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Elites, Anthropology of
Elites, Anthropology of Hugh Gusterson, Elliott School of International Affairs, Washington, DC, USA Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract Elites have been little studied by anthropologists because of practical and temperamental barriers to fieldwork. Early work on elites (in Africa, Oceania, South Asia, and Latin America) situated them in the context of broader social wholes and emphasized the importance of kinship in defining and maintaining elites. Subsequent work highlighted the roles of colonialism and capitalism in creating new elites – based on access to capital, education, and bureaucratic perquisites – that challenged and hybridized with traditional elites. While bureaucratic industrial societies present themselves as meritocracies, elites devise strategies of heredity dependent on their privileged access to the educational system and cultural capital. Anthropologists have only recently become interested in ‘studying up’ in the US, having earlier ignored the public debate of the 1950s and 1960s on the alleged ‘power elite’ in the US. Some of the most striking new work on elites has been of scientists, bankers, journalists, evangelists, psychiatrists, and development bureaucrats. Such work often requires innovative approaches to fieldwork.
‘Elites’ have been undertheorized and understudied in the social sciences, and the term has a certain vagueness: both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ societies are said to have elites, despite their divergent political and economic structures, and the privileges of elites may be grounded in genealogy, land ownership, control of capital, bureaucratic position, educational attainment, or religious status, for example. Analysts influenced by Marxism tend to emphasize the material underpinnings of elite status while those tilting toward Weber are more interested in elites’ command of authority and prestige (Bottomore, 1993; Khan, 2012; Milner, 2014). Meanwhile some commentators treat the term ‘elite’ as broadly interchangeable with ‘ruling class,’ while others – making elite status more contextual – lend the term a fractal quality: subordinate classes and groups may have their own internal elites (skilled laborers, for example), so that society is honeycombed with elites all the way down. Thus one can forgive Richard Fox (1985: 931–932) for complaining that “the breadth of the elite concept comes at the expense of theoretical integrity.” The theorization of elites is often traced back to the Italians Vilfredo Pareto (1935) and Gaetano Mosca (1960), each working independently in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to develop an alternative to Marx’s theory of hierarchy in modern society. Pareto in particular saw the hereditarian elites of old Europe as prone to degeneration over time, and hoped that elites in capitalist societies would provide a meritocratic basis for social stratification. Despite their influence on sociological discussions of elites, especially as a counterpoint to Marxian discussions, the work of Pareto and Mosca has been of less interest to anthropologists. In fact, anthropologists have historically shown relatively little interest in theorizing or studying elites. Early anthropologists were more interested in developing holistic descriptions of entire societies than of fractional segments, and they tended to be drawn to societies with relatively little division of labor. However, even as anthropology moved away from its early emphasis on holistic representations of non-Western societies, elites have still received relatively little ethnographic attention. There are many reasons for this, including practical obstacles,
386
the historical conventions of the discipline itself, and the temperamental preferences of anthropologists. Elites are busy, important people who have the power to elude or obstruct anthropologists, and whose lives are usually unsuited to the anthropologist’s classic (and time-intensive) technique of investigation – participant observation (Hertz and Imber, 1995). (While it is easy to imagine anthropologists helping peasants with the harvest, spending hours with poor womenfolk while they cook and clean, or idling with urban streetcorner society, it is harder to imagine them sitting unobtrusively at board meetings, loitering in the hallways of the upper floors of the Pentagon, or being repeatedly invited to dinner with the Rockefellers). Anthropologists have also continued to neglect the study of elites for reasons of convention: the traditional division of labor in the social sciences has given anthropologists dominion over the geographically and socially marginal, and anthropology has historically developed as a discipline that explains to the center the logic of lifeways on the periphery. This convention retains a certain force even in the era of repatriated and postcolonial anthropology. There is also, finally, for many anthropologists a temperamental obstacle to fieldwork with elites: the traditional anthropological methodology of participant observation has historically demanded of anthropologists a reflexive sympathy for the people they have studied – largely poor and marginal people. This, combined with the liberal politics of most anthropologists, makes fieldwork with elites psychologically unappealing and conflictual (Gusterson, 1997). Insofar as earlier generations of anthropologists wrote about elites, they often studied them not so much as topics in their own right but as components of larger social wholes or as products of social processes that were themselves the principal object of analysis. Examples include Dumont’s (1970) work on caste, Barth’s (1959) monograph on patron–client relations among the Swat Pathans of Pakistan, Kuper’s (1961) study of an African aristocracy, and Sahlins’ (1958) work on chiefs and followers in Polynesia. Insofar as this made elite status a processual outcome rather than a thing in itself, this was all to the good. Marcus (1983) observes that such work on elites tended
