studying politics cross-culturally: - key concepts and issues

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STUDYING POLITICS CROSS-CULTURALLY:

KEY CONCEPTS AND ISSUES1

Marc Howard Ross*

The successful cross-cultural study of politics entails two importantsteps: (1) the identification of appropriate concepts and the specifi-cation of their interrelationships, and (2) consideration of how micro-level processes within communities are related to macroprocessesbetween them. It is argued here that the concepts of authority, conflict,and community provide the theoretical foundation for the cross-cultural study of politics. Each concept can be viewed as a distinctdimension of political life; while taken together, the three can help usunderstand a wide range of significant political behaviors. These

concepts are also crucial in helping to link the more process-orientedview of politics that has dominated political anthropology and politicalscience in recent years with the more structural and static concerns thathave been dominant in macrocomparative research, such as cross-cultural studies. Finally, it is argued here not only that explicit attentionto political processes within communities offers a dynamic set ofresearch questions for the cross-cultural study of politics but also thatmore sophisticated cross-community studies can point to importanttheoretical relationships in the comparative study of politics withincommunities.

Introduction

Politics has not been a central concern of cross-cultural researchers.For example, the answer to Naroll’s 1970 question concerning whatwe had learned from cross-cultural surveys with respect to politics is:

* Marc Howard Ross is Professor of Political Science at Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr,Pennsylvania.

at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 17, 2016ccr.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://ccr.sagepub.com/

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&dquo;Not much.&dquo; Even with a generous definition of what politics is, we cansay that just over 5 percent of Naroll’s 285 citations had some aspect ofpolitical life as their main focus. In Levinson and Malone’s (1981)comprehensive review of the field a decade later, the situation is notmuch different. Sometimes this lack of concern has been noted byother researchers, for example in Harrington and Whiting’s (1972)suggestion that political socialization needed to be studied cross-culturally.One barrier to studying politics cross-culturally has been the

absence of the kind of conceptualization of political life that wouldmake cross-cultural analyses of politics interesting. A second is the factthat most of the interesting developments in political anthropologyand political science in the past twenty-five years have focused onmicrolevel political processes, rather than on political structures, andthat their central concepts are not readily stated in terms of societal-level hypotheses.Almost all of the existing cross-cultural studies of politics have

looked either at patterns of warfare or at correlates of politicalcomplexity. While these topics are important, there is a great dealmore to political life than armed combat and the evolution of the state.Collective decision-making, for example, has been studied only interms of its organization, not its processual dynamics. Similarly, therehas been virtually no systematic cross-cultural inquiry into questionsof policy-making, implementation, political socialization, authorityand compliance, or political communication; and just one or twostudies have been made of such topics as mediation, negotiation, andadjudication in different systems of political control or on questionsabout political participation, peace-making, political inequality, or thepolitical role of social, economic, or ritual groups. Those who areinterested can add to this list, I am sure.This article proposes several steps toward the fruitful study of

politics cross-culturally. First, it is important to say some things aboutapproaches to political anthropology and the study of comparativepolitics generally. Then I will offer a working definition of politics,which is useful for cross-cultural reseach and places the concepts ofauthority, conflict, and community at its center, arguing that a useful ltheory of politics needs to be built on the dynamics of these threeconcepts and their interrelationships. Finally, I will (1) discuss the

question of linking microprocesses, which are at the core of mostanalyses of politics today, and macrolevel propositions about systems sand structures, which are central to many questions of cross-culturalanalysis; and (2) suggest ways in which the cross-cultural study ofpolitics can be expanded and linked to this research for the benefit ofboth. Crucial to such linkage is the identification of the psychologicalmechanisms underlying political action at the individual and grouplevels and the organization of perceptions and frames of reference for



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political communities. Central to this effort, too, is the explicitidentification of the mechanisms underlying political action, which isillustrated through a discussion of Axelrod’s The Evolution of

Cooperation (1984). In the discussion of Axelrod’s work, I argue thatrestatement of his central ideas in cross-cultural terms makes themmore explicit and potentially testable, as well as revealing importantlimitations to his formulation.

Political AnthropologyAnthropological studies of politics have gone through several phases,

which have had important consequences for efforts to conduct cross-cultural studies of politics. The earliest works provided rich descriptionsof worldwide differences in leadership, warfare, and legal systems.Included in this phase also were efforts to account for variation on oneor more of these dimensions in terms of unilineal, evolutionarydevelopments. The problem with such efforts is not that they werenecessarily wrong, but rather that they were often overstated, and thatthe general explanations frequently far outran the available evidence.An important response to these efforts in both America and GreatBritain and in both anthropology and political science was to replacethe earlier, more speculative theorizing with classification, whileemphasizing relationships between elements in one society ratherthan focusing on patterns across societies. This functionalist phaseeschewed the possibility of offering meaningful historical generali-zations because of the lack of necessary data, an argument which wasalso bolstered by the political appeal of cultural relativity-the idea ofexamining cultures on their own terms.

