Paper short abstract:

Political anthropology was born out of the realization that something important can be learned about politics if we focus on the moral logic of social relations. How can a re-focus on relational logic help us understand people's political lives, whatever role 'the state' may now play in them?

Paper long abstract:

Political anthropology was born out of the realization that something important, perhaps essential, can be learned about politics if we focus on the moral logic of social relations: on the entitlements and obligations that these involve, the expectations that people attach to them. This insight was crucial to understanding 'stateless societies', which had no centralized apparatus of government and where the moral logic of relations between and within tribes, clans or age-sets helped make sense of what appeared from outside like political pandemonium. As anthropologists abandoned 'stateless societies' in favour of 'the state,' their interest in the moral logic of relations gave way to preoccupations with the institutions and processes of the state. Analytically, the language of relatedness gave way to the statist language of Western political theory. No doubt, and pace Scott, few people nowadays live in 'stateless societies', few do not have to reckon with the state, but this does not mean that all people everywhere now think and act politically through the categories of the modern, Euro-American state. But what if we focus on the moral logics of political relations, and the language that they are expressed in, whatever the state may be (or not be) in a given setting? How do these draw on the logics of otherwise social relations? What, if anything, makes these relations political? And how do these ideas interact with the relational logic of the modern state? I shall draw on my ethnography of Rajasthan to consider these questions.