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 7
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12061-6
Elites, Anthropology of to cluster in particular ethnographic zones where kinship – the core subject matter of early anthropology – was particularly important in understanding the dynamics of elite status: South Asia, marked by its caste system; the Pacific Islands, home to hereditary chiefs and ‘big men’; Africa, peopled by hereditary chiefs and kings; and the oligarchies of Latin America. Work by first wave anthropologists emphasized the importance in sustaining elite status of kinship relations, marriage strategies, land inheritance, patron–client relations, and ritual – what we might call the preindustrial sinews of elite power. As colonization, industrialization, and missionization transformed societies around the world, new sinews of elite power emerged. Accumulation of capital (not just land) became increasingly important, as did access to education, geographical mobility, and positions in the expanding bureaucracies of new states. In many colonial societies the power of traditional, usually hereditary, elites was challenged by the rise of new elites who owed their standing to Western education, positions in emergent state bureaucracies, and trading opportunities provided by the colonial encounter. The processes of decolonization and globalization produced rivalries between emergent and established elites with different relationships to metropolitan power centers but, over time, old and new elites often hybridized through, for example, intermarriage, the conversion of capital into land, and a turn to Western education (Billig, 2007). (This process broadly reenacted a similar development that took place in the industrializing societies of Western Europe where the ancient aristocracies and rising bourgeoisies learned over time to accommodate to one another through marriage, education, and financial alliance). Processes of elite formation and mutation under and after colonialism are discussed by Ferguson (1990), Geertz (1963), Leach and Mukherjee (1970), Luhrmann (1996), and Vincent (1971). As societies become more complex, bureaucratized and marketized, the bases of elite power shift and new kinds of specialized elites (from physicists and lawyers to investment bankers) emerge. One of the distinguishing features of complex industrial societies is that they have a more pluralistic constellation of elites than do their predecessor societies. Moreover, if the dominance of elites in ‘traditional’ societies was often expressed in direct, face-to-face contexts, elite dominance in industrial society is increasingly mediated by bureaucracies, investment markets, and educational systems, distancing elites from those below them. And if the privileges of elites in ‘traditional’ societies were often brazenly hereditary, reproduction of elites in industrial societies is, in theory at least, less regulated by kinship. Thus, Marcus (1989) and Marcus and Dobkin (1992),who has studied traditional elites on the Pacific Island of Tonga and dynastic families in the US, argues that, while kinship appears to define the transmission and reproduction of elite status for the Gettys just as much as it does for the Tongan aristocracy, the analogy is superficial and deceptive: for families such as the Gettys kin relations of inheritance constitute a shell that conceals the corporate and bureaucratic character of the contemporary dynastic family dependent, as it is, on lawyers and money managers for its functioning and reproduction. Cohen (1981) points out that in industrial, bureaucratic societies recruitment to elites is generally advertized as
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meritocratic, yet principles of heredity often find a way to suborn processes of promotion ostensibly based on merit as members of elites transmit their privileges to their children. For example, private schools become a means of converting the wealth of one elite generation into the superior educational attainment of its children, allowing the circumvention of the meritocratic prohibition on the simple inheritance of elite position (Baltzell, 1987; Khan, 2011). Moreover, as Bourdieu (1986) and Lamont (1992) argue, elites come to value taste and manners as signs of distinction when recruiting a new generation of leaders, and accomplishment in this realm is asymmetrically transmitted to the children of existing elites as they are subjected to esoteric training in manners and taste in informal social contexts within the family, in private clubs, in peer groups, and at private schools. Secret societies, such as the freemasons and the fraternities at elite universities in the United States, can also play a role in short-circuiting the processes of meritocracy (Armstrong and Hamilton, 2013). Anthropologists engaged in fieldwork in Western societies for many years tended to ignore Western elites. Thus, for example, anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s kept out of the lively, at times bitter, debate in sociology and among public intellectuals provoked by the publication of C. Wright Mills’ (1956) argument that, far from being a meritocratic society governed by a plurality of separate elites, the United States was ruled by a single ‘power elite.’ According to Mills this elite class was loosely integrated by the backstage functioning of private schools, elite universities, private clubs, and the marriage market and had become adept at disguising from the mystified masses its privileges and its degree of integration. Instead of joining this debate on elites in US society, American anthropologists engaged in fieldwork at home at this time were busy writing about ‘the culture of poverty’ or, in a logical sequel to earlier fieldwork abroad, studying processes of acculturation and economic struggle in Western enclaves of ethnic migrants from Third World countries. A milestone in the recognition of asymmetries in the anthropological gaze came with the publication of Laura Nader’s celebrated (1969) article calling on anthropologists to ‘study up.’ Nader drew attention to the problems of imposing a special visibility on the poor and powerless and appealed to anthropologists to shine an ethnographic spotlight on the functioning of power in the United States. Her article is often misrepresented as a call for anthropologists to engage in bounded studies of elite cultures, where in fact she called for studies of ‘vertical slices’ of social life that would enable the analysis of hierarchical relationships between elites and others and dramatize the essential nature of those relationships for the grounding of elite status and power. This was a way of reworking the traditional holism of anthropology. However, if the first generation of anthropologists had subordinated the study of elites to the analysis of societies as social wholes, Nader’s is a call for holism that puts the privileges and power of elites front and center. Nader observed that ‘studying up’ would probably require modifications of anthropology’s fetishized research technique of face-to-face participant observation, and this has indeed proved to be the case (Stryker and Gonzalez, 2014). Given that elites are often mobile, busy, protected by minders, resistant to being studied, and expensive to socialize with, it is unlikely that
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Elites, Anthropology of
they can be studied using the same techniques anthropologists have developed for peasants, hunter-gatherers, and the urban poor. In order to study elites effectively anthropologists are having to rethink traditional notions of bounded field sites (Marcus, 1995), and to weave naturalistic personal interactions with their subjects together with archival and media research, use of big statistical data, online interaction, and formal interviews with informants too busy to meet more than once – a research strategy I refer to as “polymorphous engagement” (Gusterson, 1997). Examples of ethnographic studies of elites that depart from conventional methodological norms include Harding’s (2000) study of the powerful American preacher, Jerry Falwell, which evoked the world he had created without access to Falwell and his aides; Rose’s (1989) highly literary response to Nader’s call to study ‘vertical slices’ of American life, juxtaposing miniaturized vignettes from the lives of poor African-Americans in Philadelphia with scenes from the lives of business elites and the country gentry in Pennsylvania; Vine’s (2011) study of decisions by the US and the UK military elites to take a Pacific Island from its inhabitants, which makes use of archival sources and formal interviews, as well as participant observation with the displaced islanders; Aldrich’s (1997) autoethnographic study of the Rockefeller dynasty, of which he himself is a member; and the sociologist Jennifer Pierce’s (1995) study of a law firm by means of covert fieldwork conducted under cover of employment as a paralegal – a strategy that violates the ethics code of the American Anthropological Association if not the American Sociological Association. Some of the most interesting work in recent years in the ethnography of elites has explored the practices of financial elites, elite taste cultures, and the world of scientific elites. This work has been undertaken in a context where, as many theorists of neoliberalism have observed, the global capitalist economy is increasingly financialized, increasingly dependent on a burgeoning new class of knowledge producers, and increasingly marked by levels of social and economic inequality that have not been seen in the West for a century (Castells, 2009; Gouldner, 1979; Harvey, 2007; Piketty, 2014). One might think that bankers and financial traders would be the most inaccessible of elites to ethnographic study, but three fine studies, all by younger female anthropologists, take readers deep inside the highly masculine world of financial elites, exploring how they are recruited and socialized and what they do at work, how their work has been transformed by digital technology, how they have remade the corporate world through leveraged buyouts, how they come to believe they deserve multimillion dollar bonuses, and how their practices helped produce the near meltdown of the global financial system of 2008 (Ho, 2009; Tett, 2010; Zaloom, 2010). Financial elites sit at the top of an increasingly unequal socioeconomic system where the wealthy are withdrawing into enclaves that are spatially segregated (Low, 2004) and aesthetically marked. Building on the work of Bourdieu (1986) and Lamont (1992) on the use of taste cultures by the wealthy to build networks and invisible barriers to socioeconomic mobility, a number of studies have explored elite taste cultures. Two of the most widely read have been sharply observed quasiethnographic studies by the journalists David Brooks (2001) and Robert Frank (2008). Beal (2000) and Czegledy (1998)
analyze the mansion-building strategies of Jordanian and Hungarian elites respectively, parsing their careful hybridization of Western and local aesthetics, while Steiner (1994) and Myers (2002) track the international art market that transforms indigenous art work from Africa and Aboriginal Australia into objets d’art that signal the worldly sophistication of the global elites that purchase them. Wulff (1999), also working at the intersection of elite culture and aesthetics, writes on the culture of international ballet dancers. Some of the most rigorous and innovative ethnographic work on Western elites has appeared in the new field of science studies. Perhaps because of their academic culture, scientific elites have proved unusually amenable to ethnographic study. Many ethnographic studies of scientists probe the symbolic prestige of science and the means by which scientists exercise their special license to declare what is true. Latour and Woolgar (1979) show how biologists make their claims authoritative; Traweek (1988) explores the cultural authority of particle physicists in Japan and the United States, while Gusterson (1996) examines the culture of American