Bjørn Thomassen

Notes towards an Anthropology of Political Revolutions

While resistance and rebellion have remained core themes in anthropology at least since the 1960s, anthropologists have paid much less attention to the study of political revolutions as real historical events. Yet there are compelling real-world reasons why they should orient their analytical apparatus and ethnographic efforts towards revolutionary events. This article advances a series of reasons why anthropology can enrich and supplement existing political science and history traditions in the study of political revolutions. Anthropology can do so via key concepts developed by Victor Turner: “liminality,” “social drama,” “communitas,” “frame,” and “play.” Turners ritual approach gains further relevance when linked to another series of concepts developed by Marcel Mauss, Gabriel Tarde, Georg Simmel, and Gregory Bateson, such as “imitation,” “trickster,” “schismogenesis,” and “crowd behavior.” To study revolutions implies not only a focus on political behavior “from below,” but also recognition of moments where “high and low” are relativized or subverted, and where the micro- and macro-levels fuse in critical conjunctions.

Anthropology, multiple modernities and the axial age debate:

This article suggests a need to link the anthropological debate of multiple modernities more closely to Weberian social theory, elaborated among others by Shmul Eisenstadt and Eric Voegelin. This implies readdressing the question concerning the anthropological contribution to the understanding of modernity, forcing a link to historical-social theory. In this context, the article discusses the growing axial age debate in social theory, which was indeed an important background to the very idea of ‘multiple modernities’.

Anthropology and social theory: Renewing dialogue

This article argues that anthropology may represent untapped perspectives of relevance to social theory. The article starts by critically reviewing how anthropology has come to serve as the ‘Other’ in various branches of social theory, from Marx and Durkheim to Parsons to Habermas, engaged in a hopeless project of positing ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional’ society as the opposite of modernity. In contemporary debates, it is becoming increasingly recognized that social theory needs history, back to the axial age and beyond. The possible role of anthropology in theorizing modernity receives far less attention. That role should go much beyond representing a view from ‘below’ or a politically correct appreciation of cultural diversity. It involves attention to key theoretical concepts and insights developed by maverick anthropologists like Arnold van Gennep, Marcel Mauss, Victor Turner and Gregory Bateson, concepts that uniquely facilitate an understanding of some of the underlying dynamics of modernity.

Re-narrating Italy, reinventing the nation: assessing the presidency of Ciampi

Abstract Italian political and public debate since the ‘earthquake years’ 1992–1994 has to a very high degree focused on the countrys identity, on the notion of ‘nation’ and how to interpret it, and on the countrys historical past and how to link it meaningfully to the (political) present. It has been less recognized that the crisis of the party political system in the 1990s also gave a new role to play for Italian Presidents at both the institutional and symbolic levels. In particular, this article argues that a fundamental change took place in the bespeaking of the Italian nation during the presidency of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, 1999–2006. Ciampi gave Italians a new language to speak and think with, a language that has become tied to a series of novel or reinvented memory practices. The aim of this article is to analyze this new nationalist discourse as it developed through Ciampis seven years as President of the Italian republic. At the empirical level, the article focuses on spoken and written texts by Ciampi himself. Those texts were either read or published in connection with particularly meaningful dates (2 June or 25 April) or places (‘le fosse Ardeatine’ or Cefalonia). At the theoretical level we argue for an anthropological approach to political transition and meaning-formation. Political regimes change as societies undergo the dissolution of established power structures, affecting not only institutional forms but also affective relations and symbolic universes of people. It is in such a context that Presidential speeches as official discourse and ‘high politics’ can come to function as a symbolic surplus and have a real effect on the semantic underpinning of nation and demos.

Review Article: Is State Building the Road to World Order?

We summarize Francis Fukuyama’s State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-first Century (London, Profile Books, 2005)and explore the limits of its arguments. State Building is a book with a very wide scope that essentially tries to “ground” and expand the fields of political science and international relations with insights from the New Institutional Economics. We suggest that doubts remain concerning the theoretical framework proposed and that many links between theory and a series of substantive claims are left unarticulated; this raises the possibility that the book’s policy recommendations are unwarranted.