Antropologer og staten

Abstract

Anthropolgists and the state. In a famous article from 1959, David Easton claimed that political anthropology has nothing to tell a political scientist, since it does not treat the state as a separate sphere. To make such a claim, Easton had to assume stability in the distribution of functions between the Westphalian state and the co-existing society, similarity between European Westphalian states, and likeness between the European state and all other states in the world. Fifty years on it seems to be clear why Easton was mistaken, and why state comparisons that do not problematize the historical and sociological conditions of every single state formation have failed. If one wants to understand the state in the age of globalization, the point of departure must be to ask how the relationship between state and society continuously changes, not if it does. As Easton points out, this is exactly what political anthropology mainly has focused on. The article gives an overview of how this has been done, from Lewis Henry Morgan to James C. Scott. It calls on political scientists to study the state empirically to a higher degee, as an endogenous part of the analysis or a dependent variable, rather than treating it as a given starting point, as an exogenous part of the analysis or an independent variable.