nuclear weapons scientists, and Helmreich (1998) documents the world of scientists at the elite Santa Fe Institute, and the way seemingly obscure scientific experiments may anchor and replicate dominant political ideologies. Luhrmann (2000) has written a powerful study of the socialization of American psychiatrists – an increasingly important category of expert in the production of American culture and identity. Meanwhile, exploring the scientific endeavor most productive of new wealth, Rabinow (1996, 2002) and Sunder Rajan (2006) have penned studies of the conjoining of venture capital and scientific entrepreneurship in the biotech industry’s remaking of the world. This new wave of studies of elites still leaves gaps. One gap concerns political elites. Weatherford’s (1981) study of the US Congress is now over 30 years old. While Wedel (1999, 2011) has written important studies of the transnational elites that manage the global development machinery and of patronage practices among the American political class, we need more studies of the way political elites function in the United States and elsewhere. That means studies of lobbyists, regulators, elected representatives, political consultants, and others. And, Bickford (2011) notwithstanding, we need more studies of military elites. In a world that is powerfully constructed by media, we also need studies of media elites and their relationship to financial, military, and other elites. Pedelty (1995) has written a vivid account of the journalistic elite that shaped Western understandings of wartorn Central America in the 1980s, exploring the ways in which these journalists’ articles are shaped in response to the interests of elites both in Central America and in the United States, and Hannerz (2004) explores the culture of foreign correspondents more generally, but we also need studies of television and radio journalists, Hollywood productions, and of the elites who own media. The ethnographic study of elites has the potential to stretch anthropology methodologically and theoretically, and to illuminate the hidden mechanics of an increasingly unequal global society. Anthropologists have historically gone into opaque cultural settings and rendered them transparent to their audience. If one of the crutches of elite power is invisibility, anthropologists have an important potential contribution to make to democracy and public discourse, as well as to
Elites, Anthropology of
anthropological scholarship, in adapting and redeploying their traditional methodology for the study of elites.
See also: Anthropology at Home; Art, Anthropological Aspects of; Big Man, Anthropology of; Caste; Colonialism, Anthropology of; Economic Anthropology; Ethnography; Fieldwork in Social and Cultural Anthropology; Finance, Anthropology of; Globalization, Anthropology of; Hegemony: Anthropological Aspects; Inequality: Comparative Aspects; Kinship in Anthropology; Marriage; Modernity: Anthropological Aspects; Money: Anthropological Aspects; North America: Sociocultural Aspects; Patron–Client Relations, Social and Anthropological Study of; Political Anthropology; Political Economy in Anthropology; Postcoloniality; Science and Technology, Anthropology of.
Bibliography Aldrich, N.W., 1997. Old Money: The Mythology of America’s Upper Class. Allworth Press, New York. Armstrong, Elizabeth A., Hamilton, Laura T., 2013. Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Baltzell, E.D., 1987. The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America. Yale University Press, New Haven. Barth, Fredrik, 1959. Political Leadership among Swat Pathans. Althone Press, London. Beal, E. Anne, 2000. Real Jordanians don’t decorate like that! The politics of taste among Amman’s elites. City and Society 12 (2), 65–94. Bickford, Andrew, 2011. Fallen Elites: The Military Other in Post-Unification Germany. Stanford University Press. Billig, Michael S., 2007. The interests of competing elites: fighting over protectionism and “free markets” in Phillipine sugar. Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 29 (2), 70–77. Bottomore, Tom, 1993[1964]. Elites and Society. Routledge, NY. Bourdieu, Pierre, 1986. Distinction. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Brooks, David, 2001. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Simon & Schuster, NY. Castells, Manuel, 2009. The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume 1. Wiley Blackwell, Oxford. Cohen, Abner, 1981. The Politics of Elite Culture: Explorations in the Dramaturgy of Power in a Modern African Society. University of California Press, Berkeley. Czegledy, Andre, 1998. Villas of wealth: a historical perspective on new residences in post-socialist Hungary. City and Society 10 (1), 245–268. Dumont, Louis, 1970. Homo Hierarchicus. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Ferguson, James, 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge University Press, New York. Fox, Richard G., 1985. Review of Elites: Ethnographic Issues by George Marcus. American Anthropologist 87 (4), 930–932. Frank, Robert, 2008. Richistan: A Journey through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich. Three Rivers Press. Geertz, Clifford (Ed.), 1963. Old Societies and New States. Free Press, Glencoe, IL. Gouldner, Alvin, 1979. Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of a New Class. Seabury Press, New York. Gusterson, Hugh, 1996. Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. University of California Press, Berkeley. Gusterson, Hugh, 1997. Studying up revisited. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 20 (1), 114–119. Hannerz, Ulf, 2004. Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Harding, Susan, 2000. The Book of Jerry Falwell. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Harvey, David, 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Helmreich, Stefan, 1998. Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World. University of California Press, Berkeley. Hertz, Rosanna, Imber, Jonathan (Eds.), 1995. Studying Elites Using Qualitative Methods. Sage, Beverly Hills, CA.
