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Brokers and Brokerage, Anthropology of
Brokers and Brokerage, Anthropology of Johan Lindquist, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract This article deals with the ebb and flow of interest in the broker in anthropology since the 1950s. It attempts to situate this interest in relation to the changing world that anthropology has been concerned with, and in the context of shifting theoretical perspectives within the discipline. Beginning with the era of decolonization and the rise of the new nation-states, it tracks the position of the broker in relation to trends within political and economic anthropology, before pointing toward current concerns in anthropology.
Introduction The broker is a classic figure in the anthropological literature, particularly with regard to the study of low-level political and economic relationships. It is important to note, however, that there has been an ebb and flow of interest in the broker and brokerage in anthropology. While appearing as a critical figure for anthropology in the context of decolonization and modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s, and later with the rise of transactionalism, the broker largely vanished from view in the late 1970s before reemerging in the wake of current engagements with neoliberalism. The moral ambiguity of the broker as an individual who crosses social boundaries and whose motives and loyalties are questioned gained increasing force in this process. This article attends to this history, which illuminates some changing concerns in the discipline since the middle of the twentieth century, primarily in the United Kingdom and the United States. But first a statement should be made about definitions. In this article, the broker is a specific type of middleman, mediator, or intermediary. Most generally, the broker is a human actor who gains something from the mediation of valued resources that he or she does not directly control, which shall be distinguished from a patron who controls valued resources, and a go-between or a messenger, who does not affect the transaction. As shall become clear, these ideal-type distinctions are difficult to sustain in the face of a changing empirical reality and innovations in anthropological theory, particularly the concern with mediation, but will serve as a placeholder to attend to the history of the concept.
Historical Trajectories Even if one can find essays that deal explicitly with middlemen in the anthropological canon, significant anthropological interest in brokers and brokerage does not emerge until the postcolonial era during the 1950s and 1960s, as a growing concern with social change challenged the largely ahistorical perspectives of functionalism and structural-functionalism. This was first made evident through studies that considered the modern village chief or head in Africa as a broker between overlapping fields of African and European political authority, particularly in the context of the Manchester school’s focus on situational analysis (Gluckman et al., 1949; but see also Fallers,
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1955). Redfield’s (1956) concern with the relationship between parts and wholes, between little and great traditions in complex societies, also led to an interest in what he called “hinge groups.” There was rarely, however, an explicit attempt to engage in a general cross-cultural or conceptual discussion concerning brokers. In contrast, classic articles by Eric Wolf (1956) and Clifford Geertz (1960) explicitly developed the idea of the cultural broker as a way to describe shifting forms of political authority and the transforming relationship between village and metropole following decolonization in Mexico and Indonesia, respectively. The work of F.G. Bailey should also be noted, as he clearly identified brokers as ‘agents of social change’ (1963: p. 101) that allowed for the integration of villages into a wider society in Orissa in India. Generally speaking, these studies attempted to historicize the development of new forms of political relationships through the figure of the broker, particularly in relation to the rise of the new nation-states. While sociologists for decades had been concerned with the ‘marginal man’ as a personality type that developed through migration and intercultural relations (Parks, 1928), in anthropology the cultural broker – generally an insider – appeared as a starting point for considering social change more broadly (Press, 1969). In this historical era, Wolf defined brokers as “groups of people who mediate between community-oriented groups in communities and nation-oriented groups which operate through national institutions” (Wolf, 1956: p. 1075). These brokers were ‘Janus-like,’ turned in two directions at once, and came to “stand guard over the crucial junctures or synapses of relationships which connect the local system to the larger whole” (Wolf, 1956: pp. 1075–1076). Particular types of individuals – often multilingual and comfortable in multiple settings – emerged as ethnographic exemplars. The African chief has been mentioned, the traditional healer engaging with Western medicine another, but most well known is perhaps the kijaji, the Javanese Muslim leader described by Geertz (1960), whose local legitimacy was based on experiences in, and relationships with, the center of the Islamic world, Mecca. With the rise of the Indonesian nation-state, the kijaji was drawn into new forms of translocal relations. As Geertz phrased it, while before he was a “scholar, curer, and mystic teacher, he is now a politician,” albeit “an amateur” one (1960: p. 247). For both Geertz and Wolf, a new form of ethnographic attention emerged that
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 2
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12178-6
Brokers and Brokerage, Anthropology of
was concerned with understanding complex systems and the relations between different levels of sociocultural integration. There were explicit disciplinary concerns as well. For Geertz, the focus on the broker was an attempt to find a space between the predominance of community-based studies in anthropology and political science’s concern with elites. The rise of modernization theory during the 1960s positioned the new nations within a developmental framework that considered the broker as a necessary but temporary actor that would disappear with the rise of new rational organizational forms. In the wake of Geertz and Wolf, there were attempts to develop and circumscribe the broker conceptually along these lines. Sydel Silverman, following Wolf, highlighted two criteria: first, ‘critical functions’ that are of ‘direct importance to the basic structures of either or both systems,’ and, second, ‘exclusivity,’ meaning that the links between two systems were monopolized by particular types of individuals (1965: p. 173). In her historical account of Central Italy, Silverman showed how certain patrons came to dominate a wide range of mediating functions between the rural community and the national system, but that after World War II many of these functions were taken over by the state, as the expansion of literacy and education allowed for locals to engage directly with bureaucracy. As such, ‘critical junctures’ were no longer guarded by one group. In Silverman’s account, there is thus a historical relationship between the position of the patron and the broker, as the former takes on the role of the latter during a certain period. Deep-seated relations of inequality – not only based on control of economic resources and familial relations of debt, but also on access to education and the ability to engage with the state – thus formed the basis for new brokerage opportunities. In this context, and in line with modernization theory, the hypothesis was that the broker emerged in an early stage of the development of the nationstate, only to later become unnecessary with the process of integration of local and national levels of society. The rise of transactionalism – a theoretical position first advanced by Fredrik Barth – focused on the strategic actions of individuals in contexts of social constraint. It was therefore not surprising that leading proponents such as F.G. Bailey, Robert Paine, and Jeremy Boissevain turned their attention to brokerage. In keeping with the methodological individualism of transactionalism, Bailey and Paine attempted to move beyond a model of brokerage based on inequality, such as that outlined by Silverman, to one that considered the nature of the transaction as a starting point. Bailey’s Strategems and Spoils broadened the discussion considerably by understanding brokers as bridging a gap in communication in a ‘situation of encapsulation’ (1969: p. 167). In Patrons and Brokers in the East Arctic (1971), Robert Paine and his collaborators were, on the one hand, concerned with the Canadian government’s expansion into the Arctic, and its effect on indigenous groups, and the role of brokers in this process. On the other hand, Paine attempted to develop a theory of patronage and brokerage that focused on roles rather than statuses based on inequality. He argued that roles were situational and that brokerage should be understood as the regulation of the circulation of values. Boissevain, in turn, identified the broker as “a professional manipulator of people and information who brings about communication for a profit” (1974: p. 148).
