradictory political structures out of which emerged significant social change. Caste and the Economic Frontier (1957) is a study of Bisipara, a village located in an isolated and poverty-​stricken part of the state of Orissa known as the Kondmals. Bisipara was home to about 700 Oriya-​­speaking Hindus whose forebears had settled in the area some 300 years earlier. Bailey’s focus was on the impact of external factors on political activity in the village, particularly the caste system. His rich ethnography enabled him to explain how the encroaching mercantile economy affected the capacity of peasants to retain control over and ownership of their land, and how two Untouchable Distiller castes were able to gain sufficient wealth to become prominent landowners themselves, which led to their attempts to elevate their positions in the caste hierarchy. Tribe, Caste and Nation (1960) dealt with a village of about 500 people less than an hour’s walk from Bisipara which the author called Baderi. Both Bisipara and Baderi were dependent on irrigated rice cultivation for subsistence, but otherwise were quite different. Bisipara was a multi-​caste settlement. Baderi was dominated by a single caste called Konds who Bailey states (p. 263) were formerly labelled Animists or Tribalists and spoke the Kui language. Unlike Bisipara, the fulcrum of political action and social change in Baderi was not the village, but instead the dispersed clan system. Presumably that explains why Bailey focused on the wider region. In this book he examined the power struggles between the Aboriginal Konds and the Hindu settlers, and introduced the term ‘bridge actions’ to capture the manner in which individuals pursued their interests by mobilizing support across competing political structures such as tribe, caste, and the modern state.

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Tribe, Caste and Nation is sometimes regarded as the best of the three Indian monographs. This is not only because of the scope of the study, but also because of its methodology and theoretical sophistication. Taking the position that disputes and conflicts are ‘diagnostic’ of the causes and directions of social change, Bailey organized the study around 38 such cases. While the analytic focus was on social structure, the author’s discussion of static vs. dynamic and synchronic vs. diachronic advanced the discipline’s capacity to deal with social change. In Politics and Social Change (1963) Bailey turned his attention to the system of representative democracy in the state of Orissa. His aim was to discover what impact parliament had on the older political structures of tribe and caste, and what it meant to people in their everyday lives. He began by interviewing about 50 members of the Legislative Assembly in the state capital, and then shifted the inquiry to the level of constituencies and villages. This was a challenging project, and Bailey candidly presented it as an experiment in methodology: whether or not the tools of social anthropology can cope with the complexity of a modern state.

Transactional model The Indian volumes were a hard act to follow, but Stratagems and Spoils surpassed all reasonable expectations. Drawing on the work of several prominent predecessors, especially Barth, Leach, Firth and Malinowski, Bailey sketched out the nuts and bolts of the transactional or agency model. The study opens with an intriguing comparison between the Mafia and violent interaction among Swat Pathans in Pakistan as displayed in Barth’s (1959) pioneering study. Bailey’s argument is that both the Mafia and the Swat Pathans arrange their politics in much the same way. This led to one of his most significant claims: beneath the veneer of cultural variation, political activity everywhere, whether in advanced western states or in tribal and peasant societies, exhibits a common set of principles. Bailey distinguishes between normative and pragmatic rules of behaviour. Normative rules are general guides to conduct; they consist of the public, formal, or ideal rules of society. Pragmatic rules are deviations from the ideal rules; they consist of the tactics and strategies that individuals resort to in order to effectively achieve their goals. Bailey does not deny that duty and altruism exist, but his clear message is that human interaction is dominated by pragmatic rules manipulated by choice-​making actors capable of rational calculation. As Bailey puts it, in everyday life most of us, guided by self-​interest, thread our way between norms, seeking the most advantageous route. This is no less true of politicians who ‘are all caught up in the act of

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outmanoeuvring one another, of knifing one another in the back, or tripping one another up … No statesman is effective unless he knows the rules of attack and defence in the political ring’ (1969, xi, xii). On one level Stratagems and Spoils is the study of politics and power, but on another level it provides a theoretical perspective for the entire discipline. People are not puppets controlled by the institutional framework; they are active agents locked in competitive struggle. Nor is the social structure unified and static; it is a dynamic entity, continuously being reshaped by the shifting transactions, alliances, coalitions, competitions, and choices that characterize human interaction. The transactional model pushed the image of the social world so far away from Radcliffe-​Brown’s structural functionalism as to render a paradigmatic shift. Stratagems and Spoils was the capstone study in this intellectual movement, and it consolidated Bailey’s reputation as an emerging star in the discipline.

Anthropology at home Morality and Expediency (1977) really did represent anthropology at home: an analytic examination of political interaction in universities. This book is an expanded version of the Louis Henry Morgan Lectures delivered at the University of Rochester in September and October, 1975. Its subject matter is the university as an organization which struggles between the contradictory goals (or ‘myths’ as Bailey labels them) of scholarship, collegiality, and service to society. Morality and Expediency picks up the scent of the self-​interested, manipulative actor which permeates Stratagems and Spoils, and pursues it into even darker corners. The focus is on the unprincipled side of human interaction, on ‘institutionalized facades, make-​believe and pretence, lies and hypocrisy’ on what ‘every public figure pretends does not exist’ (1977, 2). Bailey distinguishes between public and private interaction. Public arenas are where principles, goals, and slogans flourish, and are the locus of non-​rational debate. Principles and beliefs are devoid of criteria of ultimate worth; they can be proclaimed but not demonstrated. The private arena, uncontaminated by the urge to play to an audience, is where things get done. This is because under the protection of privacy, principles can be relaxed and compromise can prevail. To the extent that this occurs, the private arena is where rationality takes over. Yet the public arena is not merely an irksome ideological screen. It is there where people persuade each other that the world is orderly and therefore meaningful – what Bailey labels the saving lie, without which we might all go mad. One of the most impressive chapters in this study is that devoted to committees. Committees are a sub-​section of the bureaucracy. As such they

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should be guided by rationality and impersonality. Committees are quite different than communities or the collegial dimension of university life. Bureaucracies ideally only consider that part of an individual pertinent to the task under consideration, such as whether her or his record of publication warrants reward. Communities deal with the full, rounded person. With great insight, Bailey shows how in reality the community dimension always invades committee deliberations. Through casual remarks and gossip, committee members exchange personal information about the individuals under discussion. Not only does this occur, but it is Bailey’s argument (p. 66) ‘that such committees cannot work effectively unless they use such information, without formally admitting that it exists’. In a later chapter Bailey reduces the political faces of his colleagues to ten analytic constructs which he calls masks. Although he emphasizes that these are sociological rather than psychological constructs, they seem to stand midway between role and personality. There is Reason, described as a ‘technician of the intellect’, who is unconcerned with first principles, believes that every problem has a solution, and questions the sanity of anyone who fails to see things his or her way. Another mask is Baron, ‘the man with moustaches, with testicles …’ (p. 134). For Baron, the university is an arena of competing interest groups where intimidation is the weapon of choice. This chapter on masks displays Bailey’s imaginative capacity at its best, and the book as a whole provides remarkable insight into the workings of universities, and possibly other types of formal organizations as well. Yet it probably never had the same impact on the discipline as his previous books, and the reason is apparent: anthropology at home still cannot seem to compete with the discipline’s traditional focus on the (increasingly elusive) exotic ‘Other’.

Theoretical works Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils was intended as a sequel to Stratagems and Spoils. Among its highlights are sections on how leaders control followers, the differences between politicians and bureaucrats, and especially the portrayal of Lyndon Johnson as a superb pragmatic politician whose rise to power was marked by stunning deceit and ruthlessness. The term ‘treasons’ in the book’s title signals another significant change in Bailey’s approach to politics. Treasons for Bailey connote morality. Previously the emphasis was on rational and pragmatic calculation in the competition for resources and power. Now room had to be made for duty and conscience. The recognition that people are motivated by more than self-​interest no doubt was empirically justified, but it rendered the author’s

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conception of the actor and political behaviour much more complex than in Stratagems and Spoils; this in turn had far-​reaching implications for the author’s prior fidelity to positivism, for treating social systems like natural systems as Radcliffe-​Brown had advocated (1964). It should be noted that in the Prevalence of Deceit (1991) as well as the ‘Postscript’ to the new edition of Stratagems and Spoils (2001b), Bailey had already commented on his shift from a commitment to the scientific study of society to an appreciation for the sheer untidiness of human interaction. He confessed to no longer being a simple (and thus happy) positivist, confident that ‘truth’ was within the grasp of the eager ethnographer. I suppose that at this juncture of his career Bailey might have been vulnerable to the anti-​scientific stance of postmodernism and even to the extreme relativism of Geertz. Yet in different books he rejected postmodernism as a dead-​end compilation of dubious and pretentious assertions, and was equally dismissive of Geertz’s ‘thick description’ and its related implication that every culture is unique and thus cross-​cultural analysis is problematic. In the end, all that Bailey claimed is that sufficient pattern exists both within and across cultures to warrant at least a watered-​down version of the comparative method. Actually, the vast bulk of Bailey’s books could be regarded as a celebration of cross-​cultural analysis, but his approach has little in common with the formal manipulation of variables in order to establish causality. Sometimes his comparisons are extensive such as his focus on Hitler and Gandhi in his book, God-​Botherers and Other True Believers (2008). More often, however, with admirable brevity and imagination he demonstrates the underlying similarity between apparently unrelated phenomena. One example is the overlap between the manner in which the Mafia and the Pashtuns organize their political behaviour (1969). A second is his insight that both Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Gandhi’s non-​ violence are in essence theatrical performances (2001a, 179). A third is his reliance on an incident in Bisipara to explain how Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential ambitions in the United States were demolished. Tuta, an Untouchable who increased his wealth and attempted to elevate his caste position, was falsely accused by his hostile caste superiors of employing a spirit to kill a young woman. In Dukakis’s case, fabricated rumours about his mental illness and alleged tolerance of violent criminals such as Willie Horton drove a stake through his campaign (2001a, 4–​6). Both men, as Bailey points out, were victims of witch-​hunts. It is unsurprising that Bailey largely draws his comparisons from his own field work experience and his knowledge of anthropology and related fields of inquiry. What is unusual is the degree to which he turns for inspiration to his personal life, especially his working-​class background and school days in

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Liverpool, his war experience, and the different cultures of his various academic posts in Britain and America. In short, the comparisons he marshals resonate with his life experiences as a scholar and human being. All of Bailey’s books are analytically sophisticated, but rarely does he debate the contributions of his colleagues or stray into the lofty realm of grand theory. The Saving Lie (2003) is different. First of all, it addresses some of the major changes that have occurred in anthropology since the Second World War, especially the dramatic rejection of Radcliffe-​Brown’s structural functionalism and natural science model by his former student, Evans-​Pritchard. In the latter’s inaugural lecture as the new chair of anthropology at Oxford in 1948 (which, incidentally, Bailey attended), he preached from the same structural functional scripture that Radcliffe-​Brown had helped compose. Just two years later in his Marett Memorial Lecture, Evans-​Pritchard had experienced a religious-​like conversion (or, more probable, had finally publicly clarified his loss of faith in the old dogma). He argued that rather than being a science, anthropology was a branch of history, and thus fell under the umbrella of the humanities. Moreover its ethnographic goal should be to model society as a moral system, not a natural system. The task for the ethnographer was to erect an imaginary construct (by definition a set of ideas) of the essence of a society. Bailey, who expressed great admiration for The Nuer (1940), had misgivings about the assumption that the essence of a society could be captured in a single master image, but he was less disturbed by the implicit emphasis on ideas conveyed by the imaginary construct. Indeed, another major shift in Bailey’s approach to anthropology was from social structure and the observable event that dominated his early work in India to the ideas that people carried in their minds. This idealist tendency was more compatible with cultural anthropology than social anthropology, suggesting that had Bailey not relocated to the United States he may not have embraced a conceptual scheme that assigned analytic priority to ideas rather than structure and behaviour. It should be pointed out, however, that while still at Sussex his interests had already turned to cognitive anthropology. Even more significant is Bailey’s comparison of neoclassical economics and structural functionalism. On the face of it, these paradigms (or models) have little in common. The heart of neoclassical economics is expected utility and the self-​interested individual. The core of structural functionalism is group behaviour and the imperative of duty even if it comes at the expense of individual gratification. Yet both paradigms share the assumptions that they are expressions of the natural order and thus scientific, and that they exist in a state of equilibrium. Here the similarities end. Neoclassical economists (like the late Milton Friedman) assume that equilibrium is a spontaneous expression of natural

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law. In a sense it is amoral because it operates independent of human volition. Indeed, any intentional intervention of the market, by government for example, upsets the naturally generated balance between supply and demand. The structural functional paradigm, in contrast, is moral to its core. Equilibrium is attributed to the impact of duty and conscience at the level of group interaction. The central value system and priority given to consensus over conflict assure that the collective will of citizens maintains society in a state of harmony and stability; in other words, equilibrium. Bailey refers to the grand totalizing paradigms of neoclassical economics and structural functionalism as one-​sided fictions or saving lies. They are fictions because their claims to universality do not accord with the complexity of human interaction; they are saving lies because they provide us with the psychological comfort that the world is orderly and meaningful. In the final part of the book Bailey focuses on rhetoric and agency. Rhetoric implies persuasion and agency implies choice. Their ethnographic target is the detail, particularism, strategies and complexity that have been bracketed out by neoclassical economics and structural functionalism. At the same time they generate a host of alternative structures or models that are more closely connected to the empirical realm. As Bailey points out, choice between these alternative structures has less to do with evidence or truth than with the sheer power and persuasion of those who promote them. In this context Bailey evokes Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction (1957) between the hedgehog and the fox. The hedgehog has one big idea, the fox a host of small ideas. The hedgehog, Bailey suggests, is a figure of speech for totalizing structures and the fox for the numerous alternative structures revealed by rhetoric and agency. The Saving Lie is an intellectual treat. It is the analytic product or big statement of a lifetime of inquiry into politics. Especially impressive is Bailey’s knowledge about the discipline of economics. Although his interest in the economy was evident in his first book, Caste and the Economic Frontier, had he not moved from SOAS to Sussex where he interacted regularly with economists, it is questionable whether he would have developed the sophistication exhibited in The Saving Lie. Admirable clarity has been Bailey’s trademark since the publication of his first book. From Morality and Expediency onwards there was a noticeable change in his writing style. It began to exude elegance and charm and a flair for the memorable expression. The Kingdom of Individuals (1993), for example, an investigation into the contradiction between individualism and collectivism (and probably the author’s most autobiographical book), is written with a degree of seductive grace unsurpassed even by Geertz. Among the several volumes published by Bailey in the 1980s and 1990s, the most surprising may well have been the three new books based on his

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field work in India 40 years earlier. The first of them, The Witch-​Hunt (1994), is where Bailey unravelled the politics behind accusations of witchcraft related to the death of a young woman; the second, The Civility of Indifference (1996), explained how cultural norms prevented ethnic conflict from exploding into a political crisis; the third, The Need for Enemies (1998), focused on the challenges and turmoil that emerged in one part of India (Orissa) in the years following independence in 1947. There is a saying in anthropology that if one’s field work is extensive and thorough, one can ‘dine out’ on the data for years. If ever there were doubts about Bailey’s exceptional flair for field work, these three new monographs lay them to rest.

Power and religion I now turn to Bailey’s final published book: God-​Botherers and Other True Believers (2008). On the face of it, religion would appear to be an unusual subject for the author unless his purpose was merely to pound another nail into theism. In his unpublished and undated autobiography (Lower-​Middle-​ Class: A Template), he reveals that by the age of 15 or 16 he had become an atheist. In God-​Botherers (p. 19) he confirmed that he remained an atheist at the time he wrote this book. He also expressed wonderment that any educated person could believe in God. In several of his books he revealed his personal distaste for fanatics or true-​believers of all stripes, whether they occupy space in religion, politics, or even academia. Consistent with this attitude was his personal admiration for moderation as a model for living. What is therefore impressive is the balanced, fair-​minded, and thoroughly scholarly character of the book. In fact by its end Bailey no longer saw any incompatibility between higher education and religion as long as the two spheres remained in separate compartments. Equally important was his insight that all of us, religious-​oriented or not, rely on what he labels pre-​suppositional faith. This consists of beliefs and values that persist as unquestioned guidelines as long as they are judged to be useful. Early on (pp. 2–​3) Bailey provides his definition of religion: ‘Any belief … is religious to the extent that it is asserted with dogmatic finality, held on faith, without evidence, without doubt, immune from criticism, immutable, and eternal.’ Note that although a belief in God is not included in the definition, this alone does not explain why Bailey embraced its secular version such as communism, fascism, humanism, and even free-​market capitalism and his own atheist orientation. The more significant reason was his repeated identification of fanatics and true-​believers throughout the mundane realm, including the belief systems above.

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The main focus of this book is first on the religious right in America, then on Hitler and National Socialism, and finally and most extensively on Gandhi and non-​violence. Bailey points out that the religious right in America overwhelmingly supports the Republican Party, which obviously makes it political. His harshest criticism is reserved for televangelists. He regards them as hypocrites who exploit the anxieties of their gullible flocks in order to amass fortunes which they shamelessly flaunt. Yet, as he adds, in the larger picture of sins arguably committed by religion such as its basis in numerous wars, and in comparison to Hitler and Gandhi, the televangelists are small fry. Bailey’s own word for them is perfect: pipsqueaks. Hitler is portrayed by Bailey as a true-​believer in its most odious sense, but conventional religion cannot be blamed. This is because although Hitler was raised as a Catholic and attended Catholic schools, he eventually despised Christianity. According to Bailey, Hitler did retain a vague belief in a spiritual force, but his real religion was secular: National Socialism. One of the reasons that Hitler opposed Christianity (and organized religion in general) was political; he thought that the Church would distract the population away from or even oppose his political goals. A second reason was his belief that the essence of the spiritual realm had been corrupted by institutional religion, resulting in flawed and damaged human beings. The task of National Socialism was to create the new human being, armed with a sword in one hand and a copy of Mein Kampf in the other. If Hitler epitomizes evil, Gandhi epitomizes good. He was of course a true-​believer in the religious sense, confident that he was guided by God. He also thought that education is a threat to religious belief, yet he was a trained lawyer who practiced for 20 years in South Africa. Whereas Hitler revelled in violence, Gandhi’s philosophy of non-​violence was the polar opposite. Yet one of the key aims of both of them was moral regeneration of their respective societies. Although Gandhi was a Hindu, his spiritual orientation embraced all religions, and his dream was that the mundane world would evolve in the direction of peace and respect where animosity and enemies would cease to exist. As Bailey cryptically remarks (p. 195): ‘Gandhi’s is a religion for societies already in Heaven.’ Nehru, a religious skeptic, had little patience for Gandhi’s spiritualism, but he recognized that no other leader in India possessed the charisma to inspire the nation towards the goal of independence, which was achieved in 1947. Before attributing the victory solely to Gandhi, it should be pointed out as Bailey does (pp. 187–​90) that in the aftermath of the Second World War, Britain with its devastated economy and newly elected socialist government (the Labour Party) had lost its taste for its colonial empire. Of course, independence was accompanied by what Gandhi must have regarded as one of his most devastating failures – the partition of the country along religious

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lines into India and Pakistan. One year later, in 1948, Gandhi was assassinated by Hindu fanatics who could not forgive him for doing what his faith demanded: reprimanding Hindus for their abuse of Muslims. In his several books Bailey has argued that no leader can be successful without resorting to deceit and manipulation. Gandhi, who was not entirely averse to political gamesmanship but in Bailey’s judgement came closer to the ideal of the honourable statesman than almost any other figure of his stature, may be the ultimate and tragic proof.

Criticisms Not everyone has been enthusiastic about Bailey’s approach to politics. Sydel Silverman (1974–​5) criticized Stratagems and Spoils for ignoring the larger social structural context within which choice and manipulation operate. Yet Bailey has repeatedly stated that a focus on both agency and structure is obligatory in any inquiry. Joan Vincent (1990, 348) has contended that Bailey ignored the politics of the powerful. Yet his early books covered such illustrious figures as Churchill and de Gaulle, and in later years Johnson, Hitler, and Gandhi. Recall, too, that Politics and Social Change, the third of his original books on India, dealt primarily with professional politicians. Stratagems and Spoils has also been criticized for promoting an overly cynical view of the human condition. Yet not only has it been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese but it also has been praised as the modern successor to Machiavelli’s The Prince (see Bailey 2001b, 238). Many anthropologists, indeed, would regard it as the fieldworker’s model par excellence. All of the above assessments, both positive and negative, have been aimed at Stratagems and Spoils. Curiously, this book appears to have made such a huge splash that there has been a tendency to define Bailey by it ever since. Certainly if the several books that followed Stratagems and Spoils were put under a microscope, critics would face a much greater challenge because Bailey has been a moving target. Structure and the observable event gave way to agency and manipulation; duty and conscience eventually surfaced alongside self-​interest; finally, ideas were elevated to the analytic starting point. The trajectory of these cumulative shifts in Bailey’s approach has been in a single direction: a movement away from positivism, a recognition of the slippery character of ‘truth’, and the portrayal of the external world as quasi-​chaotic. In his early work Bailey expressed ‘a repugnance for ­disorder’ (1969, XIII). In his mature phase, disorder had become embraced as a defining feature of society.

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It should be pointed out that there is some repetition in Bailey’s books. Occasionally the same arguments and even ethnographic examples reappear, but in his defense they often acquire fresh significance each time his perspective changes. Of course, some degree of repetition is probably unavoidable for any scholar who consistently probes a single field of inquiry. Like Evans-​ Pritchard, Bailey also is ‘old school’ in his stance that the accumulation of knowledge is sufficient justification for academic labour regardless whether it brings benefit to humankind.2 This raises a perplexing issue. In view of the rejection of positivism by Evans-​Pritchard and Bailey, why was the welcome mat retained for one of its key elements – knowledge for its own sake, a sibling of objective and value-​neutral social science? Ironically, the explanation may concern one of Bailey’s central concepts. Knowledge for its own sake may have constituted ‘a saving lie’ that allowed simultaneously kicking positivism out the front door while patting its back at the rear door in order to sustain (by design or accident) a semblance of the scientific credentials of the discipline. How, then, to sum up the impact of Bailey’s lifelong devotion to the study of power and politics? Let me give the last word to Donald Kurtz3: ‘Bailey simply has no peers in anthropology – probably not even in political sociology or political science – when it comes to analyzing politics.’4

Notes 1 I am grateful to the directors of BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris, for permission to republish this slightly modified article which originally appeared in BEROSE (2020). 2 By sheer accident and good fortune I became one of Bailey’s students when I decided to switch from the doctoral programme at the University of Cambridge to the University of Sussex in 1968 in order to study under the guidance of Peter Lloyd, who at the time was the leading British anthropologist specializing on the Yoruba of Nigeria. 3 Kurtz’s glowing assessment appears on the back cover of Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils. Having published a fine study of his own on political anthropology (2001), he was well-​qualified to evaluate Bailey’s contribution. 4 I am indebted to Chris Griffin for his astute critique of an earlier draft of this chapter.

References Bailey, F. G. 1957. Caste and the Economic Frontier. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Bailey, F. G. 1960. Tribe, Caste and Nation. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1963. Politics and Social Change. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bailey, F. G. 1969. Stratagems and Spoils. Oxford: Blackwells. Bailey, F. G. 1977. Morality and Expediency. Oxford: Blackwells. Bailey, F. G. 1991. The Prevalence of Deceit. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1993. The Kingdom of Individuals. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1994. The Witch-​Hunt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1996. The Civility of Indifference. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1998. The Need for Enemies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bailey, F. G. 2001a. Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Bailey, F. G. 2001b. Stratagems and Spoils. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Bailey, F. G. 2003. The Saving Lie. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bailey, F. G. 2008. God-​Botherers and Other True Believers. New York: Berghahn. Barth, F. 1959. Political Leadership among Swat Pathans, London: Athlone Press. Berlin, I. 1957. The Hedgehog and the Fox. New York: Menton. Evans-​Pritchard, E. E. 1940. The Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kurtz, D. 2001. Political Anthropology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Radcliffe-​Brown, A. R. 1964 (orig. 1948). A Natural Science of Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Silverman, S. 1974–​5. ‘Bailey’s Politics.’ Journal of Peasant Studies 2: 111–​20. Vincent, J. 1990. Anthropology and Politics. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

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Part II

Professorial mentoring

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Leadership influence: an aperture on ‘character’ Christopher Griffin Anthropologists are guided in chosen themes and arrangements of facts to illustrate them, and in judgment of what is and is not significant, by their different interests, reflecting differences of personality, of education, of social status, of political views, of religious convictions, and so forth. The personality of an anthropologist cannot be eliminated from his work … (Evans-​Pritchard 1951, 84) Each creature is made in the interest of another … the good of a rational creature is community. It has long been shown we are born for community. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2011, 41)

Bailey’s aims in Politics and Social Change: Orissa in 1959 – to examine changing relations between village and state, what some called ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ interposed by ‘peasant’, and see whether social anthropology’s methods were up to it – were carried into his European programme at Sussex. This chapter examines, first, how that transfer, manifest in Stratagems and Spoils (1969 and 1970) and Gifts and Poisons (1971), reflected three influences: Evans-​Pritchard, Gilbert Murray, and Max Gluckman; second, how Bailey influenced me; and third, how the influencers and Bailey’s social background shaped not just his anthropology but his character. I confine myself to books up to and including the Sussex years, book-​ ended with his last one, God-​Botherers and Other True Believers (2008), whose commentary on faith and religion have forced me to revisit the faith I was raised in. Evans-​Pritchard (1902–​73) influenced Bailey with his grasp of social structure and moral systems, and irritated him with his 1944 conversion and take on religion and Christianity. Murray (1866–​1957), an Oxford classicist, led Bailey to logic, reason, civic power, and personal rejection of revealed religion and the idea of an afterlife. Gluckman (1911–​75), our other anthropologist, mixed structural-​functionalism with conflict and with his students examined change, employing innovative methods.

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History I: Exeter and Oxford As an external sociology student of London University in a college of technology in the 1960s, I was impressed but unsettled by the emphasis on science and quantitative methods, and left insufficiently grounded in theory, Marx and Weber especially. As for social anthropology, the closest I got to it was a unit called comparative social institutions, where we read Talcott Parsons,1 Young and Wilmott’s sociology in east London, The Irish Countryman, and a translation of Tristes Tropiques. I was drawn to experiential research having hiked around Britain and the Continent in my teens and early twenties, worked in a variety of jobs after school, and begun it all with a formative vacation spent on a farm in Ireland as a ten-​year-​old. Yet I knew next to nothing about social anthropology when I first arrived at Sussex beyond what little I’d read, blind to Evans-​Pritchard, and woefully uninformed about Bailey. I was unaware he attended Exeter College, Oxford University, between September 1942 and June 1943 before being called up after officer-​training to the Royal Horse Guards (aka ‘the Blues’), returning to Exeter in 1949 to graduate in classics. Nor did I know about Exeter’s special ties with anthropology. What I quickly learned was what we now all know: how Bailey got his doctorate at Manchester in 1955 under Max Gluckman; that he taught at the School of African and Asian Studies (SOAS) when von Fürer-​Haimendorf was Chair of Asian Studies, and set up the social anthropology department at Sussex in the 1960s. R. R. Marett, Rector of Exeter College, associate of E.B. Tylor, established anthropology at Oxford in 1919. Later he supervised Evans-​Pritchard in history. E-​P afterwards moved to SOAS for fieldwork in the Sudan under Seligman using Radcliffe-​Brown’s approach, later becoming Professor of Anthropology at Oxford. In 1946 FGB returned to Exeter College, met Gluckman, and joined him after he was made ‘Foundational’ Professor of Social Anthropology at Manchester in 1947. The Marett lectures commemorate the Rector’s role in the classics and anthropology of religion. Evans-​ Pritchard in 1950 was the first social anthropologist to lecture, followed by Firth, Hogbin, Gluckman, Fortes, and others.2 Bailey was not among the list of anthropologists invited to lecture. Maybe he was never asked; more likely his Sussex load and trans-​ Atlantic peregrinations made an invitation impractical. Had he lectured, he could have elaborated on his debts and differences with E-​P who now saw social anthropology as a kind of historiography, and therefore ultimately of philosophy or art, [which] implies that it studies societies as moral systems and not as natural systems, that it is interested in design rather than process, and that it seeks patterns and

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not scientific laws, and interprets rather than explains. Regarded as a special kind of historiography that is one of the humanities, social anthropology is released from these essentially philosophic dogmas and given the opportunity though it may seem paradoxical to say so, to be what is empirical and in the true sense of the word, scientific. (E-​P 1950, 123)

E-​P and FGB were both empiricists who treated language as behaviour, argued analysis over description, and disliked factual overload. Facts, according to E-​P, can ‘only be selected and arranged in the light of theory’. Malinowski thought the same: ‘no facts without a theory’ (Firth 2004, 90). FGB and Gluckman concurred, so did Gilbert Murray who saw in Aristotle ‘the desire of the great researcher and collector to have a philosophic framework into which all real facts will fit’ (1940, 42). What jarred with Bailey, a positivist, was E-​P’s ‘humanities’ and ‘artistic imagination’. Bailey valued knowledge for its own sake, facts were to be theoretically organized. Indeed, his India books display the same ability as Gluckman – to spot potential theory in mundane diurnal activity (Kapferer 1987). The Gifts and Poison (1971) essays are further evidence of this, but before we go there, I must refer to Stratagems and Spoils (1969​), a theoretically far more important book than Gifts. In his 2001 Postscript Bailey explained how he coaxed his students to apply its lessons to ethnographies and novels. Moreover, towards the end of the book (Stratagems and Spoils 1969, 202–3), discussing radical change, he draws on a historical novel, The Last Hurrah (O’Connor 1956), to charge historians with misinterpreting change and also misrepresenting the agents involved in change. ‘Conjectural history’ was anathema to Bailey (1970, 202–​3; 1960, 63). Reading that Postscript reference to novels, I confess a penny dropped. For at some point in the 1970s –​I cannot remember exactly when –​Bailey, for reasons I never entirely grasped, recommended to me Tey’s 1951 novel about a modern detective’s re-​examination of the blame pinned on Richard III for the murder of the princes in the Tower. Without doubt The Daughter of Time suggested how an anthropologist might organize narratives dealing with intriguing contradictions. And it was also full of stuff on gossip, slander, reputations, truth, and questionable historiography. However none of it led me to suppose Tey’s conclusion that ‘human nature found it difficult to give up preconceived beliefs’ (1951, 183) was something Bailey might one day develop –​following upon Gilbert Murray – into a case against religion and faith in an afterlife. The impact of Gilbert Murray, the prolific Australia-​born writer, translator, public intellectual, Stoic (1915), and user of anthropological concepts to analyse ancient Greek literature (1908/​1923) has gone largely unnoticed. Yet as Freddy would eventually reveal, Murray shaped his ideas on faith and religion.

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For example, it is no coincidence Murray’s use (1940) of concepts and expressions like ‘failure of nerve’, ‘humbug’, and ‘indifference’,3 and aliveness to the intellectual danger of ‘passion’, recur in Bailey’s writing, titles, and even once in correspondence when he chided me for loss of nerve. Moreover, his use of ‘pre-​suppositional’ in the context of religion (2008) to mean ideas still open to question in a believer’s mind bears the stamp of Epictetus’ prolepsis (2008), primary conceptions, preconceptions, or Tey’s ‘preconceived beliefs’, and stands as a reminder of Huxley’s discourse on the efficacy of words and primary conceptions in his account of religious hysteria and witchcraft in 17th-​century France.4 Even FGB’s reluctance to mention Murray’s name prior to God-​Botherers, or talk philosophy, rings with the Stoics’ counsel to wear your learning lightly.5 In a word, Stoicism penetrated his scientific approach: ‘The purpose of any scientific endeavour’, he declared in Stratagems and Spoils, ‘is to suggest verifiable propositions about relations between variables’. Until this happens, ‘the anthropologist or political scientist has merely described what the players themselves know, and has not begun to make his own analysis’ (1970, 8–​9, his emphasis). This contrasts clearly with Evans-​ Pritchard’s 1950 ‘humanities’ and ‘interpretative’ understanding. Like E-​P, R-​B, and most other structural, functionally inclined anthropologists, Bailey staked a lot on comparing. Hence the dozen Orissa case studies (1960), Gifts and Poisons essays, and rummaging in novels and others’ ethnographies. Still, more crucially, he followed E-​P diligently when it came to structure. ‘By social structure’, E-​P wrote, ‘[I mean] relations between groups which have a high degree of consistency and constancy. The groups remain the same irrespective of their specific content of individuals at any particular moment’ (1940, 263). The anthropologist’s job was to analyse a structure’s constituent elements, namely its patterns of social action, including native discourse. Tribe, Caste, and Nation begins with Bailey writing that he thought of calling the book ‘The Political Structure of the Konds’ but decided not to do so, despite his heavy reliance on the concept called ‘structure’ (1960, 6). A structural analysis emphasizes the regularity, the continuity, the permanence of certain forms of social interaction, and of groups of persons. It also emphasizes systems: that is to say, it assumes that the various roles (or institutions) in which persons or groups are engaged are connected with one another in such a way that what happens in one institution, or role, will regularly affect what happens in others. I have distinguished between ‘structure’ and ‘sub-​structure’. (1960, 6)

The parallels between Bailey and E-​P are obvious. What Bailey did was different, extending the idea of sub-​system to the political dynamic of three separate, distinct, interconnected political structures.

