Introduction

Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Fernanda Pirie

The issue of or order and how it is generated and maintained is one to which considerable sociological attention has been directed over the decades. Many early ethnographic studies were concerned with the question of how order was produced in small-scale, acephalous societies, those beyond the control of any state. More recently, however, anthropologists have tended to turn their attention away from the issue of how order is maintained in isolated communities to relations of power and domination in more complex societies – the effects of colonialization, domination and resistance, inter-state relations and globalization. Forms of hierarchy, hegemony and the unequal access to resources received more attention than structures of order. At the same time, anthropological analyses of conflict and violence have proliferated. The focus has been on the violent, the illegitimate and the immoral while order, it seems, has almost disappeared from the anthropological picture.

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Order and the Evocation of Heritage

Representing Quality in the French Biscuit Trade

Simon Roberts

Inviting us to reflect on the themes of 'order and disorder', the editors direct our attention back to a vast agenda of unfinished business. Some items on that agenda have been exhaustively considered, even if they remain unresolved. Among those items, two durable if contested assumptions are generally lurking somewhere in the background when we think about the constitution and reproduction of the social world. First, is an idea that a large part of the regularity we see around us can be attributed to the willed achievement of those in power. Second, is the persistent notion that commitment to a shared, articulate repertoire of norms is indispensable to stable social arrangements. In the anthropology and sociology of law, the dominance of these understandings of order has led, in broad schematic terms, to two preoccupations. One of these has been with the conditions of survival of centralized government, and so with the nature of legitimacy claims and lines of 'attachment' between subject and polity. The other has been a related concern with the conditions under which 'rules' acquire and retain validity as law, and more generally with questions surrounding 'commitment' to norms. Associated with both of these questions has been an equally durable idea that different answers to them are required in opposed, imagined contexts respectively labeled 'tradition' and 'modernity'. In this respect, there has also been a strong, and largely unchallenged, tendency – at least over the last thirty years – to think about ritual and symbolic productions, with their predominantly 'illocutionary' as opposed to 'propositional' qualities, as exclusively associated with the legitimacy claims of political hierarchies, and more specifically as a strategic resource associated with 'traditional authority'.

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Pride, Honour, Individual and Collective Violence

Order in a 'Lawless' Village

Aimar Ventsel

This chapter is about the maintenance of order in a post-Soviet Arctic village not far from the coast of the Arctic Ocean. Siberia as a region and legal anthropology as a field of study are only weakly linked. Soviet ethnography, like Tsarist Russian, post-Soviet and recent Western scholarship, has, among other things, described and analysed legal norms and the social structure of researched groups (Popov 1946, Dolgikh 1960, Shirokogoroff 1976, Gurvich 1977, Boiko and Kostiuk 1992, D'iachenko and Ermolova 1994, Grant 1995, Krivoshapkin 1997, Fondahl 1998, Ziker 2002). However, there is no literature on how these norms and concepts are maintained and violation is either prevented or punished. Another topic under-represented in Siberian anthropology, is the role of violence in the structures and methods of maintaining order. Some works show that violence and violent death is quite common in the everyday life of Siberian people (Pika 1993, Ziker 2002) and used to be part of their ritual and social behaviour (Batianova 2000), but violence as social behaviour is not discussed in Siberian anthropology.

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Order, Individualism and Responsibility

Contrasting Dynamics on the Tibetan Plateau

Fernanda Pirie

The 'problem' of order in societies that sanction violence has posed an analytic challenge to anthropologists since Evans-Pritchard's (1940) classic work on the Nuer. More recently, studies of violence and conflict in Melanesian societies have been used to critique certain models of social order. Strathern (1985), for example, uses a Melanesian example to cast doubt on the idea that order is the proper state of society and needs to be imposed on individuals who are, by natural propensity, asocial beings, a model which is associated with state legal systems. It should not be assumed, she says, that such a view is shared by members of other societies, nor that disputes necessarily represent ruptured social relations, which need to be repaired through processes of conflict resolution. Harrison (1989: 585) develops Strathern's argument by questioning a model of order elaborated in the work of Sahlins (1968) whereby tribal societies view their political groups as moral universes whose normative values derive from shared membership in a group. In many Melanesian societies, Harrison points out, violence is regarded as a threat to physical existence but not, apparently, to conceptions of the social. It is amoral, not immoral behaviour.