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He argued that centrality of location in networks, time to deal with social relations, and control over first-order resources were all critical in becoming a successful broker (pp. 154ff). The broker’s capital lay in the communication channels he controlled, while his credit was what others believed his capital to be (p. 159). Transactionalists’ focus on communication shifted attention more directly toward the formal elements of brokerage as well as the figure of the entrepreneur, thus attending more to economic relations. This was perhaps unsurprising with the rise of rural capitalism in the areas in which anthropologists were concerned. Boissevain’s claim that ‘brokerage is business’ (1974: p. 158) stated this most clearly. But transactionalism’s concern with formal relationships also allowed for the potential of bringing the economic and the political into a common frame, thus highlighting the entrepreneurial aspects of politics rather than stable relationships. While the African headman had often been considered a victim of tensions between different groups, the strategic actions of the transactionalist broker highlighted a particular problem, namely that the broker is not able to justify his actions in normative terms. If manipulation rather than the resolution of conflict was at the center of the broker’s craft, it was not surprising that he was often despised and considered dishonest. More generally, this pointed toward issues that became increasingly important as anthropologists shifted their attention away from villages toward complex societies, namely issues of trust and interpersonal relations across sociocultural borders.
The Death of the Broker By the late 1970s, however, the broker had begun to disappear as a focus of concern for anthropology. The question of power had from the beginning been at the heart of well-known debates between transactionalists and Marxists. Even sympathetic critics such as Cohen and Comaroff claimed that although it was important to distinguish the broker from patron, the broker role embodied the essential attribute of power: “the capacity to construct and purvey meanings concerning a variety of relationships and interactions” (1976: p. 89). More importantly, they claimed that political relationships were often based on the creation or mediation of boundaries of meaning rather than transactions within coherent systems of meaning, a point that illuminates contemporary discussions in anthropology and a more sophisticated understanding of the workings of power. Deborah James (2011) understands the disappearance of the broker in relation to what Jonathan Spencer (2007, Chapter 1) calls the ‘strange death of political anthropology,’ in which the analysis of local-level politics ran into a ‘dead end’ with the rise of structuralist (particularly Marxist) models of political analysis and a broad-based understanding of the postcolonial state as the primary site of power and domination in the Third World. There was perhaps also a more subtle shift of attention from the concern with particular persons, such as patrons and brokers, to particular situations that allowed for new forms of relations and brokerage (Vincent, 1978: p. 186). Arguably, however, a series of further trends reinforced the waning interest in the broker. As post-structuralism emerged
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with full force during the 1990s, the focus was broadly placed on how power productively disciplined and shaped individual subjectivities, as questions concerning agency were effectively sidelined. In this world, the local-level broker appeared increasingly insignificant in both empirical and analytical terms. In the meantime, with the reflexive critique of anthropology that emerged primarily in the United States during the 1980s, the broker arguably lost relevance precisely because of the crisis of cultural holism, which came to complicate the question of brokerage and how it might be conceptualized. As hybridity came to replace identity, the cultural forms of encapsulation that had formed the basis for an analysis of brokerage were effectively critiqued and disbanded. Finally, during the same period, a technologically centered concern with mediation, primarily in the wake of Benedict Anderson’s seminal Imagined Communities (1983), came to dominate scholarly debate, as an anthropology of media gained ground (Boyer, 2012). The question of the relationship between mediation and brokerage is one that will be further discussed at the end of this article. It is worth noting contrary developments within the discipline of history. Richard White’s (1991) influential The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 offered a nuanced understanding of relationships between settlers and Native Americans through a focus on brokers. Interestingly, White begins his book with an epigraph from the historian of anthropology, James Clifford, concerning the ongoing critique of the culture concept, thus offering a perspective on the American frontier that moved beyond the ‘billiard ball’ theory of cultural relations toward one highlighting struggles for accommodation and common meaning. More recently, historians influenced by or trained in anthropology have considered brokers as a starting point for considering imperial governance. Rothman (2011), in her study of brokers in sixteenth-century Venice, successfully combines anthropology and history by illustrating how brokers licensed by the Venetian state did not merely mediate between different categories of actors – that is, ‘Venetians’ and ‘Turks’ – but were in fact active in producing the categories of identity themselves by various means and arrangements.