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Ho, Karen, 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Duke University Press. Khan, Shamus Rhaman, 2011. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Khan, Shamus Rhaman, 2012. The sociology of elites. Annual Review of Sociology 38, 361–377. Kuper, Hilda, 1961. An African Aristocracy: Rank Among the Swazi. Oxford University Press, London. Lamont, Michele, 1992. Money, Morals, Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Latour, Bruno, Woolgar, Steve, 1979. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Sage, Beverly Hills. Leach, Edmund, Mukherjee, S.N. (Eds.), 1970. Elites in South Asia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Low, Setha, 2004. Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. Routledge, New York. Luhrmann, Tanya, 1996. The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Luhrmann, Tanya, 2000. Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry. Knopf, New York. Marcus, George (Ed.), 1983. Elites: Ethnographic Issues. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Marcus, George (Ed.), 1989. The problem of the unseen world of wealth for the rich: toward an ethnography of complex connections. Ethos 17 (1), 114–123. Marcus, George (Ed.), 1995. Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24, 95–117. Marcus, George, Dobkin, Peter, 1992. Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth Century America. Westview Press, Boulder, CO. Mills, C. Wright, 1956. The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, New York. Milner, Murray, 2014. Elites: A General Model. Polity Press, London. Mosca, Gaetano, 1960. The Ruling Class. McGraw-Hill, New York. Myers, Fred, 2002. Painting Culture: The Making of Aboriginal High Art. Duke University Press. Nader, Laura, 1969. Up the anthropologist: perspectives gained from studying up. In: Hymes, Dell (Ed.), Reinventing Anthropology. Random House, New York. Pareto, Vilfredo, 1935. The Mind and Society. Harcourt, Brace, New York. Pedelty, Mark, 1995. War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents. Routledge, New York. Pierce, Jennifer, 1995. Gender Trials: Emotional Lives in Contemporary Law Firms. University of California Press, Berkeley. Piketty, Thomas, 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA. Rabinow, Paul, 1996. Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Rabinow, Paul, 2002. French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Rose, Dan, 1989. Patterns of American Culture: Ethnography and Estrangement. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Sahlins, Marshall, 1958. Social Stratification in Polynesia. University of Washington Press, Seattle. Steiner, Christopher, 1994. African Art in Transit. Cambridge University Press, New York. Stryker, Rachel, Gonzalez, Roberto (Eds.), 2014. Studying Up, Down and Sideways: Anthropologists Trace the Pathways of Power. Berghahn Books, Brooklyn, NY. Sunder Rajan, Kaushik, 2006. Biocapital: The Constitution of Post-Genomic Life. Duke University Press, Durham. Tett, Gillian, 2010. Fool’s Gold. Free Press, New York. Traweek, Sharon, 1988. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Vincent, Joan, 1971. African Elite: The Big Man of a Small Town. Columbia University Press, New York. Vine, David, 2011. Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Weatherford, Jack, 1981. Tribes on the Hill. Rawson, Wade, New York. Wedel, Janine, 1999. Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, 1989–1998. St. Martin’s, New York. Wedel, Janine, 2011. Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and the Free Market. Basic Books, New York. Wulff, Helena, 1999. Ballet across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers. Berg, Oxford. Zaloom, Caitlin, 2010. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Abstract Elites have been little studied by anthropologists because of practical and temperamental barriers to fieldwork. Early work on elites (in Africa, Oceania, South Asia, and Latin America) situated them in the context of broader social wholes and emphasized the importance of kinship in defining and maintaining elites. Subsequent work highlighted the roles of colonialism and capitalism in creating new elites – based on access to capital, education, and bureaucratic perquisites – that challenged and hybridized with traditional elites. While bureaucratic industrial societies present themselves as meritocracies, elites devise strategies of heredity dependent on their privileged access to the educational system and cultural capital. Anthropologists have only recently become interested in ‘studying up’ in the US, having earlier ignored the public debate of the 1950s and 1960s on the alleged ‘power elite’ in the US. Some of the most striking new work on elites has been of scientists, bankers, journalists, evangelists, psychiatrists, and development bureaucrats. Such work often requires innovative approaches to fieldwork.