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History II: Sussex and Provence In 1970 I worked for Bailey for three months on a pilot project in a village in Provence not far from Italy’s Piedmont. Bailey wanted to replace sociological ‘push/​pull’ theories with situated migrant narratives emphasizing agency and choice junctures. If our methods proved viable we’d move the study to a town or city, like the Manchester anthropologists had in Africa. The discussion below centres primarily on Bailey’s team-​oriented sub-​alpine Europe-​focused work, of which I was a part: Gifts and Poison. In the following discussion the key terms and their influencers are enumerated, the former italicized. Gifts and Poisons comprised 13 essays on post-​peasant European villages, four by Bailey, nine by his students. As well as themes seen already in Orissa, like community, reciprocal exchange, reputation, conflict management, leadership, elections, outsiders, and migration, in Bailey’s hands the text also carried indications of Manchester. For instance it replicated the mentor/​student balance, ‘regional’ generalizations,6 the focus on social change, and notion of conflict and contradiction implicit in the toxicity of gifts that otherwise make for community. His stress on choice and critical decisions might have come from Evans-​Pritchard, or from Weber,7 even the Stoics, but as was the case regarding its emphasis in India (Bailey 1960, 248–​51), it is more properly attributed to Firth’s ‘social organisation’ antidote to structure. Choice in migration analysis, however, needs elaborating in relation to cognitive anthropology. Gifts and Poisons paid little heed to cognitive anthropology per se, for example the phrase ‘cognitive map’ (aptly suggestive of pathways) got scant mention. Bailey reduced the concept to World View, as had Wade who had it subsume ‘cognitive premise’ (1971, 252–​80). Not until the pilot-​project and early 1971, before leaving Sussex, did Freddy start exploring cognitive anthropology in earnest, proposing componential analysis as a means of mapping migrant choices and critical decisions.8 Field experience in the end proved componential analysis unsuitable to migration narratives on many grounds: the indecent demand put on interviewees with memory distortion, and post-​facto rationalizations. Instead, we decided to stick to the themes evident in Gifts and Poisons as they emerged in the village and Nice, including the mutual views of newcomers and hosts, and how they chose to adapt to the demands of the new society they now lived in. Put otherwise, actors’ subjective experiences would be situated for objective analysis in the wider structure and organization of a community. Transactions and Transactional Leadership sprung directly from Barth and Mauss, not from Homans’ exchange theory.9 Blaxter, in Gifts and Poison, analysed rendre service in the Pyrenees; Bailey found signori in the

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Piedmont expected only clients’ respect for their services; and in Orissa incoming Oriya, servants of the East India Company, leveraged Indigenous Konds using gifts and mediation.10 Reputations harkened back to role and status in Bisipara in that people’s interactions in one setting cross-​cut with their interaction in another, thereby enhancing a mutual feeling of community. Having a reputation –​ not necessarily enjoying one – is thus a measure of emotional belonging involving an ability to navigate values shared; if not shared, or thought not sufficiently shared, an individual or group risks being marginalized and subject to ‘them’ and ‘us’ binaries. In the villages, Bailey, myself, and other student researchers found that reputations mattered to leaders there as much as mattered in Orissa, to Machiavelli’s Princes, and to gang leaders in Cornerville studied by W. F. Whyte whose Street Corner Society (1943) was influenced by Arensberg (1937, and see Anderson 2013) whose Irish Countryman (1937) Evans-​Pritchard in turn (1951) selected as an example of the emergent anthropology of complex society. Like E-​P, Whyte saw the part an anthropologist’s personality plays in fieldwork (1943, 279). Beneath the ethnographic description he was concerned with social structure, leadership, behavioural routines, continuity, and change, every bit as much as Bailey. Furthermore, his ‘­problem of Cornerville’ was essentially what Bailey came to call ‘encapsulation’ (1969/​1970), namely, the intrusion of upper-​level political systems on lower ones, which in Boston left gang members with a choice: stick with the gang, play the ‘numbers’, and run with the Democrats, or leave the gang, lose your place, try business and the Republicans. Bailey faced a similar choice in Liverpool: stay with Scouser mates and his working-​class community or go for broke through higher education. Whyte, for his part, with an intellectual upper-​middle-​class background travelled the other way, insisting that a fieldworker’s ‘personal life is inextricably mixed with his research. A real explanation, then, of how the research was done necessarily involves a rather personal account of how the researcher lived during the period of study’ (1943, 279). On these grounds, therefore, I turn now to Freddy’s social background via his unpublished autobiography (c. 2007), and say a little of my own.

History III: Liverpool and Manchester Bailey grew up in that part of the English working class he called lower middle. His father was a printer, Freemason, Conservative, and closed-​ shop anti-​trade unionist – an enterprising man. His father’s father, a former seafarer, like his mother’s people, was barely less so. Though his mother

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died when he was a boy, Freddy appears to have weathered it without fuss. Home was a place of modest comfort, comprising himself, his dad, and a Welsh chapel-​going housekeeper called Miss Pritchard. Cousins, aunts, and uncles compensated for siblings. A can-​do uncle with a logical approach to problems left an attitudinal legacy and interest in manual crafts. Freddy enjoyed sport and outdoor activities like cycling and hiking. At university he played rugby for the college in the front row; in America he watched English football on TV (presumably Liverpool and Man. United), and back in Brighton swam off the shingle beach near one I used most days beside the Palace Pier. Whether the Greeks or Romans played into this, I am not sure; all I know is Aristotle swam and Plato declared a man ‘not learned until he can read, write, and swim’, and baths-​ mad Romans were even more aqua-​minded (Means 2020). As for that wry humour –​self-​deprecating in old age and with ailments – Aurelius would have approved (2011, 11). Excepting Church of England rites, Sunday school, and Miss Pritchard, religion played a little part in Freddy’s home or in the secondary school for ‘clever boys’ where he won a scholarship to Oxford and put down roots in reason, civics, and moral equity which late in life caused him to admit ‘the class question [still] touches me on the raw’. Education did what it did for Cornerville College Boys. It robbed him of his innocence, took him from his community, and showed him that the world is more complex than hitherto imagined. My parents and relatives were Irish immigrants who held devoutly to an authoritarian faith offset by humour which cemented home, church, parish life, and schools into a single faith-​bound cultural community whose basic values I adhered to long after I reluctantly and slowly relinquished its institutions. My parents voted Labour. My mother’s politics were shaped by growing up in British-​ruled Ireland, whereas my culturally more conservative father who may on one occasion have voted Tory, owed his tastes and values to two nearby institutions of higher learning, a Jesuit seminary, and a convent college run by nuns who built the school he worked in as caretaker.11 From the start, though I was unaware, FGB and I shared similar class origins, and implicitly saw eye-​to-​eye on equity and justice. Where we differed was on faith and religion, and I know this came as a surprise to him: after letting slip a word he asked whether I was a Catholic. He may have also suspected it from my disregard of the notes on Catholicism supplied us before fieldwork. At the time and for some decades still to come I was a fairly regular churchgoer. Bailey worshipped in the church of reason, remaining constant to the ­analysis of power, conflict, competition, and change. Raised in Liverpool, educated at Oxford, trained in Manchester, conscious of the stigma southerners

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put on northerners, capital on labour, why then given Gluckman’s Marxist inclinations did Freddy have such little time for Marx and the Marxists he accused of tackling problems with preconceived answers? Because not till his 2001 Postscript did he admit closing Marx off too early. Firth (1972) suggested three reasons most British social anthropologists in the 1960s and early 1970s avoided Marxism:12 the conviction it did not apply to non-​ capitalist societies, their bourgeois backgrounds, and (E-​P and Whyte again) personality or temperament. In Bailey’s case, we can ignore the first and second given that he was aware of India’s past industrial history, and was proud of his working-​class roots.13 But the third is less easily dismissed and Barrett’s reference in this collection to Bailey’s use of Archilochus’ hedgehog and fox archetypes provides us with an opening. FGB’s borrowing of the two (in The Saving Lie [2003], I think it was) from Berlin’s rendition of Tolstoy’s conflicted view of history (1999) was, according to Barrett, a metaphorical way of speaking about ‘totalizing structures’ on the one hand and pluralist ‘alternative structures’ involving rhetoric and agency on the other; one leans to science, the other towards the arts and humanities. I’d go further, however. Bailey was a hedgehog. Freddy knew ‘one big thing’. In Berlin’s words Tolstoy ‘looked to penetrate first causes, to understand how and why things happen as they do and not otherwise … [this] remained Tolstoy’s attitude his entire life, and is scarcely a symptom either of ‘trickery’ or ‘superficiality’. With it went an incurable love of the concrete, the empirical, and the verifiable, and an instinctive distrust of the abstract, the impalpable, the supernatural –​in short, an early tendency to a scientific attitude and positivist approach, unfriendly to romanticism, abstract formulations, and metaphysics’ (Berlin 1999, 12). Plato was a hedgehog, Herodotus a fox. I’m no Herodotus, but I am a fox; I ‘know many things’ or more precisely, am drawn to many ends, often unrelated, and even contradictory, connected if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle, [my] thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves. (Berlin 1999, 3)

Bailey’s work with leading universities and publishers unfolded for academicians in the one domain of politics, from changing structures to ‘ideas’. My work in peripheral universities, in sometimes minor third-​world publications, and outside of academia, centred around community development, local voices (1973, 1983, 1986, 2006), truth and silence (2003), and was written pragmatically. My work was not completely devoid of theory but

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was written for general readers and policy makers. The theory was, of course, a way of surviving as an anthropologist.

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History IV : Southeast France and Notting Dale Callas is a hill village in the Var whose population in 1970 of around 600 relied chiefly on wine grapes, petty tourism, and pensions. Locals said it was dying. Viable viticulture lay with just a handful of owners of consolidated scarce flat terrain. A once thriving olive oil industry, water mills, and sericulture had long disappeared with deforestation, changes in technology, and outside competition. Magnan-​La Madeleine on Nice’s west side takes its name from the Magnan stream beside the Boulevard La Madeleine and the quarter called Magnan. Working-​class, ethnically diverse with Communist affiliations, La Madeleine meets Magnan at the west end of the Promenade des Anglais, a blend of urban and rural, light industry, trades, and hillside horticulture. Artisanal workshops along the Boulevard competed for space with Armenian garment factories, Italian laundries, a large telecommunications manufacturer, and with anomalous, anonymous, new high-​rise flats (HLMs) occupied by piedsnoirs.14 Magnan proper consisted of small shops, bars, old homes, new low-​rise, and on high ground vineyards and Nice University’s Faculty of Letters. A mixed and busy individualistic area where privacy was guarded made 12 months of fieldwork difficult. Consequently, after completing my thesis just as openings in social anthropology were contracting, I accepted the offer of a three-​year contract in sociology at the regional University of the South Pacific (USP), in Fiji. Firth established sociology at USP in 1970 and remained its external assessor in sociology until, at my behest, FGB took over in 1976, where as well as assessing staff, curricula, and speaking privately with students, he presented papers, and observed the leadership style of managers. He would go on to publish, for USP leadership and at about the same time as Morality and Expediency, a paper titled The Folklore of Academic Politics.15 As for his personal influence, he made it clear to me that I was at USP to learn as much as to impart. I was not there primarily for research or thesis revision; I was there to learn, teach, and in the course of time write what I could for local or regional audiences (1983, 1986, 2003, 2006). I stayed for seven years. The Gypsy-​Traveller Site in Notting Dale, near Shepherd’s Bush, was a shambles when I began work there as warden in 1983, and despite the improvements I was able to make in concert with housing officials in the

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course of the next two years spread over three, Traveller attitudes ranged from hostile to friendly, rarely without suspicion. The key to my relations included reciprocity, being always around but not resident, and participating as much as possible.

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Community and Reputation Callas was a private (chacun chez soi), individualistic, left-​wing, fiercely secular community. People described it as renfermé and uncooperative. Malicious gossip (mauvaise langue), jalousie (envy), and interference were considered cause and effect of endemic ill will (mauvaise entente). Some put this down to a demographic that left many isolated elderly people battling a course between being seen as sociable – but not a gossip – and unsociable (sauvage). The solution? Brief ritual good manners. Though even then, fear of gossip and being labelled a gossip, caused people to limit their dealing with others. Newcomers and outsiders frequently complained of such things. A Calabrian builder spoke about local builders, ‘real Callassiens’, trying to put him out of business with Mafia tactics like those big construction companies had done on the coast, running to the townhall to check he had building-​permits and met construction standards, or undercutting his quotes. Another outsider (éstranger) a young Algerian, said that when visiting the coast for the day wearing new shoes he made a point of catching the bus outside the village to minimize the gossip. Thus were reputations and terms like civilisé, ­cultivé’, eot etentille, comme il faut, sauvage, moins evolué, and moins civilize allocated. In Magnan-​La Madeleine old Italian and Armenian inhabitants16 blamed a sense of disappearing ‘community’ on immigrants, urbanization, increasing conspicuous consumption spreading from the city, and on a concentration of wealth and influence among a few old Nice families who owned land in the CBD going back to Sard times. Of course, Nice’s confected reputation for opulence and hedonism was not how everyone in Magnan-​La Madeleine saw it. Some saw in it a proud libertarian mentalité and independence typical of the region, some regarded it as essentially Niçois, others yet regarded it as a dangerous everyday anarchy. Not a few blamed it on the mayor, Jacques Medicin, whose father had once been mayor: the Medecins were vieux Nicois, Nissards, vrais Nicois, indigenes, whose attitudes and ­behaviour –​‘attract outsiders, who –​typical of the Midi – take everything they can, but help others as little as possible’. It is the same Roman mentality, that is to say head of the family and clients in the Roman sense. The old mayor who is dead now was a sort of Florentine prince surrounded by clients. He had a funeral like only an Italian prince or

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Sicilian caiid, or Italian mafioso. There were thousands of people and a mountain of flowers. He was the patriarch, the Roman prince, the Roman Medici of Nice.17

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This reminded me of what the Calabrian in Callas had said, and suggested Nice was fertile ground for a politics of reputation (Bailey 1970), but not one I was prepared to tread. I would leave that to Graham Greene (1982).18

Power and leadership Mayoral candidates in Callas faced two sorts of rule, what Bailey called normative and pragmatic (1969), moral and expedient (1977). One set down the official rules of electoral context, the other laid out what was needed unofficially to secure victory. The first need not detain us. A mayor is a functionary. Under his leadership the council of 13 in Callas was an entity linking commune to the state via a regional prefecture at Fréjus. In practice the council rarely met, as the mayor, K. E., made most decisions or, failing that, away in Fréjus (where he was Prefecture Secretary General), he delegated them to M. G. his first deputy (premier adjoint), or at a push his second. Routine matters were handled by the townhall Secretary in Callas, an outsider, a role previously performed by M. G.’s late-​father. For me, at least, if not villagers, what lent the election spice was a history of bitter bickering between the mayor and first deputy who now challenged him. Most villagers I spoke with in the days before voting –​tight-​lipped about their own intentions – claimed that policy-​wise both teams represented more or less the same thing: development. Any other differences were personal and irrelevant; the fact they might have also been political went unmentioned. Thus was a mask of normative cohesion upheld. The Mayor and First Deputy, K. E. and M. G., followed three pragmatic rules: mayoral success goes to the Callas born-​and-​bred man with an extensive social network; victory follows he who secures newcomers’ votes by calling in what is owed him for services rendered; and becoming mayor assumes access to resources through superior knowledge of political systems outside the village. In sum, transactions mattered, and the leaders and their teams measured up as follows. Six of the mayor’s side, including K. E., were locals (gens du pays); five of them generally identified as paysans or cultivators. The rest were less clearly identified except in the case of Mme. C., a middle-​aged piednoir,19 Director of the African Friendship Society, with close links to the Church and church property she and other European women from North Africa lived on. Moreover, having her society mentioned on K. E.’s list sent a powerful message to other conservative exiles.

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Apart from himself, M. G.’s list included only one paysan and three other long-​term residents. Most of his team were relative newcomers and none more prominent than Post-​Master, M. B., a piednoir M. G. had recruited to offset Mme. C.’s influence. Despite M. G.’s familiarity with strangers and desire for change through tourism, the mayor beat him when it came to pragmatic rules one and two. As for rule three, let me put it like this. The deputy’s knowledge of land and property boundaries was unrivalled, him having previously helped his late-​father compile the commune’s land-​register, and hence with K. E. away most days in Fréjus he often dealt with newcomers, harbingers of structural change. The question remained was it enough to offset the mayor’s knowledge of resources and decision-​makers in Fréjus. In the end, the mayor won 11 of the 13 council seats leaving M. G., the postmaster, and two members of the opposition to battle it out a week later for the two remaining places, which in any event M. G. and his partner won. M. G. put this down to a resurgence of newcomer support, including some of the Algerian exiles. Not till Fiji and west London would religion and politics surface again as important in my research. Under the M40 motorway near up-​market Notting Hill, six or seven extended families comprising about a hundred people, mostly Irish Travellers, occupied 19 bays crammed with caravans, cars, and lorries. This was a place workmen refused to enter and council officials avoided largely because Travellers and Gypsies, who do not subscribe to leaders, make ‘organized anarchy’ an intimidating venture for outsiders. Here social structure consisted of independent-​minded nuclear family households linked both on site and outside by kinship and marriage to other equally independent households. Married brothers and close male cousins often competed for status. Not until the 1960s did Travellers and Gypsies wanting permanent caravan sites begin electing leaders to regional and national organizations; note here that, even by then, by ‘leaders’ most Travellers and Gypsies simply meant their male ‘head’ of household. Martin Ward was the closest thing to an overall leader by virtue of his pioneer site status, his family’s long residence, his legal wins, and his extended family’s reputation as fighters. Indeed, his fierce reputation as a battler earned him a grudging respect that bolstered that fragile stability afforded by what Gluckman elsewhere (1955) called ‘peace in the feud’. Threat of force was ultimately his way. Transactions was mine. Precarious harmony was further enhanced by way of a common enemy in buffers, us the ‘settled people’, and by a palpable ‘need for enemies’ (Bailey 1998), secrecy, dissimulation as well as by conspicuous rites of passage (Griffin 2002, 2006). In these circumstances what Travellers practised is what Sansom (1980), a former Gluckman student, in an Aboriginal fringe camp, called indifferent witnessing and Bailey (1998), courtesy of Murray, the civility of indifference.

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Conspectus Late in his life and my own, Freddy’s views on faith and religion have forced me to think about faith and religion far more deeply than I probably would have otherwise, bearing in mind what I always thought most persuasive about the good life of religious-​minded exemplars devoid of hypocrisy was the same solicitude and kindness I found in him. William James once observed that what distinguishes Stoicism from Christianity was not doctrine but ‘emotional mood’ (1985, 43). Freddy was chill, in contemporary parlance. Irish culture and personality, on the other hand, are shot through with passion and emotion which, regardless of Freddy’s Stoic rationality and my own religious skepticism, tie me still in some measure to an ancient European Christian civilization whose faith was complemented by hope and charity. In fact, emotionally, I was delighting in knowing Irish monks on the Continent in the Dark Ages were both saints and scholars whose copying and securing of ancient Greek and Roman texts, according to Cahill (1995), helped save western civilization. When Freddy died, he forwent a funeral, donating his body instead to medical research at UCSD. So before him did Mary, his wife, who had helped him throughout his career, especially in India, and was one of a large Irish family. As Freddy kept the faith of what Ferry (2014) calls ‘secular spirituality’ to the finish, it’s therefore only proper we allow Ferry the last word. Finally, the philosopher emerges historically as an individual figure quite distinct from the priest, his authority deriving not from the secrets he holds or withholds but from the truths he clarifies and makes public, not from occult mysteries but from his capacity to conduct transparent rational argument. (Ferry 2014, 385)

Notes 1 He attended Malinowski’s LSE seminar. 2 The series is by no means confined to social anthropologists. 3 Epictetus’ The Discourses, Book 2:9. 4 ‘Words are at once indispensable and fatal. Treated as working hypotheses, propositions about the world are instruments, by means of which we are enabled progressively to understand the world. Treated as absolute truths, as dogmas to be swallowed, as idols to be worshipped, propositions about the world distort our vision of reality and lead us into all kinds of inappropriate behaviour … Treated as working hypotheses –​ as useful frames of reference, with which to organize and cope with the given facts of human existence-​propositions made up of these words have been of inestimable value. Treated as dogmas and idols, they have been the cause of such enormous evils as theological hatred, religious wars, ecclesiastical imperialism, together with such minor horrors as the orgy at Loudon and Surin’s self-​suggested madness … more dangerous than crimes of passion are the crimes of idealism’ (Huxley 1977, 292).

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As in witchcraft and sorcery the power of words alone to harm and confuse, distort and destroy, has parallels in gossip and scandal (Gluckman 1963, 1968), as Gifts and Poison noted. In this vein, too, to illuminate by comparing, I’d sometimes speak to Fiji audiences of ‘bitchcraft’ in Provence, a subject Favret-​Saada (1980) would dissect soon elsewhere in France.

5 Whatever we make of Geertz’s (1988) take on E-​P’s ‘maddeningly brilliant’ writing, Bailey’s early books need little literary interpretation. 6 Mediterranean studies surfacing in Britain in the 1970s as a body of regional theory came to nothing on account of underfunding and Bailey’s departure. 7 Weber’s name missing from Stratagems and Spoils (1970) is surprising considering Parsons’ 1930 translation of The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism, and The Structure of Social Action, 1968. English translations and commentaries on Weber by Gerth and Mills (1947), and Bendix (1960), also arrived long after Weber’s death. If, like Gluckman, FGB thought inter-​disciplinary stuff distracted from social anthropology’s urgent need to hone new skills, it might also explain why –​if memory serves me – sociologists per se rarely visited Freddy’s seminar. 8 Consequently, Berreman, Metzger, and Williams, Frake, Goodenough, Conklin, Burling, and Tylor, appeared at some length in my footnotes. 9 Durkheim and Street Corner Society inspired Homans’ (1961) social exchange theory, yet apart from passing mention in Stratagems and Spoils, and to my cost, Street Corner got little airplay at Sussex, or if it did, I missed it. 10 Some have good reason to see Donald Trump and Australia’s PM, Scott Morrison, as transactional leaders. 11 Mary Douglas began her education there. I used her work when it came to Traveller religion. 12 Anthropologists in the US as different as Sahlins and Harris bought into Marx, while British exceptions included Lloyd (at Sussex) and Bloch (at UCL). By the late 1970s Marxism in UK and French anthropology had pretty much fizzled out (Kuper 1999, 183). 13 Alert to the East India Company, FGB saw no purpose entering into the history of English plunder (Tharoor 2017). 14 Algerian Independence in 1962 triggered an exodus of white colonists to Midi cities like Marseille and Nice where many came to occupy subsidized flats called HLMs (habitations à loyer modérés). 15 Unfortunately I lost the USP leadership offprint. 16 Numerous Italians in Magnan-​La Madeleine came from Citta-​di-​Castello, Perugia, between the two world wars, around the same time as Armenians. The majority before that came from border regions like Genoa and Piedmont. 17 The speaker was a middle aged Côte d’Azure man whose words come from a longer piece where he was asked whether the chacun chez soi mentality of Callas was also typical of Nice. 18 J’accuse (1982) charged Medecin with corruption and mafia collusion in building; he fled abroad, was extradited, and gaoled. 19 It is likely piedsnoirs derives from the boots of Foreign Legionnaires.

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References Anderson, Oscar. 2013. ‘Street Corner Society & Social Organization.’ Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences. https://​doi.org/​10.1002/​jhbs21630. Arensberg, C. 1937. The Irish Countryman. London: Macmillan. Aurelius, M. 2011 (1961). Meditations. Translated by Martin Hammond. Melbourne: Penguin Books. Bailey, F. G. 1960. Tribe, Caste and Nation: A Study of Political Activity and Political Change in Highland Orissa. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1969. Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1970. Politics and Social Change: Orissa in 1959. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bailey, F. G. 1971. Gifts and Poisons, The Politics of Reputation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bailey, F. G. 2008. God-​Botherers and Other True Believers, Gandhi, Hitler, and the Religious Right. London and New York: Berghahn. Bendix, R. 1960. Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait. London: Heinemann. Berlin, I. 1999 (1953). The Hedgehog and the Fox, an Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. London: Phoenix. Blaxter, L. 1971. ‘Rendre Service and Jalousie.’ In Gifts and Poisons, edited by F. G. Bailey. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Cahill, T. 1995. How the Irish Saved Civilization. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Codd, N. 1971. ‘Reputation and Social Structure in a Spanish Pyrenean Village.’ In Gifts and Poisons, edited by F. G. Bailey. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Epictetus. 2008. Discourses and Selected Writings. Translated and edited by Robert Dobbin. London and New York: Penguin Books. Evans-​Pritchard, E. E. 1950. ‘ “Social Anthropology Past and Present”, the Marett Lecture, 1950.’ Man 50 (Sept): 118–​24. Evans-​Pritchard, E. E. 1951. Social Anthropology, six BBC lectures (winter 1950), London: Cohen and West. Evans-Pritchard 1976 (1940) The Nuer. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Favret-​Saada, J. 1980. Deadly Words, Witchcraft in the Bocage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferry, L. 2014. The Wisdom of the Myths, How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life. Translated by T. Cuffe. New York: Harper Collins. Firth, R. 1975 (1972). ‘The Sceptical Anthropologist? Social Anthropology and Marxist Views of Society.’ ASA Publications, edited by M. Bloch, Malaby Press. Firth, R. 2004. ‘Bronislaw Malinowski.’ In Totems and Teachers, Key Figures in the History of Anthropology, edited by S. Silverman. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Gerth, H. H. and Wright Mills, C., editors and translators. 1947. From Max Weber, Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Gluckman, M. 1955. ‘The Peace in the Feud.’ Past and Present, 8 (1): 1–​14. Greene, G. 1982. J’accuse, the Dark side of Nice. London: The Bodley Head. Griffin, C. 1973. ‘Italians into Southeast France.’ An unpublished PhD diss. thesis, University of Sussex.

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Griffin, C. 1983. ‘Social Structure, Speech, and Silence: Fijian Reactions to Social Change.’ In Inking: The Expanding Frontier, edited by W. Maxwell. Philadelphia: Franklin Institute. Griffin, C. 1986. ‘Crime and Punishment, Social Meaning.’ In Fijians in Town, edited by C. Griffin with M. Monsell-​Davis. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific. Griffin, C. 1999. ‘Wardening, Witnessing, Words and Writing.’ Journal of Australian Studies 6 (1): 45–​68. Griffin, C. 2002 ‘The Religion and Social Organisation of Irish Travellers on a London Caravan Site. (Part I)’ Nomadic Peoples N.S. 6 (1): 45–​68; (Part II) N.S. 6 (2): 110–​20. Griffin, C. 2003. Texts and Violence, Lies and Silence: Anthropologists & Islanders Negotiate the Truth. Suva: University of the South Pacific. Griffin, C. 2006. ‘Unity, Identity, Nation Building: Challenges to Fijian Leadership.’ In Australia’s Arc of Instability: The Political and Cultural Dynamics of Regional Security, edited by D. Rumley, V. Forbes, and C. Griffin. Dordrecht: Springer. Griffin, C. 2008. Nomads Under the Westway: Irish Travellers, Gypsies and Other Traders in west London. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press. Griffin, C. and Meschack, D. 2002. ‘Displacement and Forced Settlement: Gypsies in Tamil Nadu.’ In Conservation and Mobile Indigenous Peoples, edited by D. Chatty and M. Colchester. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Huxley, A. 1977 (1952). The Devils of Loudun. London: Granada. James, W. 1985 (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin Books. Kuper, A. 1973/​ 1999. Anthropology & Anthropologists: The Modern British School. New York: Routledge. Means, H. 2020. Splash, Ten Thousand Years of Swimming. London: Allen and Unwin. Murray, G. 1929 (1908). ‘Anthropology in the Greek Epic Tradition Outside Homer.’ In Anthropology and the Classics, Six Lectures Delivered Before the University of Oxford, edited by R. R. Marett. Nabu Public Domains Reprint. Murray, G. 2015 (1940). Stoic, Christian and Humanist. Delhi: Facsimile Publisher. Parsons, T. 1968. The Structure of Social Action, Vol. II. New York: The Free Press. Sansom, B. 1980. The Camp at Wallaby Cross: Aboriginal Fringe Dwellers in Darwin. Atlantic Hills, NJ: Humanities. Tey, J. 2009 (1951). The Daughter of Time. London: Arrow Books. Tharoor, S. 2017. Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India. London: Scribe. Wade, R. 1971. ‘Political Behaviour and World View in A Central Italian Village.’, In Gifts and Poisons, edited by F. G. Bailey. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

5 A personal memory of F. G. Bailey

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Gavin Smith It is important to take into account the purpose that an author sees his or her intellectual intervention to be serving. (Smith 2014, 120)1

Anybody who has to ‘go to the field’ in a place with which they are not normally familiar will know the nervousness I felt finding myself 4,500 metres up in the Andes, in March 1972, among people who spoke a Spanish that I had in only rudimentary form and a Huanca that I would have to learn as I went along. As I woke in my haphazard four-​poster bed –​mattress on the floor, four bits of wood holding up a sheet of plastic to stop the leak in the roof from hitting me as I slept –​the cold, bright day greeted me like a bucket of water in the face. What to do today? I had come here to spend time with the people of Huasicancha, peasants locally infamous for their persistent –​and even today very active –​aggression toward the local haciendas (ranches) that had for over a century been expanding onto their land. My specific interest as a social anthropologist was in rural resistance and I now had the opportunity for learning about one such case as it was happening and from the inside. Today there was, so I had heard, a very controversial, meeting to be held about how to move forward with the land invasion currently taking place (Hobsbawm 1974; Smith 2011). As I tumbled down the steep, water-​riveted way that passed for a street, and made for the main square, I ran into two men and two women having an animated conversation. They had no problem telling me what it was about. Among many other things, it was about whether the women could, in our terms, ‘put forward a resolution’ in the meeting. ‘Absolutely not’, said one of the older men. A somewhat younger man proposed that they could certainly speak and say what they liked, but to make a resolution, or propose a motion, well now that seemed a bit … The two women would have none of it. How would I record this? In the actuality of that fieldwork there was really no obvious horizon of relevance that might serve to clarify just what to note and what to leave aside. Hand gestures, include those? What about how people are reacting to my presence, important?

