Paper short abstract:

Few political anthropologists now take their object of study to be an 'ethnos' or culture. In the light of post-Weberian theories of power it is the political order that emerges as the most convenient unit for anthropological comparison,a project we might term 'kratography' rather than 'ethnography'

Paper long abstract:

Anthropology has inherited the term 'ethnography' from an earlier era, but for political anthropologists this has become an increasingly anachronistic expression, since few now take their object of study to be an 'ethnos' or culture as such. As Kuper (1999) notes among many others, by the late twentieth century the notion of bounded cultures as systemic wholes had been problematized and largely abandoned by social anthropologists. I argue that in the light of post-Weberian theories of power it is the political order that emerges as the most convenient unit for anthropological comparison, rather than the essentially 19th century concepts of a bounded culture or society. The study of such orders might be termed 'kratography' - the attempt to describe and analyse domains of power and the social forms that flow from them. A revisionist reading of classical ethnographies of the Nuer and Trobriand Islands places them in a new context: as kratographies these studies reveal the power relations and projects of governance backgrounded by their original settings.