The Return of the Broker In the past decade, there has arguably been a renewed concern with the broker in anthropology. Transformations in the global economy since the collapse of Bretton Woods and ensuing neoliberal reform have increasingly problematized statecentered models of power and sovereignty and pushed for a reconceptualization of the relationship between state and market. It is in this context that we can note a great potential for the return of the broker in ethnographic terms as an actor that emerges and becomes positioned along these fault lines (James, 2011). Furthermore, technological innovations in transportation, communication, and media have created a transnational landscape that has formed the backdrop for anthropology. It has become increasingly clear that the metaphor of transnational flow needs to be specified empirically and that brokers are critical in this process, not only on the local level but also among the transnational
elites that have increasingly become a familiar focus for anthropologists. As noted earlier, in the past few decades a broader focus on mediation has largely displaced the concern with brokers. With the rise of digital media and the internet, in particular, mediation has moved to the center of anthropological attention. As science and technology studies has come to replace cultural studies as a primary interlocutor for anthropological theorizing, however, perspectives such as actor–network-theory have led many anthropologists to problematize the distinction between human and nonhuman agency, thus allowing for a renewed discussion concerning the relationship between brokerage and mediation, and of agency, more generally. In contrast to the fantasies of ideologues who imagine a world of disintermediation characterized by free markets without borders, in the contemporary moment it appears that brokers are proliferating rather than becoming obsolete. In fact, with neoliberal reform and economic and political deregulation, the broker appears as a critical figure, indeed, one might argue, as an ideal anthropological informant. In the global south, James notes as much in relation to transitional settings such as post-apartheid South Africa, where “state, market, and patrimonial/patriarchal-style political authority intersect” (2011: p. 318). She sees the reemergence of brokers who can mediate between these spheres, in her case in the context of land reform. In what follows, I will identify a few other domains in which the broker has emerged as a site of concern.
Current Trajectories As tourism has become one of the world’s largest industries in recent decades, it has also become a key site of interest for anthropologists. In the relationship between ‘hosts’ and ‘guests,’ various forms of brokers, most notably the tour guide, have attracted the attention of anthropologists. In the new anthropology of tourism there is, for instance, the recognition that brokers do not mediate between already existing cultures, but are rather active in producing and encapsulating cultural authenticity, and of commodifying and selling these experiences and images. Macdonald’s (2006) work on tour guides in a ‘difficult heritage’ site, the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremburg, highlights one productive site in ethnographic terms, in which guides attempt to control interpretation in different ways. But tourism itself is not easily circumscribed, and the rise of volunteer and retiree tourism points to relationships between leisure and labor, and the rise of new zones of contact and brokerage that are capturing the interest of anthropologists. The rapidly expanding global industry for tertiary education should also be noted in this context, as the recruitment of students depends on brokers, many of them former students themselves. The global rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), particularly in the context of the development aid industry, but also in transnational activism, has led scholars to consider the role of brokers in these processes. Although Olivier de Sardan (2005, Chapter 11) distinguishes between agents who work directly for donors and rent-seeking development brokers, it is perhaps more fruitful to highlight his point that there is an a priori normative distinction – which has limited empirical
Brokers and Brokerage, Anthropology of support – between grassroots do-gooders and corrupt actors. Of particular interest in the emerging literature on development brokers is Brokers and Translators (Mosse and Lewis, 2006), which is an attempt to combine an actor-oriented approach rooted in the Manchester school of anthropology with a Latourian concern with translation in actor–networktheory. Rather than considering brokers as strictly mediating between aid donors and recipients, the authors ask how unpredictable development projects are actually implemented through the translation of interests, concepts, and practices, and how particular forms of meaning are established in this process. The anthropology of transnational migration has tended to focus on sites of departure or destination. While social networks and diasporic communities have been widely researched, the commercially oriented migrant broker has been vilified since the advent of liberalism, an ethical position that has often been reproduced in the scholarly literature. This discourse is particularly evident in discussions concerning human trafficking in which there is an enduring distinction between ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator.’ However, in the context of Asia and the Middle East, in particular, there is an ongoing turn from undocumented to documented transnational migration, in which the rise of licensed recruitment agencies has been matched by increasing demands for state documentation. In this process, brokers both convince people to become migrants and negotiate paperwork in relation to the state bureaucracy (Lindquist et al., 2012). As in ongoing discussions concerning the rise of NGOs, neoliberalization and the shifting relationship between the state and market are both creating the opportunity for new types of brokers – who engage both with local populations and bureaucracies – while reproducing an a priori ethical discourse. In an important sense, brokerage has been an ethnographic black box in both the development and migration industries, a fact of which anthropologists are increasingly cognizant. In the examples noted earlier, we see how the moral ambiguity of the broker – as an actor whose primary commitment appears as maximizing individual gain and is therefore deemed untrustworthy – has remained constant across time and space (James, 2011: p. 319). This ethical position is perhaps most evident in the burgeoning work on the transnational market in organ transplants, in which Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2003), in her brand of militant anthropology, names particular brokers in the ‘rotten trade.’ On the other hand, it is also possible to see how this position has become problematic in ethnographic terms in relation to the earlier discussion. For instance, Lawrence Cohen (2003) speculates about the rise of ‘bioethical brokers’ who come to control the discourse surrounding organ transplants. These include scholars and policy-makers, who are certainly often sincere in their intentions, but who should nonetheless be considered as epistemic brokers. Cohen’s ethnographic focus thus illustrates a broadened anthropological concern that makes evident multiple fields of brokerage across previously disconnected domains. Another field in which one can note a renewed interest in the broker is in the anthropology of finance, which has shifted attention toward the economic elites that are at the center of the global economy. Cailtin Zaloom (2006), for instance, in her study of trading floors in Chicago’s and New York’s financial