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The fact that one of the people is the cousin of the person whose house I’m in? Obviously any of these things could matter, as Gluckman’s (1958) famous article on the opening of a bridge in southern Africa is often used to illustrate. But it is only after the encounter –​perhaps even long after –​that the relevance of one thing or another comes into focus. Faced with this vast array of bits, ‘reality’ can be more paralysing than animating. In my case I was fortunate in not being an especially open-​ minded anthropologist. Not everything mattered to me (I doubt it does to anybody. Open mindedness is vastly overrated; if rigorously adhered to you’d get no fieldwork done at all). I had come to find out how a successful local peasant rebellion actually worked. How were tactics decided? How did they fit into large-​scale strategies? Were there ‘leaders’? How were they decided? Who did they have to answer to? … and so on. Armed with such ‘narrow mindedness’ the situation I encountered so soon after my Nescafe breakfast was armed with possibilities. But it wasn’t really narrow-​mindedness that I was armed with methodologically; it was Bailey’s particular extension of the hallmarks of Manchester School anthropology (of which he was part): the extended case method and situational analysis (Van Velsen 1979). So before going on, let me say a word or two about how I understood this as I tried to arrange what I encountered in the field into organizable bits. To begin with, and rather obviously, it meant attending carefully to the kinds of social situations the fieldworker encountered. Actually making oneself aware of a daily encounter as a situation is not necessarily so obvious. As one week followed another it meant finding a way to classify one situation in such a way that a) it could be set alongside another and b) thus, identified, it could be placed into a larger social scale. In so doing, ‘We … move beyond social processes to delineate the social forces that impress themselves on the ethnographic locale’, as Burawoy puts it (Burawoy 1998, 15).2 I will return to this second issue (placing situations in context), but let me say something about the first (delineating situations to begin with). As I say, attending to social situations is not quite as obvious as it might seem. First of all, it means making oneself conscious of the fact that what one is encountering is just that: a social situation. What is happening here? Who’s involved? What kind of people are they? What are they doing? What are they talking about? How are they expressing this talk –​calmly, excitedly, as a matter of routine, or as something abnormal and so on? Certainly there is enough for one such situation to take up about ten pages of fieldnotes – particularly if one is concerned with social relations in process, moving along as they happen. Like most social anthropologists I was interested in social change, that is to say not just any change, but the kinds of changes that would unfold into modified social forms; not just a change in household composition when a son is kicked out for hitting his father, but the

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implications of what sons starting to hit their fathers might mean if that became a pattern. Obviously a great deal of social change could be revealed by turning back to history but I was especially interested in studying rural insurgency as it happened. So getting at social change on a grand scale by looking back at history could be complemented by looking at it in the present, necessarily at a smaller scale. The way Bailey built on extended case method and situational analysis provided a set of guidelines for making this apparently microscopic focus work to this end. So returning now to the discussion in the highland community, I focused on two elements of the situation that Bailey makes central to his argument in Stratagems and Spoils. What were the normative rules being alluded to and what were the practical rules actually being enacted? It seemed to me that the two men were calling upon normative rules about women’s conduct in not just any public meeting, but the one about to take place. And the fact that there was a certain amount of emotion on all sides in this discussion made me think that the upcoming event was not just any meeting, but one whose process and outcome might have longer term implications. So I became especially alert when the women wanted to assert some practical rules: specifically, that, given the importance of this meeting and the major role women had so far played in the insurrection campaign, they should be able to raise important issues. It seemed to me that what the outcome of this situation might be could signal an important kind of change for the people concerned. Set outdoors in the dry-​earth square in front of the municipal building, the positions people took were, to my eyes, quite formal. Three men sat at a table brought from the building, facing most of the adults from the community. The men stood on one side of the square faced by the table, and the women –​rather strikingly to me –​sat on the other side. As the meeting progressed a man would stand forward, moving to the centre of the square, and make an argument to which there might often be a rejoinder from another man. Women would lean toward one another and share a whispered remark. Gradually it became clear that an important argument was arising with men beginning to interrupt one another until a man at the table banged his fist down and called for calm. To his evident surprise and subsequent annoyance, this allowed an older woman to make her case in a very loud voice. She dismissed the arguments of both sides among the men and referred to what seemed like an entirely irrelevant issue: what about the small livestock left at the house compounds during an ‘invasion’ of the hacienda lands? The seated authority made a dismissive gesture with his arm and turned back to one of the male ­speakers. As the latter began to make his point, a loud ululation arose from the seated women, to the point where neither he nor any of his colleagues could be

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heard. Fast-​forwarding to an hour or so later, by the end of the meeting it had been decided that an especially effective way for the comuneros/​as to establish themselves on the hacienda land, not easily to be moved, would be to bring not only their horses, sheep, llamas, and cattle onto the disputed land, but the chickens, goats, and other domestic animals too.3 As the meeting broke up and people began to disperse, I caught up with my neighbours from the earlier encounter as they sauntered back to their mud houses close to my own. I asked them why the outcome had not been as any of them had anticipated. In this case it was pretty clear, even to a neophyte like me, that normative rules asserted that men spoke at the ­meetings. Women might make the occasional point, but that was about it. When the elderly woman had spoken so forcefully she had been dismissed by the community authority at the table. She had tried a practical move but it seemed to have failed. But when there was an attempt to return to ‘normal’ the entire body of women present made it impossible to speak. Over time the authorities and thence the men present had to relent. While women’s intervention continued to be hassled and interrupted, especially by older men, and clearly embarrassed the authorities at the table, the result they sought was achieved: they had always partaken in the resistance operations, but now that participation was acknowledged; as a result, it gave them voice and it changed a key element of how the campaign was to be carried out. The very different answers men and women gave provided me with an initial access point into the way in which persistent use of practical rules might, over time and given a whole set of other factors, actually produce revised normative conduct.4 This of course is a tiny component of what constitutes fieldwork, but it gives some insight about how to begin. Much would be modified as my two years unfolded. And not the least of these things would be the question of scale that Gluckman handles in his seminal bridge article. It is obvious that what happened in the disputes over land in the central highlands during the early seventies when I was doing fieldwork cannot be explained simply by reference to the practices, relations, and material conditions that I could access in situ. But it is also true that the forces at work at a larger scale were by no means simply the external context for a more proximate ‘reality’. The problem of the elusive and variable interweaving of scales was to become one of the major challenges of my later work. It is also important to note that ‘scale’ refers as much to time –​to ­history –​as it does to space. I have come to refer to my own approach in anthropology as historical realism (Smith 2014). If we are to speak of social process, then for me this means more than acknowledging the unfolding dynamism of social relations; it also means understanding the present as a moment made by history and in the making of history. The presence that so

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impresses itself on us during fieldwork and whose observation was made so acute for me by what I learned from Bailey needs to be offset by our intentional turning to history, something I was to learn from another mentor as Freddy was planting his feet on California beaches. So let me turn to that part of my story now.

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But it’s a small place I came to the University of Sussex about six years after Freddy Bailey had started the department. Compared with my peers I was an older student. After a degree in economics and history I had gone through a variety of career possibilities in a range of countries, from working for Ford, doing a stint on Wall Street, and managing a small company in South Wales. I hated all of them and this was the early seventies, radicalism was in the air and I had read Stratagems and Spoils; I thought this F. G. Bailey, whoever he was, might have some insights not so much in doing politics which my friends were mostly into back then, but in winning at politics which I at least was not too sure about. So I applied to Sussex. Actually I applied to a number of the ‘big departments’ –​Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard. I was living in Canada and was moonlighting from my job to do make-​up courses in anthropology at McGill in preparation. During that year I was part of the student organizers of the African Studies Association meetings in Montreal. It was taken over by the Black Panthers, which gives some idea of what I mean when I say that politics was in the air and speak of radicalism. One evening I met Lloyd Fallers, who taught at Chicago, at a bar. Round about then I was accepted into the graduate programme at Sussex. So after nervously introducing myself I asked his advice. ‘How do you respond to competition?’ he asked me. ‘I freeze up.’ ‘Well don’t come to Chicago then’, he retorted. I told him about this fascinating guy whose book I had read, and said I’d like to go and work with him. ‘That’s what I would do’, he replied. ‘But it’s a small place so if he leaves you won’t have many options.’ Sometime later I was in England and I went to see Freddy. This was in the Spring. There was a summer to go before things would begin at Sussex. I was to return to tie things up in Canada and then come back. That meeting is vivid in my memory. Freddy conveyed to me the excitement not just of scholarship but about being in a new department and pushing the boundaries of what social anthropology could do. He agreed to supervise me. When I arrived in the Fall I was still amazed that he had agreed to my joining the department given my lack of anthropology but I quickly realized that the very risk involved was what interested Freddy.

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I was a very uneasy neophyte. I had not been in the university environment for a decade, I and I knew very little about social anthropology. For me in those days, as for the majority of postgraduates in the department, Bailey was the department. As far as I can remember I met virtually nobody else during my MA year, apart from maybe three or four other graduate students. David Pocock was a terrifying figure (at least to me) and though I attended a seminar run by Peter Lloyd and Garry Runciman, Peter was at that time very much a west Africanist and Runciman must have been visiting from Cambridge. Freddy Bailey was beyond all possible comparison the most inspirational and constructive graduate teacher I have ever met. Above all and speaking only for myself, he turned a confused and directionless person convinced only of his deep and pervasive mediocrity (and interest in politics) into somebody who began to feel that he could actually write something original. The clever thing about Freddy was that he could – and would – inject the originality into your scrappy draft and make you think there was at least a tiny bit of you in it. That’s almost unique in my experience. As with many British universities there were no courses at the graduate level. So to get my feet wet, since my previous degree was mostly in history, he suggested I write an essay on history and anthropology. Somehow my essay got to Eric Hobsbawm (see Smith 2014, 121 footnote 4).5 This was potentially embarrassing, for two reasons. The first was because, since I was above all interested in peasant resistance, I focused for the history portion on Hobsbawm’s on Primitive Rebels – about which I was quite critical. The second was because in the innocent days before my move to academia I had spent a night cruising the Montreal jazz clubs with ‘Francis Newton’ the nom de plume of E. J. Hobsbawm in his role as jazz critic –​and so kind of knew him, but in a very different light. The meeting he invited me to in his Birkbeck office was embarrassing but fortuitous. It was fortuitous because my tutelage under Professor Bailey was to be, as I knew even then, short-​lived. In one departmental seminar that began in enigma and ended in suppressed hilarity, Bailey, an acknowledged authority on political strategy (including university politics), broke the ‘news’ to the postgraduate body that he had been wooed away to California. Unbeknownst to Freddy, his imminent departure was the worst kept secret at Sussex. I think some of us countered our disappointment at the prospect of losing Freddy by having a bit of a laugh that the supposed authority on micro politics and ‘the strategic uses of passion’ was entirely unaware that his secret was rather a collective one. The meeting with Hobsbawm and the imminent departure of Freddy combined to shift my interest in rural resistance to Latin America. But there was nobody in the department who was interested in either. Freddy

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suggested that I should check out a few other departments. As a result I spent the first few months of my doctoral years doing the rounds. After exploring several options I spent a brief stint at Cambridge supervised by John Barnes, renowned for his innovatory use of the notion of social networks and the first head of that department, later to become sociology. Eventually, defeated by networks there so intricate that even the inventor of the notion couldn’t figure them out, and confronted by a residency requirement that nobody had told me about, I returned to finish my D.Phil where I belonged: at Sussex. Using some of the stratagems I had learned from Professor Bailey I found the laziest graduate supervisor I could find there, moved from a town near campus to London, and pressed myself upon Eric Hobsbawm who proved to be a generous mentor. He also directed me to my field site in Peru where he had learned of a rebellious group of peasants he thought I could study to test out my criticisms of his book. If all this seems a little too personal and not much about the department as I knew it when Freddy was there, then you have been misled. In my experience there was a kind of inventing-​as-​we-​go atmosphere about the place and this went as much for the teaching staff as for the students. Chatty first names for faculty irrespective of age, reputation, or gender were de rigeur. I am sure they still are, but this was relatively unusual 50 years back. The general idea was that familiarity breeds content –​perhaps in both senses of the word. But what made this more than simply a trendy sign of the times was that ‘Sussex’ really did stand for a radical egalitarian re-​ordering of British society. I have a lot to be thankful for as a graduate of the department. I thank God I was once taught by F. G. Bailey, that I (re-​)met Eric Hobsbawm, and that I never got a degree from Cambridge (and, just to be fair, nor from Oxford either for that matter).

Collective struggle I am fortunate that on entering a graduate programme in social anthropology I was taught by two inspirational teachers. What they taught me has been duly tossed in a bowl, mixed, cooked, and then served in its now indigestible version –​my own. How they taught me, their skill as teachers, I could never come close to emulating. I have told the story of one of those teachers (Smith 2011) and here I am trying to tell the story of the other. But the two stories are so mixed together that it is proving hard to separate them. And that is largely to do with the mischievous Freddy who lured me to his department, I’m pretty sure allowed that embarrassing essay to fall into Hobsbawm’s hands, and then urged me to wander around the

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departmental marketplace to get a sense of what was on offer as he winged off to Southern California. When I reflected on studying with Hobsbawm in a previous essay (2011), I sent it to a friend who had been in the graduate programme with me at Sussex. He wrote back I think with some surprise. ‘Reading this’, he said, I have the feeling that you had a plan. Things interrupted the plan and you rejigged it. But what emerges is a set of developments. For me I could never think of those years that way, for me it started with chance and then there may have been a few stratagems and spoils but [it was] all pretty open-​ended for me.

These two constructed memories –​his and mine –​seem to me to reflect quite well the ‘forms’ we picked up, him from Bailey and me from Bailey and Hobsbawm – my two immensely talented teachers. You would only have to read Primitive Rebels and Stratagems and Spoils side-​by-​side to see what I mean. I am sure there are multiple ways of reading either book, but many have noted how Hobsbawm’s book is written as a series of progressions. Things unfold. Freddy’s book, the first departure from his brilliant India books, is all about agency, working the game not knowing the outcome. That’s how my friend saw his early career. I saw mine as a bit of both. Ten years after Primitive Rebels came out Eric Wolf published Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (1969). I read it in the few months before I went to do my fieldwork. Both were books by scholars on the left who took seriously the role of rural people in making their own history. As one would expect they were different in approach, the one by the historian making comparisons largely across time periods, the one by the anthropologist comparing rebellion across different societies albeit in different periods also. But they had in common a particular perspective, what today we might call a sort of positionality: a view of different rural movements from the outside looking in. Each speculated about relations among peasants as they engaged in struggles, and each had things to say about their mentalité. But for me, the anthropologist, catching the dynamics of those relations and the way in which ideas emerged momentarily in the actuality of practice was a priority: a kind of enquiry in which the enquirer tries to ‘enter the space of the world the researcher seeks to understand’ (Ortner 1995, 173). It was not easy to find an actively ongoing insurgency and still harder to get ‘inside’ one and, once inside, disentangled the social relations and practices given the high level of emotion inevitably involved in this kind of politics. Hobsbawm made it possible for me to find an unfolding rebellion, Bailey gave me the tools for getting in and disentangling it. Then, through time and with the fieldwork and the writing-​up, the different focus of their respective work was gradually combined in my own, to new ends. I was

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interested in the work that had to be done within a rural movement so it might achieve its goals – something for which Freddy prepared me. And I wanted to get a clear picture of the ‘conditions of possibility’ for their success arising from the wider arenas of regional, national and global forces. Limited though my ability was to do this with any thoroughness, it nonetheless was driven by the kind of agenda set by Hobsbawm (for more see Smith 2014, 86–​123; see also Smith 2011). In Hobsbawm’s study of the same collective struggle that interested me he provides the reader with the political setting of the 1880s, the late 1930s, 1945–​48 and the early 1970s, each of these periods being when the people I worked with mobilized against authorities (Hobsbawm 1974). He refers to these as ‘stages’ in an unfolding series of political developments. As the years unfold, he sees the emergence of leadership and organization enhanced by the support of regional and national political figures and their respective parties. Referring to other political movements he had said that they, ‘can disrupt and rely on the political reverberations of their disruption. [But] this does not give them much leverage’ (Hobsbawm 1984, 291, emphasis in original). I disagreed. I wanted to know who had leverage within the movement, for which his work was especially helpful and, departing from him here, how the collective struggle might itself be effective in achieving its goals, these goals not being set by a broader revolutionary struggle (as Hobsbawm had implied in Primitive Rebels) but by the participants themselves instead. And there, Bailey’s insights were helpful. In the first part of this chapter I described how I used what I learned from Stratagems and Spoils to get at some of the inner workings of these people’s struggles. One area that would have interested both my mentors would be how people manoeuvred to achieve their own goals possibly to gain leverage in steering the direction of the insurgency. Both might also have been interested in the role of outsiders. In fact, one of the most famous leaders of the peasant struggle in the Central Andes, Elias Tacunan, to whom Ciro Alegría dedicated his seminal novel of Indigenous protest Ancho y ajeno es el mundo (1941), came from this community. Yet as this hijo del pueblo became increasingly devoted to regional and national organizing he was impeached by the comuneros. My evidence suggests that as far back as the 1880s the husicanchinos were suspicious of established political parties and of guidance from prominent political figures. Their attitude to leadership by individuals, even among their own, was always guarded. From everything I had read I had assumed that collective solidarity was the outcome of the alignment of people in shared interests and goals. Yet I knew such an outcome required prior work, possibly by intelligent leaders and possibly with the use of locally effective rhetoric. After Stratagems

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and Spoils Freddy became increasingly interested in the role of rhetoric as a political resource. For some of those who preceded me and spent a longer time under his tutelage this influence can be seen in their work (Bailey 1971, 1973), but I was not long enough with him nor well enough schooled in the linguistic and cognitive anthropology that seemed to be increasingly an influence on him. Perhaps that’s a shame because I wonder how he would have guided me over those two years in thinking through the rhetorical preparations I believed that I was witnessing. As the weeks went by I witnessed perpetual animated discussion on an almost daily basis on just one topic, la reivindicación; different groups seeking to make their views felt, as we have seen; a growing sense of impatience that nothing was yet quite fixed –​though this last may have been a feeling more of my own than of the people around me. It was only after the second or third invasion onto disputed land and the resulting confrontation with local guards, the police or the military, that it finally dawned on me that what I took to be preparation was actually the thing itself. To put it in fancy language, dialogics animated moments of collective actions like oil on the cogs of a machine. One way to think of this is that because each participant had contributed to the ongoing debate that had resulted in this particular action, so they were committed to take part. It is not difficult to see how this mitigated against the directing weight of one or another individual ‘leader’. Of course any discussion of micro-​politics of this kind has to take account of context and setting. In this case, writing today, nearly 50 years later, and in a scholarly collection, it is hard to convey the atmosphere of fear that shot up and down from week to week as news came in, or a rumour circulated, or people learned of a comunero (community member) imprisoned. At least as I saw it, people were attuned for a sound out of place, an habitual awareness that would raise the register of an ordinary day. The peasants prided themselves on the nickname they had acquired – ‘the foxes’ – because the fox was a figure they saw as the antithesis of exhibited pride or foolhardy courage. Their stories were loaded with such figures and when a well-​known personage from a past struggle arose in a narrative, that individual’s impressively elusive, fox-​like disappearance into the mountains was the most common ending. The role of stories addressed another issue that Hobsbawm seemed to take almost for granted, but it concerned me: how the experiences of partially successful past confrontations were transmitted down the generations. Moreover, the exchange of narratives combined with another oral element. This was the importance not simply of dialogue but of commitment within dialogue, of holding a position not just as a fancy point of

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rhetoric but with the whole body: what was being discussed was the defense and future of your livelihood. I found that if I gathered four or five people together and asked them to tell me about a past event that they all claimed to know about, I would get four or five accounts. Yet as one account followed another, diverging in often quite crucial ways from its predecessor, all would nod in agreement while the growing level of enthusiasm was infectious. The experience of the uprising in the 1880s was not static. People told of in the present and for the present; their accounts were sources of information but also, in the telling, energy generators. I never had the chance to share this with Freddy, but I think he would have agreed about the degree to which engagement in vigorous argumentation, discussion, and conversation can itself generate important energy, even perhaps an entangled sense of collectivity. While it is obvious that the perspective I developed on what Hobsbawm calls the ‘stages’ of a longstanding struggle, as well as the role of leadership –​from abroad or from within –​were strikingly different from his, I don’t think they devalue his interpretations so much as enriching them. The way in which the daily threat and occasional actuality of quite physical violence certainly modified the political manoeuvres going on among these local rebels I would never have been able to disentangle what was going on without Freddy’s rationalist toolbox. There’s no doubt that I could not have done without it. If a general point is to be made here, it is the one made in the epigraph: from the purpose a social analyst sees their intellectual intervention to be serving, there follows, at least in part, the approach they take. And so it was with Hobsbawm and Bailey and then for me, in my turn, as I learned from them and worked their insights to my own purpose. I still think that my focus on how collective struggle by subaltern people is put together and on how it might gain leverage was worthwhile. And I would not have been equipped to do that without F. G. Bailey’s insights. But I am less sure that I was able to ‘move beyond social processes to delineate the social forces that impress themselves on the ethnographic locale’ (Burawoy 1998, 15). These were what I have called the broader ‘conditions of possibility’ that would have allowed me to assess the extent to which the peasants’ struggles were any more than political reverberations that lack much political leverage (Hobsbawm 2014). But it was by seeking to cover both these foci –​the internal dynamics of collective rural insurgency and the placing of that insurgency both within a longer term historical landscape and a broader set of social and political forces –​that led me to mature under Freddy’s influence so that I might develop my own framework, which I now call historical realist ethnography (Smith 2011).

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Notes 1 I apologize for the hubris of quoting my own work as an epigraph but it is the best way of alerting the reader to the fact the purpose of my intellectual interventions has drifted off substantially from that professed by Professor Bailey both when I knew him and in later work (see Barrett 2020). As I argue in the chapter from which this quote is taken, far from seeing these differences as problematic, I see them as the essence of what intellectual work is all about (see Smith 2014, 86–​123). 2 Actually he adds something else: the need to study the situations encountered in the everyday world ‘as simultaneously shaped by and shaping an external field of forces’ (Burawoy 1998, 15, italics mine). I will come back to this point near the end when I note my move away from the training I got from Freddy. 3 Though not explicitly alluded to by the women, the reasons for this strategy were multiple. It freed up the women to join in the operation unencumbered by responsibilities at the house. As events developed, it also allowed people to give the impression that these peasants had long been settled on land they had in fact only recently ‘revindicated’ (reivintigado) –​an important factor when land inspectors were used to settle disputes (Smith 1989). 4 Though not something Freddy addresses too much in Stratagems many of them having to do with power in its multiple forms. 5 I am only speculating about how Hobsbawm got to read that essay of mine. But here’s a possible connection. Primitive Rebels, Hobsbawm’s first book, was the outcome of a series of talks he gave to the anthropology department at Manchester at the invitation of Max Gluckman. I have no idea if Bailey met him then, but if so, there would be the connection.

References Bailey, F. G. 1969. Stratagems and Spoils. Oxford: Blackwell. Bailey, F. G. Ed. 1971. Gifts and Poison. Oxford: Blackwell. Bailey, F. G. Ed. 1973. Debate and Compromise. Oxford: Blackwell. Barrett, S. R. 2020. ‘Politics as Theatrical Performance and Backstage Pragmatism: Work and Legacy of F. G. Bailey.’ In Bérose internationale des histoires de l’anthropologie. Paris. Burawoy, M. 1998. ‘The Extended Case Method.’ Sociological Theory 16 (1): 4–​33. Gluckman, M. 1958. Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand. Manchester: Manchester University Press for The Rhodes-​Livingstone Institute. Hobsbawm, E. J. 1974. ‘Peasant Land Occupations.’ Past and Present 62: 120–52. Hobsbawm, E. J. 1984. The Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Ortner, S. 1995. ‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal.’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1): 173–93. Smith, G. 2011. ‘From Primitive Rebels to How to Change the World: Reflections on Two Periods in Anthropology and History.’ Labour/​Le Travail, 67 Spring: 157–​71.

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Smith, G. 2014. Intellectuals and (Counter-​) Politics: Essays in Historical Realism. Oxford: Berghahn. Van Velsen, J. 1979. ‘The Extended Case Method and Situational Analysis.’ In The Craft of Social Anthropology, edited by A. L. Epstein. Oxford: Pergamon:. Wolf, E. R. 1969. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper & Row.

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Mancunian Realism and Melanesian anthropology David Lipset We made … observations on how our subjects actually behaved, we collected genealogies and censuses, made diagrams of villages and gardens, listened to cases and quarrels, obtained commentaries on all these incidents, collected texts from informants about customs and rituals, and discovered their answers to cases stated. Out of this … mass of data we analyzed a general outline of the culture, or the social system, according to our main theoretical bent. (Gluckman 2006, 15)

In this chapter, I argue that there has been an unacknowledged relationship of Manchester anthropology that Max Gluckman promoted, and in which F. G. Bailey was trained, to a small network of Melanesianists, myself included. The chapter begins with a brief account of the orientation and interests of what I shall call ‘Mancunian Realism’, Gluckman’s actor-​­centred methodology. I then appraise the political anthropology that Bailey went on to develop from it, before turning to the impact of Mancunian Realism on Melanesian anthropology. Specifically, I assess exemplary texts in the work of John Barnes, Peter Worsley and A. L. Epstein, and then evaluate the extent to which Mancunian Realism did and did not influence my doctoral research in Papua New Guinea.

Gluckman and Manchester anthropology Max Gluckman founded the Department of Social Anthropology and Sociology at the Victoria University of Manchester in 1949 (Gordon 2018). In 1950, there were only one or two faculty, Emrys Peters was a lecturer, and Elizabeth Colson had a readership. A small number of graduate students including F. G. Bailey, T. Scarlett and A. L. Epstein, Ronald Frankenberg, Victor Turner, and Jaap van Velsen, among others, appeared over the following years. Theory, Bailey recalled, did not preoccupy departmental seminars. ‘They always began with a case or with a piece of fieldwork, and an argument developed from that’ (Bailey quoted in Kempny 2005, 157). By contrast to Radcliffe-​Brown, Gluckman advocated that research focus on

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narrative incidents in small groups and among persons acting, or misbehaving, in terms of particular values and social norms. He ‘called for an anthropology that defined its subject matter as actors making decisions rather than as social structures composed of interconnected social roles’ (Colson 2008: 335). By the decade’s end, Mary Douglas was given to declare that it was ‘evidently time to salute a “school” of anthropology, whose publications are developed through close discussion, and where each individual’s work is enhanced by his focus on a common stock of problems’ (1959, 168). There were several types of cases in the Manchester methodology (Mitchell 2006). The simplest involved two persons, such as the deference a daughter-​in-​law might show her father-​in-​law by crawling across a room in front of him. More elaborate, which Gluckman called a ‘social situation’, might involve events that took place during a limited time and in a specific place (Gluckman 1940, 1958, 9; Turner 1957, 1968; Garbett 1970). An example of the latter was the official opening of a new bridge in Zululand in 1935 that he analysed (1940) to show what different multi-​ethnic and colonial constituencies were up to before, during, and after the day-​long event. A third type, ‘the extended case study’ (van Velsen 1967), could include a sequence of events involving a single group of people during a longer interval than a ‘social situation’ during which relations between the principal actors might shift during the case interval. The commitment of the Manchester School in general, and of Bailey, its adherent, was to a focus on sociopolitical action and individual choices made amid circumscribed events in shifting historical contexts, not to mention a direct, plain-​spoken writing style I shall call ‘Mancunian Realism.’ In a sense, what Bailey later called his ‘Manchester bones’ (quoted in Kempny 2003, 30) were a weak form of methodological individualism (Weber 1947). If strong methodological individualism claims that social phenomena can be exclusively explained in terms of individual action and subjectivity, then the weak version makes the claim that the foregrounding of individuals, or what Parsons called an ‘action frame of reference’ (1937, 43–​51), should be balanced in relation to the social contexts, or, what Durkheim labelled ‘social facts’ (1938, 110), in which they operate and pursue their interests and advantage for themselves. Mancunian Realism thus emphasized the role of micro-​level social activities, voluntarism and rationality, amid collective institutions, traditions, and historical forces. In any case, I think the trope is a good shorthand for the source and crux of Bailey’s analytical and empirical framework and shall employ it in what follows. The goal of Mancunian Realism was ‘to bring societies to life’ in actor-​ centred narratives, but Gluckman could hardly fail to acknowledge normativity and custom in tribal South Africa. But for him normative order was not coherent or timeless; it was inconsistent, subject to contradiction

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(Evens 2006; Kuper 1973), not to mention the vagaries of history. So the analytical challenge was to account for norms in conflict. Gluckman’s paradigmatic solution to this problem found one expression in his famous conclusion that rites of rebellion against Swazi authority and Nuer feuds could both renew, rather than subvert, an otherwise stable and legitimate moral order. In other words, some kinds of conflict might ultimately benefit the status quo ante (Gluckman 1955b, 1963). At the same time, ethnography must not ignore indeterminacy, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Conflict was resolvable by appeal to ritual, magic, customary restraint, and obligation, yet it was not. Conflict was a permanent condition of, rather than an aberration in, social life, just as the soft methodological individualism in Mancunian Realism might imply.

Bailey and Mancunian Realism Although he adopted the case-​ based, methodological individualism and historical concerns of Mancunian Realism whole cloth, instead of traipsing down Gluckman’s well-​beaten track to British Africa and the Rhodes-​ Livingston Institute (Werbner 1984), Bailey left the University of Manchester in 1952 to do doctoral research in Orissa (now Odisha) in India, then a newly independent state. In the Khond village of Bisipara (now Bisipada), he set about doing the kind of … research that I had been trained to do in Manchester: genealogies, censuses, maps, working with informants, most of whom were young men like myself, having events and rituals explained to me, and eventually getting two or three of them to write texts for me. (Quoted in Kempny 2003, 17)

Following the award of his degree (1954), and a subsequent move to a first job at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS) in 1956, a trilogy of monographs appeared (Bailey 1957, 1960, see also Otten and Simpson 2016), the key feature of each being how decision-​making, negotiating, and persuading took place not to radically transform political order, or even to maintain the polity, but just to try to take advantage of worlds offering multiple economic resources and defined in terms of plural concepts of hierarchy and legitimacy. Given his abiding interest in Machiavellian intrigue, and commitment to Mancunian Realism, Bailey took up ‘the routine of political strategizing, manipulation and the advancement of interests’ (Vincent 1990, 338; Silverman 1974/​5). He went on to write Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics (1969) to develop a set of cross-​culturally applicable distinctions. Actors should be viewed as constrained by, but not reduced

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to, the normative frameworks of institutions. Pragmatic tactics were deployed that often involved sub rosa deal-​making guided by means-​ends calculations (cf. Goffman 1959). Leaders recruited followers and formed factions, like entrepreneurs using resources and credit. Drawing from his own work in Orissa, Barth’s Political Leadership among Swat Pathans (1959), as well as from 20th-​century British and French politics, to exemplify his view of political process, Bailey used what Gluckman had called ‘the method of apt illustration’ (2006, 15). Gifts and Poisons: The Politics of Reputation (1971), an edited collection that followed, then focused on individuals in small-​scale peasant societies in Europe competing to build up and sustain social standing, not as leaders, but as equals, particularly as modernity subverted sources of self-​respect and political identity in their communities. Following the Manchester model, Bailey and his colleagues made productive use of rich and detailed accounts of local-​level politics that were integrated into broader situations and larger scales of society in India, Africa, and Europe (see also Swartz, Turner, and Tuden 1966). Widening his gaze in The Tactical Uses of Passion (1983), Bailey drew from Indian parliamentary debates, a town council meeting in California, an incident in Le Carre’s The Honorable Schoolboy (1977) as well as his own observations of university committees, to argue that in face-​to-​face politics, taken-​for-​ granted codes of rational behaviour, reasoning, and bargaining prevailed, and disputes arose about how best to solve a particular problem at hand. Despite consensus, emotional displays, he called them ‘tactics of persuasion’ (1983, 32), express intractable commitments. They might be fanciful or fruitful, especially when logical thinking and rational practicality failed to win the day. ‘Passions, in these circumstances, are a route to power’ (Bailey 1983, 24), or at least they could be. In all, politics involved a volatile relationship between norms and individual action. Actors sought to achieve ends making choices that adhered to, or rejected, normative conventions and values.1 ‘My fallback position … [is that] there’s an “official” story and underneath is the “real” story, and that story exists in a host of conflicting versions’ (quoted in Kempny 2003, 30).

