Aims and Scope
A main aim of the Journal International Political Anthropology is to give voice to conceptual and methodological creativity, linking the study of politics to perspectives and tools drawn from disciplines or subject areas that were long considered irrelevant to the study of politics proper. We therefore invite contributions that link contemporary problems of politics to the comparative analysis of civilisations, mythology, archaeology, history of the longue durée, religion, symbolism, violence, or political spirituality. We are interested in contributions that thematise the pre-political links between human beings and authority and that connect the analysis of historical crises with the interpretation of meaning as a central aspect of the formation of leaders, political consciousness, or social cohesion.
The Journal is interdisciplinary, wishing to combine insights and approaches from across the social, political and human sciences and philosophy that for too long have been kept apart. We suggest the term ‘anthropology’ as an open-ended term to be interpreted in two main directions. First, the Journal wishes to build on classical traditions in anthropology, and in particular its concern with the role of human experiences in social and political processes. It is at the same time necessary to take a distance to the functionalist tendency that dominated most political anthropology throughout the post-war period, e.g. the approach to society as a self-enclosed functional entity, very similar to the nation-state based political science and historiography that this Journal wishes to go beyond: hence its prefix, ‘International’. However, ‘classical anthropology’, so dismissed during the last decades, did produce conceptual and theoretical developments still to build on. The ‘political anthropology’ we refer to here includes figures like Victor Turner, Paul Radin, Marcel Mauss, Colin Turnbull, Gregory Bateson and René Girard, or other anthropologists who may not have been classified as ‘political anthropologists’, but who in their works focused on ritual, violence, conflict, and disintegration, or who explored the underlying positivities of social co-existence outside the mainstream functionalist frameworks of analysis.
Second, the Journal refers to ‘anthropology’ in the sense of philosophical anthropology and epistemology, going back to the classical tradition (especially Plato). We are interested in contributions that thematise the pre-political links between human beings and authority in themes such as gift-giving, trust, beauty, truth, and truth-telling. We are similarly interested in contributions that connect analysis of historical crises with the interpretation of meaning as a central aspect of the formation of leaders, political consciousness, or social cohesion. While thus encouraging contributions from a wide range of perspectives and issues, the Journal wishes to inspire scholarly debate and locate itself within three broad problem areas. First, while contemporary studies of politics take for granted the dichotomy between order and disorder, International Political Anthropology aims to problematise the emergence and crisis of political forms as historically concrete phenomena. One focus of methodological innovation concerns dissolutions of order, where experience shapes political consciousness, interpretive judgments, and meaning-formation. Regarding the history of political thought, it has not been sufficiently recognised that the greatest figures of political thought, across the World civilizations, all lived through periods of dissolution of order. This opens up for an experiential as opposed to a 'scholastic' type of theory building, of particular contemporary significance. Second, while contemporary political science tends to prescribe forms of rationality for decision-making or to understand politics as the constitutionally regulated conflict of institutions, International Political Anthropology is equally interested in pre-political dimensions, which at a deeper level would include the links between the ‘self’ and the ‘World’. A specific focus of the Journal here concerns the links between the types and forms of ‘personality’ or ‘conduct of life’ and larger institutional processes, including the rise and fall of large-scale political entities. Relating to the current debates on democracy, the Journal will give particular voice to the critical analysis of democratic forms that emphasise extra-institutional processes, such as the ‘totalizing’ and ‘individualizing’ tendencies that jointly define the modern condition. Third, while the contemporary study of politics is predominantly contained within the temporal horizon of the Enlightenment, assuming that modernity can be studied on its own terms, International Political Anthropology approaches contemporary problems with a genuine sense for expanding horizons to both non-Western and pre-modern and ancient societies. The aim of the Journal is to root the understanding of contemporary problems in a range of traditions and streams of thought that encompass Antiquity, Renaissance, early modernity, and theoretical attempts in the course of the 20th century that from a comparative perspective have worked towards bringing these threads together. Concerning the current debates on globalization, the Journal has a particular aim to a) emphasize the parallels between the current period of globalization and earlier periods, especially the global empire building of Antiquity, followed by periods of crisis and collapse, and b) compare the rise, spread and fall of socio-political entities across space and time. The editorial board of the Journal of International Political Anthropology is composed of leading scholars within the above mentioned disciplines and approaches. While the working language of the Journal is English, we have an explicit aim to incorporate and disseminate scholarship produced outside the English-speaking world. In short, we are interested in contributions that discuss innovative scholarship from any corner of the academic landscape. For any further information about this Journal, please contact the Chief Editors.
- Who we are (2 Articles)
- Where we are (0 Articles)
- Mission Statements (1 Article)