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districts, pays close attention to various types of ‘economic men’ who broker trades, as financial markets have moved from floor-based to electronic trading. From an anthropological perspective, it is clear that the ‘global economy’ is made up of actors who are engaged in making actual trades and that this should be considered ethnographically. But the importance of technologies and algorithms in finance has also meant that it is within the anthropology of finance, as well as the anthropology of science, that actor–network-theory has been most influential. The attempt to do away with the distinction between human and nonhuman agents has opened up for a more radical understanding of brokerage. In this context, Latour makes a critical distinction between intermediaries and mediators. The intermediary “transports meaning without transformation” while “mediators transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry” (2005: p. 39). In fact, it is upon this distinction that Latour makes a contrast to other forms of sociology. From the perspective of actor–network-theory, there exist an endless number of mediators, and thereby brokers, who thereby are positioned at the center of analysis and as a starting point for considering various processes of encapsulation and the production of social forms. A recent example of anthropologists using actor–network-theory is the discussion by Bill Maurer et al. (2013) on the rise of the ‘mobile money agent’ who functions as a kind of ‘human ATM’ by facilitating monetary transactions for users via mobile phones. As they note, there are ongoing discussions within the mobile money industry concerning whether the agent is an intermediary and mediator, a classic question in anthropology. Rather than focusing attention on the broker, the mobile money agent itself, Maurer and his colleagues use the industry’s interest in the agency of the broker as an entry point for considering ongoing discussions about ‘agency’ and money, once again illustrating how anthropologists are increasingly considering particular kinds of experts as knowledge brokers. Finally, it is worth noting the anthropology of media. In Boyer’s (2012) review of the field, he notes a shift of attention away from media as a form to mediation as a process, which has in part led to an increasing focus on producers (2012: p. 386), thus suggesting that one question for anthropology in the future is precisely the relationship between brokerage and mediation. In this context, the anthropological interest in journalists is notable, as in Ulf Hannerz’s (2004) ethnography of foreign correspondents, and in Zeynep Devrim Gürsel’s (2012) work on ‘image brokers’ in news journalism in the era of digital media. In both cases, anthropologists are concerned with how journalists broker news and images in a process of world-making, thus once again showing how in the contemporary era brokers are less – once again borrowing F.G. Bailey’s term – encapsulated than engaged in processes of encapsulation.
Final Thoughts: Ebb and Flow From one perspective, the ebb and flow of interest in the broker can be considered in relation to the changing nature of the state. While former colonies were transformed into nationstates after World War II, since the 1980s neoliberalization has both transformed the state and modes of governance.
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It is therefore worth considering if interest in the broker both reflects a crisis of political authority and a mode of anthropological theorizing in the face of such a crisis. But a major difference between the current era and the earlier one is that while previously it was generally clear what the broker was mediating between, the village and the national capital, or, more generally, encapsulated political structures, in the contemporary context of unbounded fieldsites this is not immediately obvious. This is arguably more of a possibility than a constraint as anthropologists are able to avoid the pitfalls of methodological individualism and consider the broker as an ethnographic entry point that illuminates broader contexts and processes from a particular position of mediation. As such, the renewed focus on the broker moves beyond a static conceptualization of the relationship between the ‘local,’ ‘national,’ or ‘global,’ thus understanding scale as emergent in relation to the ethnography at hand and aiming to set things in motion rather than to resolve or put an issue to rest. The problem of how to describe and conceptualize what the broker mediates between is thus primarily ethnographic, as is the more specific question if the broker is better understood as an intermediary or mediator – actors or entities that make a difference or no difference in the transaction, respectively (Latour, 2005).
See also: Anthropology: Overview; Big Man, Anthropology of; Borders, Anthropology of; Development: SocialAnthropological Aspects; Economic Anthropology; Exchange in Anthropology; Finance, Anthropology of; Globalization, Anthropology of; Inequality: Comparative Aspects; Migration: Anthropological Perspectives; Nongovernmental Organizations: Anthropological and Historical Aspects; Patron–Client Relations, Social and Anthropological Study of; Political Anthropology; Political Economy in Anthropology; State: Anthropological Aspects; Tourism.
Bibliography Anderson, B., 1983. Imagined Communities. Verso, London. Bailey, F.G., 1963. Politics and Social Change: Orissa in 1959. University of California Press, Berkeley. Bailey, F.G., 1969. Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics. Blackwell, Oxford. Boissevain, J., 1974. Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Boyer, D., 2012. From media anthropology to the anthropology of media. In: Fardon, R., et al. (Eds.), Handbook of Social Anthropology. Sage, London, pp. 383–392.