‘Elites’ have been undertheorized and understudied in the social sciences, and the term has a certain vagueness: both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ societies are said to have elites, despite their divergent political and economic structures, and the privileges of elites may be grounded in genealogy, land ownership, control of capital, bureaucratic position, educational attainment, or religious status, for example. Analysts influenced by Marxism tend to emphasize the material underpinnings of elite status while those tilting toward Weber are more interested in elites’ command of authority and prestige (Bottomore, 1993; Khan, 2012; Milner, 2014). Meanwhile some commentators treat the term ‘elite’ as broadly interchangeable with ‘ruling class,’ while others – making elite status more contextual – lend the term a fractal quality: subordinate classes and groups may have their own internal elites (skilled laborers, for example), so that society is honeycombed with elites all the way down. Thus one can forgive Richard Fox (1985: 931–932) for complaining that “the breadth of the elite concept comes at the expense of theoretical integrity.” The theorization of elites is often traced back to the Italians Vilfredo Pareto (1935) and Gaetano Mosca (1960), each working independently in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to develop an alternative to Marx’s theory of hierarchy in modern society. Pareto in particular saw the hereditarian elites of old Europe as prone to degeneration over time, and hoped that elites in capitalist societies would provide a meritocratic basis for social stratification. Despite their influence on sociological discussions of elites, especially as a counterpoint to Marxian discussions, the work of Pareto and Mosca has been of less interest to anthropologists. In fact, anthropologists have historically shown relatively little interest in theorizing or studying elites. Early anthropologists were more interested in developing holistic descriptions of entire societies than of fractional segments, and they tended to be drawn to societies with relatively little division of labor. However, even as anthropology moved away from its early emphasis on holistic representations of non-Western societies, elites have still received relatively little ethnographic attention. There are many reasons for this, including practical obstacles,
386
the historical conventions of the discipline itself, and the temperamental preferences of anthropologists. Elites are busy, important people who have the power to elude or obstruct anthropologists, and whose lives are usually unsuited to the anthropologist’s classic (and time-intensive) technique of investigation – participant observation (Hertz and Imber, 1995). (While it is easy to imagine anthropologists helping peasants with the harvest, spending hours with poor womenfolk while they cook and clean, or idling with urban streetcorner society, it is harder to imagine them sitting unobtrusively at board meetings, loitering in the hallways of the upper floors of the Pentagon, or being repeatedly invited to dinner with the Rockefellers). Anthropologists have also continued to neglect the study of elites for reasons of convention: the traditional division of labor in the social sciences has given anthropologists dominion over the geographically and socially marginal, and anthropology has historically developed as a discipline that explains to the center the logic of lifeways on the periphery. This convention retains a certain force even in the era of repatriated and postcolonial anthropology. There is also, finally, for many anthropologists a temperamental obstacle to fieldwork with elites: the traditional anthropological methodology of participant observation has historically demanded of anthropologists a reflexive sympathy for the people they have studied – largely poor and marginal people. This, combined with the liberal politics of most anthropologists, makes fieldwork with elites psychologically unappealing and conflictual (Gusterson, 1997). Insofar as earlier generations of anthropologists wrote about elites, they often studied them not so much as topics in their own right but as components of larger social wholes or as products of social processes that were themselves the principal object of analysis. Examples include Dumont’s (1970) work on caste, Barth’s (1959) monograph on patron–client relations among the Swat Pathans of Pakistan, Kuper’s (1961) study of an African aristocracy, and Sahlins’ (1958) work on chiefs and followers in Polynesia. Insofar as this made elite status a processual outcome rather than a thing in itself, this was all to the good. Marcus (1983) observes that such work on elites tended
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 7
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12061-6
Elites, Anthropology of to cluster in particular ethnographic zones where kinship – the core subject matter of early anthropology – was particularly important in understanding the dynamics of elite status: South Asia, marked by its caste system; the Pacific Islands, home to hereditary chiefs and ‘big men’; Africa, peopled by hereditary chiefs and kings; and the oligarchies of Latin America. Work by first wave anthropologists emphasized the importance in sustaining elite status of kinship relations, marriage strategies, land inheritance, patron–client relations, and ritual – what we might call the preindustrial sinews of elite power. As colonization, industrialization, and missionization transformed societies around the world, new sinews of elite power emerged. Accumulation of capital (not just land) became increasingly important, as did access to education, geographical mobility, and positions in the expanding bureaucracies of new states. In many colonial societies the power of traditional, usually hereditary, elites was challenged by the rise of new elites who owed their standing to Western education, positions in emergent state bureaucracies, and trading opportunities provided by the colonial encounter. The processes of decolonization and globalization produced rivalries between emergent and established elites with different relationships to metropolitan power centers but, over time, old and new elites often hybridized through, for example, intermarriage, the conversion of capital into land, and a turn to Western education (Billig, 2007). (This process broadly reenacted a similar development that took place in the industrializing societies of Western Europe where the ancient aristocracies and rising bourgeoisies learned over time to accommodate to one another through marriage, education, and financial alliance). Processes of elite