Mancunian Realism in Melanesia As did many contributors to this volume, I attended the graduate programme in anthropology at UC San Diego (1975–​85) where I took Bailey’s first year graduate seminar, the syllabus of which was largely made up of ethnographies by his Manchester cohort. When I subsequently elected to do doctoral research on politics and culture in the newly independent state of Papua New Guinea (PNG), he did not refuse to serve as my supervisor,

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although this was not a part of the world in which he had an abiding interest. Manchester anthropology had made a few influential inroads to the literature there, which he certainly knew; and here, I am thinking of John Barnes, Peter Worsley, and A. L. ‘Bill’ Epstein2 whose work lent inspiration to my research. John Barnes had received a ‘crash-​course in fieldwork’ from Gluckman and Clyde Mitchell at the Rhodes-​Livingston Institute (RLI) in 1946 (Young 2011, 5). He did fieldwork among the Ngoni people in southern Africa, and then took jobs at Sydney University and later, at the Australian National University (ANU).3 As part of his switch from Africa to the Pacific, he wrote a classic essay, ‘African Models in the New Guinea Highlands’ (1990), which may be seen in terms of the soft methodological individualism of Mancunian Realism. The article distinguished between an institution, the patriliny found in such African societies as Tallensi, Tiv and Nuer, and the cumulative patrifiliation among Chimbu, Mae-​Enga, and other PNG Highland societies that were then coming to light in the 1950s. In the latter, group membership depended on recruitment and optation – the agency of local-​level actors – while ‘ascribed relationships’ were only a ‘belief’ (Barnes 1990, 48). Descent was competitive and unstable, and thus subject to revision that ignored genealogy. In other words, social groups in PNG arose ‘at the individual … level’ (1990, 51), as did, of course, big men leadership, while in Africa, groups took priority. In the former, according to Barnes, ‘it might be said that a local group becomes dominant because of the big men who belong to it’ (1990, 51, see also Sahlins 1963 and Wagner 1974). He went on to contrast conflict processes. Among Tiv, Nuer, and Tallensi, groups tended to divide in a ‘chronic’ way (1990, 53). Over the course of several generations, they might split into separate, yet related, segments of a larger group; ‘the division of the lineage into two branches … [was] already present … in the cradle’ (1990, 53) in the sense that succession was structurally problematic. In the PNG Highlands, conflict was ‘not chronic but catastrophic’ (1990, 53), unpredictable, and often the outcome of violence or defeat in war. Historical or ethnographic differences between the two regions aside, Barnes’ insights were clearly of a piece with the heart of Mancunian Realism; a view of institutions and norms from an actor-​centred perspective. Like Barnes, Peter Worsley, whom Gluckman had recruited to Manchester in early 1950 (Macfarlane 1989, Worsley 2008, 69), was also an Africa hand, having worked after the war as a colonial officer on Swahili training manuals in what has since become Tanzania. MI5 blocked his plan to return to do RLI-​based research due to his Communist sympathies (Worsley 2008, 77, 83).4 On Gluckman’s advice, he applied for, and got, a scholarship at the ANU, but was once more barred from doing fieldwork, now in

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colonial New Guinea, because of his political leanings.5 He was allowed to do a project on an Aboriginal people near Groote Eylandt for nearly a year. While writing his thesis, he became increasingly interested in millenarian movements in Melanesia, the so-​called ‘cargo-​cults’.6 He pored through archives from several venues in the southwest Pacific, read the emerging literature, and eventually wrote The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo’ Cults in Melanesia (1968). Drawing from, or at least in accordance with, the Mancunian Realist methodology that fixed on local responses to global history, the book foregrounded a range of Indigenous defiance against, submission to, and conflict with colonial administrations, plantation economies, and so forth. Needless to say, it offered of a series of detailed, community-​ based case studies, with particular reference to activities of local-​level leadership, not waiting passively, but organizing ritual and material preparations for the end of the old, existing order and the beginning of the new era of eternal happiness, abundance, and political control, which late 19th-​and 20th-​ century millenarian movements across the region prophesized.7 Worsley called the book a Marxist analysis. To him, these social movements were comprehensible ‘as rational attempts to make sense out of a social order that appears senseless and chaotic’ (Worsley 1957, 126) and as responses to colonial economic deprivations, missionization, and global conflict, and as a step in the direction of secular politics and market integration. My view is that its argument can also be seen, once again, to suggest the relationship emphasized in Mancunian Realism between actors and history. Lastly, I turn from millenarian movements to A. L. ‘Bill’ Epstein’s perhaps more prosaic interest in local-​level conflict and social control, during the years just prior to Papua New Guinea’s independence from Australia. He and his wife, Scarlett, had both been students at Manchester in the 1950s (Yelvington 1997). Epstein had studied urban courts in the Copperbelt in Zambia (1951) while Scarlett Epstein conducted fieldwork on the local economy of villages near Mysore in South India (Epstein 1962). In 1958, the two of them moved to Australia, obtained positions at the ANU and began fieldwork in rural PNG the following year, after successfully resolving their own politically motivated visa issues (see Yelvington 1997, 294; Epstein 1968). Subsequently, Bill Epstein participated in a series of seminars about law, the last of which gave rise to the edited volume, Contention and Dispute (1974), with chapters by its participants. The actor-​centred orientation and methods of Mancunian Realism prevailed, although authors were not out of the Gluckman shop. The seminar had commissioned case studies of dispute management and conflict resolution that might contribute to the administration of law in a context of accelerating ‘economic and political change in the Territory … and … the looming prospect of … independence’ (Epstein 1974, 1).

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Property disputes, marital conflict, as well as sorcery threats appear in the volume. Local leaders and administration officials establish facts, mediate, and resolve grievances through forms of self-​help, such as competitive food exchanges on Goodenough Island (Young 1974) or the burning of a ‘divination substance’ among the Mt. Hagen people (Strathern 1974). By contrast to efforts to eliminate customary law in Africa, the close association of social control to local-​level politics led Epstein to look forward to the establishment of village courts in the new country. As a compilation of quarrels, retaliations, intervillage tensions, and violence, together with how conflicts were resolved, Contention and Dispute obviously illustrated the value of a case-​based focus in Melanesia, now in relation to conflict resolution and the emerging postcolony.

Mancunian Realism and methodological holism: rereading Mangrove Man In 1981, which was six years after independence, I went to PNG with Kathleen Barlow (my ex-​wife).8 My general idea was to study the extent to which local-​level leadership conventions were relevant to the Westminster parliamentary system in the new state with a particular focus on the country’s so-​called ‘founding father’, Sir Michael Somare, its first prime m ­ inister.9 I thought that doing fieldwork among the Murik Lakes people would serve my project well since Sir Michael was a native son (1975). The Murik, moreover, were unstudied, despite their regional reputation as the leading overseas traders in the Sepik region (Mead 1935) and their world-​wide status among tribal art collectors (Lipset 2005; Conru 2019). Once we reached the Murik Lakes, I abandoned my project. The Lakes were located about 60 miles down the coast to the southwest of the provincial capital. Today, one can make the trip in a couple of hours. However, in the early 1980s, outboard motors were less powerful and the boats – big, wooden outrigger canoes – were much heavier than the little 23-​foot fibreglass boats that replaced them in the 1990s. The trip used to take 8–​10 hours, unless the outboard motor broke down en route, due to rusty sparkplugs and such. The Murik villages, in other words, were remote and transportation was not at all easy. Consequently, the prospect of doing multi-​sited research was too hard. I turned to a good Manchester topic: local-​level leadership and social control (Lipset 1997) and followed the framework of Mancunian Realism, the nuts and bolts of which Bailey himself had summarized in an unpublished, bulleted handout he gave me on my way out the door to PNG (see the epigraph). I studiously collected genealogies, took censuses, tape-​recorded texts, observed cases, and attended meetings. Many of the latter were held in Murik Male Cult halls where I listened to senior men from Darapap and

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Mendam, two feuding villages, negotiate a customary conflict resolution process, wide-​ranging discussions about which went on for months.10 What did the conflict, which had involved a series of brawls between male youth from two Murik villages, mean? How had it begun, who was liable, and, because one had not been staged for a generation or two, what should the conflict resolution rite look like? Senior men recited stories about earlier instances of comparable events, and after I eventually established rapport with the young men, they recalled how exciting it was to fight specific youth who had sexual relationships with their wives and girlfriends and how they were anointed with Male Cult war magic for the first time in their lives. Finally, after 14 months, a series of events resulted in a narrowing of differences between the two feuding villages, and a consensus arose to stage a reconciliation rite (baas). Sauma, the adoptive father of my ex-​wife, took the lead when he travelled to one of the offshore islands by boat and returned with a pig that an hereditary trading partner had gifted him, the pig being the key claim to sponsorship of the rite. In the event, when two boatloads of Mendam men pulled up at the Darapap lakeshore, ginger leaves were tied to their prows and lineage emblems were displayed. The visitors, perhaps amounting to 50 men or so in number, clambered ashore and made their way through Darapap village tying ginger leaves on the shafts of canoe paddles and the pilings of each and every building in it. Everyone then gathered in the Male Cult House where hosts plied guests with a day-​long feast. Senior men stood and gave speeches about common genealogical relations between the two villages and individuals made compensation payments to specific men with whom they had fought during the melee. Needless to say, I paid close attention to specific Murik actors. But subsequently, I have to admit that, analytically, my curiosity became increasingly attracted to what the whole process meant – both in Murik terms and in terms of theories of gender and society that were then afoot in the feminist anthropology of the day (Weiner 1976; Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Strathern 1981; Meeker, Barlow and Lipset 1986). Leadership and social control in Murik society in particular, and perhaps in the Sepik region more generally, were part of a gendered relationship between jural and domestic domains.11 That is to say, women’s capacities to love, birth children, and nurture babies were culturally valued and privileged in such a comprehensive way that men’s institutions seemed bent on denying the extent to which masculine capacities were marginal, particularly in the aftermath of the colonial ban on warfare. In pre-​­missionized days, for example, authority in the Male Cult had depended on the exchange of sexual services of wives, which junior men provided senior partners in return for occult powers in warfare (Lipset 1997, 187–92). As a training for affective detachment, this was a struggle for them. Meanwhile, lineage leadership and status ornaments (sumon) were both understood in terms of the cultural

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ideal – a schema – of a generous mother surrounded by dependent, hungry children, whom she nurtured abundantly and unconditionally, with the goal of reproducing, and maintaining ‘her’ family, the kinship-​based moral order. Leaders, whether male or female, were thus associated with grand feasts, which were nothing more than ostentatious acts of maternal nurture, just as the rites they sponsored, like the reconciliation rite I observed in 1982, were acts of moral reproduction of society. On the one hand, Murik men sought affective independence from wives while on the other, Murik leaders sought to be ‘mothers’ in order to achieve lineage authority, influence, and prestige. But this maternal metaphor of masculine agency had another implication: it was also a model for the meaning of social process. In Mancunian Realism, social process arises from the instrumental agency of actors within the ambit of institutional norms. What I observed consisted of a brawl, the institution of avoidance relations and the reconciliation rite. My argument was that it seemed to simulate reproductive process, as understood in Murik culture. Both begin with sexual relations cloaked in jealousy. Conflict ensues between rivals, which is contained. The parties are separated from each other, quarantined like a pregnant woman. ‘She’ must avoid society, because ‘she’ is vulnerable to the enemies of her kin, and vice versa, society must avoid ‘her’ because she is impure. Both processes – of pregnancy and conflict resolution – culminate when a new ‘body’ is ‘born’, either in the all-​female, Birth House or in the Male Cult House. During both, mystical knots are tied, food is shared and lineage ornaments may be displayed (Barlow 1985b, 143). ‘Conflict resolution rites elicit a metaphor of procreative process and vice versa, procreative process elicits conflict and rites of conflict resolution’ (Lipset 1997, 263). Put another way, by arguing that Murik leadership, authority and social process are modelled on a culturally specific concept of maternal reproduction and motherhood, I tilted the balance of my understanding of Murik conflict resolution more toward methodological holism than the actor-​ ­centred Mancunian Realist framework. If the case study focus of the latter on the pursuit of goals by individuals is meant not just to construct the moral order, but also to exemplify the cultural and historical moment, I had spared no analytical effort to conceptualize Murik social process in cultural, or perhaps collective, terms that made the claim that individual action, while indispensable, was made comprehensible by institutions – gender identity and Murik reproduction beliefs, in this instance.12 I had not abandoned Mancunian Realism at all. But I had shifted the analysis of my extended case study over to the principal claim of methodological holism, which is that culture makes action possible, rather than vice versa (Zahle 2003). The historical temper of Mancunian Realism did open up a bit of insight, which I think the political circumstances of that moment prevented me from appreciating at the time. Despite the stewardship of Sir Michael Somare,

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PNG’s first prime minister, who as I mentioned above was Murik by birth and upbringing, the extended case study, and the way I analysed it, depicted a society squarely on the margins of the new postcolonial state, development, and market integration. To an extent, the conflict resolution process may also be understood in terms of this wider political context. While this sort of conflict was characteristic of Murik society, and did seem to have occurred over and over again, perhaps it was possible to connect current macro-​historical processes to their outbreak and subsequent resolution by means of customary forms of social control. During the first years after independence, the PM had embarked on a policy of decentralization, dispersing power to the provinces under pressures from secessionist movements. A related policy was also to promote modes of social control. At that historical moment, in other words, PNG was becoming a Melanesianized state whose authority was less differentiated from its citizenry than it had been under Australian rule (Lipset 1989). My Murik case demonstrated that legal pluralism ruled the day (Griffiths 1986), which is to say that PNG was a weak state. Indeed, violence was increasing in towns and rural areas that was due, in part, to a lack of legal institutions. Empirically, what did the extended case study of two feuding communities that I featured in Mangrove Man (Lipset 1997) illustrate? My sense was that the moral crisis and the subsequent actions of local-​level leadership disclosed an ongoing contradiction in Murik social structure, an abiding contradiction between the sexual desire of youth and moral social order. To be sure, macro-​level change was going on. A new postcolonial state was taking its first steps. But in the Murik Lakes, instead of facing intractable problems in 1982, such as the lack of basic services, costs of education, and a lack of markets for the Murik fishery, local-​level leadership had become symptomatically preoccupied with the re-​invention of tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Prickett 2009), a re-​invention that recapitulated a pre-​ capitalist vision of procreation, pregnancy and birthing – as if society could still reproduce itself independently of modernity.

Conclusion: Mancunian Realism, F. G. Bailey and Murik conflict resolution My willingness to substitute research on extended case study of local-​level conflict resolution for my original, multi-​sited project resulted from the tenets of Manchester Realism Gluckman introduced to Bailey, as well as to Barnes, Worsley, and Epstein in the early 1950s and Freddy passed along to me in the mid-​1970s. What were they? 1) Conflict played out in small-​scale, face-​to-​face events are the front door of ethnographic knowledge. 2) Events

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depict individuals taking sociopolitical action in terms of self-​interest that is defined both by pragmatic tactics and normative values amid historical contexts that are always in flux. And 3), an insistence on fine-​grained, ethnographic detail (Kapferer 2006). As I say, Mancunian Realism never insisted that micro-​level action caused culture and history. It never made the strong claim that dispensed with culture and history. Its methodological individualism was weaker: social phenomena could be understood in cases but cases took place within norms that anteceded as well as guided it. In Mangrove Man, I certainly portrayed the reconciliation process in the Murik Lakes from the ground-​up. Lacking fixed definition, who took charge of it, as well as the very meaning of its form were debated, re-​imagined and subject to individual initiative. But the theoretical view I eventually worked out diverged from Mancunian Realism. By focusing on the relationship of an extended case study to a metaphor of procreation, motherhood, and gender dynamics in Murik culture, I implicitly argued that the meaning of social action, its norms, concepts, and values, did not derive from actor-​ centred agency, but was rather an oxymoron, a re-​invented tradition that emphasized the interrelatedness of actor-​based social process to gendered and cultural institutions, perhaps in a manner reminiscent of John Barnes’s view of descent in the Highlands of PNG. I have little doubt that Bailey’s early Orissa work adopted a similar theoretical position. He also emphasized the embeddedness of caste and tribal relations in the new dimensions of the postcolonial economy. But I think that a combination of the political circumstances in the new postcolony with the weak methodological holism to which I subscribed ended up producing a bit too much Sepikiana for Bailey, a thoroughgoing Mancunian Realist, but one who was no Melanesianist. (Of course, by not working in Africa, he had done much the same thing to Gluckman.) In other words, the ethnography and analysis were perhaps a bit too thick and insufficiently actor-​centred for his taste. But he neither objected, nor withdrew from it. With characteristic poise, he presided with aplomb from soup to nuts, although I doubt it riveted him the way it did me. Acknowledgements: Thanks to Kevin Avruch, Robert Gordon, Steve Gudeman, Richard Handler, Dan Jorgensen, Adam Kuper, and Dame Marilyn Strathern for reading a draft of this chapter.

Notes 1 De disagreed: ‘Bailey’s analytical model is best suited to understand politics as quotidian where political power is given a theoretical and empirical legitimacy, sans the idea of resistance’ (2014, 18, see also Vincent 1978, 175).

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2 See also Keith Hart was a member of the Faber Mission, a 1972 consultant team, commissioned by the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program that visited PNG, then in the run-​up to independence, to develop policy recommendations for the new state. Observing that the territory was being used to siphon money back to Australia, Hart promoted the idea that the government should aim itself at self-​sufficiency, grassroots development and income equality (Hart 2002; Conroy 2015). See also Alan Rew (1974) who spent five years at Manchester in the early 1960s. 3 Founded at the beginning of the Cold War, the Australian National University (ANU) had state funding and a charter to advise parliament and the federal bureaucracy. ‘It was thus always vulnerable to national security interests’ (Gray 2019, 63). 4 ‘Many of those who gathered around Gluckman at Manchester in the early years … were left-​oriented, a few of them being members of the Communist party, which Gluckman himself never joined’ (Kapferer 2006, 87). In the Cold War, such leftward leanings were divisive. Worsley recalled that Gluckman told him that ‘Evans-​Pritchard … had said that he would do his best to ensure that I, as a Marxist, never got a post in anthropology – and he (and others) succeeded’ (2008, 77). 5 The Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) had been established in 1949, with input from MI5, to help overcome the Anglo-​American distrust of Australian security, after it was discovered that classified information had been leaked from Canberra to the USSR (Andrew 1989, 226–​30). Both ASIO and the Menzies government ‘pursued communists and suspected “fellow travelers” with an almost religious fervor’ (Gray 2019, 60). An ASIO officer, vetting Gluckman’s file in connection to his visa application (also rejected on the grounds that he was a ‘dangerous communist’) to visit to PNG in 1960, was given to remark that anthropological fieldwork would make ‘the … perfect cover … for subversive activities among undeveloped peoples’ (cited by Gray 2019, 61, 68–​75, see also Kuklick 2011, 15). 6 Given Worsley’s ideological leanings, he developed an interest in the work of Mikloukho-​Maclay, a Russian who had visited the north coast of PNG in the 1870s, and had evidently observed ‘what sounded very like Cargo Cults going on long before any … whites, notably missionaries, had arrived’ (Worsley 2008, 95). 7 The Mau Mau Rebellion, which had broken out against the colonial administration in Kenya in 1952, captured Worsley’s attention, as he had worked there before going to Australia, as well as left-​wing intellectuals in the UK and the public at large. Gluckman publicly challenged the colonial governor both in the Manchester Guardian and in academic venues. The well-​known Scottish publisher James McGibbon then sought to persuade him to do a book about Mau Mau. ‘But Max wasn’t a Kenyan specialist, so he suggested instead that McGibbon publish the material I had collected about the Cargo Cults, insofar as they involved what to Europeans seemed superstition of the most gross and savage kind – they resembled Mau Mau’ (Worsley 2008, 124). 8 See Barlow 1985.

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9 At that time the UCSD Anthropology Department was overrun with Melanesianists, among both faculty and graduate students. Having been a student of Gregory Bateson as an undergraduate (Lipset 1982), one of the things I took from him was a particular interest in the Sepik region of PNG (Bateson 1957). 10 The Murik spoke Menung, their vernacular, and Tokpisin in the 1980s. I had taken a short course in the latter back in La Jolla prior to departure, and tried my best to learn Menung while there. 11 Later, I adopted Bakhtin’s concept of ‘dialogue’ (1984), which I viewed as a more conceptually powerful concept of that gendered relationship between jural and domestic institutions (Lipset 1997). 12 From a viewpoint of disciplinary impact, I must confess that this analytical move was probably a mistake since it was either misunderstood or just ignored in subsequent Pacific ethnography. Perhaps I belonged to the wrong invisible college, or perhaps my argument was too particularistic, which is to say, too Murik-​ centred, or perhaps the claim that law and politics might be understood in terms of a domestic metaphor was too theoretically counterintuitive when applied to a jural domain, otherwise said to be subordinate to masculine authority which typically controls domestic relationships (Fortes 1969).

References Andrew, C. 1989. ‘The Growth of the Australian Intelligence Community and the Anglo-​American Connection.’ Intelligence and National Security 4 (2): 226–​30. Bailey, F. G. 1957. Caste and the Economic Frontier. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1960. Tribe, Caste and Nation. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1969. Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bailey, F. G. 1971. Gifts and Poisons: The Politics of Reputation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bailey, F. G. 1983. The Tactical Uses of Passion. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bakhtin, M. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barlow, K. 1985a. ‘Learning Cultural Meanings Through Social Relationships: An Ethnography of Childhood in Murik Society, Papua New Guinea.’ PhD diss., Department of Anthropology, University of California (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International). Barlow, K. 1985b. ‘The Social Context of Infant Feeding in the Murik Lakes of Papua New Guinea.’ In Infant Care and Feeding in the South Pacific, edited by L. B. Marshall, 137–​54. New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. Barnes, J. 1962/​1990. ‘African Models in the New Guinea Highlands.’ Reprinted in Models and Interpretations, Selected Essays by J.A. Barnes, 44–​55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barth, F. 1959. Political Leadership among Swat Pathans. London: Athlone Press. Bateson, G. 1936/​1957. Naven: A Survey of the Problems suggested by a Composite Picture of a New Guinea Tribe drawn from Three Points of View. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colson, E. 2008. ‘Defining “the Manchester School of Anthropology”.’ Current Anthropology 49 (2): 335–​37. Conroy, J. 2015. ‘The Eclipse of PNG’s Eight Aims and the False Dawn of Informality.’ Accessed 30 July 2020. https://​devpol​icy.org/​the-​ecli​pse-​of-​pngs-​ eight-​aims-​and-​the-​false-​dawn-​of-​info​rmal​ity-​20151​211/​. Conru, K, ed. 2019. Sepik Ramu Art. Brussels: Conru Editions. De, Gitika. 2014. ‘Models of Political Analysis: A Contemporary Re-​ appraisal of F. G. Bailey and the Manchester School.’ CAS Working Paper Series. New Delhi: Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Douglas, M. 1959. ‘Review of Tribal Cohesion in a Money Economy by William Watson.’ Man 59 (9): 168. Durkheim, E. 1895/​ 1938. The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: The Free Press. Epstein, A. L. 1951. ‘Urban Native Courts on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt.’ Journal of African Administration 3: 117–​24. Epstein, A. L. 1962. Economic Development and Social Change in South India. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Epstein, A. L. ed. 1974. Contention and Dispute: Aspects of Law and Social Control in Melanesia. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Epstein, S. T. 1968. Capitalism, Primitive and Modern: Some Aspects of Tolai Economic Growth. London: Routledge. Evens, T. M. S. 2006. ‘Some Ontological Implications of Situational Analysis.’ In The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology, edited by T. M. S. Evens and D. Handelman, 49–​63. New York: Berghahn. Fortes, M. 1969. Kinship and the Social Order. Chicago: Aldine. Garbett, G. K. 1970. ‘The Analysis of Social Situations.’ Man (NS) 5 (2): 214–​27. Gluckman, M. 1940. ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand.’ Bantu Studies 14: 147–​74. Gluckman, M. 1955b. Custom and Conflict in Africa. Oxford: Blackwell. Gluckman, M. 1963. Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. London: Cohen & West. Gluckman, M. 2006. ‘Ethnographic Data in British Social Anthropology.’ Reprinted in The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology, edited by T. M. S. Evens and Don Handelman, 13–​22. New York: Berghahn. Goffman, I. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Gordon, R. 2018. The Enigma of Max Gluckman: The Ethnographic Life of a ‘Luckyman’ in Africa. Omaha, NB: University of Nebraska Press. Gray, G. 2019. ‘ “In My File, I Am Two Different People”: Max Gluckman and A.L. Epstein, the Australian National University, and Australian Security Intelligence Organization, 1958–​60.’ Cold War History 20 (1): 59–​76. Griffiths, J. 1986. ‘What is Legal Pluralism?’ Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 24: 1–​55. Hart, K. 2002. ‘World Society as an Old Regime.’ Accessed 30 July 2020. http://​ themem​oryb​ank.co.uk/​pap​ers/​world-​soci​ety-​as-​an-​old-​reg​ime/​. Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T., eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kapferer, B. 2006. ‘Situations, Crisis, and the Anthropology of the Concrete: The Contribution of Max Gluckman.’ In The Manchester School: Practice and

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Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology, edited by T. M. S. Evens and D. Handelman, 118–​57. New York: Berghahn. Kempny, Marian. 2003. Unpublished interview of F. G. Bailey. New York: Wenner-​ Gren Foundation. Kempny, M. 2005. ‘History of the Manchester “School” and the Extended-​Case Method.’ Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 49, no. 3 (2005): 144–​65. Accessed 13 August 2021. www.jstor.org/​ stable/​23179079. pp. 180–​201. Kuklick, H. 2011. ‘Personal Equations: Reflections on the History of Fieldwork, with Special Reference to Sociocultural Anthropology.’ Isis 102: 1–​33. Kuper, A. 1973/​ 1999. Anthropology & Anthropologists: The Modern British School. New York: Routledge. Le Carre, J. 1977. The Honorable Schoolboy. New York: Random House. Lipset, D. 1980/​1982. Gregory Bateson: Legacy of a Scientist. Boston: Beacon Press. Lipset, D. 1989. ‘Papua New Guinea: The Melanesian Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1975–​1986.’ In Democracy in Developing Countries, Vol. 3: Asia, edited by L. Diamond, J. J. Linz, and S. M. Lipset, 383–​423. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Lipset, D. 1997. Mangrove Man: Dialogics of Culture in the Sepik Estuary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lipset, D. 2005. ‘Dead Canoes: The Fate of Agency in Twentieth Century Murik Art.’ Social Analysis 49 (1): 109–​40. Macfarlane, A. 1989. ‘Interview with Peter Worsley.’ Accessed on 24 July 2020. www.berghahnbooks.com/​title/​WorsleyAcademic Mead, M. 1935. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: Morrow. Meeker, M, Barlow, K. and Lipset, D. 1986. ‘Culture, Exchange and Gender: Lessons from the Murik.’ Cultural Anthropology 1 (1): 6–​73. Mitchell, J. C. 2006. ‘Case and Situation Analysis.’ In The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology, edited by T. M. S. Evens and Don Handelman, 23–​44. New York: Berghahn. Ortner, S. and Whitehead, H. eds. 1981. Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Otten, T. and Simpson, E. 2016. ‘F. G. Bailey’s Bisipara Revisited.’ Review of Rural Affairs 51 (26 & 27): 25–32. Parsons, T. 1937. The Structure of Social Action. New York: The Free Press. Prickett, S. 2009. Modernity and the Reinvention of Tradition: Backing into the Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rew, A. 1974. Social Images and Process in Urban New Guinea: A Study of Port Moresby. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co. Sahlins, M. 1963. ‘Rich Man, Poor Man, Big Man, Chief: political types in Melanesia and Polynesia.’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 5: 285–​303. Schwartz, T. 1962. The Paliau Movement in the Admiralty Islands, 1946–​1954. New York: Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 49, Part 2. Silverman, S. 1974/​5. ‘Bailey’s Politics.’ Journal of Peasant Studies 2: 111–​20. Somare, M. 1975. Sana: An Autobiography of Michael Somare. Hong Kong: Niugini Press.

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Strathern, M. 1974. ‘Managing Information: The Problems of a Dispute-​settler (Mount Hagen).’ In Contention and Dispute: Aspects of Law and Social Control in Melanesia, edited by A. L. Epstein, 271–​616. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Strathern, M. 1981. ‘Culture in a Netbag: The Manufacture of a Subdiscipline in Anthropology.’ Man (NS)16 (4): 665–​88. Swartz, M., Turner, V., and Tuden, A. 1966. Political Anthropology. New York: Aldine. Turner, V. 1957. Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life. New York: Humanities Press. Turner, V. 1968. The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Velsen, J. van. 1967. ‘The Extended-​Case Method and Situational Analysis.’ In The Craft of Social Anthropology, edited by A. L. Epstein, 129–​49. London: Tavistock. Vincent, J. 1978. ‘Political Anthropology: Manipulative Strategies.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 7: 175–​94. Wagner, R. 1974. ‘Are there Social Groups in the New Guinea Highlands?’ In Frontiers of Anthropology, edited by M. Leaf, 95–​122. New York: Van Nostrand. Weber, M. 1947/​1964. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Translated by A. R. Henderson and T. Parsons. New York: The Free Press. Weiner, A. B. 1976. Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives in Trobriand Exchange. Austin: University of Texas Press. Werbner, R. 1984. ‘The Manchester School in South-​Central Africa.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 157–​85. Worsley, P. 1957. The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo’ Cults in Melanesia. New York: Schocken Books. Worsley, P. 2008. An Academic Skating on Thin Ice. New York: Berghahn. Yelvington, K. 1997. ‘An Interview of A.L. Epstein.’ Current Anthropology 38 (2): 289–​315. Young, M. 1974. ‘Private Sanctions and Public Ideology: Some Aspects of Self-​help in Kalauna, Goodenough Island.’ In Contention and Dispute: Aspects of Law and Social Control in Melanesia, edited by A. L. Epstein, 40–​66. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Young, M. 2011. ‘A.L. (“Bill”) Epstein.’ The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 1 (1): 119–​29. Zahle, J. 2003. ‘The Individualism/​ Holism Debate on Intertheoretic Reduction and the Argument from Multiple Realization.’ Philosophy of the Social Sciences 33 (1): 311–​41.

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Part III

Individuals in situations

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Negotiating the gap between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’: older Americans’ strategies Yohko Tsuji In the late 1970s, I had an eye-​opening experience in F. G. Bailey’s ­political anthropology class. He said, ‘when two people enter a social arena, there is always politics’. Until then, I had a narrowly-​defined idea of politics as political systems, disregarding people who shaped and were shaped by them. Bailey’s statement revealed to me the importance of considering ­people’s motivations – often hidden behind their actions – in anthropological research. In addition, from his view of a human society as ‘inherently conflictual’ (Wilford in this volume), I have also learned that social life always involves negotiations. Understanding the significance of individual motivations and negotiations became a valuable asset in my research on older Americans. This chapter explores how older Americans negotiate the gap between the ‘ought’ (e.g., being independent) and the ‘is’ (e.g., needing assistance) of old age and what motivates them to do so. To illustrate their strategies, I examine social exchange and post-​retirement housing. My ethnographic data come from three decades of fieldwork, which started in 1987 at Lake District Senior Center in a small town in upstate New York.1 Established in 1952, this private non-​profit organization offered a wide range of recreational, educational, and community service opportunities. Its participants had widely varied socioeconomic backgrounds from a wealthy business owner to welfare recipients. While the majority were middle-​class whites with white-​collar or blue-​collar pre-​retirement occupations, the elders’ ethnic and religious backgrounds included Protestants, Catholics, Jews, whites, Blacks, Asians, and immigrants. My primary research method was participant-​observation. During my initial fieldwork of 18 months, I went to the senior centre every day and joined the elders in painting, knitting, singing, chatting, kneading clay, hearing lectures, eating lunch together, and so on. In subsequent years, I kept in touch with my informants by visiting the centre occasionally, calling them, visiting them at home, hospitals or nursing homes. Through follow-​ up research, I also met many older Americans of succeeding generations, including baby boomers.

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Old age and American culture: apotheosis of independence I grew up in Japan in the traditional three-​generation family in which my widowed grandmother lived with my parents, my sister and me. The neighbourhood was full of older people who also resided with their children’s family. Young children were taught that elders deserved special care after lifelong hard work; to be kind and respectful toward them. Children also witnessed how these elders’ long lives were celebrated on the culturally recognized milestone birthdays at ages 60, 70, 77, 80, 88, 90, and so on (Tsuji 2011). When I moved to San Diego in 1976 to attend college, this picture of senescence changed notably. First, older people disappeared from my life. Second, many Americans had negative views of old age, which I first recognized in my roommates’ words after my octogenarian friend’s visit from Indiana; ‘He has outlived his usefulness. He’d be happier dead’; ‘I would commit suicide before I become old, frail, and ugly.’ Cruel though these words might seem, I later learned that their reactions reflected the widespread negative stereotypes of senescence in a culture, which ‘hates, fears, and makes fun of aging’ (Weinberg 2006, xiii), views reaching age 50 as ‘officially over the hill’ (Jenkins 2016, 2), and makes people ‘terrified at fifty’ (Jong 1994, xix). One anthropologist acknowledged such dismal views of old age in America as ‘a cultural wasteland’ with ‘retirements and funerals [as] crude markers for the stark beginning and end’ (Myerhoff 1984, 312). Another statement echoed the same sentiment: ‘the years following the age of fifty or perhaps sixty are commonly considered a kind of existential purgatory between the end of one’s active life and death’ (Samuel 2017, 4). Young children also shared this antipathy to old age. After viewing the simulation of age-​progression on their faces, they cried, ‘I don’t want to get old’ (Gullette 2004, 3–​4). Ageing is a panhuman phenomenon, yet Americans treat it remarkably differently from my observations in Japan (Tsuji 2020). As I became more familiar with American culture, I came to understand that the major reason for this dissimilarity lay in cultural differences, in particular, in the seemingly opposing dominant values of these two societies: the utmost importance of independence in America and the strong emphasis on interdependence in Japan. As people grow older, their health declines and their self-​ sufficiency diminishes. Consequently, their need for assistance increases. Hence, old age represents the antithesis of cherished American values, such as independence, health, youth, and productivity, creating a wide gap between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. Maintaining autonomy, in particular, becomes a major challenge for Americans because, unlike elders in some other cultures, they

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are not entitled to ‘rightful dependency’ (Fry 1980, 127). Instead, they are expected – and wish – to remain independent despite losing the capacities to do so. Because the gap between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ of old age is large in America, how to deal with it has been the focus of many studies, and a variety of solutions have been suggested. One group proposes to place elders outside the mainstream activities and values. For instance, disengagement theory asserts both the societal and personal benefits of elders’ social withdrawal (Cumming and Henry 1961). The anthropologist Barbara Anderson postulates ‘deculturation’ in which elders ‘unlearn’ ‘the given way of a society’ as an adaptive method of coping with their disadvantages (1972, 210). By contrast, the successful ageing paradigm advocates American values by demanding each elder ‘[enact] cultural norms of persons as healthy, active, independent, and long-​living subjects’ (Lamb 2014, 50) without considering age-​associated declines. Since the 1980s, this paradigm has been dominant in dealing with ageing issues (Lamb, Robbins-​Ruszkowski, and Corwin 2017, 1). Thus, ‘successful aging’ was a catchphrase repeatedly used by the participants of the White House Conference on Aging in 2015 (Loe 2017, 226). Yet, as I show in this chapter, my elderly interlocutors dealt with the gap between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’ in their lives not by denying their diminishing self-​sufficiency, but by acknowledging it. They did so within the realm of American culture in ways that demonstrated agency, reinforcing Bailey’s reminder that even the most disadvantaged can manipulate the system to enhance their status (1960, 159–​60).