Cohen, L., 2003. Where it hurts: Indian material for an ethics of organ transplantation. Zygon 38, 663–688. Cohen, A., Comaroff, J.L., 1976. The management of meaning: on the phenomenology of political transactions. In: Kapferer, B. (Ed.), Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior. Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Philadelphia, pp. 87–107. Fallers, I., 1955. The predicament of the modern African chief: an instance from Uganda. American Anthropologist 57, 290–305. Geertz, C., 1960. The Javanese kijaji: the changing role of a cultural broker. Comparative Studies in Society and History 2, 228–249. Gluckman, M., Mitchell, J.C., Barnes, J.A., 1949. The village headman in British Central Africa. Africa 19, 89–106. Gürsel, Z.D., 2012. The politics of wire service photography: infrastructures of representation in a digital newsroom. American Ethnologist 39, 71–89. Hannerz, U., 2004. Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents. University of Chicago Press. James, D., 2011. The return of the broker: consensus, hierarchy, and choice in South African land reform. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17, 318–338. Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction of Actor–Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, New York. Lindquist, J., Xiang, B., Yeoh, B., 2012. Opening the black box of migration: brokers, the organization of transnational mobility and the changing political economy in Asia. Pacific Affairs 85, 7–19. Macdonald, S., 2006. Mediating heritage: tour guides at the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds, Nuremburg. Tourist Studies 6, 119–138. Maurer, B., Nelms, T., Rea, S., 2013. ‘Bridges to cash’: channelling agency in mobile money. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (1), 52–74. Mosse, D., Lewis, D., 2006. Theoretical approaches to brokerage and translation in development. In: Lewis, D., Mosse, D. (Eds.), Development Brokers and Translators. Kumarian, Bloomfield, pp. 1–26. Olivier de Sardan, J.P., 2005. Anthropology and Development: Understanding Contemporary Social Change. Zed Books, London. Paine, R. (Ed.), 1971. Patrons and Brokers in the East Arctic. Social and Economic Papers, St John’s, Newfoundland. Parks, R.E., 1928. Human migration and marginal man. American Journal of Sociology 33, 881–893. Press, I., 1969. Ambiguity and innovation: implications for the genesis of the culture broker. American Anthropologist 71, 205–217. Redfield, R., 1956. Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Civilization. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Rothman, N., 2011. Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul. Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Scheper-Hughes, N., 2003. Rotten trade: millennial capitalism, human values and global justice in organs trafficking. Journal of Human Rights 2, 197–226. Silverman, S., 1965. Patronage and community-nation relationships in Central Italy. Ethnology 4, 172–189. Spencer, J., 2007. Anthropology, Politics, and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Vincent, J., 1978. Political anthropology: manipulative strategies. Annual Review of Anthropology 7, 175–194. White, R., 1991. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge University Press. Wolf, E., 1956. Aspects of group relations in a complex society: Mexico. American Anthropologist 58, 1065–1078. Zaloom, C., 2006. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Abstract This article deals with the ebb and flow of interest in the broker in anthropology since the 1950s. It attempts to situate this interest in relation to the changing world that anthropology has been concerned with, and in the context of shifting theoretical perspectives within the discipline. Beginning with the era of decolonization and the rise of the new nation-states, it tracks the position of the broker in relation to trends within political and economic anthropology, before pointing toward current concerns in anthropology.
Introduction The broker is a classic figure in the anthropological literature, particularly with regard to the study of low-level political and economic relationships. It is important to note, however, that there has been an ebb and flow of interest in the broker and brokerage in anthropology. While appearing as a critical figure for anthropology in the context of decolonization and modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s, and later with the rise of transactionalism, the broker largely vanished from view in the late 1970s before reemerging in the wake of current engagements with neoliberalism. The moral ambiguity of the broker as an individual who crosses social boundaries and whose motives and loyalties are questioned gained increasing force in this process. This article attends to this history, which illuminates some changing concerns in the discipline since the middle of the twentieth century, primarily in the United Kingdom and the United States. But first a statement should be made about definitions. In this article, the broker is a specific type of middleman, mediator, or intermediary. Most generally, the broker is a human actor who gains something from the mediation of valued resources that he or she does not directly control, which shall be distinguished from a patron who controls valued resources, and a go-between or a messenger, who does not affect the transaction. As shall become clear, these ideal-type distinctions are difficult to sustain in the face of a changing empirical reality and innovations in anthropological theory, particularly the concern with mediation, but will serve as a placeholder to attend to the history of the concept.
Historical Trajectories Even if one can find essays that deal explicitly with middlemen in the anthropological canon, significant anthropological interest in brokers and brokerage does not emerge until the postcolonial era during the 1950s and 1960s, as a growing concern with social change challenged the largely ahistorical perspectives of functionalism and structural-functionalism. This was first made evident through studies that considered the modern village chief or head in Africa as a broker between overlapping fields of African and European political authority, particularly in the context of the Manchester school’s focus on situational analysis (Gluckman et al., 1949; but see also Fallers,
870
1955). Redfield’s (1956) concern with the relationship between parts and wholes, between little and great traditions in complex societies, also led to an interest in what he called “hinge groups.” There was rarely, however, an explicit attempt to engage in a general cross-cultural or conceptual discussion concerning brokers. In contrast, classic articles by Eric Wolf (1956) and Clifford Geertz (1960) explicitly developed the idea of the cultural broker as a way to describe shifting forms of political authority and the transforming relationship between village and metropole following decolonization in Mexico and Indonesia, respectively. The work of F.G. Bailey should also be noted, as he clearly identified brokers as ‘agents of social change’ (1963: p. 101) that allowed for the integration of villages into a wider society in Orissa in India. Generally speaking, these studies attempted to historicize the development of new forms of political relationships through the figure of the broker, particularly in relation to the rise of the new nation-states. While sociologists for decades had been concerned with the ‘marginal man’ as a personality type that developed through migration and intercultural relations (Parks, 1928), in anthropology the cultural broker – generally an insider – appeared as a starting point for considering social change more broadly (Press, 1969). In this historical era, Wolf defined brokers as “groups of people who mediate between community-oriented groups in communities and nation-oriented groups which operate through national institutions” (Wolf, 1956: p. 1075). These brokers were ‘Janus-like,’ turned in two directions at once, and came to “stand guard over the crucial junctures or synapses of relationships which connect the local system to the larger whole” (Wolf, 1956: pp. 1075–1076). Particular types of individuals – often multilingual and comfortable in multiple settings – emerged as ethnographic exemplars. The African chief has been mentioned, the traditional healer engaging with Western medicine another, but most well known is perhaps the kijaji, the Javanese Muslim leader described by Geertz (1960), whose local legitimacy was based on experiences in, and relationships with, the center of the Islamic world, Mecca. With the rise of the Indonesian nation-state, the kijaji was drawn into new forms of translocal relations. As Geertz phrased it, while before he was a “scholar, curer, and mystic teacher, he is now a politician,” albeit “an amateur” one (1960: p. 247). For both Geertz and Wolf, a new form of ethnographic attention emerged that
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 2
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12178-6
Brokers and Brokerage, Anthropology of