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Vigilante Groups and the State in West Africa

Tilo Grätz

Many contemporary African states are weak states in the Weberian sense of the term because they lack full control of their territories, an absolute monopoly of violence and feature ineffective institutions (Jackson and Rosberg 1982, Roitman 1999, von Trotha 2000). The existence of local powers, authorities and independent political arrangements, as well as legal structures and modes of resource appropriation, further accentuates this picture. Parallel power structures and practices range from corporate groups which organize tax evasion, corruption, smuggling and informal production, to autonomous realms of local jurisprudence, including adjudication, sanctioning and taxation, to opposing political movements, quasi-independent regions and warlords. There are many 'intermediary' forms of local political control beyond the reach of the state which may draw upon both local modes of political action and new institutions (Alber 2000, 2001, Schlee 2001). Among these are vigilante groups1 and local militias, which have recently increased in importance in many African countries. Vigilante groups are often able to generate specific regimes of public order (Abrahams 1998), dominate legal processes and control economic subsystems, at least in a certain region. They often operate in marginal or peripherical regions of African states – for instance in the area of Lake Chad and Sudan (Perouse de Montclos 1998, Roitman 2000) – although not exclusively, as many examples from urban areas in South Africa and Kenya reveal. In any event, they are often more than simple organizations of self-defence; they give rise to local movements, create multiple social ties and ritual relationships among their members and are shaped by pertinent moral discourses. Regardless of their local legitimacy, they may share similar features with sectarian groups, bandits and secret associations. Their rootedness in local societies may, nevertheless, be very different, as may their relationship to local elites and the central state.

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Imposing New Concepts of Order in Rural Morocco

Violence and Transnational Challenges to Local Order

Bertram Turner

In this paper the maintenance of local order in south-west Morocco is analysed as the interaction between different models of order informed by different but interrelated legal spheres. These models are based on different legal repertoires which incorporate different notions and ideals of what order actually is, according to various moral codes and philosophies. These concepts of order partially overlap but may be mutually exclusive or contradictory in certain circumstances. Thus, the paper concerns a plurality of concepts of order and their respective relations to practices of regulating disorder. The focus is on the connection between concepts of local order and ideas about what are permissible or necessary instances of violence. In certain circumstances in rural Morocco violence is perceived as a necessary contribution to the rearrangement of order.

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Law, Ritual and Order

Peter Just

Virtually all human action depends on order, creates order, defends order, contests order. One hardly needs to be a cognitive scientist to recognize that human mental activity is, fundamentally, a process of conferring categorical order on a universe in which phenomena and processes are unique and continuous (Lakoff 1990). And, whether one prefers the earlier formulations of Sapir (1986) and Whorf (1964) or the more recent and fashionable ones of Michel Foucault (1982, 1994), it seems that few fail to take for granted the crucial and determinative role that natural language plays in ordering one's perception of reality. So any consideration of order and disorder necessarily opens an immensely wide field of inquiry. What, one might reasonably ask, doesn't have at least something to do with order and disorder?

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The Disorders of An Order

State and Society in Ottoman and Turkish Trabzon

Michael E. Meeker

How should we understand the relationship of a state order and a social order? Is it possible to theorize the state apart from society, and society apart from the state? For example, would it be possible to institute a state as a kind of protective umbrella for a collection of societies, as in the instance of a collection of tribes, peasantries and citizens, speaking different languages and ascribing to different religions? And might such a state, in its role as a protective umbrella, take a variety of forms, including the form of a liberal and democratic state as anticipated by some for the new Iraq? Or should we consider instead another hypothesis? The politics of a state might always be inseparable from a politics of society. This would mean that the order of the state and the order of society would react one upon the other, and so always be mutually implicated, one with the other.

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Anthropological Order and Political Disorder

Jonathan Spencer

My theme in this chapter can be simply summarized in three juxtaposed quotes. The first is from F.G. Bailey's late 1960s introduction to political anthropology, Stratagems and Spoils: 'I have picked out in this introduction certain moral themes which ride between the lines of the book. Behind these themes – and behind the whole endeavour – is a repugnance for disorder, for the mere jumble of facts in which no pattern can be perceived, for "mere anarchy"' (1969: xiii). The second is from 'Thick Description' (Geertz 1973), probably the single most quoted anthropological essay of the 1970s: 'Nothing has done more, I think, to discredit cultural analysis than the construction of impeccable depictions of formal order in whose existence nobody can quite believe' (1973: 18). The third is from Nancy Scheper-Hughes' Death without Weeping (1992), a monograph which sums up the anthropological spirit of the 1990s as comprehensively as Geertz's essay evokes the decade of Watergate and large hair:

The blurring of fiction and reality creates a kind of mass hysteria and paranoia that can be seen as a new technique of social control in which everyone suspects and fears every other: a collective hostile gaze, a human panopticon (see Foucault 1979), is created. But when this expresses itself positively and a state of alarm or a state of emergency is produced … the shocks reveal the disorder in the order and call into question the 'normality of the abnormal', which is finally shown for what it really is (Scheper- Hughes 1992: 229).

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