Helping each other to help themselves Among senior centre participants, forming support relationships was one of the common strategies to maintain independence (Tsuji 1997, 2016, and 2020). One important feature of these relationships is balanced exchange. When elders accept help or a favour, they adamantly reciprocate. This action not only prevents them from becoming a supplicant but also enables them to be both a giver and a receiver, which a quadriplegic anthropologist, the late Robert Murphy, called the ‘hallmark of maturity’ (1987, 201). Most centre people loathed asymmetrical exchange because being a debtor indicates not only the lack of independence but also the possible subjugation to those on whom they depend. Asymmetrical exchange also violates the American value of egalitarianism. But do older Americans have enough resources to participate in balanced exchange? Commenting on the paucity of their resources, James Dowd said, ‘The aged have very little to exchange which is of any instrumental value.

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What skills they once had are often outmoded; the skills which remain can often be provided more efficiently and with less cost by others’ (1975, 590). With today’s fast-​paced social, cultural, and technological transformations, the values of elders’ exchange resources may dwindle even more. While some may retain certain abilities of worth or may even be wealthy, elders’ diminished resources are often regarded as one of the major reasons for their social withdrawal (Dowd 1975; Matthews 1979). How did older Americans in my study manage to maintain balanced exchange and remain socially engaged? Complementing each other’s lessened or lost abilities offered one solution. A good example of this is the mutual support between Diane and Helen, two retired teachers in their eighties (Tsuji 1997, 2016, and 2020). They lived on the same block in their own houses and attended programmes together at Lake District Senior Center. Diane still drove while Helen did not. But Helen was a good walker while Diane was lame, walking slowly with a cane. When Helen needed to go to a supermarket and a drug store that were too far to reach on foot, Diane drove her. In return, Helen went to a bank to deposit Diane’s check and to a pharmacy to pick up Diane’s prescription drugs while she waited in her parked car. Because Diane had hearing impairment, Helen also alerted Diane when she heard sirens from fire engines and police cars or when the turn signal did not shut off automatically after Diane changed a lane. On rare occasions when they ventured to unfamiliar territory, Helen navigated for Diane. In addition to complementing each other’s missing abilities, Diane and Helen, both single and predeceased by all of their next of kin, had the key to the other’s house and checked on each other by calling at noon. One morning, this arrangement proved to be a godsend when Diane fell in the bathtub. Being alarmed when Diane did not answer, Helen entered Diane’s house, found her in the bathtub, and called for help. Becoming immobile after a fall is not uncommon among older people. I heard more than a score of such cases during my research of three decades. But other victims were not as lucky as Diane. Jennifer, for instance, inched her way to the phone in agonizing pain for more than seven hours before she could call for help. A good number of centre people made a daily phone call to a friend. Among them were Robert and Betty, two octogenarian former high school teachers. Unlike Diane and Helen, they did not live nearby and rarely saw each other. But their daily talk on the phone meant more than checking on each other’s well-​being. It provided them with emotional support and a window to the outside world. In short, elders’ calling arrangements played a vital role in prolonging their autonomy, because it ensured security and brought social contact in their often solitary lives without violating the cultural code against dependency. These arrangements offered balanced

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exchange based on the equal participation of both parties and equal benefits to both of them without much financial cost. Reducing the cost of exchange also helps to maintain balanced exchange with diminishing resources. Group-​ based exchange serves this purpose. Centre people often sent greeting cards collectively. When a peer became ill or lost a loved one, they circulated a get-​well card or a sympathy card for signatures and messages. When the senders subsequently experienced major illness or death in the family, they were reciprocated by a card sent from a group of friends rather than multiple cards from each of them. A dish-​to-​pass meal also had the advantage of group-​based exchange. It was a good substitute for hosting a dinner party or dining out together, social currency many seniors no longer possessed. Because giving and receiving took place simultaneously at a dish-​to-​pass meal, people were freed from the ‘obligation to return’ (Mauss 1967). To encourage the participation of those who no longer cooked (e.g., residents of assisted living facilities) or who had dietary restrictions, the customary rule of each participant contributing a dish was modified. Those who had given up cooking brought store-​ bought food, such as juice and ice cream. Elders with dietary restrictions brought their own meal and enjoyed company rather than food sharing. In this way, centre people avoided making distinctions among their peers who had varying degrees of decline and different lifestyles. The choice of resources also plays an important role in maintaining balanced exchange with limited means. Harumi Befu argues, ‘[J]‌ust about anything under the sun from smile and expression of respect to giving of advice and material rewards can all serve as resources for exchange’ (1977, 270). This fact enabled centre people to exchange a wide range of things that cost them neither money nor materials. For example, it was a common practice among centre people to exchange small tokens that pleased their receivers, such as kind words, gestures of affection, and praise of their peer’s clothes and accessories. These actions made both the giver and the receiver feel good without incurring any monetary cost. Beneficial information was another common exchange currency. Elders with high cholesterol gladly learned about egg-​yolk substitute and bacon made of pork substitute. Overweight seniors welcomed the advice of using a smaller plate to make a reduced serving size look bigger. Eleanor offered an alternative activity to a long trip for elders who, like herself, had given up travelling due to declining health: to go to the main bus stop in downtown, get on the bus that came next, and enjoy a one-​hour tour (each route made an entire round in an hour). With a senior citizens discount, the cost of this ‘trip’ was 25 cents (the fare in 1987–​88). It had the unknown elements of a long journey because travellers did not know the destination until the bus came and the bus might take them to a part of town unfamiliar

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to them. In any event, this bus ride was a nice break from the travellers’ daily routine. Centre people also valued tips for economizing and easy recipes for those with dietary restrictions. In addition to balanced exchange, another strategy to circumvent the stigma of dependency was maintaining multiple support relationships and minimizing their dependency on each partner. The four octogenarians mentioned above – Diane, Helen, Robert, and Betty – uniformly adopted this strategy. Though they all said their support partner was indispensable for their survival, they formed additional support relationships with other ­people. For instance, Diane had a long-​lasting relationship with the daughter of her late cousin who helped her with tasks she could no longer perform, such as changing a bulb in the ceiling light or moving heavy furniture. The younger woman found in Diane a precious source of family history and received much comfort in sharing memories of departed relatives and bygone days. Helen had a small circle of friends with whom she exchanged hospitality. When Helen planned a dinner party, Diane drove her to do grocery shopping. But she was invited only when she and other guests belonged to the same social circle. Furthermore, each year, Diane and Helen separately celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays with a different set of friends. Robert and Betty also established several other partnerships. Robert found additional support sources among the participants of the art class and the chorus group at Lake District Senior Center and the fellow parishioners of his church. The people he interacted with through these activities offered additional networks that met his different needs. Betty also had other circles of mutual support that included the members of a women’s club and her church. In summary, to negotiate the gap between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’ in their lives, my interlocutors established support relationships with their peers. They adopted two major strategies to avoid the stigma of dependence: maintaining balanced exchange and forming multiple support networks.2 Behind their actions are the two American values of egalitarianism and independence. Balanced exchange assured equal partnership, saving them from becoming a supplicant. Multiple support networks minimized elders’ dependency on just one partner. Being formed by individual volition rather than by convention, elders’ support relationships reflect another American value about the freedom of choice.

Balanced exchange for nursing home residents As my informants grew older and came to need assistance for eating, dressing, bathing, and toileting, a fair number of them moved to a nursing home

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rather than ‘receiving intimate bodily care (such as toileting and bathing) from kin’ (Lamb, Robbins-​Ruszkowki, and Corwin 2017, 10). Their dependence on caregivers is so essential to sustain life that many Americans regard nursing home residents as personifying the loss of independence. Do these elders still have options to engage in balanced exchange? In theory, balanced exchange exists between nursing home residents and their caregivers because the care the residents receive is paid for by them, their families, long-​term care insurance, or public assistance, such as Medicaid. Yet when elders depend on caregivers for their very existence, the latter have potential power to transform the former into a supplicant. Unequal power may also lead to elder abuse at the hands of unscrupulous care providers. How do nursing home residents maintain balanced exchange in this situation? What kind of resources do they have to be equal partners? My research has shown that: 1) some exchange resources are still available to nursing home residents despite undeniable declines of their physical and mental capacities; 2) the respect, appreciation, and affection they earn from the staff are vital for being equal partners in these seemingly lopsided relationships. The cases of Dorothy and Cynthia demonstrate these points. Dorothy, an active participant at Lake District Senior Center for many years, was predeceased by both her husband and her only child. When her frailty intensified in her 90s and her senior apartment no longer met her needs, she moved to a nursing home. She was still ambulatory and had the option to live in an assisted living facility. But considering the prospect of further decline and having no relatives nearby, she chose the nursing home instead. Dorothy’s move to a nursing home and her diminishing physical abilities did not stop her active participation in nursing home programmes. Indeed, she loved dancing so much that she even danced in a wheelchair after becoming non-​ambulatory. She sank her diminutive body in her wheelchair and propelled it to the dining room for meals and to the recreation room for various activities. Dorothy, with her gentle demeanour, was reputed to be fiercely independent. Also, she often said, ‘No matter how old I have grown, I am always young at heart.’ Though her sojourn in the nursing home extended for more than a decade, she remained ‘young at heart’ and lived to be 102. As one of the senior centre staff said, Dorothy had no self-​pity in a situation that might have made many others feel sorry for themselves. Dorothy’s caregivers admired her positive attitudes despite many losses in her life. They also appreciated her politeness toward them. For instance, she always said, ‘Thank you’, even for a minor routine task they performed, such as giving her pills and bringing her water. Kathy, a nurse, welcomed such courtesy because some residents yelled at her and demanded she attend to their needs immediately, claiming they paid her salary.

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Regular visitors also serve as ‘highly visible resources’ that might affect the staff’s treatment of the residents (Gubrium 1975, 98). Though Dorothy had no relatives in the local area, she received weekly faxes from her late husband’s niece in Michigan. She, as well as her son-​in-​law (widowed husband of her daughter) and grandchildren, came to see her several times a year. Her friends in the local community visited her frequently. Dorothy’s advanced age enhanced caregivers’ respect for her. At the age-​ homogeneous Lake District Senior Center, advanced age lost its saliency and consequently its negative connotations. Elders who had lived an unusually long life were admired and thought to be an asset for the centre community. Dorothy became such an asset for the nursing home community due to not only her age but also her other remarkable qualities. Cynthia also engaged in balanced exchange as a nursing home resident despite her loss of mobility and financial dependence on Medicaid, a form of public assistance, until death. While Medicaid covered the cost of room and board and skilled nursing care, it allowed recipients to keep only $50 a month out of their social security benefits and pension and withheld the rest to pay for their care. Hence, Cynthia’s monthly allowance was barely enough to cover incidentals, such as birthday cards for her family, postage to send them, and snacks from the vending machine. To deal with this situation, Cynthia, a well-​educated, well-​travelled former journalist, adopted a philosophical approach and made it known to her friends that she would like to receive grape tomatoes in summertime and chocolate in the colder seasons to snack on. Her visitors willingly accommodated her request. But how did she reciprocate such favours and engage in balanced exchange with her friends, not to mention her caregivers? Despite the paucity of financial assets, Cynthia had a resource which people greatly appreciated: the stories she experienced as a journalist and had learned from books throughout her long life. Both her friends and caregivers were paid back by fascinating stories which this octogenarian with a keen mind and deep interest in life told them. When Diane, one of my interlocutors mentioned earlier, moved to a nursing home, she said, ‘Many people came here to die. But I came here to live.’ Like Diane, both Dorothy and Cynthia lived their lives to the fullest at a nursing home. They acknowledged their lack of physical ability to deal with such basic needs as eating, bathing, dressing, and toileting and accepted assistance to continue to live as an autonomous social being with unique history and personality. In the absence of physical autonomy, they maintained social and psychological autonomy. These cases show that elders with physical infirmity still have the potential to engage in balanced exchange with caregivers.

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Choosing post-​retirement housing Housing offers older Americans an important strategy to prolong autonomous life. During the 18 months of my initial fieldwork in 1987–​88, I came to know with whom and in what type of housing 80 of the senior centre participants lived. The most common living arrangement was living alone (49 or 61 per cent), followed by living with a spouse (28 or 35 per cent). One widower lived with his widowed father, and two moved to a nursing home. Elders lived in various types of housing: single-​family homes, mobile homes, age-​mixed apartments, senior apartments, assisted living facilities, and nursing homes. All but those in assisted living facilities and nursing homes maintained an independent life. The most striking feature of centre people’s post-​retirement housing to me was the high rate of mobility. Among 75 elders whose post-​retirement housing history I obtained during my initial research in 1987–​88, a majority (47 or 63 per cent) moved before or during this period. Only 28 (37 per cent) did not make any post-​retirement change of residence. My subsequent data indicated a similar trend. They covered the two decades from 1989 to 2009 and followed 65 of the original group of elders, including 54 people who had died during this period.3 Forty of them (62 per cent) moved while 25 (38 per cent) did not. The combined data covering the entire research period from 1987 to 2009 revealed that only seven (11 per cent) had not made post-​retirement moves. A comparison of the 1987–​88 data and the summary data of 1987–​2009 reveals a notable increase of multiple post-​retirement moves, as elders grew older and required a different type of housing that could meet their increasing need for assistance. The number of one-​time movers was 30 in both cases. But because the sample size in the follow-​up research was smaller, percentage-​wise, one-​time movers increased from 40 per cent in the initial data to 46 per cent in the subsequent ones. Those who had moved twice rose from 13 to 16. Three-​time movers more than doubled from four to ten. There were no four-​time movers in the first data, but the second data included two of them. My informants moved to a variety of housing, which ranged from luxurious retirement homes to subsidized senior apartments and public housing for low-​income elders. As they became infirm, many moved again to assisted living facilities or nursing homes. In choosing suitable housing in later years, ‘No two situations are the same’ (Morris 1987) claimed the former president of the board of directors at Lake District Senior Center. His comment corresponded to a wide range of reasons center people gave for their post-​ retirement change(s) of residence. Some who worked in a big city favoured retirement in the

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country. Others moved to return home or to be near their families. Also important were available choices of senior housing and good medical and eldercare services, as well as various cultural, recreational, and educational programmes. One centre participant voiced yet another reason: ‘I felt antsy after my retirement. So, I moved to start a new stage of my life.’ Behind varied reasons and personal situations leading to the change of post-​retirement residence, I detected a general pattern of moving to a type of housing with easier maintenance and better access to assistance (e.g., from a house to an apartment or from a senior apartment to an assisted living facility). This resulted in two notable trends. First, as mentioned above, more elders moved – many more than once – with the advancement of age. Second, as my informants grew older, the number of residents in senior housing increased. During my initial fieldwork in 1987–88, the majority (49 out of 80 or 61 per cent) lived in age-​mixed environments: 33 in their own house, 14 in regular apartments, and two in trailer homes. Those who lived in housing for elders was 31 (39 per cent): 24 in senior apartments, five in assisted living facilities, and two in nursing homes. In my follow-​up research from 1989 to 2009, these numbers were reversed; the majority of my informants (43 out of 65, or 66 per cent) lived in age-​homogeneous housing: 20 in senior apartments, two in assisted living facilities, 21 in nursing homes. Only 18 (28 per cent) lived in age-​mixed housing: nine in their own house, one in a trailer home, and eight in age-​mixed apartments.4 While the number of nursing home residents jumped from two to 21, all but nine elders gave up their house where they had spent most of their adult life. In short, varied though my informants’ reasons were for changing residence, one common denominator was their quest for independence, including maintaining intergenerational autonomy with their adult children. As the maintenance of the dwelling becomes burdensome and the likelihood of poor health and infirmity increases, moving to a type of housing that is easier to maintain and offers better access to assistance enables older Americans to prolong their autonomy. When worsening debilities make independent life untenable, all but three of my informants chose to live in a nursing home rather than living with their children. However, this by no means indicates children’s indifference to ageing parents. In fact, the family is a primary source of eldercare in America. My interlocutors’ choice of nursing homes over children’s care affirms the cultural norm of intergenerational autonomy, which generally both the parents and the children wish to maintain. Be that as it may, as their parents’ health declined, some children asked or even begged parents to move in with them, though only three of them in my research succeeded.5 Two of these parents were in their 80s and one in her 90s. In all three cases, parents lived in New York state and children in New Hampshire, Texas, and California, respectively.

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Living this far apart made children’s care of parents extremely difficult. In the absence of cultural prescriptions other than the autonomy of each generation, family support of elders in America is fashioned by a complex interplay of love, concern, guilt, and the quest for independence, as well as elders’ health conditions and the geographical distance between parents and children. Although moving helped to prolong older Americans’ independence, it was merely one of their housing-​related means of negotiation to meet the ‘ought’. Some elders adopted various other strategies without moving. Adding a ramp and grab rails is common to enhance accessibility and prevent a fall in keeping with the Aging-​in-​place movement. Hiring helpers is another (Buch 2018). The weekly service of a domestic helper enabled Robert to continue to live in his big house until he moved to a retirement community. Some elders modified a room to suit their more sedentary life. Diane, who was lame but continued to live in her house until age 93 when a fall compelled her to move to a nursing home, created a cockpit-​like area in her living room where she spent most of her time at home. This small space had a comfortable La-​Z-​Boy reclining chair, a floor lamp for reading, a table with a telephone, a remote control for the television set, and such miscellaneous items as a tissue box, a pen, and a memo pad. Because everything she needed was within arm’s reach, she did not have to move except to go to the bathroom and the kitchen or retire to the bedroom at night. Some senior centre participants made innovative living arrangements so that they could continue to live at home. Esther, a widow with disabilities, shared her home with a young couple who helped her with household chores and grocery shopping in exchange for free rent. Doris, a nonagenarian widow, had her septuagenarian friend, Bonnie, who lived in her own senior apartment, but slept every night at Doris’ house to provide help in case of emergency. While the majority of my informants eventually moved, a small minority of non-​movers also demonstrated how important it was to be independent and to retain their choice and control in decision-​making. Like elders who made post-​retirement moves, non-​movers listed a variety of reasons for their decisions, including sentimental attachment to their home, low cost of living in a house without a mortgage, wishing to keep pets6 or gardens, deploring to live in close proximity to neighbours in an apartment, and apprehension of facing a new environment. As they aged further, living at home may have caused social isolation, lack of security, and deterioration of the quality of life. Yet seven in my sample refused to give up their house because, in addition to the reasons mentioned above, ‘living at home … positively affirmed their continued status as independent and adult persons’ (Buch 2015, 41). Two centre people said that they would leave their house only when they died or needed skilled nursing care.

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My research has revealed that post-​retirement housing provides older Americans with an important means of negotiating the gap between their diminishing abilities and the cultural demand of independence. It has also been noted that elders exercised their agency in making post-​retirement housing decisions though they may have received information and consultation from family, friends, and other sources, such as the County Office for Aging. The cases of Dorothy and Cynthia indicate that some elders with infirmity still retain the capacity to make their own decisions. However, in other cases, frailty and disability diminished elders’ agency. Among seven of my informants who made out-​of-​town moves in the last several years of their lives, only two actively participated in the decision-​making. The rest, being in poor health, followed their children’s decision and relocated nearby or lived with them.

Conclusion: People, culture, and negotiation Old age is a panhuman experience that involves some negative outcomes, such as physical declines, illness, loss of loved ones, and death. For instance, in the Manyōshū, a Japanese poetry anthology of the 7th and 8th centuries, one poet compared the pains of old age to pouring salt into a wound and his infirm body to an old donkey without legs (Kojima, Kinoshita, and Satake 1984, 259). Many centuries later, a similar remark was made by one of my American informants: ‘Being old means living with many physical debilities, such as aches and pains, useless ears, and lame legs.’ Be that as it may, ‘[a]‌ging is much more a social judgment than a biological eventuality’ (Sontag 1972, 32). Thus, the hardships of old age are amplified in America where dominant cultural values generate a wide gap between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’ and older Americans are subjected to powerful normative pressure. My research has illustrated how senior centre participants negotiated this reality, guided by dominant American values, such as independence, freedom of choice, and egalitarianism. In particular, they endeavoured to conform to ‘the national ethic of self-​reliance’ (Cohen 1998, 63), despite the contradictory fact that it was the primary source of their ‘oppression’. This indicates that American culture not only causes problems and constraints in addition to those biologically generated but it also provides the resources to deal with this unfavourable situation (e.g., how to be dependent without jeopardizing a sense of independence).7 Elders’ strong wish to comply with dominant values despite increasing difficulties provided an important motivational force for their actions, as observed in social exchange and post-​ retirement housing.

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Bailey offers a meaningful insight with regard to cultural values and people’s motivation for their actions: ‘how the game works … may not be known to those who play it’ (1969, 9). Thus, although I argue for the importance of dominant American values in guiding my informants’ motivations and actions, they would never say, for instance, that reciprocating the favour they received was essential because to be both a giver and a receiver is the ‘hallmark of maturity’ (Murphy 1987, 201). Instead, they might call it being fair, right, or nice. Likewise, they would be unlikely to explain their decision to move from their house to a senior apartment in terms of prolonging their autonomy. Instead, they said that taking care of a big yard became burdensome or they no longer needed a big house with all of their children living elsewhere. Bailey maintains that to find ‘how the game works’ is the job, not of the participants, but of the researchers who must go beyond a simple description of the game (1969, 9). The paradox of culture as a problem creator and a problem solver, which Bailey found among Indian villagers governed by the caste system (1960 and 1969) and I among older Americans, is not unusual but intrinsic to human experience. Bailey explained this paradox in two different but closely connected ways. First, ‘normative rules’ co-​exist with ‘pragmatic rules’ (Bailey 1969, 5). The former tells ‘what is the right and proper thing to do’ (1969, 16), while the latter says ‘what is the effective thing to do, right or wrong’ (1969, 16). Furthermore, people do not always follow the ‘normative rules’ (1969, 22). In any given social arena with at least two actors where, according to Bailey, ‘there is always politics’, the simultaneous existence of these two types of rules not only impacts people’s motivations for their actions but also enables them to negotiate their disadvantaged status (Bailey 1960 and 1969). Second, sociocultural systems do not exist in the abstract but are embodied in people’s lives and shaped through their agency. Consequently, normative rules are subject to people’s interpretation. They are not ‘an unshifting guide for conduct’ (Bailey 1969, 22). Thus, no matter how rigid and despotic the systems may seem, people exercise their agency vis-​à-​vis these systems. This fact not only creates leeway for even the most disadvantaged but also induces people’s ingenuity to achieve their goals. It is such decisions and actions of individuals that keep sociocultural systems alive, adaptive, and feasible even in the most difficult situations and under rapid social change.

Notes 1 All the names of places, people, and organizations in this chapter are p ­ seudonyms. Elders’ ages were those at the time of my initial fieldwork in 1987–​88 unless otherwise noted.

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2 Maximizing self-​help is another strategy. Center people also relied on institutional assistance, such as a transportation service for the elderly and other eldercare services, because donations and payments for the services received did not make them feel indebted (Tsuji 2020). 3 In the follow-​up data, the sample size was sixty-​five because housing history of ten out of seventy-​five elders in the original data could not be obtained due to frailty and death. 4 Out of 65 people, three lived in one of their children’s homes and one in a hospice. These people are not included in the numbers discussed here because it is ambiguous whether their places of residence are age-​homogenous or age-​mixed. 5 These three are my informants who moved to their children’s homes. In the late 1980s, one center participant brought his widowed father to live with him. 6 During my initial fieldwork, pets were not allowed in most apartments and senior housing though some nursing homes had a pet-​visiting programme (Savishinsky 1985) or kept a few cats and some birds on their premises. Today, this rule no longer applies, and the residents of most rental and senior housing can keep small dogs and cats. 7 Americans tend to perceive independence in opposition to dependence. However, they are not mutually exclusive but ‘interpenetrate within the same culture’ (Lamb 2000, 40). This fact also helps older Americans negotiate with ‘the national ethic of self-​reliance’ (Cohen 1998, 63).

References Anderson, B. 1972. ‘The Process of Deculturation: Its Dynamics among United States Aged.’ Anthropological Quarterly 45 (4): 209–​16. Bailey, F. G. 1960. Tribe, Caste, and Nation: A Study of Political Activity and Political Change in Highland Orissa. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1969. Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics. New York: Schocken Books. Befu, H. 1977. ‘Social Exchange.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 6: 255–​81. Buch, E. D. 2015. ‘Postponing Passage: Doorways, Distinctions, and the Thresholds of Personhood among Older Chicagoans.’ Ethos 43 (1): 40–​58. Buch, E. D. 2018. Inequalities of Aging: Paradoxes of Independence in American Home Care. New York: New York University Press. Cohen, L. 1998. No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cumming, E. and W. Henry. 1961. Growing Old: The Process of Disengagement. New York: Basic Books. Dowd, J. J. 1975. ‘Aging as Exchange: A Preface to Theory.’ Journal of Gerontology 30 (5): 584–​94. Fry, C. L., ed. 1980. Aging in Culture and Society: Comparative Viewpoints and Strategies. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Gubrium, J. F. 1975. Living and Dying at Murray Manor. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Gullette, M. M. 2004. Aged by Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Jenkins, J. A. 2016. Disrupt Aging: A Bold New Path to Living Your Best Life at Every Age. New York: Public Affairs. Jong, E. 1994. Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir. New York: Harper Collins. Kojima, N., Kinoshita, M., and Satake, A. 1984. Kan’yaku Nihon no Koten 3: Manyōshū 2 [Japanese Classics in Translation: The Ten Thousand Leaves]. Tokyo: Shōgakukan. Lamb, S. 2000. White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender, and Body in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lamb, S. 2014. ‘Permanent Personhood or Meaningful Decline? Toward a Critical Anthropology of Successful Aging.’ Journal of Aging Studies 29 (4): 41–​52. Lamb, S, J. Robbins-​Ruszkowski, and A. I. Corwin. 2017. ‘Introduction: Successful Aging as a Twenty-​ First Century Obsession.’ In Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession: Global Perspectives, edited by S. Lamb, 1–​23. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Loe, M. 2017. ‘Comfortable Aging: Lessons for Living from Eighty-​ Five and Beyond.’ In Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession: Global Perspectives, edited by S. Lamb, 218–​29. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Matthews, S. H. 1979. The Social World of Old Women: Management of Self-​ Identity. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Mauss, M. 1967. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by I. Cunnison. New York: W. W. Norton. Morris, F. 1987. ‘Pick Your Retirement Home Ahead of Time.’ The Ithaca Journal, October 14, p. 5A. Murphy, R. F. 1987. The Body Silent. New York: Henry Holt. Myerhoff, B. G. 1984. ‘Rites and Signs of Ripening: The Intertwining of Ritual, Time, and Growing Older.’ In Age & Anthropological Theory, edited by D. I. Kertzer and J. Keith, 305–​30. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Samuel, L. R. 2017. Aging in America: A Cultural History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Savishinsky, J. 1985. ‘Pets and Family Relationships among Nursing Home Residents.’ Marriage & Family Review 8 (3–​4): 109–​34. Sontag, S. 1972. ‘The Double Standard of Aging.’ Saturday Review of the Society 55 (39): 29–​38. Tsuji, Y. 1997. ‘Encounters with the Elderly in America.’ In Distant Mirrors: America as a Foreign Culture, edited by P. R. DeVita and J. D. Armstrong. 2nd ed., 89–​99. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Tsuji, Y. 2011. ‘Rites of Passage to Death and Afterlife in Japan.’ Generations 35 (3): 28–​33. Tsuji, Y. 2016. ‘The Obligation to Give, Receive, and Make a Return: Comparing the Meanings of Reciprocity in America and Japan.’ In Distant Mirrors: America as a Foreign Culture, edited by P. DeVita. 4th ed., 242–​58. Long Grove, IL: Waveland. Tsuji, Y. 2020. Through Japanese Eyes: Thirty Years of Studying Aging in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Weinberg, J. A., ed. 2006. Still Going Strong: Memoirs, Stories, and Poems about Great Older Women. New York: The Haworth Press.

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Conundrums of caste, history, and truth: Hindu Nadar identities in urban South India Sara Dickey F. G. Bailey delighted in exploring ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ and the frequently unfixable nature of each.1 While he focused to great effect on the arenas of politics, administrations, and social sciences, his emphasis on agency within structure also makes his arguments germane to a wide variety of narratives posed as truths by ‘lay’ individuals. Here, I apply Bailey’s perspectives to accounts of caste history told by Hindu Nadars in southern India. Historically viewed as one of the lowest-​ranked castes in the region, Nadars have also become one of the wealthiest South Indian communities in the past century. As a community2 and as individuals, Nadars live with two highly disjunctive identities –​identities that carry contrasting levels of honour and stigma. Because both statuses are publicly readable and framed by largely inflexible hierarchies, because castes are seen as hereditary groups, and because persons are frequently identified by others with their extended kin groups, individual Hindu Nadars are to some extent ‘known’ by the entire community’s reputed caste and class standings. Any discursive attempt to attain or affirm respectability and social regard, then, rests on asserting claims about the community as a whole. Different sections of Nadars narrate contrasting histories, however, each presented as the ‘true’ past. Bailey’s analyses of ‘truth’, of the cognitive and social models that he dubs ‘saving lies’, and of their strategic interactive uses elucidate the purposes of Nadars’ historical narratives. In this chapter, I build on over 60 formal interviews carried out in 2018–​20 with Hindu Nadars of different classes, occupations, ages, regional origins, and genders. All live in the city of Madurai, Tamil Nadu, though none consider themselves to be native to the city. Almost all the interviews elicited a striking narrative strategy that became the catalyst for this essay, viz.: when asked to describe how their own family came to live in the city, their immediate response was to recount a centuries-​long history of all Nadars. In this chapter, I draw from this unanticipated set of accounts to examine the disparate and often incompatible ways in which these urban Nadars call upon constructions of history to negotiate and authenticate their proper social positions, and their purposes in doing so. Commerce

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is the most frequent form of livelihood for Madurai’s Hindu Nadars, and in this chapter I focus primarily on interviews with business owners, who, due largely to their class diversity, narrated the widest range of historical accounts. We generally assume that ‘truth’ has a one-​ to-​ one relationship with ­reality –​it is what ‘really’ happened or what ‘truly’ is the case. Bailey, however, contends that ‘there is not one truth: there are many truths, each manufactured within a particular system and to suit particular interests’ (1991, 94). Every truth has its competitors. All models of the world, all truths and all explanatory ideas, are of necessity a kind of fabrication: ‘a single situation can be defined –​structured or modeled –​in different and incompatible ways’ (2003, 3–​4). Why do we actively participate in a world of untrue truths? In two sage works, The Prevalence of Deceit (1991) and The Saving Lie (2003), Bailey scrutinizes the deployment of fabrications-​as-​truths in both institutional and everyday life. Our truths –​which Bailey also variously terms ideas and models –​accomplish two cognitive-​psychological and social functions, he argues. First, they help us to make sense of the world and to feel secure in it. Bailey contends in The Prevalence of Deceit that ‘individuals could not survive emotionally or cognitively without the solace and intellectual convenience of a simplified representation of their world, which gives them the feeling that to some extent they understand and therefore control their lives’ (1991, 34). Two decades later in The Saving Lie, Bailey states that everything understandable –​everything that we can talk about, argue about, or plan to deal with –​requires an idea; from that perspective ideas also are a kind of reality, something that we experience … Ideas –​to push the matter to an extreme –​can also be thought of as lies of a special kind … the ‘life lie’ or the ‘saving lie’, or the ‘lie that makes life possible’.