was concerned with understanding complex systems and the relations between different levels of sociocultural integration. There were explicit disciplinary concerns as well. For Geertz, the focus on the broker was an attempt to find a space between the predominance of community-based studies in anthropology and political science’s concern with elites. The rise of modernization theory during the 1960s positioned the new nations within a developmental framework that considered the broker as a necessary but temporary actor that would disappear with the rise of new rational organizational forms. In the wake of Geertz and Wolf, there were attempts to develop and circumscribe the broker conceptually along these lines. Sydel Silverman, following Wolf, highlighted two criteria: first, ‘critical functions’ that are of ‘direct importance to the basic structures of either or both systems,’ and, second, ‘exclusivity,’ meaning that the links between two systems were monopolized by particular types of individuals (1965: p. 173). In her historical account of Central Italy, Silverman showed how certain patrons came to dominate a wide range of mediating functions between the rural community and the national system, but that after World War II many of these functions were taken over by the state, as the expansion of literacy and education allowed for locals to engage directly with bureaucracy. As such, ‘critical junctures’ were no longer guarded by one group. In Silverman’s account, there is thus a historical relationship between the position of the patron and the broker, as the former takes on the role of the latter during a certain period. Deep-seated relations of inequality – not only based on control of economic resources and familial relations of debt, but also on access to education and the ability to engage with the state – thus formed the basis for new brokerage opportunities. In this context, and in line with modernization theory, the hypothesis was that the broker emerged in an early stage of the development of the nationstate, only to later become unnecessary with the process of integration of local and national levels of society. The rise of transactionalism – a theoretical position first advanced by Fredrik Barth – focused on the strategic actions of individuals in contexts of social constraint. It was therefore not surprising that leading proponents such as F.G. Bailey, Robert Paine, and Jeremy Boissevain turned their attention to brokerage. In keeping with the methodological individualism of transactionalism, Bailey and Paine attempted to move beyond a model of brokerage based on inequality, such as that outlined by Silverman, to one that considered the nature of the transaction as a starting point. Bailey’s Strategems and Spoils broadened the discussion considerably by understanding brokers as bridging a gap in communication in a ‘situation of encapsulation’ (1969: p. 167). In Patrons and Brokers in the East Arctic (1971), Robert Paine and his collaborators were, on the one hand, concerned with the Canadian government’s expansion into the Arctic, and its effect on indigenous groups, and the role of brokers in this process. On the other hand, Paine attempted to develop a theory of patronage and brokerage that focused on roles rather than statuses based on inequality. He argued that roles were situational and that brokerage should be understood as the regulation of the circulation of values. Boissevain, in turn, identified the broker as “a professional manipulator of people and information who brings about communication for a profit” (1974: p. 148).
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He argued that centrality of location in networks, time to deal with social relations, and control over first-order resources were all critical in becoming a successful broker (pp. 154ff). The broker’s capital lay in the communication channels he controlled, while his credit was what others believed his capital to be (p. 159). Transactionalists’ focus on communication shifted attention more directly toward the formal elements of brokerage as well as the figure of the entrepreneur, thus attending more to economic relations. This was perhaps unsurprising with the rise of rural capitalism in the areas in which anthropologists were concerned. Boissevain’s claim that ‘brokerage is business’ (1974: p. 158) stated this most clearly. But transactionalism’s concern with formal relationships also allowed for the potential of bringing the economic and the political into a common frame, thus highlighting the entrepreneurial aspects of politics rather than stable relationships. While the African headman had often been considered a victim of tensions between different groups, the strategic actions of the transactionalist broker highlighted a particular problem, namely that the broker is not able to justify his actions in normative terms. If manipulation rather than the resolution of conflict was at the center of the broker’s craft, it was not surprising that he was often despised and considered dishonest. More generally, this pointed toward issues that became increasingly important as anthropologists shifted their attention away from villages toward complex societies, namely issues of trust and interpersonal relations across sociocultural borders.
The Death of the Broker By the late 1970s, however, the broker had begun to disappear as a focus of concern for anthropology. The question of power had from the beginning been at the heart of well-known debates between transactionalists and Marxists. Even sympathetic critics such as Cohen and Comaroff claimed that although it was important to distinguish the broker from patron, the broker role embodied the essential attribute of power: “the capacity to construct and purvey meanings concerning a variety of relationships and interactions” (1976: p. 89). More importantly, they claimed that political relationships were often based on the creation or mediation of boundaries of meaning rather than transactions within coherent systems of meaning, a point that illuminates contemporary discussions in anthropology and a more sophisticated understanding of the workings of power. Deborah James (2011) understands the disappearance of the broker in relation to what Jonathan Spencer (2007, Chapter 1) calls the ‘strange death of political anthropology,’ in which the analysis of local-level politics ran into a ‘dead end’ with the rise of structuralist (particularly Marxist) models of political analysis and a broad-based understanding of the postcolonial state as the primary site of power and domination in the Third World. There was perhaps also a more subtle shift of attention from the concern with particular persons, such as patrons and brokers, to particular situations that allowed for new forms of relations and brokerage (Vincent, 1978: p. 186). Arguably, however, a series of further trends reinforced the waning interest in the broker. As post-structuralism emerged
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with full force during the 1990s, the focus was broadly placed on how power productively disciplined and shaped individual subjectivities, as questions concerning agency were effectively sidelined. In this world, the local-level broker appeared increasingly insignificant in both empirical and analytical terms. In the meantime, with the reflexive critique of anthropology that emerged primarily in the United States during the 1980s, the broker arguably lost relevance precisely because of the crisis of cultural holism, which came to complicate the question of brokerage and how it might be conceptualized. As hybridity came to replace identity, the cultural forms of encapsulation that had formed the basis for an analysis of brokerage were effectively critiqued and disbanded. Finally, during the same period, a technologically centered concern with mediation, primarily in the wake of Benedict Anderson’s seminal Imagined Communities (1983), came to dominate scholarly debate, as an anthropology of media gained ground (Boyer, 2012). The question of the relationship between mediation and brokerage is one that will be further discussed at the end of this article. It is worth noting contrary developments within the discipline of history. Richard White’s (1991) influential The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 offered a nuanced understanding of relationships between settlers and Native Americans through a focus on brokers. Interestingly, White begins his book with an epigraph from the historian of anthropology, James Clifford, concerning the ongoing critique of the culture concept, thus offering a perspective on the American frontier that moved beyond the ‘billiard ball’ theory of cultural relations toward one highlighting struggles for accommodation and common meaning. More recently, historians influenced by or trained in anthropology have considered brokers as a starting point for considering imperial governance. Rothman (2011), in her study of brokers in sixteenth-century Venice, successfully combines anthropology and history by illustrating how brokers licensed by the Venetian state did not merely mediate between different categories of actors – that is, ‘Venetians’ and ‘Turks’ – but were in fact active in producing the categories of identity themselves by various means and arrangements.