formation and mutation under and after colonialism are discussed by Ferguson (1990), Geertz (1963), Leach and Mukherjee (1970), Luhrmann (1996), and Vincent (1971). As societies become more complex, bureaucratized and marketized, the bases of elite power shift and new kinds of specialized elites (from physicists and lawyers to investment bankers) emerge. One of the distinguishing features of complex industrial societies is that they have a more pluralistic constellation of elites than do their predecessor societies. Moreover, if the dominance of elites in ‘traditional’ societies was often expressed in direct, face-to-face contexts, elite dominance in industrial society is increasingly mediated by bureaucracies, investment markets, and educational systems, distancing elites from those below them. And if the privileges of elites in ‘traditional’ societies were often brazenly hereditary, reproduction of elites in industrial societies is, in theory at least, less regulated by kinship. Thus, Marcus (1989) and Marcus and Dobkin (1992),who has studied traditional elites on the Pacific Island of Tonga and dynastic families in the US, argues that, while kinship appears to define the transmission and reproduction of elite status for the Gettys just as much as it does for the Tongan aristocracy, the analogy is superficial and deceptive: for families such as the Gettys kin relations of inheritance constitute a shell that conceals the corporate and bureaucratic character of the contemporary dynastic family dependent, as it is, on lawyers and money managers for its functioning and reproduction. Cohen (1981) points out that in industrial, bureaucratic societies recruitment to elites is generally advertized as
387
meritocratic, yet principles of heredity often find a way to suborn processes of promotion ostensibly based on merit as members of elites transmit their privileges to their children. For example, private schools become a means of converting the wealth of one elite generation into the superior educational attainment of its children, allowing the circumvention of the meritocratic prohibition on the simple inheritance of elite position (Baltzell, 1987; Khan, 2011). Moreover, as Bourdieu (1986) and Lamont (1992) argue, elites come to value taste and manners as signs of distinction when recruiting a new generation of leaders, and accomplishment in this realm is asymmetrically transmitted to the children of existing elites as they are subjected to esoteric training in manners and taste in informal social contexts within the family, in private clubs, in peer groups, and at private schools. Secret societies, such as the freemasons and the fraternities at elite universities in the United States, can also play a role in short-circuiting the processes of meritocracy (Armstrong and Hamilton, 2013). Anthropologists engaged in fieldwork in Western societies for many years tended to ignore Western elites. Thus, for example, anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s kept out of the lively, at times bitter, debate in sociology and among public intellectuals provoked by the publication of C. Wright Mills’ (1956) argument that, far from being a meritocratic society governed by a plurality of separate elites, the United States was ruled by a single ‘power elite.’ According to Mills this elite class was loosely integrated by the backstage functioning of private schools, elite universities, private clubs, and the marriage market and had become adept at disguising from the mystified masses its privileges and its degree of integration. Instead of joining this debate on elites in US society, American anthropologists engaged in fieldwork at home at this time were busy writing about ‘the culture of poverty’ or, in a logical sequel to earlier fieldwork abroad, studying processes of acculturation and economic struggle in Western enclaves of ethnic migrants from Third World countries. A milestone in the recognition of asymmetries in the anthropological gaze came with the publication of Laura Nader’s celebrated (1969) article calling on anthropologists to ‘study up.’ Nader drew attention to the problems of imposing a special visibility on the poor and powerless and appealed to anthropologists to shine an ethnographic spotlight on the functioning of power in the United States. Her article is often misrepresented as a call for anthropologists to engage in bounded studies of elite cultures, where in fact she called for studies of ‘vertical slices’ of social life that would enable the analysis of hierarchical relationships between elites and others and dramatize the essential nature of those relationships for the grounding of elite status and power. This was a way of reworking the traditional holism of anthropology. However, if the first generation of anthropologists had subordinated the study of elites to the analysis of societies as social wholes, Nader’s is a call for holism that puts the privileges and power of elites front and center. Nader observed that ‘studying up’ would probably require modifications of anthropology’s fetishized research technique of face-to-face participant observation, and this has indeed proved to be the case (Stryker and Gonzalez, 2014). Given that elites are often mobile, busy, protected by minders, resistant to being studied, and expensive to socialize with, it is unlikely that
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they can be studied using the same techniques anthropologists have developed for peasants, hunter-gatherers, and the urban poor. In order to study elites effectively anthropologists are having to rethink traditional notions of bounded field sites (Marcus, 1995), and to weave naturalistic personal interactions with their subjects together with archival and media research, use of big statistical data, online interaction, and formal interviews with informants too busy to meet more than once – a research strategy I refer to as “polymorphous engagement” (Gusterson, 1997). Examples of ethnographic studies of elites that depart from conventional methodological norms include Harding’s (2000) study of the powerful American preacher, Jerry Falwell, which evoked the world he had created without access to Falwell and his aides; Rose’s (1989) highly literary response to Nader’s call to study ‘vertical slices’ of American life, juxtaposing miniaturized vignettes from the lives of poor African-Americans in Philadelphia with scenes from the lives of business elites and the country gentry in Pennsylvania; Vine’s (2011) study of decisions by the US and the UK military elites to take a Pacific Island from its inhabitants, which makes use of archival sources and formal interviews, as well as participant observation with