The life lie –​the type of truth that I examine in this ­chapter –​‘is the fiction that people build up about themselves –​who they are, what they do –​and about how their world works; they live inside the lie’. Like other saving lies, it is ‘pronounced “self-​evident” and shielded from doubt and questioning’ (2003, 2). As long as doubt is adequately deflected, the life lie enables us to navigate our social environment. Second, as Bailey explores at length in these two texts, truths serve as forces of persuasion and coercion that can convince others to see the world as we want them to. In focusing on the strategic utility of truths, Bailey contends that cognitive models not only constitute classification systems that enable us to make sense of the world; they also provide cudgels that, when wielded effectively, may convince others to view the world as we wish. He states, ‘The only way in which we can understand “truth” and “untruth”

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is to see them as rhetoric, as concepts used primarily for persuasion. They are political words, weapons for use in competition for power’ (1991, 128). Living in a highly prestige-​conscious society that is ‘strongly driven by status and rank’ (Rao 2001, 87), Nadars deploy the life lies of their community history in order to reconcile their disjunctive statuses into a highly respectable identity, and thereby gain the positive social regard and recognition that they see as their due (see Dickey 2013). Here, Bailey’s primary contribution toward grasping such social negotiations lies in its most specific points: if no single perspective can be considered fully truthful, why is a given model selected, what does it accomplish for the speaker, and by what means does a speaker try to convince others of its unique truthfulness? Thus we do not ask which history is more accurate. Instead, recognizing that the purpose of models is to ‘define situations for one another’ (2003, 123), the more fruitful questions are what model of reality is being proffered by each truth, and what it aims to achieve.

Histories and identities Among Hindu Nadars in Madurai, competing narratives of the caste’s history do indeed serve as ‘tools’ and ‘weapons’ (Bailey 2003, 131) in the struggle to designate the ‘situation’ of caste and class alignment. As noted above, the full caste’s history is crucial for explaining a family’s truth because their identity and standing are derived from the community: the entire caste’s standing must be explained and legitimated in order to achieve recognition of who they and their families ‘truly’ are. The uses of history to stake identity claims in India have long been noted with interest by scholars (see, e.g., Ali 1999; Appadurai 1981; Chakrabarty 2008). Janaki Nair cogently describes the spectrum of historical genres at play today: Between the rational and the irrational, the coherent/​closed and the incoherent/​open, between the use of positivist evidentiary protocols and mythic/​ cosmo-​temporal frames, between the master narratives of linear time and a far more disjunctive temporality, from the verifiability of truth, to the active deployment of hearsay/​faith –​there lies a flourishing but disorderly range of historical practices. (2016, 237)

Each part of this spectrum appears in the corpus of histories I was told during interviews. The diversity of genres and forms of evidence provides historical narration with a malleability that enables the strategic representation of different tellers’ divergent interests.

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Harald Tambs-​Lyche contends that ‘each caste has a narrative of how the “we” became the community observed today’ (2018, 83). Yet exactly who constitutes the caste community being commemorated can be a matter of dispute, as the narratives below will demonstrate. Hindu Nadars in Madurai form a much more diverse and sometimes contentiously divided community than most of those who appear in collective memory studies.3 This is in part because no contemporary Nadars are native to Madurai, at least according to family histories, having migrated sometime over the past 200 years from a wide variety of towns, districts, and geographical zones, all of which remain important anchors of identity. Nadars also recognize significant occupational and regional divisions and subdivisions among themselves, and these are themselves ranked within the caste. How Madurai Hindu Nadars use history –​and the ‘histories’ that they use –​to construct and claim their identities varies significantly around those divisions. The structural pillars of class and caste provide the tension that Nadar caste histories aim to resolve. Although closely intertwined, they are locally viewed as distinct forms of identity and hierarchy. Class is seen to be determined by economic, cultural, and social resources and therefore perceived as potentially mutable. In reality, however, the enculturated practices and social networks required to raise one’s class are difficult to acquire for those with little income or education, and/​or who are of low caste. Furthermore, class categories in Madurai are as suffused with moral qualities as are caste categories (Dickey 2016, 12–​13), and it is widely assumed that people of different classes have different ‘natures’. Indeed, in many ways, caste prejudices (about, for example, propensities for thoughtfulness, violence, lack of hygiene, honesty, or work ethic) have been absorbed into the ideologies of class. Yet class remains idealized as a fluid system. Caste, on the other hand, is explicitly recognized as hereditary. Ideologically rooted in embodied pollution, while tied historically to forms of labour, economy, and political power, caste does not change over the course of an individual’s life, other than in rare circumstances. Yet while caste may appear static or rigid, it is, like class, a process as well a structure. It must be continually enacted, defended, and contested, and the pliable range of historical evidence can support multiple discourses about a caste, its ranking, and its nature. In his influential essay ‘Closed Social Stratification in India’, Bailey lays out a schema of the different ‘referents of “caste” in India’ (1963, 107–​9). Of these referents, jati and caste categories are most apposite for understanding the nature of ‘Nadar’ as a contemporary identity. ‘Caste categories’, in Bailey’s terms, ‘are aggregates of persons … usually with the same traditional occupation and sometimes with the same caste name’ (1963, 107).4 They are not, however, groups, but ‘categories made up of groups with similar attributes’ (1963, 107). A jati, on the other hand, is a group,

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‘in that members not only had common attributes but interacted with one another in a way that they interacted with no member of another group’ (1963, 109). Jatis in southern India are, for example, usually endogamous, and shifts in marriage patterns often signal shifts in who ‘counts’ as a group member.

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Nadar pasts A brief review of 400 years of recorded Nadar history provides crucial context for the narratives that follow. Drawing from scholarly and local community sources in English and Tamil, I focus on Nadars’ varying efforts at caste mobility, divisions within the community, and attitudes toward the caste system itself. When I refer here to the ‘Nadar community’, I adhere to scholars’ standard contemporary usage of the caste name –​which itself is a modern term that was neither used by nor applied to most Nadars’ forebears even in, say, the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (In India, the English term ‘community’ serves today as a convenient euphemism for ‘caste’ or ‘jati’. For my own purposes in this chapter, it also serves as a somewhat ambiguous label both capacious and condensable enough to refer to anything between a category and a group.) The general view –​contested by some –​is that Nadars’ forebears were known, rather, as Shanans. A small subset of the Shanans were wealthy landowners, and carried the title of Nadan, ‘lord of the land’. (The contemporary name Nadar is a respectful form of Nadan; likewise the historical Shanans are today usually referred to as Shanars.) In the 1600s–1800s, most Shanans lived in the southernmost Tamil regions. The large majority subsisted by climbing and tapping palmyra palms and producing palm sugar and alcoholic toddy. This work was considered dishonourable not only because it was gruelling manual labour but also because alcohol is seen as a polluting substance. Shanans, who were themselves viewed as polluting to higher castes, were barred from using village wells, temples, and schools (Hardgrave 1969; Roy 2019; Sheeju 2015; Templeman 1996). European Protestant missionaries, arriving in the early 1700s, perceived the Shanans as ‘read[y]‌for new beliefs and … the conditions for a new kind of life’ (Dirks 1996, 122). Large-​scale conversion to Christianity began in the early 1800s. Protestant missions freed labourers from bonds of debt, and established schools that welcomed both Christian and Hindu Nadars (Dirks 1996; Schröder 2010). Nadars built on these educational and economic resources by establishing businesses and encouraging their children to enter mercantile and professional occupations. Their success as traders

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was made possible in part by their monopoly on palmyra products and by the rapidly growing market for palm sugar and toddy, as well as for the salt and dried fish that coastal Nadars produced (Hardgrave 1969, 96, 98, 130n). Many Hindu Nadars began to expand their trading networks further north. In the early 1800s traders began to build fortified settlements, or pettais, to protect their products and themselves from bandits along these routes. Their new wealth eventually enabled them to build their own civic institutions –​schools, temples, and banks –​and by the beginning of the 20th century the Nadars had become the ‘pre-​eminent trading community’ in the region (Damodaran 2008, 183; also see Jeganathan 2007). Through the 19th and 20th centuries, Hindu Nadars tried by various means to parlay their wealth into higher status, first by making a bid to rise within the caste system itself, and later to gain more general respect for their social, economic, and political standing outside of caste. Nadars’ first efforts included public rejection of embodied markers of their abnegation such as sartorial practices, including the prohibition against wearing clothing on their upper bodies, beginning in the early 1800s (see Kent 2004; Sheeju 2015). Several decades later, Nadars embarked on a more direct path of ‘sanskritization’ (Srinivas 1967), adopting key practices of orthodox and ‘pure’ higher castes (see Venkatachalapathy 2010). Having their standing ratified, however, required persuading higher castes to interact with Nadars in ways that recognized the aspirants’ ‘clean’ status (such as inter-​dining and admittance into higher castes’ temples), a difficult feat.5 Rather than creating acceptance, Nadars’ economic gains and attempted social advancement brought on over a century of violent retaliation by higher castes. Such attacks, sometimes deadly and widespread, culminated in 1899 in the arson and ‘plunder’ of the Sivakasi Riots, in which thousands of Nadars were killed and hundreds of homes destroyed (Hardgrave 1969, 118–​19; Roy 2019). Nadars nonetheless persisted with a variety of strategies to alter their social place. Eyeing political power as a means to shape social and legal policies to their advantage, some adopted more secular tactics. Nadars were centrally involved in various parts of the powerful Non-​Brahman Movement that began to spread in southern India in the late 19th century. Non-​­political advocacy organizations such as the Nadar Mahajana Sangam were created as well. The Sangam was founded in 1910 as a central organization to promote the welfare of Nadars. One of the Sangam’s first campaigns was to change the community name officially to Nadar, due to the pejorative connotations attached to ‘Shanan’, a change successfully instituted with the 1921 census (Hardgrave 1969, 133–​6). Finally, community institutions have also proved vital in Nadars’ efforts to improve social standing. Of these, uravinmurai (‘local associations’) and

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schools have been two of the most important. Uravinmurai, which developed out of the pettai fortifications, provide mutual aid through loans and business capital, apprenticeships in retail trades, and mentorship in business practices, and have been crucial to the caste’s collective economic security (Templeman 1996; Washbrook 1975). The uravinmurai collect an annual tax (mahamai, a ‘common good fund’) from member households. Many have used mahamai and other income to build schools, one of the key elements of Nadars’ cultural improvement strategies. Nadar-​run schools offer education to children of all castes and religions, at relatively moderate fees, and are seen as creating goodwill and respect from other members of Tamil society (Templeman 1996, 172). Such civic contributions are viewed as critical because, while extreme exclusions against Nadars are rare in urban areas today, evidence suggests that many non-​Nadars in Tamil Nadu continue to regard the community’s caste position as very low.

Nadars’ histories Because Nadar families’ social, economic, and geographical histories are directly relevant to their identity negotiations today, they inform the narratives of the past, present, and future offered by respondents.6 As noted above, my question about respondents’ families’ paths to Madurai almost always provoked accounts of Nadar caste history writ large.7 These historical narratives tended to fall into one of several types. Each type drew from history in distinct ways offering different resolutions of the disjunction between Nadars’ caste and class identities, and different truths about the community’s past and present –​functioning strategically as a life lie constructed according to the narrator’s interest. The three most common types of narratives are as follows: 1. Nadars are directly descended from the most powerful groups to have populated the Madurai region –​rulers and/​or their warriors –​who were banished to the hinterlands when their regime was ousted; their upward mobility now is simply a return to rightful standing. 2. While some of the people today called Nadars (i.e., the Shanans) were once involved in degrading labour, those who rightfully carry the Nadar name have always been higher status, and primarily involved in trade. There is little or no connection between the two sets of people. 3. Nadars were indeed discriminated against in previous centuries, but they have overcome this oppression using characteristic Nadar traits. These meritorious traits distinguish them from most other caste communities, and they may differentiate among Nadar subsets as well.8

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Unless otherwise noted, interviews were carried out in Tamil. In the sections that follow, I explore examples of these historical narratives and analyse their strategic use as life lies in the negotiation of identity.

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Nadars were rulers or warriors, centred in Madurai, who were driven out when their kingdom was overthrown Many Nadars contend that their ancestors were either the warriors of the ancient Pandya kingdom or the Pandya rulers themselves.9 The most elaborate account that I heard of Nadars’ royal origins came from the head of a large automotive firm, a man in his late 70s. Meeting in his office, I gave the usual introduction, explaining that I was carrying out a ‘cultural history of the Nadar community in Madurai’ and asking people to tell me how their families came to the city. Rathinasamy’s10 immediate response was to correct my assumption about Nadars’ geographical origins. Madurai –​the city from which the Pandyas had for centuries ruled the southern region of India –​was in fact the nucleus of Nadar power, he stated. Speaking in English, Rathinasamy explained: ‘Up until 300, 400 years back, Madurai was a site for Nadars. We had the ruling king as one of our tribe … We [also] had hundreds and hundreds of small pocket kingdoms from Sivakasi right down to Kanyakumari.’11 The Nadars were experts in martial arts, in fact so renowned that their warriors were recruited to train the soldiers of allied kingdoms. ‘And they were also a very cultured lot’, he said. ‘Very family-​ oriented, very religious. Educated to the extent available in those days.’ The Nadars, he continued, also possess a special relationship with the goddess Meenakshi, whose massive temple forms the centre of Madurai’s old city. (The god Sundareswarar, a form of Shiva who is Meenakshi’s husband, also resides there.) Rathinasamy explained: Meenakshi, though she was the empress, as everybody [today] sort of acknowledges, she was basically a daughter of one of the Pandya kings. I don’t know why she married Shiva … Of course the background story will say she went right up to Mt. Kailash, she knocked on the door, and out Shiva came. But she was a daughter of a Pandya king in Madurai.

He noted that because of this kinship relationship, Nadars (at least wealthy Nadars) were given preferential access to Meenakshi’s sanctum for ­centuries –​far from being denied entry to the temple, as in more recent history. This included exclusive use of the temple’s western gate, the gate closest to Meenakshi’s shrine, ‘for about 1500 years’. But ultimately, the situation shifted with ‘the invasion by the Vijayanagara king and the installation of his Nayak governors’. The Nayaks, Rathinasamy

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contended, banished the long-​ruling Pandyas ‘to the hinterlands’, the drylands of the eastern and southern coastal bands of the Tamil region. Vaunted forebears such as the Pandyas undergird a life lie that achieves two ends. This saving lie establishes Nadars’ royal, martial, and divine lineage, laying the groundwork for a view of the Nadar community as ‘natural’ leaders, high-​minded and committed to laudable social values –​ innate traits demonstrated over millennia. For many centuries, this model claims, Nadars were the leaders and defenders of the Tamil country. It also explains their sojourn into the wilderness as punishment by their victors, an injustice that has now been righted. Those who proffer this model speak of their high status as a given, effectively deflecting any sense of persisting stigma. This type of history was articulated most emphatically and elaborately by members of wealthy business families. Those in this category typically identify their social peers as other men and women of wealth and power, rather than as the Nadar community per se. Having achieved affluence, regard, and often influence, they espouse a history that demonstrates the naturalness and inevitability of their social standing. The implication is that caste standing may now be publicly recuperated in accord with class.

Nadars are not related to Shanars While Rathinasamy spoke of all Nadars as a single group –​a jati, in Bailey’s schema –​several other respondents saw the present-​day ‘Nadars’ instead as a caste category. They divided Nadars into ranked groups, even insisting that the highest groups share no heritage with the lowest. They most frequently distinguished ‘northern’ traders from ‘southern’ toddy tappers. Often this distinction is framed as an opposition between ‘Six Towns’ Nadars (those whose ancestors come from trade centres north and west of the palmyras and salt farms of Tirunelveli District) versus those Nadars who have arrived (at least more recently) from the palmyra lands of the southern coast. This distinction stood at the centre of some respondents’ narratives. It emerged as a source of contention between a 50-​year-​old woman, Valli, and her 60-​year-​old husband, Shanmugam, who own and manage a large food products company. As I would learn, Shanmugam’s ancestors had moved to one of the Six Towns from the southern coast. His great-​grandfather was the first family member to arrive in Madurai, where he set up a ghee shop. Later he entered the transport business, and then his son –​Shanmugam’s grandfather –​founded the family’s food products firm. Valli’s family history prior to two generations back is hazy, as she discusses below, but her father grew up in another of the Six Towns and then, as an adult, established a distributorship in a larger town west of Madurai.

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Although both Shanmugam and Valli are descended from Six Towns Nadars, two excerpts from our first interview reveal stark differences in their views about Nadars’ origins. The interview began this way: Sara [to Shanmugam]: Can you tell me where your family comes from, how they came eventually to Madurai? Shanmugam:  Normally Nadars are from down South. Our kula teyvam [ancestral deity] is near Tiruchendur. No matter which Nadars you see, they may say they come from Virudhunagar or Sivakasi [two of the Six Towns], but originally they came from [the southern towns of] Tirunelveli or Tuttukudi. Here, as background to his own family’s story, Shanmugam explicitly calls out what he sees as a false distinction between the southern Nadars and the Six Town Nadars. Valli, however, never locates her family’s origin on the southern coast. Later in the interview, I asked her to talk about her father’s kula teyvam, which was enshrined in his large joint-​family ancestral home. Her paternal grandfather, his brothers, and their families were the first to reside there, but Valli says the family does not know where they had lived previously. ‘We think we shifted from Tanjore [Tanjavur]’, she says, rooting her family to an inland city northeast of Madurai renowned for literature, visual arts, and Hindu orthodoxy. She then described her father’s majestic ancestral home: It’s modeled on a Chettinad house.12 We must have had some connection with the Nagaratta Chettiars [a high-​ranked caste of merchants and bankers]. In our area, there were many rituals that we did, like putting on the turmeric marriage cord, they were all in the Nagaratta style. We must have had some ‘thick relationship’ with the Chettiars.

Shanmugam:  These Nadars are separate. There are also the Panaiyeri Nadars [Palmyra-​Climbing Nadars]. Sara [to both]:  Which Nadar groups do you belong to? Valli:  [in English] ‘Original’ Nadars. Shanmugam:  We don’t know exactly what we are, actually. If you look at them all together, Nadars came from –​ Here Valli cuts her husband off abruptly: Hello! You cannot say that. Original Nadars only came from six towns, from the western direction … They didn’t join with Tuttukudi. They came for business. While Shanmugam describes all Nadars as having a common origin along the southern coast, even stating that his trading family descended from palm tappers, Valli adamantly denies any assertions of related origins.

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She substantiates this by claiming a status of ‘original’ Nadar, whose clean caste name had been appropriated, she implies, by unrefined people who carried out degrading, polluting labour. Valli underscores this by associating her northern family with the high-​status Chettiars who gave her relatives respect and accord, and with the city of Tanjavur, far removed from the southern coast. Her family’s roots are linked to the arts and to Brahmanical Hindu orthodoxy, not toddy tapping. Thus she fends off any concerns about discrimination against ‘Nadars’, because the true Nadars were never –​even in the past –​treated as low caste. Those who portray their elite section of the caste category as the only legitimate Nadars reject a unified historical narrative provided in accounts like Rathinasamy’s. Although eminently successful, speakers like Valli feel tainted by the association with Shanars. These self-​proclaimed ‘legitimate’ Nadars outline a fiercely corrected past as a means of resurrecting their own community’s true history. Unlike Rathinasamy, they admit no stigma in their past whatsoever –​instead demanding recognition as a people who have always, continuously, been worthy of respect. This life lie reinforces the stigma applied to others, employing key codes of caste inequality –​ ­pollution and labour –​to exclude others and to claim the Nadar mantle as a member of a higher caste.

Recognition of past discrimination, overcome by Nadars’ innate traits The most common reply to my question about family history, however, claimed no elevated origin for Nadars. Instead, it portrayed a story of upward mobility grounded in the work ethic, entrepreneurship, mutual aid, and trustworthiness of the community. This type of narrative often begins explicitly with Nadars’ former treatment as untouchable, and then emphasizes how Nadars overcame this discrimination by dint of merit. It was told by respondents across class, age, and regional origin. But while such accounts are largely celebratory, they can also be deployed to denigrate either more highly ranked subsets of the Nadars, or those lower castes who have been ‘unable’ to ‘advance’ themselves. Sundaran, a 65–​year-​old building supply business owner who is heavily involved in the administration of several Nadar secondary schools, and who spoke primarily in English during our interview, began his account by casting doubt on the Pandya legend, noting, ‘That is one story, but we do not know what is true.’ He emphasized instead the resources that Nadars had built for themselves in recent centuries. He told me, We were called Shanars before. They were actually economically backward, socially backward, but now they have actually pulled themselves up only

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through education … The uravinmurai was formed because we were all ostracized. They had to group themselves to fight back for their rights.

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Nadar values and institutions enabled their early success in trading, he argued: They were traveling back and forth, and needed a safe place to stay, so they established the pettai … So, we came up through trading. Made money, and kept it. Even ladies at home, they had cows there, the dung they sold, the milk they sold, then they bought gold, they bought lands –​women –​at home. While men were going out and working. So this is how they saved and they brought themselves out of poverty.

Other factors in their success, he added, included tightly knit family bonds and trustworthiness in business. To some extent, this form of the life lie is simply celebratory. Such tellings impute vaunted values to the speakers and to their community as a whole. In other cases, however, these tributes shift into explicitly drawn contrasts with others. Two accounts help us to discern these sides of this narrative. In the first, a middle-​class businessman reverses Valli’s ranking, calling out class hierarchies among Nadars based on regional origin. In the second, a middle-​class professional disparages Dalits for lacking the character that would enable them to achieve. Muthusamy, who owns a small grocery store, also emphasized core Nadar values in describing the community’s rise from dryland origins to inland trading. He illustrated these values with the story of his own family’s upward mobility, then deployed them strategically to elevate his own section of the Nadars –​those who had once worked in manual labour on the southern coast. His paternal grandfather had struggled in the salt fields in Tuttukkudi District. To escape that back-​breaking labour, in 1935 the family left to stay with relatives in Madurai. His grandmother sold vegetables from ‘a stand in the street, with all her five children around her feet’ and his grandfather carted palm sugar on foot from their distant village to sell in the city. ‘It was a time of suffering’, he said, until the sons grew old enough to begin working in other Nadars’ grocery shops. When his own parents married, they committed to educating their children so that the next generation could escape ‘such difficult work’. Coming to the present, Muthusamy continued with his account of aspiration and achievement, stating, I work 18 hours a day. Only six hours of rest … In all the [Nadar] shops near mine, that’s how it is. [But] 20 years from now, no Nadars will be in business. And if they are, they’ll be very high up.

In contrast, ‘50 years ago other people were thinking, Nadars can’t reach such a level, they are a palm sugar [i.e., polluted] people. If you touch them,

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you will be polluted’. When I asked, ‘What do those people think now?’ he replied, ‘Now, they can’t do anything. No matter what, we are Number One in Madurai District … Before they said we can’t go inside the temple. Now, if you go and look all around that very temple, it’s Nadars who are the millionaires [kotiswaran].’ Furthermore, not only have outsiders’ views of Nadars shifted, so too have some Nadars’ internal judgements about northern and southern groups. Muthusamy stated, Sivakasi Nadars,13 if they see us, they’ll put us down. Sixty years ago, we [southern Nadars] were always in the shop, we were selling lowly things like tamarind, but they were high-​level … They were oil merchants, lentil and grain merchants, they were selling fireworks and paints.

Now, the standing has been reversed: The Six Towns people, they work only ten hours a day. They open the office at 10:00, go to lunch at 2:00, back only in the early evening … Now, when they want brides for their sons, they come to us. Because our boys won’t be lazy, they’ll work hard, and no matter what they’ll support the girl correctly and keep her in style and comfort … [The boy] has that attitude from the place he is born.

Muthusamy emphasizes first how Nadars have proven higher castes wrong, achieving what was previously unthinkable to the public at large. Next, he tears down the distinction that Valli had made between Six Towns Nadars and southerners –​and then claims that today the quintessential Nadar values belong to his group only, calling the others lazy and irresponsible. Alienated from the dry palmyra scrubland, he implies, northern Nadars have failed to maintain true Nadar standards. In other cases, however, a similarly value-​laden contrast is drawn with members of (other) low-​ranked castes. I heard an example one afternoon when I had gone to visit Shanmugam and Valli, about one year after my first interview with them. They were talking with a 55–​year-​old lawyer named Mani, a relative of Valli’s, who had just returned from addressing a Nadar history conference. Mani had an intense style of focus and speech. He asked me to explain my research. After listening closely, he stood up to leave, then abruptly stopped to drive home the unique qualities of Nadars. ‘Nadars burst up like a spring from the ground!’ he enjoined, emphasizing an almost autochthonous nature for the caste and an unheralded but potent arrival onto the social scene of the South. He then requested me to explain ‘in one word’ why Nadars have been so much more successful than most other castes in southern India. When I proved unable to condense all possible qualities into a single term, Mani shook his head. The one word, he said, was ‘necessity’ (here he used the English term). Because Nadars were downtrodden by other people, they

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rose up and resisted oppression and plunged their way forward. ‘Necessity’ led to the uravinmurai and the investment in businesses and social institutions that enabled the Nadars to keep rising. Intrigued, I asked how he would compare Nadars to others who had been equally oppressed. Why, I suggested, didn’t those others (I referred specifically to two local Dalit castes) feel the ‘necessity’ to reject their degrading situation and to succeed economically? ‘Well’, he responded, those castes are not driven like Nadars are, they don’t care about their oppression. In other words, they do not have the necessity –​this is the key difference that Nadars have from other communities. Other jatis don’t have a full community ready to fight against discrimination –​did any other jati fight when told they could not have mustaches, wear upper cloths, or enter temples? No.

Here, having reached my limits of agreeing to be agreeable, I interjected that I knew several people from those ‘other jatis’ who would strongly disagree. Mani, displeased, submitted that, yes, there might be one or two people in each of such caste groups who resisted their oppression, but the others just accepted their situation meekly. ‘Nadars are different because they fought. They weren’t passive and weak … For us’, he said in English, ‘it was the necessity to survive –​it was survival of the fittest.’ In these stories that pay tribute to Nadars’ determination, tenacity, resilience, and a suite of other meritorious values, Nadars’ history relies not on past glory for the validation of the community’s true worth, nor on the disavowal of past stigma, but on innate qualities that allowed caste members to overcome hardship and degradation by self-​reliantly building their own social institutions and gaining self-​respect. Thus while they anchor their accounts in the truth of the Shanars’ subjugation and suffering, there is nothing natural in that previous oppression. What is natural –​that is, embedded in the soil and in their character –​are the attributes that enabled them to overcome the oppression. They document a change in what is essentially a merged caste and class: as their laudable qualities and assiduous efforts improved their economic circumstances, they also brought greater respect to the Nadar caste as a whole. Unlike Rathinasamy, then, these speakers portray Nadars’ success as a contemporary achievement based in merit, rather than a recuperation of a past rank.14 These values make ‘real’ Nadars who they are, whether downtrodden by higher castes or disparaged by elite members of their own castes. Not surprisingly, characterological differences can also be drawn against other castes who are found wanting due to an innate passivity or other reasons inherent to their own natures. Such life lies, then, can be used to counter the prejudice of higher-​ranked Nadars as well as that of outsiders, while also reproducing discrimination against lower-​ranked castes.

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Conclusion Nadars’ efforts to navigate their standing in urban social life by setting forth narratives of caste history underscore several aspects of ‘caste’ and of ‘history’. The narratives included in this chapter demonstrate the processual nature of caste identities, the diversity of interests among members of a single caste community, and the qualities of historical recountings that are especially well suited for building a ‘lie that makes life possible’. The multiplicity of truths that account for any given situation in Nadars’ narratives, along with their frequent incongruity –​even when the narrators are restricted to middle-​and upper-​class business owners –​is demonstrated through Nadars’ continuous efforts to resolve the discomfiting fit between caste stigma and class honour. Each truth tale, each life lie, explains and legitimizes an identity that urgently requires resolution. Narratives of history allow urban residents to construe the past in a fashion that, as Bailey argues, helps to navigate their present. Because the popular usage of history incorporates an exceptionally wide array of potential sources and evidentiary forms, the same community’s history can be told in vastly different ways (here correlated largely with the class of the teller). Every form of these recuperative histories is an explanation, a life lie that asserts a vision of the world that is both reassuring to those who hold it and, they hope, convincing to those who hear it.

Notes 1 Field research was supported by a National Science Foundation Senior Research Award and by funding from Bowdoin College. I am grateful to my colleague Rajasekaran Jesudasan for crucial assistance in carrying out interviews and for generative conversations on the research material, and to Professor S. Arokinathan for deftly guiding my reading of Tamil sources. I also thank V. A. Vidya, Diane Mines, Tulasi Srinivas, Geoffrey Burkhart, and Rachel Sturman for fruitful discussions and debates, and the editors of this volume and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on the chapter. 2 I discuss colloquial and analytical usages of the term ‘community’ below. 3 Examples from South India include Headley 2011, Moffatt 1979, and Sekine 1993. 4 For most of India, it would be more accurate to say that members of a caste category sometimes had the same traditional occupation. 5 See Bailey (2001, 96–​100) for a carefully parsed model of this process. 6 All of the interviews drawn upon in this chapter were carried out with research associate Rajasekaran Jesudasan, a fieldworker in his own right. Rajasekaran, who was raised and educated in Madurai and whom I have known since 1985,

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possesses the social connections that made it possible for me to interview relatively well-​off business owners, a demographic with whom I had previously had little connection in Madurai. 7 Although these histories were recounted in an interview setting with a foreign anthropologist and a Madurai native non-​Nadar researcher, and thus might appear to be explanations aimed at convincing an atypical audience, they overlap closely with oral and written accounts of Nadar history produced in other venues, as well as with public discourses. (See Nair [2016] for related examples.) 8 A fourth category of response holds that Nadars, who were treated as untouchable in the past, must now resist caste inequality by using their relative economic and social privilege to ally with contemporary Dalits (or ‘scheduled castes’, formerly Untouchables). These accounts formed the smallest set by far, and none of the respondents was from a business family. 9 The Pandyas first appear in Tamil literature in the 4th c. BCE, and were dominant in the 6th–10th and 13th–14th c. CE. Other jatis also claim the Pandya rulers or warriors as ancestors (see, e.g., Headley 2011). 10 All narrators’ names are pseudonyms. 11 Sivakasi is southwest of Madurai; Kanyakumari is at the southern tip of the subcontinent, roughly 160 km distant. 12 Chettinad is a region to the northeast of Madurai, long considered the home of the Nagaratta Chettiars. 13 Sivakasi, one of the Six Towns, is a commercial and industrial center, site of numerous Nadar-​owned businesses in fireworks, safety matches, and printing. Muthusamy narrates not only the ranking of different business occupations, but also the shifting jati lines within a caste category as they are marked by marriage alliances. 14 Locating the source of merit in caste stands in stark contrast to the highest castes’ efforts to erase both caste and the causal relationship between caste and merit, whereby merit is fashioned as ‘an embodied ideal’ independent of a person’s caste (Subramanian 2015, 296). Yet in both cases, the concept of merit is invoked to demonstrate that achievements have been earned and are highly deserved.

