Organizational Ethography

Organizational ethnography purpose to depict the shift in level of analysis and kind of interpretation that mark this response to the perceive limitations of structural ethnography.

Organizational ethnography focuses on the kinds of questions that characterize action-oriented ethnographies.

The analytical framework of organizational ethnography

The organizational point of view has become central to ethnography that stresses the study of transaction and social processes. Firth argued the case for examining the role of individuals in decision making, including choosing between alternative principle behavior, and the social consequence of those decisions.

Firth focused on the individual decision maker acting within a framework of rules, opportunities, and non-normative, constraints. Although he acknowledge the necessity of examining structural issues as a first step in anthropological analysis, he emphasized the need to examine the relationships between principles and practice, drawing explicit attention to the alternatives for action for individuals and to the process of their selecting between them. The concept of social organization refers not to “structural principles”, but to what people do.

 An “organizational” perspective extends attention from normative rules of society to individuals as they choose to comply with or depart from those rules. Firth formulates the issue in this way “the working arrangements by which a society is kept in being rest upon individual choice and decision. Here is our great problem as anthropologist to translate the act of individual into regularities of social process.

Different factor can influence the choice that individuals make. These include, in firth the “magnitude of the situation,” and the “alternatives open for choice and decision”.

An example of alternatives for action is evident in anthropological studies of the relationship between mother’s brothers and sister’s son, “if there is more than one of either, of if the mother has no brother, what happens?

For firth, analysis a structural of social organization follows that of structure. He argues that conducting a structural analysis should precede the posing of organizational question, but he is also concerned with principle evident in behavioral itself. These principles reflect interaction between behavior and organizational factors. They are not normative; rather they are defined by firth as “organizational principles”.

Organization principles reflect the adjustments individuals make when faced with organizational problems. For example, the principles of moderation or expediency.

Organizational principles are significant because they identify, conceptualize, and analyze what people do.

A Transitional Study : Political System of Highland Burma

 Leach’s political system of highland Burma (1954) draws upon the tradition of structural analysis seen in the nuer, but it also introduces an organizational point of view.

Leach extends ethnography from accounts of normative basis of the system, what people should do, to analysis of the possibilities of behavior-what people could do.

Similarly, in political system the reader is informed that the kachins and the shans, the people among whom Leach worked, are “almost everywhere close neighbors and in the ordinary affairs of life they are mixed up together”. Leach also describes a strategy of manipulating “cultural identities” when kachins become shans and when one sort of kachin becomes another. Whereas this procedure is incidental to evan pritchards analysis- it view as a mechanism for maintaining structural stability, it assumes crucial in leach concern with the dynamics of cultural change.

Leach contends that the process by which individuals change their cultural identities, that is, change who they claim to be, use to be understood by examining the meaning people attribute to structural categories. He assert  “if then we are to understand the nature of kachin social structure, we must examine the practical meaning of those verbal expressions which a kachin uses when making statement about the subject matter which I as anthropologist, call social structure”.

Thus, marriage rules-who should or should not marry whom-provide the primary structural principles of community organization.

The kachins have a “formal” rule about marriage that involves these categories. It is that man may not marry into his own lineage or that of his dama, and woman may not marry into her own lineage or that of her mayu. Once a mayu-dama relationship is established between two lineages, it “must be perpetuated by further marriages”. Leach contends that although this rule appears to rigid and unworkable because it closely restrict the choice of mates, in practice the system works because the rule is circumvented. As he states the ability to circumvent “make it possible for kachins to talk as if they were conforming to mayu-dama regulations while in fact they are doing something quite different.

The possibilities of action: Political Leadership among Swat Pathans

Like earlier structural ethnographies, it is concerned with the role of values and normative principle in shaping social life. Its focus, however, is on the possibilities of action-the behavioral alternatives available to individuals-and the bases for choosing among them, embodying the perspective suggested in firth’s program for studying the process of decision making and viable action.

Ethnography problem and solution

 Political leadership among swat pathans deals with the question of political organization in society that is “acephalous” and “anarchic”. It concerns the principles of political organization among some 400.000 people in a “land of freedom and rebellion”. Although the socioeconomic and cultural contexts of pathans of the swat valley in northwest Pakistan differ from those of the Nuer, the analytical problem of the study is similar to the explored in the nuer. Both monographs concern the ways in which order is achieved and maintained among a bellicose people who, in the absence of an effective central government, use, or threaten to use, physical force to acquire culturally valued and to protect themselves against the acquisitiveness and aggressiveness of others.

For swat pathans, land is their basic interest and self-help is their primary defense against threats to holding it and to wealth that derives from it.

A similar situation prevails among Nuer. There, too, men seek protection against aggression through self-help. “the club and the spear are the sanctions of right” and “it is the knowledge that a Nuer is brave and will stand up against aggression and enforce his rights by club and spear that ensures respect for person and property”. He adds, moreover, that a man draws on others for support in fights and kin and neighbor become allies.