The Return of the Broker In the past decade, there has arguably been a renewed concern with the broker in anthropology. Transformations in the global economy since the collapse of Bretton Woods and ensuing neoliberal reform have increasingly problematized statecentered models of power and sovereignty and pushed for a reconceptualization of the relationship between state and market. It is in this context that we can note a great potential for the return of the broker in ethnographic terms as an actor that emerges and becomes positioned along these fault lines (James, 2011). Furthermore, technological innovations in transportation, communication, and media have created a transnational landscape that has formed the backdrop for anthropology. It has become increasingly clear that the metaphor of transnational flow needs to be specified empirically and that brokers are critical in this process, not only on the local level but also among the transnational
elites that have increasingly become a familiar focus for anthropologists. As noted earlier, in the past few decades a broader focus on mediation has largely displaced the concern with brokers. With the rise of digital media and the internet, in particular, mediation has moved to the center of anthropological attention. As science and technology studies has come to replace cultural studies as a primary interlocutor for anthropological theorizing, however, perspectives such as actor–network-theory have led many anthropologists to problematize the distinction between human and nonhuman agency, thus allowing for a renewed discussion concerning the relationship between brokerage and mediation, and of agency, more generally. In contrast to the fantasies of ideologues who imagine a world of disintermediation characterized by free markets without borders, in the contemporary moment it appears that brokers are proliferating rather than becoming obsolete. In fact, with neoliberal reform and economic and political deregulation, the broker appears as a critical figure, indeed, one might argue, as an ideal anthropological informant. In the global south, James notes as much in relation to transitional settings such as post-apartheid South Africa, where “state, market, and patrimonial/patriarchal-style political authority intersect” (2011: p. 318). She sees the reemergence of brokers who can mediate between these spheres, in her case in the context of land reform. In what follows, I will identify a few other domains in which the broker has emerged as a site of concern.
Current Trajectories As tourism has become one of the world’s largest industries in recent decades, it has also become a key site of interest for anthropologists. In the relationship between ‘hosts’ and ‘guests,’ various forms of brokers, most notably the tour guide, have attracted the attention of anthropologists. In the new anthropology of tourism there is, for instance, the recognition that brokers do not mediate between already existing cultures, but are rather active in producing and encapsulating cultural authenticity, and of commodifying and selling these experiences and images. Macdonald’s (2006) work on tour guides in a ‘difficult heritage’ site, the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremburg, highlights one productive site in ethnographic terms, in which guides attempt to control interpretation in different ways. But tourism itself is not easily circumscribed, and the rise of volunteer and retiree tourism points to relationships between leisure and labor, and the rise of new zones of contact and brokerage that are capturing the interest of anthropologists. The rapidly expanding global industry for tertiary education should also be noted in this context, as the recruitment of students depends on brokers, many of them former students themselves. The global rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), particularly in the context of the development aid industry, but also in transnational activism, has led scholars to consider the role of brokers in these processes. Although Olivier de Sardan (2005, Chapter 11) distinguishes between agents who work directly for donors and rent-seeking development brokers, it is perhaps more fruitful to highlight his point that there is an a priori normative distinction – which has limited empirical
Brokers and Brokerage, Anthropology of support – between grassroots do-gooders and corrupt actors. Of particular interest in the emerging literature on development brokers is Brokers and Translators (Mosse and Lewis, 2006), which is an attempt to combine an actor-oriented approach rooted in the Manchester school of anthropology with a Latourian concern with translation in actor–networktheory. Rather than considering brokers as strictly mediating between aid donors and recipients, the authors ask how unpredictable development projects are actually implemented through the translation of interests, concepts, and practices, and how particular forms of meaning are established in this process. The anthropology of transnational migration has tended to focus on sites of departure or destination. While social networks and diasporic communities have been widely researched, the commercially oriented migrant broker has been vilified since the advent of liberalism, an ethical position that has often been reproduced in the scholarly literature. This discourse is particularly evident in discussions concerning human trafficking in which there is an enduring distinction between ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator.’ However, in the context of Asia and the Middle East, in particular, there is an ongoing turn from undocumented to documented transnational migration, in which the rise of licensed recruitment agencies has been matched by increasing demands for state documentation. In this process, brokers both convince people to become migrants and negotiate paperwork in relation to the state bureaucracy (Lindquist et al., 2012). As in ongoing discussions concerning the rise of NGOs, neoliberalization and the shifting relationship between the state and market are both creating the opportunity for new types of brokers – who engage both with local populations and bureaucracies – while reproducing an a priori ethical discourse. In an important sense, brokerage has been an ethnographic black box in both the development and migration industries, a fact of which anthropologists are increasingly cognizant. In the examples noted earlier, we see how the moral ambiguity of the broker – as an actor whose primary commitment appears as maximizing individual gain and is therefore deemed untrustworthy – has remained constant across time and space (James, 2011: p. 319). This ethical position is perhaps most evident in the burgeoning work on the transnational market in organ transplants, in which Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2003), in her brand of militant anthropology, names particular brokers in the ‘rotten trade.’ On the other hand, it is also possible to see how this position has become problematic in ethnographic terms in relation to the earlier discussion. For instance, Lawrence Cohen (2003) speculates about the rise of ‘bioethical brokers’ who come to control the discourse surrounding organ transplants. These include scholars and policy-makers, who are certainly often sincere in their intentions, but who should nonetheless be considered as epistemic brokers. Cohen’s ethnographic focus thus illustrates a broadened anthropological concern that makes evident multiple fields of brokerage across previously disconnected domains. Another field in which one can note a renewed interest in the broker is in the anthropology of finance, which has shifted attention toward the economic elites that are at the center of the global economy. Cailtin Zaloom (2006), for instance, in her study of trading floors in Chicago’s and New York’s financial
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districts, pays close attention to various types of ‘economic men’ who broker trades, as financial markets have moved from floor-based to electronic trading. From an anthropological perspective, it is clear that the ‘global economy’ is made up of actors who are engaged in making actual trades and that this should be considered ethnographically. But the importance of technologies and algorithms in finance has also meant that it is within the anthropology of finance, as well as the anthropology of science, that actor–network-theory has been most influential. The attempt to do away with the distinction between human and nonhuman agents has opened up for a more radical understanding of brokerage. In this context, Latour makes a critical distinction between intermediaries and mediators. The intermediary “transports meaning without transformation” while “mediators transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry” (2005: p. 39). In fact, it is upon this distinction that Latour makes a contrast to other forms of sociology. From the perspective of actor–network-theory, there exist an endless number of mediators, and thereby brokers, who thereby are positioned at the center of analysis and as a starting point for considering various processes of encapsulation and the production of social forms. A recent example of anthropologists using actor–network-theory is the discussion by Bill Maurer et al. (2013) on the rise of the ‘mobile money agent’ who functions as a kind of ‘human ATM’ by facilitating monetary transactions for users via mobile phones. As they note, there are ongoing discussions within the mobile money industry concerning whether the agent is an intermediary and mediator, a classic question in anthropology. Rather than focusing attention on the broker, the mobile money agent itself, Maurer and his colleagues use the industry’s interest in the agency of the broker as an entry point for considering ongoing discussions about ‘agency’ and money, once again illustrating how anthropologists are increasingly considering particular kinds of experts as knowledge brokers. Finally, it is worth noting the anthropology of media. In Boyer’s (2012) review of the field, he notes a shift of attention away from media as a form to mediation as a process, which has in part led to an increasing focus on producers (2012: p. 386), thus suggesting that one question for anthropology in the future is precisely the relationship between brokerage and mediation. In this context, the anthropological interest in journalists is notable, as in Ulf Hannerz’s (2004) ethnography of foreign correspondents, and in Zeynep Devrim Gürsel’s (2012) work on ‘image brokers’ in news journalism in the era of digital media. In both cases, anthropologists are concerned with how journalists broker news and images in a process of world-making, thus once again showing how in the contemporary era brokers are less – once again borrowing F.G. Bailey’s term – encapsulated than engaged in processes of encapsulation.
Final Thoughts: Ebb and Flow From one perspective, the ebb and flow of interest in the broker can be considered in relation to the changing nature of the state. While former colonies were transformed into nationstates after World War II, since the 1980s neoliberalization has both transformed the state and modes of governance.
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It is therefore worth considering if interest in the broker both reflects a crisis of political authority and a mode of anthropological theorizing in the face of such a crisis. But a major difference between the current era and the earlier one is that while previously it was generally clear what the broker was mediating between, the village and the national capital, or, more generally, encapsulated political structures, in the contemporary context of unbounded fieldsites this is not immediately obvious. This is arguably more of a possibility than a constraint as anthropologists are able to avoid the pitfalls of methodological individualism and consider the broker as an ethnographic entry point that illuminates broader contexts and processes from a particular position of mediation. As such, the renewed focus on the broker moves beyond a static conceptualization of the relationship between the ‘local,’ ‘national,’ or ‘global,’ thus understanding scale as emergent in relation to the ethnography at hand and aiming to set things in motion rather than to resolve or put an issue to rest. The problem of how to describe and conceptualize what the broker mediates between is thus primarily ethnographic, as is the more specific question if the broker is better understood as an intermediary or mediator – actors or entities that make a difference or no difference in the transaction, respectively (Latour, 2005).
See also: Anthropology: Overview; Big Man, Anthropology of; Borders, Anthropology of; Development: SocialAnthropological Aspects; Economic Anthropology; Exchange in Anthropology; Finance, Anthropology of; Globalization, Anthropology of; Inequality: Comparative Aspects; Migration: Anthropological Perspectives; Nongovernmental Organizations: Anthropological and Historical Aspects; Patron–Client Relations, Social and Anthropological Study of; Political Anthropology; Political Economy in Anthropology; State: Anthropological Aspects; Tourism.
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