References Ali, D. 1999. ‘Introduction.’ In Invoking the Past, edited by Daud Ali, 1–​ 12. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Appadurai, A. 1981. ‘The Past as a Scarce Resource.’ Man, n.s. 16 (2) 201–​19. Bailey, F. G. 1963. ‘Closed Social Stratification in India.’ European Journal of Sociology 4 (1): 107–​24. Bailey, F. G. 1991. The Prevalence of Deceit. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bailey, F. G. 2001. Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Bailey, F. G. 2003. The Saving Lie. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Chakrabarty, D. 2008. ‘The Public Life of History: An Argument Out of India.’ Postcolonial Studies 11 (2): 169–​90. Damodaran, H. 2008. India’s New Capitalists. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Dickey, S. 2013. ‘Apprehensions: On Gaining Recognition as Middle-​ Class in Madurai.’ Contributions to Indian Sociology, n.s. 47 (2): 217–​43. Dickey, S. 2016. Living Class in Urban India. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Dirks, N. B. 1996. ‘The Conversion of Caste: Location, Translation, and Appropriation.’ In Conversion to Modernities, edited by P. van der Veer, 115–​63. New York: Psychology Press. Hardgrave, R. L., Jr. 1969. The Nadars of Tamilnad. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Headley, Z. E. 2011. ‘Caste and Collective Memory in South India.’ In A Companion to the Anthropology of India, edited by I. Clark-​Decès, 98–​113. Oxford: Blackwell. Jeganathan, N. 2007. Virutunakar Varalaaru [History of Virudhunagar], Volume 1. Virudhunagar, India: Jasper Printers. Kent, E. 2004. Converting Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moffatt, M. 1979. An Untouchable Community in South India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nair, J. 2016. ‘Textbook Controversies and the Demand for a Past: Public Lives of Indian History.’ History Workshop Journal 82 (1): 235–​54. Rao, V. 2001. ‘Celebrations as Social Investments: Festival Expenditures, Unit Price Variation, and Social Status in South India.’ Journal of Development Studies 38 (1): 71–​97. Roy, L. 2019. Nadar Varalaaru: Karuppaa …? Kaaviyaa …? [Nadar History: Black …? or Saffron …?]. Madurai, India: Lajapathiroy. Schröder, U. 2010. ‘No Religion, But Ritual? Robert Caldwell and The Tinnevelly Shanars.’ In Ritual, Caste, and Religion in Colonial South India, edited by 60. Wiesbaden, Germany: M. Bergunder, H. Frese, and U. Schröder, 131–​ Harrassowitz. Sekine, Y. 1993. Pollution Theory and Harijan Strategies among South Indian Tamils. Doctoral thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Sheeju, N. V. 2015. ‘The Shanar Revolts, 1822–​99: Towards a Figural Cartography of the Pretender.’ South Asia Research 35 (3): 298–​317. Srinivas, M. N. 1967. Social Change in Modern India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Subramanian, A. 2015. ‘Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste.’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 57 (2): 291–​322. Tambs-​Lyche, H. 2018. ‘Historicity, Subalternity and Caste.’ Rivista degli Studi Orientali XCI (2): 81–​93. Templeman, D. 1996. The Northern Nadars of Tamil Nadu. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Venkatachalapathy, A. R. 2010. ‘ “More Kshatriya than Thou!” Debating Caste and Ritual Ranking in Colonial Tamilnadu.’ In Ritual, Caste, and Religion in Colonial South India, edited by M. Bergunder, H. Frese, and U. Schröder, 274–​92. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz. Washbrook, D. 1975. ‘The Development of Caste Organisation in South India 1880 to 1925.’ In South India, edited by C. J. Baker and D. A. Washbrook, 150–​203. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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The moral guises of injustice: from Bisipara to Aotearoa Erica Prussing As one of his last several doctoral students in the 1990s, I appreciated the opportunity to have numerous conversations with F. G. Bailey about cultural change, politics, and morality. I remember being impressed then, and remain so now, by Bailey’s striking ability to think and talk through how these themes intertwine in social life across widely varying times and places. His research energies at the time were focused on producing on a trio of books for Cornell University Press (1996a, 1996b, 1998) that addressed these themes, through revisiting his 1950s-​era fieldwork at multiple sites in the Odisha (then Orissa) region of eastern India. We interwove discussion of these with our main conversational focus, which was my dissertation project about women’s experiences with substance abuse in a Native North American reservation community. As a fledgling ethnographer, I was just beginning to situate an initially more psychological analysis of cultural change within the context of the broader politics surrounding tribal control of health services in the United States. Bailey was engaged in far more nuanced analysis as he reanalysed both previously published and unpublished case studies of political conflicts from past fieldwork. These conflicts were situations that featured diverse social actors, multiple political agendas, and changing cultural resources, such that their outcomes were not predetermined or easily predictable. Moral claims figured prominently within each, and Bailey’s approach emphasized how these claims served multiple purposes – sometimes to support justice, but other times to frame injustice in a positive moral guise that aimed to make it socially acceptable. I have kept in mind Bailey’s rich, multilayered analytical approach to the role of moral claims within political conflicts within my own evolving work about efforts to promote Indigenous health equity. In this chapter, I juxtapose a current ethnographic project about epidemiology and Indigenous health equity onto one of Bailey’s retrospective analyses from the 1990s, in order to demonstrate the continuing relevance of his ethnographic insights into the workings of morality during political conflicts. Specifically, I try to pick up on Bailey’s keen eye for how participants in political conflicts regularly reframe what others experience as injustice in morally positive terms,

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in their attempts to achieve their own agendas. I draw most centrally from his 1996 The Witch Hunt: Or, the Triumph of Morality, in which Bailey documents how key participants in a conflict in the village of Bisipara ended up framing the persecution of one man as a positive act in support of the collective good. For comparison, I draw an example from my own current multi-​sited ethnographic study of epidemiological researcher/​practitioners who are working to promote Indigenous health equity. This example specifically focused on the twists and turns of a political conflict in Aotearoa New Zealand, in which Māori researchers have contended with recurrent political efforts to deny that ethnicity patterns health and social inequities – and to frame this denial within a moral rubric of alleged ‘fairness’.

Bailey’s ethnography: understanding morality, politics, and cultural change In The Witch Hunt, Bailey focuses on a series of events in the village of Bisipara in the 1950s that he struggled at the time to fully understand. Community members moved from a conflicted and somewhat contradictory process of interpreting the cause of a tragic death in the village to intensively scapegoating one member as responsible for it. Enacting his own take on the extended-​case method of the Manchester School, Bailey emphasizes how this situation could have played out in multiple ways. Local cultural conventions included organizing social and political life through structuring social relationships by caste, employing the related institution of a village council (panchayat) in local governance, and justifying both of these cultural institutions with references to morally-​vested ideas about their beneficence and rightfulness. All of these conventions were changing in the 1950s in response to a diversification in economic resources that cut across castes, an unprecedented extension of national institutions of governance into the region, and local people’s awareness of new moralities promoted by Gandhi and other post-​independence national leaders (which reframed caste hierarchies, for example, as morally unacceptable). As Bailey emphasized in earlier analyses (1957, 1960), he was especially interested in how political conflicts under these complex and changing conditions featured ways of thinking, talking, and acting that creatively bridged or hybridized the distinctive cultural worlds (e.g., caste and nation) that were now interacting to shape village life. In some conflicts that he witnessed in Bisipara and other regional villages, newer or less conventionalized frameworks for thinking and acting came to dominate outcomes, while in others longer-​standing local conventions came to do so. In The Witch Hunt, Bailey ethnographically examines how an unusual and therefore especially tragic

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death in Bisipara led to the enactment of a public moral drama in which a man already marginalized by virtue of caste, Tuta, ended up being targeted, blamed, and heavily sanctioned. Within this scapegoating logic, he was considered to have caused a teenaged girl’s death from malaria by keeping a spirit being that had gone rogue. This being was helping him to generate wealth through new strategies, formerly unavailable to those of lower caste status in recent history when wealth, land access, and higher caste had been inextricably intertwined. Bailey attends closely to the moralizing references that panchayat members made to justify their actions toward Tuta. Their statements emphasized how their decisions represented the collective good of the village. This assertion seemed to be accepted by others in the village, at least for all appearances in public social life. Yet Bailey emphasizes how those in power within conventional local, social, and political institutions were exercising their own self-​interest, by facilitating an outcome that supported the existing caste structure, benefited the panchayat and sirdar (the local political leader), and otherwise reasserted conventionalized modes of thought and action in the face of potential alternatives – all at substantial material and social cost to Tuta. He describes how numerous individuals with whom he interacted seemed to recognize this contrast between appearances and reality yet still did not challenge the outcome, seeming to find it to be acceptable – or if not entirely that, then at least to be a tolerable level or form of injustice. Bailey’s analysis foregrounds the ‘ambiguity and ambivalence on every side’ (p. 200) that shapes how interactions unfold in complex political ­conflicts – even as moments of consequence, public consensus, and assertions of moral clarity can and do coalesce out of the mix. Moral assertions play multiple roles in these processes: they figure as means for calling for needed change, yet participants also use them to express ambivalence about change and/​or to attempt to legitimate new or continuing forms of injustice. Bailey’s approach underscores how there is never a full and complete ethnographic explanation for why a specific outcome comes about in any particular situation. Knowing social structure, economic resources, local social history, and other salient moral and material resources instead helps an ethnographer to ascertain the ‘cultural deck of cards’ (p. 204) that shape the conditions of possibility within a given situation of conflict, influencing the strategies that individual social actors can use to articulate particular interpretations (or ‘models’, in his terminology) of what is happening and needs to happen next, as they work to promote the outcome to the conflict that they desire. An ethnographer’s task is therefore to document the culturally shaped social interactions through which multiple possible outcomes emerge and evolve, and either become foreclosed or remain active as the situation plays out. References to morality permeate this process, as different participants both

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articulate their own claims and counter one another’s – all working to frame their own agendas and aspirations as good, right, and just.

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Quantifying justice: epidemiology for Indigenous health equity Over the past several decades, intersecting transnational trends of activism for Indigenous rights and global interest in ‘evidence-​based’ and ‘data-​ driven’ decision-​making have produced an expanding transnational network of health researchers working to promote Indigenous health equity. Those who work in epidemiology are strategically engaging the high credibility often accorded to scientific and especially quantitative data, in support of fundamentally moral claims about needs to redress Indigenous health inequities. Examples of such work include highlighting both the extent of health disparities experienced by Indigenous communities globally (e.g., Anderson et al. 2016), and how the limitations of available data systematically underestimate their scope (e.g., Freemantle et al. 2015). In order to challenge conventional representations of Indigenous health and generate new attention to promoting equity, researchers use epidemiological methods to monitor disparities in Indigenous health compared to majority groups in national populations, and to assess how colonialism and its legacies serve as sociopolitical determinants of these patterns (see also Prussing 2018). I first noticed this emerging field of epidemiology for Indigenous health equity as an aside during my dissertation fieldwork in the 1990s; I was able to invest in learning more about it between 2005–​11, and over the past decade have focused my ethnographic research on better understanding its workings and impacts. I was drawn to this topic by a sense that critical and post-​positivist approaches to quantitative sciences deserve a higher profile in medical anthropology’s important critiques of conventional metrics and measures in global health (e.g., Adams 2016), coupled with a sense that unfolding discussions of these alternative approaches within science and technology studies (e.g., Harding 2015) would benefit from richer ethnographic examples. Proposing to help ethnographically document their work in ways that spoke to these issues, I approached a variety of pro-​equity epidemiologists working to promote Indigenous health, and found that the overwhelming majority were interested in the project (see also Prussing 2020). The facts that I have earned a Master’s in Public Health that specializes in epidemiology, and that my projects use critical and participatory methodologies (e.g., Denzin, Lincoln, and Smith 2008) that overlap substantially with those central to pro-​equity research, has helped to facilitate these conversations and relationships.

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I conducted ten months of multi-​sited ethnographic fieldwork between 2013 and 2016 with an interconnected network of epidemiologists working to promote Indigenous health equity in three regional settings: the continental US, Hawai’i, and Aotearoa New Zealand. I conducted participation observation in workplaces, at health events, and at health research conferences; completed interviews with epidemiological researchers and others who use their data in practice or advocacy (n=​47 across settings); and compiled research publications and related documents. 85 per cent of the researchers interviewed self-​identified as Indigenous, and 15 per cent as members of either settler majority populations or other ethnic groups. Almost all (88 per cent) had completed graduate-​level professional degrees, primarily MDs and/​or PhDs but also Master’s degrees; and a substantial majority (72 per cent) had been working in Indigenous health for between 10 and 20 years. Researchers are drawn into pro-​ equity research in epidemiology for varying reasons, but many describe finding quantitative data and analysis both intellectually enjoyable and politically useful in advocacy for justice in health. When I asked about how she first encountered epidemiology, for example, one Māori researcher recalled ‘I suppose I was interested in justice, and saw the power of numbers that could kind of contribute to a more just society.’ She had specifically noticed how the power of numbers to more accurately document the scope of health disparities could help support moral arguments about redressing these injustices. She and other researchers also recalled growing up within or around Indigenous families and communities, aware of the heavy toll taken by both chronic (e.g., cardiovascular disease, diabetes) and infectious diseases (e.g., rheumatic fever, tuberculosis) on their relatives and neighbours. Many also encountered or witnessed racial discrimination in economic opportunities and housing, as well as in health care, and understood that all of these dimensions of experience were interconnected. Coming into epidemiology with such detailed contextual knowledge of how discrimination and other colonial legacies inform in Indigenous population health patterns, researchers recognize and challenge epidemiology’s conventional tendencies toward reductionistic measures and causal claims. As a recent publication by Māori epidemiologists explains, their work ‘challenges underlying assumptions of prevailing epidemiological methodologies and methods, proposing resistant and alternative ways to think about quantitative data, to formulate research questions, and to undertake research’ (Paine et al. 2020, 187). One experienced Māori researcher elaborated on this during an interview, explaining how this approach reconfigures the ways in which work is conventionally done

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through the research cycle of designing studies, collecting and analysing data, and disseminating findings: generally, the question, you know, will have been conceived of by Māori. [EP: Yeah.] And you know, it’s a question that’s of importance. It’s a Māori priority. We use appropriate methods of data collecting. And appropriate, non-​ deficit analysis and interpretive frameworks. [EP: Right, OK.] And I guess, make recommendations to end users of research – whether that’s community participants, or whether or not it’s the Ministry of Health or my colleagues [in medicine and public health] and various other end users. Recommendations that are very much focused around systems, and professionals, and wider determinants.

This work therefore explicitly aims to counter individual-​level and victim-​ blaming themes in conventional epidemiological approaches to Indigenous health, and to call for systemic or structural change. As another Māori researcher explained to me, this approach to epidemiology fits within broader trajectories of Indigenous activism for justice: ‘Quantitative research is just one tool with which to fight the fight for Māori … Indigenous research needs to use whatever methods it has available to investigate and find answers for Indigenous communities.’ Such statements also highlight how responding to Indigenous community experiences and priorities is a central orientation within this pro-​equity approach to epidemiology. While researchers frequently encounter political conflicts in all regional settings for this project, I focus here on the recent twists and turns in the politics surrounding racism and health in Aotearoa New Zealand in order to illustrate Bailey’s approach to the many moral guises that injustice can take, as participants in political conflicts work to frame and reframe their agendas as good, right, and just. About 15 per cent of the population in Aotearoa New Zealand identifies as Māori, and Māori advocacy for justice in education, language, political representation, and health has been actively recognized through government actions like establishing Māori directorates within government ministries, and the founding of Te Puni Kōkiri as a distinct Ministry of Māori Development in 1992. The founding of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975 figures for many as a watershed moment that set the stage for these subsequent developments. The Treaty of Waitangi, or Te Tiriti o Waitangi, refers to the English and Māori language versions, respectively, of a foundational document for Aotearoa New Zealand from 1840 that established the role of Māori in the new British colonial nation. Māori advocates maintain that as Treaty partners, they have a right to participate fully in decisions that impact their communities and the nation, and to have their interests and aspirations protected. Claims of Treaty violation can be brought to the Waitangi Tribunal, and a ‘Health Services and Outcomes

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Inquiry’ is presently underway (since 2019) in response to enduring health inequities. As one Māori researcher noted:

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We see our work from a Treaty of Waitangi rights point of view. So, the third article of the Treaty is about Māori enjoying the same rights and privileges as British subjects. So I see that sort of monitoring of disparities and the freedom to be free from racial discrimination as an Article Three issue.

Her perspective was echoed and elaborated upon by others, a number of whom added that what Māori researchers are ultimately doing is monitoring how the government monitors their health. Another Māori researcher, for example, explained his sense that: We very much view looking at disparities as a way of monitoring the Crown [New Zealand government]. So it’s not about, you know, that THEY should be looking at inequalities to try and reduce them and meet the needs of Māori, [EP: OK, yeah.] but we – it’s also OUR right to be able to monitor them and look at inequalities and if they – if the Crown is or isn’t addressing them adequately.

Pro-​equity epidemiology is therefore about monitoring how disparities in health are being framed or defined, given how this shapes whether and how they are being addressed. By the early 2000s, Māori pro-​equity researchers were focused on making a case for how racism and other legacies of colonialism have differentially shaped health for Māori as compared to European-​ derived (Pākehā) groups in Aotearoa New Zealand. More experienced researchers recalled how national policy and public discussion in the 1970s and 1980s often fused a moral value on ‘equality’ with that of ‘fairness’, resulting in policies that were formulated and justified in terms of treating everyone equally. As one Māori health research and advocate recalled, these prominent themes made it difficult through the 1990s to make a compelling case that institutionalized injustice required systemic change: it was pretty, I suppose, pretty underdeveloped? [EP: OK.] It was really hard? [EP: Yeah.] It was hard because there hadn’t been the thinking about, about what you would do by trying to convince the system that they were doing things differently for Māori people as opposed to non-​Māori people. And you were working in an environment in which everybody felt that it was really important to do it the same for everybody. And the idea that they perhaps weren’t doing the same for everybody and that maybe in order to, you know, tip the differential you actually had to do something different? [EP: Right, OK.] So that was an interesting time! (laughs)

Māori researchers at this time were advocating for equal health targets for key national public health goals like screening for disease, achieving immunization coverage, and so forth but the Ministry of Health continued to

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set target levels differently for Māori and non-​Māori. Its 1997 report on national progress toward health outcomes includes a text box in the table of contents, for example, highlighting how separate targets for Māori were set for 14 of the 25 health outcomes discussed (New Zealand Ministry of Health 1997). Immunization coverage rates serve as one example. Alongside a higher burden of infectious disease among Māori compared to Pākehā populations, Māori researchers and the Ministry of Health have long recognized significantly lower immunization rates for Māori compared to other population groups in Aotearoa New Zealand. The 1997 report noted above cites data from 1992 showing full immunization coverage at age 2 at 60 per cent for non-​Māori and 40 per cent for Māori. It specifies target goals of increasing those receiving all recommended vaccinations to 85 per cent by 1997, and 95 per cent by 2000 – with a separate and lower target of within 10 per cent of this percentage for ‘areas or populations with low coverage’ (1997, 89). On the same page, however, the document also contradicts this point by stating a goal for immunization rates to ‘match the non-​Māori rate by 1997’. While this goal had not been either unequivocally stated or achieved in 1997, Māori pro-​equity advocacy to include it successfully got referenced in print here. Researchers described to me how, by the 2000s, they had begun to combine epidemiological data about patterned disparities in population health with clearer and more developed frameworks from transnational pro-​equity researchers, about racism and discrimination as determinants of these patterns. By 2002, their advocacy on this front had led to racial discrimination being explicitly referenced in the national Ministry of Health policy for Māori health, He Korowai Oranga. But their efforts to use this more developed call for justice to continue pushing for more equitable public health targets was quickly complicated by shifts in the national political climate. Politician Don Brash, for example, delivered his widely publicized Orewa speech in 2004 and cited one cherry-​picked sociological study of poverty to claim that being Māori does not in fact consistently correspond with need. By this logic, since inequities do not exist, it is divisive and damaging to the nation to continue to engage in what Brash termed a ‘grievance industry’ through the Waitangi Tribunal, and creating policy on the basis of race or ethnicity is therefore unnecessary and unfair (Brash 2004). Māori researchers are immersed in data documenting that such inequities do exist, however. As one researcher commented, it is vital to focus on ‘ethnicity – which in New Zealand IS proxy for need because it’s a racist society.’ Yet the denial of systemic inequities across Māori and non-​Māori populations helped to fuel election wins by Brash’s political party (the National Party), and political pressure mounted to shift from ‘race-​based’

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thinking and programming to a ‘performance-​based’ focus that responds to ‘need’. This focus circled back to the moral reframing of a one-​size-​fits-​ all logic in terms of ‘fairness’, as in earlier decades. By denying the extensive body of knowledge about how ethnicity patterns inequity, Brash and his supporters aimed to blunt attention to racial discrimination in national policy and public discussions. In the health sector, the impacts of these pressures are reflected in how the Ministry of Health’s Māori health chartbooks (Tatau Kahukura) in 2006 and 2010 backed off from the 2002 Māori health strategy, He Korowai Oranga, and no longer explicitly mentioned racial discrimination. The Ministry’s 2014 ‘refresh’ of He Korowai Oranga did the same. As government programmes faced pressure to focus on need-​based outcomes, they also engaged with global trends of neoliberalization that included ‘performance-​ based’ monitoring of programmes. Most Māori researchers were skeptical of such monitoring via performance targets – recognizing how this approach can still foster inadequate investment in substantive change, given people’s tendencies to determine ways to ‘fulfill’ targets that do not address systems and structures (see also Adams 2016). Yet all recognized that setting targets was a major and enduring feature of national public health planning, so felt that it was important to intervene and shape this process. Māori researchers were able to continue leveraging their credibility in quantitative methods to serve as scientific consultants in national health planning, and a number recognized that this confluence of ideas about ‘fairness’ and ‘measurable performance’ provided new opportunities to push toward more equitable targets. As one Māori researcher involved in these discussions explained to me, performance-​ based metrics required programmes to very clearly document how they were achieving their stated goals to deliver outcomes that are ‘fair’. In other words, while referencing ‘fairness’ to deny inequities is more feasible in speeches and other discursive forums in which rhetoric is central, ‘performance’ assessment is a discursive field that relies on data. Confronted with continuing inequities in outcomes like childhood immunization rates, she kept asking why targets for Māori health differed from those for the majority population, if ‘we are supposed to be delivering a system that gives the same health outcomes … for all population groups?’ This question intentionally highlighted the disjuncture between denials of inequity reframed in the positive glow of fair and just responsiveness to need, and the copious evidence for inequalities in health. Others involved in these discussions were therefore pressed to justify how ‘fairness’ is in fact achieved, by holding Māori health to lower standards than non-​Māori. Partly in response to such instances of advocacy by Māori researchers, national targets for health outcomes like childhood immunization rates

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were revised for the first time to be equal across all population sectors by the mid-​2000s (e.g., New Zealand Ministry of Health 2016). This solution ended up being acceptable both to those focused on the moral value of ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’, yet also those who were advocating for equity by challenging ideas and practices that normalize poorer outcomes for Māori. Leveraging the credibility of data, and recognizing the contradictions that it highlighted between ‘fairness’ and equity in this instance, is what enabled Māori researchers to apply sufficient pressure for change – even while fuller public discussions of racism and discrimination remained constrained. As the decade unfolded, pro-​equity epidemiological researchers continued to keep the topic of racism’s impacts on health in view, despite this political chill – analysing data about racial discrimination (Harris et al. 2006), and continuing to develop anti-​racist coalitions in the health sector (Came, McCreanor, and Simpson 2016). Sociopolitical currents have more recently shifted again to support more explicit policy and public discussion of how racial discrimination (e.g., New Zealand Ministry of Health 2015; Talamaivao et al. 2020) and especially institutional racism (e.g., New Zealand College of Public Health Medicine 2015; Came-​Friar et al. 2019) impact Māori health. These twists and turns highlight the degree of flexibility that Māori researchers exercise in their efforts to advance fundamentally moral claims about equity, given how the political workings of settler colonialism can involve substantial public approval for denying and morally reframing examples of the consequences of institutionalized injustice. In talking with Māori researchers about the range of their experiences with data-​driven advocacy for equity, I was struck by how many described a similarly flexible approach to other rhetorical or discursive tools. One example is the Treaty of Waitangi, which as noted above, Brash’s speech had also moved to marginalize. While some Māori researchers continued to reference it as they previously had, a number of others described picking and choosing when and how to do so, depending on the situation they were encountering. As one Māori researcher who was especially closely involved in policy advocacy commented, ‘The Treaty is an important tool. A very important tool. But I’d hate for it to be the only one that we have available.’ I noticed other conversations about this topic among Māori researchers and advocates. In response to a question from a well-​established Māori scholar and activist in the audience at one Indigenous health conference that I attended in 2016, presenters explained that their own strategy has been to adhere to the principles articulated in Te Tiriti without explicitly flagging them as such, when they present data to city, regional, and/​or national governing institutions. The panel leader explained how this strategy responds to the reality that many people in Aotearoa New Zealand agree with at least some dimensions of its core principles – but since terms like ‘Te Tiriti’ and ‘Treaty’ have

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become political flashpoints for some, using them can prematurely shut down conversations. As such, he explained, rearticulating the principles themselves in other terms can sometimes be more productive. A similar flexible and strategic approach is evident in researcher comments about rights discourse in health politics. Transnational activism for Indigenous rights had become a fuller part of many national conversations about Indigenous health, as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was recurrently discussed and eventually ratified by 148 member nations in the late 2000s. As multiple Māori researchers commented, asserting that health is a human right became another useful framework to couple with epidemiological data at this point in Aotearoa New Zealand. As one Māori researcher commented, rights discourse has clear persuasive potential that cannot be realized in all situations: ‘Again, it’s another story, another way to argue? That works sometimes, with some people.’ In these ways, pro-equity researchers demonstrate a pragmatic flexibility in how they use epidemiological data in concert with other persuasive tools, understanding that their work to advance fundamentally moral claims about equity is unfolding in a complex terrain of competing moral claims and counter-​claims within national public and policy discussions in Aotearoa New Zealand. As one Māori researcher with considerable experience in policy advocacy summarized, ‘I think that actually, it’s helpful to have a range of cards in your hand that you can play when you need to … and that you can play the card that is most suited to the situation or context.’ This analogy directly echoes Bailey’s discussion of how to understand the cultural dynamics (‘deck of cards’) at hand within political conflicts like those he witnessed in Bisipara. The added twist here, however, is that in this ethnographic scenario, the ethnographer is not necessarily the main or only one to have insight into these strategic sensibilities and decisions.

Morality, political conflict, and ethnographic knowledge There are clearly substantial differences between ethnographic work drawn from the daily flow of social life in a localized Indian village in the 1950s, and a more workplace-​ focused study of professional researcher-​­ activists involved in data-​driven health advocacy in the 2010s. For Bailey, an unusual event precipitated the temporary ‘outing’ of otherwise normally manageable tensions in Bisipara over the moral value of new economic strategies in visibly changing times. By conducting epidemiology in ways that promote Indigenous health equity, and thereby leveraging global trends in data-​ driven decision-​making and planning in the service of advocacy for change, pro-equity researchers are actively engaged in an intentional ‘outing’ of the

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conventional routinization of practices like denying Indigenous health inequities and framing this approach in positive moral terms like ‘fairness’. In the example of health targets described above, Indigenous researcher-​advocates were ultimately able to leverage their knowledge of and access to data to pressure for closer attention to the contradictions between what claims to ‘fairness’ convey, and what ‘performance-​based’ outcome data actually documents. Villagers like Tuta, in Bailey’s case study, did not have access to functional alternatives once more powerful villagers had effectively morally tarnished the main card in their hand (in this case, cultural justifications for their ability to accrue wealth despite being lower caste). Assertions that he should be scapegoated in the name of the collective good therefore prevailed. For me, these two ethnographic scenarios highlight both enduring insights of Bailey’s approach to morality and politics, and also some newer developments in how anthropologists conduct ethnographic work into the 21st century. Bailey’s detailed focus on the unfolding twists and turns of specific conflicts enabled him to foreground the many moral guises of injustice, or how particular social actors can sometimes succeed in using positive moral terms to reframe what others experience as inequitable. In these ways, conflicts can sometimes lead to the perpetuation of conventionalized inequities along institutionalized lines like caste and ethnicity. Depending on the circumstances, those experiencing these inequities may not have resources in the available cultural deck of cards to mount a compelling challenge. Bailey’s analysis also highlights how changes in ethnographic roles, responsibilities, and representations were emerging in cultural anthropology by the 1990s. For the past 50 years, the discipline has engaged in an intermittent, incomplete, and ongoing conversation about its goals and methods. Bailey recognizes these evolving themes in works like The Witch Hunt, by including recurrent commentary about the broader nature of ethnographic knowledge – and, in particular, focusing on why he was less able to fully analyse these events at the time as compared to decades later. In witnessing how Tuta was treated in Bisipara, for example, Bailey specifically compares and contrasts his own thinking with that of others within the setting, often noting how he tended at the time to expect or presume more similarities than were warranted. He notes that his own tendencies to contrast a scientific and often biomedical model of the tragic death with the more explicitly morally-​laden local model of a rogue spirit being, for example, were not shared by villagers – who seemed more likely to view both models as overlapping. Bailey also observed that not everyone in the community believed that spiritual causes resulted in this tragic death, but recognized that their skepticism did not necessarily mean that they were invested in mounting alternative interpretation, or interested in contesting collective actions to identify and sanction the spirit being’s alleged keeper.

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Thinking back, Bailey suggests that it was his ethnographic responsibility to appreciate how and why this was the case – much more so than he was able to at the time, given that he was not yet able to reflect on his own expectations and assumptions with greater ‘humility’ (p. 37). While discussions of how positionality and perspective influence ethnographic work have been more developed in other sectors of anthropology and related fields, Bailey’s briefer but evocative thoughts about these matters here align well with these conversations. Postcolonial, Indigenous, critical race and feminist studies have examined positionality in research in depth, as part of re-​­envisioning ways of doing research that are centred on values of responsibility and justice (e.g., Harding 2015). Indigenous critiques and related efforts to decolonize anthropology (Harrison 2011; Vargas-​Cetina 2013) have specifically addressed ethnographic representation, and call for ethnographers to better recognize how the authority accorded to their voices can interfere with others who are also translating the experiences and perspectives of specific cultural worlds to broader audiences. These conversations have promoted shifts toward projects that focus on the work done by people who cultivate and inhabit such translational roles, rather than positioning the ethnographer as the only one to have unique or more complete insight into articulating more local realities for more global audiences. This more inclusive approach does not deny the need for or importance of ethnographic work, but more actively recognizes how social life includes many observant witnesses and participants with valuable insights into anthropological concerns, such as understanding the entanglements of morality and politics. My brief ethnographic examples in this chapter in no way replicate the richness and complexity of Bailey’s extended case study, and I do not ethnographically specialize in political conflicts per se. Yet Bailey’s focus on how moral claims figure within the unfolding twists and turns of complex political conflicts has profoundly influenced how I notice, and work to analyse, these situations when they arise in my work. Bailey’s critical approach peels back the layers of rhetoric and initial appearances to delve into what purposes are actually being served by particular moral claims, and is highly attuned to the very frequent instances in which those who benefit from the status quo use such claims in attempts to recast inequity and injustice as if they are good, right, and/​or normal.

References Adams, V, ed. 2016. Metrics: What Counts in Global Health. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anderson, I., B. Robson, M. Connolly, F. Al-​ Yaman, E. Bjertness, A. King, M. Tynan, R. Madden, A. Bang, and C. E. A. Coimbra. 2016. ‘Indigenous and

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Tribal Peoples’ Health (The Lancet–​Lowitja Institute Global Collaboration): A Population Study.’ The Lancet 388: 131–​57. Bailey, F. G. 1957. Caste and the Economic Frontier: A Village in Highland Orissa. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1960. Tribe, Caste, and Nation: A Study of Political Activity and Political Change in Highland Orissa. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1996a. The Civility of Indifference: On Domesticating Ethnicity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. hunt: Or, the Triumph of Morality. Ithaca, Bailey, F. G. 1996b. The Witch-​ NY: Cornell University Press. Bailey, F. G. 1998. The Need for Enemies: A Bestiary of Political Forms. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brash, D. 2004. ‘Nationhood, speech to the Orewa Rotary Club.’ www.scoop.co.nz/​ stories/​PA0401/​S00220/​nationhood-​don-​brash-​speech-​orewa-​rotary-​club.htm, accessed 17/​08/​2021. Came, H. A., T. McCreanor, and T. Simpson. 2016. ‘Health Activism Against Barriers to Indigenous Health in Aotearoa New Zealand.’ Critical Public Health 27 (4): 515–​21. Came-​Friar, H., T. McCreanor, L. Manson, and K. Nuku. 2019. ‘Upholding Te Tiriti, Ending Institutional Racism and Crown Inaction on Health Equity.’ New Zealand Medical Journal 132 (1492): 62–​6. Denzin, N. K., Y. S. Lincoln, and L. T. Smith, eds. 2008. Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. Los Angeles: Sage Publications. Freemantle, J., I. Ring, T. G. Arambula Solomon, F. C. Gachupin, J. Smylie, T. L. Cutler, and J. A. Waldon. 2015. ‘Indigenous mortality (revealed): the invisible illuminated.’ American Journal of Public Health 105 (4): 644–​52. Harding, S. 2015. Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Harris, R., M. Tobias, M. Jeffreys, K. Waldegrave, S. Karlsen, and J. Nazroo. 2006. ‘Effects of Self-​reported Racial Discrimination and Deprivation on Māori Health and Inequalities in New Zealand: Cross-​sectional Study.’ The Lancet 367 (9527): 2005–​09. Harrison, F. V., ed. 2011. Decolonizing Anthropology. 3rd ed. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association. New Zealand College of Public Health Medicine. 2015. Māori Health Policy Statement. Wellington: New Zealand College of Public Health Medicine. www. nzcphm.org.nz/​media/​89786/​2015_​11_​30_​m_​ori_​health_​policy_​statement.pdf, accessed 17/​08/​2021. New Zealand Ministry of Health. 1997. Progress on Health Outcome Targets: Te haere whakamua ki nga whainga hua mo te hauora. Wellington: Ministry of Health. New Zealand Ministry of Health. 2015. Tatau Kahukura: Māori Health Chart Book 2015. Wellington: Ministry of Health. New Zealand Ministry of Health. 2016. ‘Health targets: Increased Immunisation.’ www.health.govt.nz/​new-​zealand-​health-​system/​health-​targets/​about-​health-​ ­targets/​health-​targets-​increased-​immunisation. Paine, S.-​ J., D. Cormack, P. Reid, R. Harris, and B. Robson. 2020. ‘Kaupapa Māori-​informed Approaches to Support Data Rights and Self-​determination.’ In Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Policy, edited by M. Walter, T. Kukutai, S. R. Carroll and D. Rodriguez-​Lonebear, 187–​203. London: Routledge.