the displaced islanders; Aldrich’s (1997) autoethnographic study of the Rockefeller dynasty, of which he himself is a member; and the sociologist Jennifer Pierce’s (1995) study of a law firm by means of covert fieldwork conducted under cover of employment as a paralegal – a strategy that violates the ethics code of the American Anthropological Association if not the American Sociological Association. Some of the most interesting work in recent years in the ethnography of elites has explored the practices of financial elites, elite taste cultures, and the world of scientific elites. This work has been undertaken in a context where, as many theorists of neoliberalism have observed, the global capitalist economy is increasingly financialized, increasingly dependent on a burgeoning new class of knowledge producers, and increasingly marked by levels of social and economic inequality that have not been seen in the West for a century (Castells, 2009; Gouldner, 1979; Harvey, 2007; Piketty, 2014). One might think that bankers and financial traders would be the most inaccessible of elites to ethnographic study, but three fine studies, all by younger female anthropologists, take readers deep inside the highly masculine world of financial elites, exploring how they are recruited and socialized and what they do at work, how their work has been transformed by digital technology, how they have remade the corporate world through leveraged buyouts, how they come to believe they deserve multimillion dollar bonuses, and how their practices helped produce the near meltdown of the global financial system of 2008 (Ho, 2009; Tett, 2010; Zaloom, 2010). Financial elites sit at the top of an increasingly unequal socioeconomic system where the wealthy are withdrawing into enclaves that are spatially segregated (Low, 2004) and aesthetically marked. Building on the work of Bourdieu (1986) and Lamont (1992) on the use of taste cultures by the wealthy to build networks and invisible barriers to socioeconomic mobility, a number of studies have explored elite taste cultures. Two of the most widely read have been sharply observed quasiethnographic studies by the journalists David Brooks (2001) and Robert Frank (2008). Beal (2000) and Czegledy (1998)
analyze the mansion-building strategies of Jordanian and Hungarian elites respectively, parsing their careful hybridization of Western and local aesthetics, while Steiner (1994) and Myers (2002) track the international art market that transforms indigenous art work from Africa and Aboriginal Australia into objets d’art that signal the worldly sophistication of the global elites that purchase them. Wulff (1999), also working at the intersection of elite culture and aesthetics, writes on the culture of international ballet dancers. Some of the most rigorous and innovative ethnographic work on Western elites has appeared in the new field of science studies. Perhaps because of their academic culture, scientific elites have proved unusually amenable to ethnographic study. Many ethnographic studies of scientists probe the symbolic prestige of science and the means by which scientists exercise their special license to declare what is true. Latour and Woolgar (1979) show how biologists make their claims authoritative; Traweek (1988) explores the cultural authority of particle physicists in Japan and the United States, while Gusterson (1996) examines the culture of American nuclear weapons scientists, and Helmreich (1998) documents the world of scientists at the elite Santa Fe Institute, and the way seemingly obscure scientific experiments may anchor and replicate dominant political ideologies. Luhrmann (2000) has written a powerful study of the socialization of American psychiatrists – an increasingly important category of expert in the production of American culture and identity. Meanwhile, exploring the scientific endeavor most productive of new wealth, Rabinow (1996, 2002) and Sunder Rajan (2006) have penned studies of the conjoining of venture capital and scientific entrepreneurship in the biotech industry’s remaking of the world. This new wave of studies of elites still leaves gaps. One gap concerns political elites. Weatherford’s (1981) study of the US Congress is now over 30 years old. While Wedel (1999, 2011) has written important studies of the transnational elites that manage the global development machinery and of patronage practices among the American political class, we need more studies of the way political elites function in the United States and elsewhere. That means studies of lobbyists, regulators, elected representatives, political consultants, and others. And, Bickford (2011) notwithstanding, we need more studies of military elites. In a world that is powerfully constructed by media, we also need studies of media elites and their relationship to financial, military, and other elites. Pedelty (1995) has written a vivid account of the journalistic elite that shaped Western understandings of wartorn Central America in the 1980s, exploring the ways in which these journalists’ articles are shaped in response to the interests of elites both in Central America and in the United States, and Hannerz (2004) explores the culture of foreign correspondents more generally, but we also need studies of television and radio journalists, Hollywood productions, and of the elites who own media. The ethnographic study of elites has the potential to stretch anthropology methodologically and theoretically, and to illuminate the hidden mechanics of an increasingly unequal global society. Anthropologists have historically gone into opaque cultural settings and rendered them transparent to their audience. If one of the crutches of elite power is invisibility, anthropologists have an important potential contribution to make to democracy and public discourse, as well as to
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anthropological scholarship, in adapting and redeploying their traditional methodology for the study of elites.
See also: Anthropology at Home; Art, Anthropological Aspects of; Big Man, Anthropology of; Caste; Colonialism, Anthropology of; Economic Anthropology; Ethnography; Fieldwork in Social and Cultural Anthropology; Finance, Anthropology of; Globalization, Anthropology of; Hegemony: Anthropological Aspects; Inequality: Comparative Aspects; Kinship in Anthropology; Marriage; Modernity: Anthropological Aspects; Money: Anthropological Aspects; North America: Sociocultural Aspects; Patron–Client Relations, Social and Anthropological Study of; Political Anthropology; Political Economy in Anthropology; Postcoloniality; Science and Technology, Anthropology of.
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