However, the analyses of the process through which followers and allies are mobilized differ between the ethnographers of the Nuer and Swat phatans.

In barth account, it is the choices of individuals in combining together that are critical in shaping swat pathan political organization. These are not simply determined by any set of structural rules. Accordingly, he builds his argument around an analysis of pathan decision making and the logic that underlies it. Whereas Evans-P examines normative rules that are supposed to govern conduct between territorial units (for example, tribes and their subdivisions), Barth looks at “political action” which he defines as the “art” of creating “effective and viable bodies of supporters”. Evan-P focuses on modes of thought, Barth on modes of action.

Barth focuses on the process shaping the choices that is individuals make contrast with that in the Nuer.

Among swat pathans, follower chose whether or not join politically corporate groups, the groups that they will join, those they will leave, and those in which they will remain.

Barth’s focus on choice leads him to adopt certain methodological innovations. He emphasizes the study of “observable activities”. His rationale is that the analysis of such activities, in conjuction with that of behavioral alternatives, possibilities, and contraints, permits inference of the “bases of choice”. This procedure results in his using description of events and actions, presented in the form of “cases”, “examples”, and “illustrations” as evidence for his analysis.

The differential emphasis on choice in the two monographs is evident in the treatment of local group, the basic unit in the political system of both Nuer and swat pathans.

A village is a political unit in the structural sense, but it has no political organization.

His “central problem” is “to explore the kinds of relationship that are established between person is swat, the way in which these may systematically manipukated to build up positions of authority, and the variety of politically corporate groups which result

Textual organization

1.       Formulates the problem of the monograph and the present for its argument

2.        

3

Claims and data

The argument interweaves discussion of modes of reputation, to engage in a game of escalating retaliation

Barth also discusses pathan the concept and standard in term of which pathans evaluate “saint” (pir, baba, pacha, sahib, among other native categories) who constitute another type of leader.

Barth also discusses pathan  ideas about Land tenure, since it is in the context of competition for the control of land that individuals are mobilized politically. Each member of the land owning caste (pakhtun) has a share (brakha) of the land lineage.

Barth’s analysis of pathan ideas is also evident in his discussion of their concept of an “assembly” (jirga) of landowner.

Barth’s model of swat pathan political organization includes the possibilities for followers as well as leaders.

Having indicate what motivates and contrains both leader and followers to enter political relationship, barth analyzes the strategies available to leaders in their competition with one another.

Among pathans, the objects of strife are “woman” zin “Gold” (zer) and “land”.

Such careers are determined by strategies available to leaders for gaining influence over followers. Barth analyzes these strategies in terms of what is and what is not possible to do.

Barth identifies an organizational principle in these strategies of leadership. “there is” he contend “an upper limit to every chief’s aggressiveness, since he must always keep the number of his enemies lower than the total force of his following”.

The distribution of wealth is another source of authority for pathan leader.

Having examined how leaders establish and maintain position of political authority abd form political groups, Barth describes the relationships between such groups as aliiance between leader and the “bloc” they represent.

Barth examines the conditions that facilitate or inhabit alliance formation.

However, the tension implicit in pathan concept does not always manifest itself in practice and Barth identifies several contarints on political fisioning.

Correspondingly, BARTH CONTENDS, THERE IS AN INVERSE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE WEALTH OF LANDOWNER AND THEIR UNITY.

To support his contention that this model represents the process of fission and fusion, he explores its implications for the pattern of land redistribution

By a similar method, Barth supports his analysis of the balance between blocs.

Thus, when a bloc composed of rival factions grows large enough to withstand and even dominate its opposition, leaders of these faction break off and go over to the other bloc.

Barth sees the persistence of both blocs as confirmation of his interpretation that an equilibrium within the pathan political system is based on a balance of power between them.

Barth’s examination of the principle of balanced opposition within and between blocs takes the perspective of individual leaders and consider the possibilities open to them for exercising leadership.

That a central authority does not occur supports Barth’s analysis of the factors that constraint leaders. He identifies four factor that inhibit the concentration of authority. They are “the equal division of property between sons, the pattern of proposal revenge, the difference in the rate of increase of supporters and opponents, and the opposition of other leaders to the acquisition of predominant power by any individual.

Thus, The dynamic of gaining power generates obstacles to retaining it. By these principle, balance built into the a cephalous bloc system.

Models of feuding in two monograph : Comparing ethnographic argument

Barth discusses them in the context of interpreting the bases of pathan leadership, since leadership may be gained, lost, or maintained through conflict generated around the acquisition and defense of such objects. Neither choice of where to introduce the basis conflict into ethnography is arbitrary; each reflects the ethnographers view of its relevance to the overall argument.

For barth, a feud provides an occasion on which a leader can act to establish or enhancehis authority. Its importance, in his view, derives from its role in the wayin which leaders build and maintain a following.

It is also that had barth done he fieldwork in the southern sudan, his account would have looked more at leader and followers, each pursuing their individual interests, and might have been entitled political leadership among Nuer.