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Prussing, E. 2018. ‘Critical Epidemiology in Action: Research for and By Indigenous Peoples.’ Social Science & Medicine-​Population Health 6: 98–​106. Prussing, E. 2020. ‘Through a Critical Lens: Expertise in Epidemiology for and by Indigenous Peoples.’ Science, Technology and Human Values 45 (6): 1142–​67. Talamaivao, N., R. Harris, D. Cormack, S.-​J. Paine, and P. King. 2020. ‘Racism and Health in Aotearoa New Zealand: A Systematic Review of Quantitative Studies.’ New Zealand Medical Journal 133 (1521): 55–​68. Vargas-​ Cetina, G., ed. 2013. Anthropology and the Politics of Representation. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

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Part IV

Rules and roles of conflict

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The social construction of the Washington Consensus on international trade policy Robert H. Wade This chapter is about a conference in Geneva where mainstream economists debated how to insert ‘international trade’ into the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. In order to show how I came to ‘anthropologize’ this conference I need to bring in some autobiography, beginning with my arrival at Sussex University in late 1967. I had been accepted into the Economics PhD programme at Sussex. I applied from my homeland, New Zealand, because Sussex was the site of the, by-​then, famous Institute of Development Studies. As son of a New Zealand diplomat I had lived in Sydney, Canberra, Wellington, Washington DC, Ottawa, Colombo, Kuala Lumpur; I had also conducted fieldwork on the economy of the residents of the remote but semi-​famous South Pacific island of Pitcairn (home of descendants of the Bounty mutineers). The combination of my experience in several other cultures, plus my growing dismay at neoclassical economics (a world without social ­connections, only markets and governments) produced an epiphany: I would switch my PhD studies from economics to anthropology, thinking that the latter might give me a better entry into Adam Smith’s ‘wealth of nations’ – the study of why most people in less developed countries were shockingly poorer, insecure, and more constrained in life options than people in New Zealand and other western countries. I visited Freddy in his office. He was amiable and gracious, we had a long conversation, he looked at my papers, and said ‘yes’, though I had hardly any training in anthropology.

Italy My intention was to ask Adam Smith-​type questions through fieldwork in India, but the anthropology department had obtained a large research grant to finance a dozen or so doctoral students in agricultural villages in Europe. I went to the southern Tuscan region of Maremma where the Italian state carried out a massive land reform during the late 1940s and 1950s. The reform involved the expropriation of large estates (compensated at the value

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the owners had declared for tax purposes) and heavy investment in creating viable family farms so as to increase agricultural production and undercut the growing Italian Communist Party campaigning for ‘land to the people’. The Italian government, as well as other European governments and the US, were worried that ‘communism’, having been defeated in the Greek civil war next door, would sweep through the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’ and spread through northwest Europe. I wanted to study effects of this ‘exogenous’ change in wealth and status. For 18 months, I lived in a village in the middle of a large tract of expropriated land (the landscape must have been designed by Michelangelo for beauty more than production). In Bailey fashion I ‘soaked and poked’, and listened to gossip as the entry to social norms and local politics. I wrote up monthly fieldwork consolidation reports and sent them back to Sussex. The resulting PhD was not so much about the land reform, because between the end of the land reform in the mid-​1950s and my research in the area in 1969–​70, with the ‘Italian miracle’ in between, the problem had pivoted from ‘not enough land for the people’ to ‘not enough people for the land’, and agriculture and farmers had become marginal. The thesis was more about the way that ‘social capital’ at the base stopped the apparently deep political cleavages at the top from turning Italy into a ‘centrifugal democracy’ (Wade 1975, 1979).

India After my PhD I became a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University. I did intensive fieldwork in India, which focused on water reform. I wanted to find out why the average productivity of canal-​irrigated agriculture was so low (a brake on India’s overall economic development), and how it could be raised by changes in the way the canals were being operated and maintained, without expensive capital investments. I studied how the civil engineers of the Irrigation Department were operating and maintaining large public canal systems, and their interactions with each other and with farmers. I lived in a town and a village in Kurnool district, Andhra Pradesh (South Central India), for months before it dawned on me one day that I had been operating on a mistaken –​implicit – premise. I presumed that the irrigation engineers running the giant canals (some irrigating 100,000 hectares a year or more) aimed to give the farmers reliable water service as best they could, using the primitive infrastructure available to them. Farmers complained to me that they had to bribe the engineers in order to get better water service, but I tended to treat ‘corruption’ as an overblown problem that westerners too easily blamed for underdevelopment. So I did

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not pay too much attention to the farmers’ complaints. On that day I looked again at my fieldnotes and began to add up the sums that various groups of farmers had told me. My goodness, so much money, what happened to it? My research pivoted into a study of what turned out to be a large-​scale, well institutionalized, very secret system of bureaucratic corruption, operating in all the ‘wet’ departments of government (those with large flows of revenue). As state officials at the district level began to hear of my interest in the corruption system they got jittery –​less friendly in conversation with me, and menacing farmers who talked to me. My premise was wrong, because to persuade farmers to pay them amounts adding up to several or many times their salary, they had to make farmers uncertain about water supply, so that groups of farmers would run to them (to their PA, personal assistant) and offer money to shift the uncertainty onto others. They used the money to pay off debts incurred to buy the franchise for their present post and to save enough to buy their next post. They paid upwards to the officer two ranks above, who might run a kind of auction to decide who got into the post (for an expected two-​year tenure). Some posts were much more lucrative than others, and posts acquired price reputations; the final price was affected by such things as caste and origin within or outside the state of Andhra Pradesh. An Executive Engineer complained he had to pay much more than the normal price of the post because he was Brahmin in a state dominated by Reddys and he was born and grew up on the next-​door state of Karnataka. The officer two ranks above would have paid upwards to the Chief Engineer or the Irrigation Minister to get into his post. He then would need to recoup his money to buy the next post. Some Superintending Engineers were paying 40 times their annual salary to buy a normal two-​year posting to certain lucrative SE posts on the Krishna-​Godavari delta, money they raised partly by selling the franchise to the posts in their span of control (maybe 20–​25) and partly from maintenance contract ‘rake-​offs’. The money funnelled through the Irrigation hierarchy joined money coming up through other wet departments into the hands of the Chief Minister and on up to the Gandhi family and other top politicians in Delhi. My published papers were the first to describe and analyse the ‘market for public office’, as I called it; and they informed official Government of India reports on India’s black economy (Wade 1982a, 1985). This research focused on the state bureaucracy and its interactions with farmers at district level. At the same time, I was also studying how and why some villages had established quite an elaborate and long-​lasting system of government, independent of the state’s local government, while other villages, maybe only several kilometres away, had no such system. I knew that the general understanding was that Indian villages were so based on caste identities

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that village-​or place-​based cooperation was rare and fragile. My aim was to explain how and why some villages in my area came to be exceptions, with an ‘endogenous’ government able to provide public goods. A village committee appointed and monitored ‘village irrigators’ to irrigate the whole of the village’s land when water became scarce, and ‘village field guards’ to keep grazing animals off the standing crops (no fences). Once in existence to provide these vital defensive functions, the committee and the village fund could also organize the provision of other public goods, including bribing the engineers to secure a better water supply. I published the findings in a book, Village Republics: Economic Conditions of Collective Action in South India (1988, Cambridge University Press, reprinted 1994 and 2007).

South Korea In 1979 I turned to South Korea where I wanted to compare the Korean bureaucracy for operating and maintaining canal irrigation systems with the Indian one. I lived in a small city and spent three months soaking and poking with farmers and the staff of the irrigation bureaucracy (Farmland Improvement Association). The contrast was striking, especially given that both bureaucracies were providing essentially the same service. The Indian one had very few incentives for officers to work conscientiously in line with the objectives of the organization; the Korean one was full of incentives, both individual (e.g., a promotion formula) and collective (e.g., competitions between all the work units of the bureaucracy in sports and even in making organic fertilizer). These competitions had the effect of strengthening identity with the organization. I described the Korean bureaucracy and its interaction with farmers –​in the context of the overarching highly authoritarian state –​in Irrigation and Agricultural Politics in South Korea (1982b, Westview Press). With that title the book sank without trace; I should have sought Freddy’s help for a brighter one.

Taiwan In the early 1980s, South Korea and Taiwan were heralded as ‘Newly Industrializing Countries’ (NICs). I chose to soak and poke in Taiwan, and to study the big picture of how the state had been imparting ‘directional thrust’ to the whole economy, particularly in industry. I spent over three months (too short) talking with officials, academics, and businesspeople (Taiwanese and foreign), often going along networks of friends-​of-​friends and conversing more than interviewing, aiming to get beyond the ‘face’ of

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the official story to the ‘reality’ or ‘underwear politics’. I read with growing disbelief the voluminous literature then emerging from neoclassical economists celebrating Taiwan and South Korea as ‘free market success stories’, a model to the world of how getting the government out of the way and letting free markets work was key to their success (remember, this was in the early years of Thatcher and Reagan and the neoliberal revolution, so confirmation bias brought academic prestige). My findings were the basis of Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (1990, Princeton University Press, reprinted 2004; awarded Best Book or Article in Political Economy by the American Political Science Association for publications in 1989–​91).

The World Bank in Washington DC In 1984, after fieldwork in Taiwan, I was invited to join the World Bank in Washington DC as a staff economist, to work especially on agricultural development. My reasons for accepting had less to do with interest in what the Bank wanted me to do than with understanding –​by soaking and poking, paying attention to social relationships, incentive structures and norms –​how the World Bank operated from the inside; and in particular, how it promulgated such a simple ‘one size fits all’ recipe for ‘best policy’. This message came to be known as the ‘Washington Consensus’, and was the same message western neoclassical economists used to describe South Korea’s and Taiwan’s success. Throughout this period, I was both fascinated and appalled to experience, close up, how the Bank’s staff were disciplined to endorse ‘There is no alternative’ (TINA) to the Washington Consensus. This message was endorsed not just to outsiders, but also internally to themselves. I experienced the dynamics of ‘groupthink’ with a vengeance. Even in lunchtime conversations it was risky to bring in qualifying evidence (e.g., from East Asia). Before long one would get a reputation as ‘not reliable’, ‘not a good economist’, and might be invited to find employment elsewhere. During that period, 1984 to 1988, many people who had worked in the Bank advising on, for example, how to develop a bicycle industry, or a petrochemical industry, or anything else in the spirit of industrial policy, were either fired or had to rebrand themselves as experts in environment, or good governance, or poverty reduction. The hard-​line neoliberals in charge called it ‘cleaning the stables’ from the McNamara era. While working in the Trade Policy Division, I was asked to write a report on how East Asian countries had promoted exports. When I explained that they had integrated export promotion with import substitution like ‘the two

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wings of the same bird’, I was told that the Bank did not want to know about import substitution (unless it was negative), only about export promotion. I left in 1988 to work in the more honest atmosphere of the Office of Technology Assessment, an agency of the US Congress.

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Geneva and UNCTAD Fast-​forward to the following case study. It is about what happened in a one-​and-​a-​half-​day meeting of experts to discuss ‘appropriate trade policy’, held at UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), in Geneva, 9–​10 December 2013, organized by its Division of International Trade. My account is an example of how I have tried, over many years and many places, to pan in to micro situations (such as this meeting) and pan out to large-​scale generalizations, always bearing in mind that anthropologists are the only social scientists allowed to say that the plural of ‘anecdote’ is ‘evidence’. The meeting illustrates the central point that the ongoing global economic slump at that time, far from prompting rethinking of core free-​ ­market ideas, had the effect of consolidating their hold in the mindset of experts and officials of (western-​dominated) international organizations. The UNCTAD trade meeting was one of many international meetings at that time to construct global goals as successors to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), due to ‘expire’ in 2015. The successors were to be called the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While the expiring MDGs related to developing countries the SDGs were intended to apply to all countries. The specific objective was to consider how to translate MDG 8 (an open, rule-​based, non-​discriminatory trade regime) into a trade goal to go into the post-​2015 SDGs. Around 35 people participated over one and a half days. They included academic international trade economists from continental European and British universities; employees of or consultants to international organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank, and UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), also staff of the organizing Division of International Trade; and me, a professor of global political economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Barometer of thinking The arguments made during the meeting –​and not made –​can be used as a barometer of the mindset for global trade policy in epistemic communities

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of trade experts. One leading question is the extent of rethinking of the long-​ established high priority given to free trade policy as an engine of growth, in developing and developed countries. The fact of UNCTAD sponsorship –​ rather than WTO, World Bank or Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) sponsorship –​might lead one to expect rather more ‘out of the box’ thinking than normal, given that UNCTAD has been, since it was created in 1964, a leading international think tank on behalf of developing countries and in the 1970s the main source of ideas about a ‘new international economic order’ (NIEO). So, was there any sign, in this conference, that neoliberal free trade policy was ‘in retreat’ as of 2013, and any sign of an emerging alternative narrative? The academic trade economists, in remarkably uniform style, stood before the PowerPoint projection screen at the head of the room and waved an arm at algebraic symbols, followed by tables of regression coefficients. They spent most of their time talking about how they constructed the model and how they did the econometrics, and little time talking about the ‘intuition’ of their results and the links with the SDGs. In the intermissions the academic trade economists grouped and gossiped with each other, as friendly members of the same epistemic community who met from time to time at academic gatherings. The more practical trade policy people took for granted that trade expansion was, if not the engine of growth, then a growth engine so powerful that it could be prescribed for independently of other priorities, so that trade-​offs did not have to be considered. They took for granted that trade expansion requires free trade policy (e.g., no protection), and went straight on to consider issues of ‘trade facilitation’ (reduced transactions costs), and how to get ‘trade facilitation’ prominently into the SDGs. Here they stressed that the onus of facilitating trade falls not only on developing country governments, but also on governments of developed countries, which must give more ‘aid for trade’. Aid for trade could be used to help developing countries computerize their customs departments, invest in port infrastructure, and the like. They also stressed the importance of reducing financial market imperfections, especially to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) engage in international trade; and they further stressed the importance of governments investing in developing skills, alongside reforms to make labour markets flexible (make firing easier). Conversely, they warned –​invoking the theory of second best –​against developing country governments using trade protection as an easy escape from reducing ‘distortions’ or ‘imperfections’ with instruments close to the source of the problem (instruments for directly reducing financial market or labour market distortions, for example). Trade protection should always be avoided, because it is too far removed from the source of imperfections and

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too easily abused; on this there was complete and frequently repeated unanimity. ‘Market imperfections’ was a constant reference point through the conference, for both the academics and the trade policy people. Something had only to be described as a ‘market imperfection’ for everyone to know it was wrong. ‘Market imperfections’ (implicitly) meant power, and power in market transactions was ipso facto wrong, it must be disappeared. That was the core of the trade policy people’s argument. Some said explicitly that, yes, there are always ‘short-​term’ adjustment costs following trade liberalization; but we know that the longer-​term gains from free trade, in the form of greater efficiency of resource use, will more than offset the short-​term costs. They had bits and pieces of advice about what trade goals should go into the SDGs, but they were mainly interested in affirming the rightness of the core ‘trade facilitation’ agenda.

2013 or 1983? I was fascinated. What year are we in, I asked myself: 2013 or 1983? What organization are we in: UNCTAD or some combination of the WTO, World Bank, and OECD? When I spoke near the end I commented on the almost total absence of mention (let alone discussion), after one and a half days, of mega events and trends, such as: (a) China, and the ability of Chinese manufacturers to ‘knock out’ manufacturing in many middle-​income countries, thus changing the relevance of ‘comparative advantage theory’ that lay behind the policy of free trade; (b) Finance, free capital movements, and exchange rate movements driving global payments imbalances in the wrong direction; (c) the Trans-​ Pacific Partnership, then under negotiation; (d) the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, then under negotiation; and (e) the various European Union free trade agreements under negotiation or recently negotiated with India, Japan, and Korea.

I pointed out that workers knocked out of employment in labour-​intensive activities, like textiles or shoes, by Chinese imports tended to remain unemployed for long periods and remain in the same place rather than travel to find work (Wade 2004). So the alternative to trade protection may well not be reallocation of people into more ‘efficient’ employment but into unemployment or lower-​wage precariat activities like personal care. I held up my Palestinian scarf, recently bought in the market in Hebron for 25 shekels. It was made in Palestine, of cotton. Next to it in the market was an almost identical scarf made in China, of nylon, selling for ten shekels. The Palestinian textile industry has been more or less wiped out by cheaper Chinese imports. I pointed out that the Palestinian Authority (the nearest thing Palestine has to a government) has nothing close to an

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industrial extension service, similar to what I studied in Taiwan, where engineers coach factories about how to improve production-​line layout, how to obtain a new kind of machine tool, and the like. This, even though factories I had visited in Palestine and others I heard about, were mainly supply-​ constrained rather than demand-​constrained, and supply-​constrained partly because they were so close in factory layout, equipment, storage, waste disposal and general work conditions to Dickensian London (Wade 2014). However, when the conference participants talked about the need for support services to firms in developing countries to help them enter export markets (perhaps financed by aid for trade), they were thinking of trade-​ promotion services, not industrial extension services. They did not see the links between exporting, enhanced production capabilities, and import replacement (Wade 2004). I pointed out that all the fine talk of ‘more aid for trade’ ignored the question: how much more aid for trade, and why that figure rather than another? And if ‘aid for trade’ should be put into the SDGs with a target of $3 bn a year from rich-​country governments to developing country governments, what happens if they agree to give only $1.5 bn a year? Do we still expect the developing country governments to do the same as we expect on the basis of $3 bn a year? No one raised such obvious questions. I said that protection, like any powerful instrument, can be used well, or badly. It has often been used badly, particularly when given in a way which eliminates competitive pressure on protected firms. But it has also been used well, so that it buffers some firms from international competitive pressures without removing them completely (Wade 2013b). Future discussions of trade policy should be less tied to the presumption that trade facilitation is the queen of development policy priorities, and more concerned with the question of how governments can use protection well –​as distinct from ‘always less’ –​as a complement to export promotion policies, like ‘the two wings of the same bird’. My larger point was that the conference was following conventional neoclassical trade theory in making no distinction between static comparative advantage and dynamic comparative advantage, or static efficiency and dynamic efficiency. We were accepting that the key development question is: ‘How to achieve the most productive use of today’s resources?’ rather than ‘How to achieve faster growth of productivity of tomorrow’s resources?’ The latter implies that the state should take actions which limit trade in targeted sectors today in the interests of boosting the growth of those sectors tomorrow – such as by using trade protection to force domestic consumers to buy more expensive domestically produced goods for a time, so as to build up demand for new industries thought important for the economy’s future growth and allow those industries to surf down cost

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curves through ‘learning by doing’. But neoclassical economics has always sought to minimize the use of state power beyond what is necessary to keep markets competitive. The hidden power implication of the neoclassical prescription for free trade is seen from David Ricardo’s famous example of Portugal and England and wine and textiles. Ricardo ‘proved’ that England should specialize in textiles, Portugal in wine, and then they should trade textiles and wine to meet domestic consumption. Both populations can consume more of both commodities than if they met domestic consumption by being self-​ sufficient in both. But if a given market value of textiles requires four skilled workers and six unskilled, and the same market value of wine requires one skilled worker and nine unskilled, and if textiles has dense linkages with other industries (e.g., machinery) and wine does not, then it is wise, from Portugal’s point of view, that it ‘does what it takes’ to retain some capacity in textiles, rather than allow England to get all of the skill-​intensive, technologically dynamic activity. Following Ricardo’s prescription for free trade keeps England as the hegemon, Portugal as its appendage. Ricardo was an English financier and member of parliament, and his family owned assets in the Portuguese wine trade.

Investor-​state relations Finally, I pointed out that investor-​state (more accurately, investor versus state) arbitration clauses built into free trade agreements (FTAs) and bilateral investment treaties (BITs) are likely to be having the effect of distorting development priorities. Investor-​state arbitration clauses enable foreign companies to sue governments directly –​before secret, extrajudicial tribunals –​ for cash compensation over earnings lost because of national social, health, or environmental legislation, and even for loss of ‘expected future profits’. Even just by threatening to sue (backed by expensive legal teams), corporations like Philip Morris can make a government hesitant to pass measures to restrain cigarette smoking, notwithstanding that smoking causes more premature deaths than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined, according to the World Health Organization (Tavernise 2013). Mining company threats to sue may make a government hesitant to restrict mining in a national park. More than just distorting development priorities, investor-​state arbitration tends to undermine national sovereignty and the accountability of governments to citizens, in deference to the profit-​seeking preferences of multinational corporations. The rights of corporations receive heavy protection; for example, they include the right to compensation for ‘indirect expropriation’, meaning that the government can be sued for a regulatory policy

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which diminishes the value of an investment even if the regulation applies equally to foreign and domestic firms (Wallach 2013). Investor-​state dispute settlement clauses tilt power firmly to western investors. In the WTO framework, by contrast, a corporation can sue a government for damages only via getting its own government to act on its behalf, not directly. Both the TTP and the TTIP trade and investment deals make a big point of investor-​versus-​state arbitration. These so-​called ‘mega-​­regionals’ are being used by western states to establish the trade and investment rules –​ bypassing the whole multilateral WTO process –​by which the rest of the world will be allowed access to their markets, for decades ahead; rules which are designed to favour their own corporations in competition with those from elsewhere (especially from China), and thereby to protect the western states’ economic, political, and security dominance. The future of the world order –​the structure of world power – is at stake in these apparently circumscribed, technical deals. The chair thanked me for my ‘very useful intervention’, and the conversation resumed as though I had not spoken. Nothing more was said about these issues. ‘Trade facilitation’ meant ‘free trade’ for all, period.

Free trade policy The conference stuck to the core mainstream narrative: free international trade (with high trade facilitation) will cause economies to specialize production in line with their comparative advantage (in those activities where production has the lowest opportunity cost, is the least inefficient, out of all those activities which the economy could potentially produce); and countries specializing in comparative advantage and trading freely will maximize their gains from trade, where gains are defined entirely in terms of consumption. From this ‘positive’ analytical narrative (called a ‘theory’) follows the ‘normative’ conclusion that free trade policy should be prescribed. Participants acknowledged there was then an issue of the distribution of the gains from trade within each economy; but said this was for the government to sort out, not for economists. Participants barely mentioned the well-​known criticism of the argument, that it depends on a whole raft of very restrictive assumptions: such as costless resource mobility between uses within each country and resource immobility between countries; full employment before and after trade; no increasing returns to scale; market prices reflect social costs; and so on. Nobody questioned the assumption that free trade will lead to specialization in line with comparative advantage (every economy by definition has something in which it has comparative advantage). But as my point

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about China knocking out manufacturing capacity in many middle­income countries suggests, this hallowed argument ignores that a substantial part of international trade is now driven by absolute advantage, with China having an absolute advantage in many sectors. If free trade policy leads to specialization in line with absolute rather than comparative advantage, the welfare effects will be quite different from the predictions of standard theory. Employment in industries subject to competition from absolute­advantaged imports produced in other countries will plummet and not be regained elsewhere in the economy. Of course, the mainstream theory says that prices –​exchange rates –​will adjust to ensure that trade remains roughly balanced; so that as China’s exports knock out capacity in some sectors of country X (e.g., India, Palestine, Brazil, and US), the exchange rate adjustment will price some of country X’s production back into competitiveness against imports and/​ or into competitiveness against domestic production of rival products in third markets; so that over the longer run, sizeable trade imbalances will not persist. Given the larger neoclassical mindset of the conference I was relieved to hear the chairman mention in passing –​but only in passing – that trade imbalances in the real world were often persisting and not cured by automatic adjustment in exchange rates. Indeed, this is a theme that UNCTAD has stressed for years: the desirability of international agreement based on a formula for adjusting exchange rates with inflation or productivity differentials. This, of course implies much more management of exchange rates. Exchange rates tend to be driven less by trade flows than by essentially speculative capital flows, which can drive exchange rates in the wrong direction, making trade imbalances larger. No wonder, when the disproportions between trade flows and financial flows are so large. In 1997, just before the start of the East Asian/​Latin American/​Russian economic crash, the value of financial transactions was about 15 times the world’s annual gross product. In 2012, notwithstanding the hard times since 2008, it was almost 70 times (Wade 2012).

Narrow minds help protect power in the hands of western states The experience of the conference reminded me of three things. First, many international trade economists engage hardly at all with the above issues, bracketing them into some other domain for others to work on. Second, many international trade economists do not engage at all with issues of ‘sustainability’. Sustainability remained buried beneath an ocean of silence throughout this conference about trade in the post-​2015 SDGs.

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Third, UNCTAD is not a cohesive entity. The Division on Globalisation and Development Strategies, which is responsible for producing the annual Trade and Development Report (often wrongly taken to be ‘UNCTAD thinking’), is the one part of UNCTAD still thinking and writing in the spirit of UNCTAD as a think tank for developing countries where ‘big picture’ issues about the functioning of the global economic and financial systems are analysed and prescribed for, where ‘power’ is a central concept (UNCTAD 2009). The narrative of other divisions is closer to that of the western-​centric WTO, World Bank, and OECD, without power or exploitation or nationalism. This bifurcation within the organization is no accident. Western states have tried for years to restrict UNCTAD from analysing and prescribing for the global economy and financial system, wanting this left to the ‘competent’ international organizations like the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and OECD (controlled by western states). UNCTAD should limit itself to monitoring the trends out there in developing countries and giving advice to them on how to more fully integrate their economies into the (western-​governed) world economy. The western states have had impressive success in bringing most of UNCTAD into line. The key is appointments to powerful positions. For some years after 2013 UNCTAD was headed by a man well known to be campaigning for a top position in his native country, who used UNCTAD as his launch pad and travel agency; while his deputy was an aggressive Scandinavian advocate of neoliberal ideology determined to get UNCTAD into line with ‘proper scientific economics’, meaning neoliberal economics. That was an effective combination of talents to neuter the organization as a think tank for developing countries (Wade 2013a). All this leaves open the interesting question of how the Division on Globalisation and Development Strategies has managed to escape, and write TDRs in the original spirit of UNCTAD despite constant western hostility.

No rethinking The post-​2008 global slump, far from provoking major rethinking of core free market narratives (as happened in the hard times after the 1929 crash, when New Deal/​welfare state/​social democracy narratives became dominant), reinforced their influence in western economies and international economic organizations. The Washington Consensus of the 1990s and 2000s was by 2013 boosted by a close cousin, the Brussels-​Berlin Consensus, which gives even less importance than the Washington Consensus to national sovereignty and more importance to expanding the geographic and sectoral scope for corporate profit-​making and cutting back the role of government

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(‘austerity is the only cure for the eurozone’, said German Chancellor Wolfgang Schauble in 2011). In this vision, the role of democracy is to diffuse popular resentment at the resulting concentration of income and wealth at the top (the top 1 per cent of Americans hold 51 per cent of stock market wealth in the US), while the role of the state is to enforce international agreements that allow capital and labour to be bought and sold freely around the world; with a firewall between democracy and the state. UNCTAD has to be kept on the margins and/​or taken over by senior people who subscribe to the western narrative, believing it to be best for the world, quite contrary to the original spirit of UNCTAD. What I owe most to Freddy Bailey and anthropology at Sussex was the spirit of immersion, soaking and poking, paying attention to who interacts with whom and what people say –​and don’t say – in everyday conversation, as a way to understand the sense they make of their world, their norms and the structures of power and identity in which they operate; always looking behind the ‘face’ for their ‘reality’, always looking for the ‘underwear politics’. I employed the Bailey toolkit in sites as far from traditional anthropology as the Taiwanese state, the World Bank’s Trade Policy Division, and UNCTAD conferences on international trade.

References Tavernise, S. 2013. ‘Big Tobacco Steps up Its Barrage of Litigation.’ International New York Times, 13 (December): 1. UNCTAD. 2009. Trade and Development Report, 2009. Geneva. Wade, R. H. 1975. ‘The Base of a “Centrifugal Democracy”: Party Allegiance in Rural Central Italy.’ In Beyond the Community: Social Process in Europe, edited by J. Boissevain and J. Friedl. The Hague: Ministrie van Onderwijs en Wetenschappen. Wade, R. H. 1979. ‘Fast Growth and Slow Development in South Italy.’ In Underdeveloped Europe: Studies in Core-​Periphery Relations, edited by D. Seers et al. Brighton: Harvester Press. Wade, R. H. 1982a. ‘The System of Political and Administrative Corruption: Canal Irrigation in South India.’ Journal of Development Studies, 18 (3): 287–​328. Wade, R. H. 1982b. Irrigation and Agricultural Politics in South Korea. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Wade, R. H. 1985. ‘The Market for Public Office: Why the Indian State is Not Better at Development.’ World Development, 13 (4): 467–​97. Wade, R. H. 2004. Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialisation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wade, R. H. 2012. ‘Why Has Income Inequality Remained on the Sidelines of Public Policy for So Long?’ Challenge 55 (3): 21–​50. Wade, R. H. 2013a. ‘The Art of Power Maintenance: How Western States Keep the Lead in Global Organisations.’ Challenge 56 (1): 5–​39.

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Wade, R. H. 2013b. ‘Trade Liberalisation and Economic Growth: Does Trade Liberalisation Contribute to Economic Prosperity? Yes: David Dollar; No: Robert Wade.’ In Controversies in Globalisation: Contending Approaches to International Relations, 2nd edition, edited by P. Haas and J. Hird. London: Sage. Wade, R. H. 2014. ‘Economic and Political Development Under Conditions of Demi-​sovereignty: the West Bank.’ Challenge 57 (6): 71–​8. Wallach, L. 2013. ‘The Corporation Invasion.’ Le Monde Diplomatique (English) December: 1.

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‘Rules are weapons’: can F. G. Bailey’s toolbox aid our understanding of irrigation bureaucracies? Namika Raby Introduction F. G. Bailey’s three-​layer pyramid model of politics (2001, 80) focuses on the leaders, the bureaucracy, and the ordinary people. The dynamic interplay between these three levels is nowhere better expressed than in irrigation management where the political leaders, the bureaucracy, and the farmers clash over the control of water, a multivalent symbol. Given the scale, cost, and technical complexity of constructing, operating, and maintaining large irrigation systems, bureaucracies are equated with ‘government’ and given the charge of designing, constructing, and operating irrigation management programmes; however, they do not function as an isolate. Policies and funding are set by leaders, and the rhetoric is to benefit the people through their participation. To achieve the goals of a programme, all three levels of the pyramid must function in collaboration. The following extended case study of Ridi Bendi Ela, a pilot project of the Irrigation Management Transfer Program, in the Kurunegala District, Sri Lanka, illustrates the interactive dynamics of the above three level through a triad of institutions: The Government of Sri Lanka; the Irrigation Department; and the farmer organizations. The first is the politician with an eye towards the next election; the second, the bureaucracy which Max Weber defined as ‘among those social structures which are the hardest to destroy. More and more the material fate of the masses depends on the steady and correct functioning of the increasingly bureaucratic organizations’ (Weber, quoted in Gerth and Mills 1946, 228). However, this case illustrates the conditions under which the bureaucracy puts aside its steady and correct functioning in favour of protecting its own interests by self-​aggrandisement through goal displacement (Bailey 2001, 72–​3); and finally, the three-​tiered farmer organization carved within the technical boundaries of the irrigation system and dependent on the politician and the bureaucracy.

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Following Bailey, the above three ‘institutions in the form of rules’ are not a guide to action but justify or condemn action and are based on values, conventions (beliefs), or codified laws (2001, 115). Bailey defined three types of rule: normative rules prescribing proper forms of interaction, both co-​operative and combative; strategic rules on how to win; and pragmatic rules on how to evade and not openly challenge normative rules. The following extended case study is an application of Bailey’s theoretical framework to show the implacable reality that decides which of the three normative 19) in the goal-​ oriented Irrigation frameworks will survive (2001, 117–​ Management Transfer Program (IMT) in Sri Lanka. Through this extended case study taking a series of specific incidents affecting the same persons or groups through a long period of time (I will show) the change of social relations among these persons and groups within the framework of their social system and culture. (Gluckman 2003, 10)

Gluckman further advocated that in order to overcome the problem of ‘typicality of an extended case study, numerical statements through quantitative analysis as well as history as a tool to illustrate social change be adopted’ (2003, 11). My ethnographic fieldwork in Ridi Bendi Ela conducted over more than a two-​year period became the input into a sample for a Participatory Rural Appraisal (Chambers 1991). The irrigation system covers 11 hamlets. It is further divided into the head, middle, and tail ends. This is based on water availability at the head and progressive shortfall at the middle and tail. All 11 hamlets comprise 2,319 households and are members of the farmer organization. A random sample of approximately 10 per cent of households was selected from the 11 hamlets. This resulted in a total of 229 households and 610 members which then became the focus of the evaluation. The objective of this exercise was to enhance and analyse the conditions under which the company functions based on the community’s own views and perceptions. Data was entered into EXCEL and transferred to SPSS 17. This data was cross-​tabulated, and a Pearson Chi-​Square statistically significant association found between variables analysed at