Power & its disguises : anthropological perspectives on politics / by John Gledhill.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 228-240) and index.

1. Locating the political: a political anthropology for today. How not to use the West as a point of departure. The distinctiveness of the modern state. Wider implications of historical discontinuity. Political anthropology reconstituted -- 2. The origins and limits of coercive power: the anthropology of stateless societies. The externalization of the political as the negation of power. Sexual politics in stateless societies. State formation and state origins. Civilization, mother of barbarism -- 3. From hierarchy to surveillance: the politics of agrarian civilizations and the rise of the Western national state. Political systems in theories of European development. A specifically European dynamic? Agrarian civilization outside Europe -- 4. The political anthropology of colonialism: a study of domination and resistance. Structural-functionalist political anthropology as a child of its time. The colonial process as an object of analysis.