Power Persuasion, and Language: A Cririque of the Segmentary Model in the Middle East

Abstract

A famous definition of power reads: In studying political organization, we have to deal with the maintenance or establishment of social order … by the organized exercise of coercive authority through the use, or the possibility of use, of physical force.

Democratic Technologies of Speech: From WWII America to Postcolonial Delhi

“…There is virtually no urban ethnography of India from this period to help us understand how “traditional” leaders spoke or what were the prevailing linguistic ideologies concerning how they should 12 . But from the extensive work on leadership in rural India (Hitchcock 1959; Park and Tinker 1959; Wood 1959) we might conclude that even “traditional” leaders used “persuasive”(Caton 1987) speech of the sort promoted by community developers.…”

“…Natural leaders, lacking other sources of authority, lead through their words (cf. Caton 1987). To lead effectively, natural leaders must generate intensive interaction among members of a group or community.…”

‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men’: the moral and political scales of migration in the central Mediterranean

“…As they demanded, denied, enacted, or judged migration policies under the umbrella of universal hospitality, they sliced the world along the threshold of welcome or trespass in different ways: some of them scaled the political below the moral, others elevated the political above the moral, others, still, drew the political realm across its moral counterpart. Here ‘scale’ and its derived verb – ‘to scale’ up or down – denote two related moves of framing (Caton ) and stagecraft (Shryock ). In the first denotation, ‘scaling’ frames any concrete act of hospitality as that between members of horizontal groups of different sizes.…”

Mobile Peoples: Pastoralists and Herders at the Beginning of the 21st Century

“…The next few chapters of Salzman's work address a wide range of debates and issues common to the study of pastoralists throughout the world and to some extent also in anthropology generally (see e.g., Lancaster 1981;Dresch 1986;Caton 1987;Eickelman 1989). He asks several questions.…”