For many, the questions of whether politics even existed in many ofthe small-scale societies in which anthropologists worked, and of howto think about it if it did, were also important. Strongly influenced byWeberian sociology, Radcliffe-Brown and others declared that withoutthe centralized authority of the state, politics-meaning the physicalcontrol of some territory-simply did not exist. Others were moreinterested in other aspects of culture and society and paid politics littleheed.2 2

Some scholars resisted such narrow definitions of the political.Lowie, a student of the Plains Indians, continued to see the rise of thestate as a central question, but he inquired as well into ways in whichnonpolitical associations also fill political functions, such as decision-making, law enforcement, or conflict management; he argued thatpolitics is universal (Lowie 1927, 1948). The 1940 publication ofAfrican Political Systems represented an important, albeit naive, step inthe comparative study of politics. In their &dquo;Introduction,&dquo; Fortes andEvans-Pritchard first distinguish between uncentralized and centralizedsocieties (which they elegantly call Type A and Type B) and make the



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point that politics is found in both kinds of societies, but that it takesdifferent forms in each. States, as contrasted to uncentralized societies,they say, are larger, have greater internal status differences, havegreater social and economic heterogeneity but no differences insubsistence patterns, have rights to the organization of localized force,have greater association with a territory, and have symbols of fertility,health, prosperity, peace, and justice that playa key role in legitimatingauthority. The eight case studies in the rest of the book then providerich ethnographic data, which are more or less consistent with thesegeneralizations.While this list today is seen as containing some dubious concept

construction, as well as some empirically uncertain propositions,Fortes and Evans- Pritchard must be credited with strongly advocatingthe systematic consideration of politics, even in the smallest societies.Subsequent authors have gone on to suggest further refinements oftheir two categories, especially that of uncentralized societies(Middleton and Tait 1958). Schapera (1956) and Mair (1962) finishednailing shut the Weberian coffin, again through African comparisons,emphasizing states as one form of political community, but alsooffering some rich descriptions of political decision-making, dispute-settlement processes, and the dynamics of leadership selection inother kinds of political systems.

During this same period, political scientists who were interested incomparative politics (i.e., in the study of European national govern-ments at that time) also emphasized structural distinctions amongsystems, focusing on ways in which democratic and totalitarian or two-party and multiparty systems differed.The so-called behavioral movement in the social sciences in the

postwar years touched political science and anthropology differently,but one effect on both was an increased concern with political actionand a rejection of the primordial role of political structures in the studyof politics. In political science, this produced an increased interest inthe study of public opinion and its relationship to political action and aconcern with decision-making processes, rather than just how suchtasks were structured; it led to a more sophisticated understanding ofthe ways in which public policy was made and implemented. Forothers, it led to a renewed concern with the relationship between thestructure of the economic and social order, on the one hand, and thepolitical order on the other.The processual approach to the study of politics in anthropology

similarly placed great emphasis on the unfolding of events in localcommunities, rather than assuming that outcomes are simply theproduct of political structures (Swartz, Turner and Tuden 1966; Swartz1968). Conflicts, whose outcomes are problematic rather than pre-dictable, increasingly became the centerpiece of such research.



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Ethnographic accounts began to pay more attention to what peopleactually did, rather than what they said they did or said they weresupposed to do. But at the same time that the call for a processualfocus in the study of politics pointed to an emphasis on the study ofconflict, major essays offered few substantive propositions for acomparative theory of politics.Work within the processual framework enhanced our understanding

of comparative political processes in several important domains. Barth(1959) and Bailey (1970) helped us to appreciate the important waysin which political authority and power are negotiated and disputedabout, rather than being fixed properties of a political system. Cohen(1969,1974) and Turner(1957) led us to see how ritual and symbol arepart of daily political action, rather than something apart from it. Barth(1969), Cohen (1969), and many others have made us much moreaware than we once were of the ways in which community membership,such as that defined by ethnicity, is both highly variable acrosssituations and subject to intense political maneuvering. Nader and herstudents have shown the ways in which conflict and disputing are verymuch a part of normal political life, not just products of systems in crisis(Nader and Todd 1976).What held together the processual approach in political anthro-

pology, however, was not much more than a focus on the unfolding ofpolitical events or processes, as opposed to a concern with outcomesor structures. Such an orientation is more methodological thansubstantive, and while it has led to important insights about politics, asis illustrated above, it is inadequate as a theory of politics; it is

completely empty with respect to the identification and interrelation-ship of key concepts.A second weakness of the processual orientation is that it has little to

say about politics as a comparative process. There are at least tworeasons why this is the case. One reason is that, while there is a

recognition, and even an appreciation, of the fact that politicalprocesses, such as decision-making, dispute resolution, leadershipselection, or ritual legitimation, occur in a wide variety of settings, mostattention to them is exemplary rather than systematic, meaning thatsystemic differences between communities or societies are rarely thebasis for the selection of the cases that are studied or the generali-zations that are derived from such studies. The other reason for thelack of a comparative framework is that, because some work hascorrectly raised questions about the meaning of such units as tribe,culture, or society, many researchers have felt cautious about systematiccomparison, fearing that they might drown in methodologicalproblems. This is unfortunate.To be successful in the long run, the cross-cultural study of political

life needs to address both of the following concerns: the identification



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and interrelationship of crucial concepts and the consideration ofways in which observations within societies can produce an under-standing of politics across societies as well. In the remainder of thisarticle, I will address both of these concerns, first proposing that theconcepts of authority, conflict, and community ought to be central inthe cross-cultural study of politics; then starting to spell out importantways in which patterns of authority, conflict, and community arerelated to each other; and, finally, showing that these are appropriateconcepts for a cross-cultural, comparative theory of political life, onethat offers generalizations about behavior across societies, as well aswithin them.

Central Concepts: Authority, Conflict, and Community

Politics: A Working DefinitionDefinitions of politics vary in scope from descriptions of universal

processes to lists of specific activities found in societies with certainforms of social organization. I opt for a broad definition, for my purposeis to understand political life in a wide range of contexts, and thisrequires a definition that emphasizes universal political processesover particularistic structures. Existing functional definitions of politicsvariously emphasize either the maintenance of order through thecontrol over force within a territory or the ways in which both tangibleand symbolic goods are distributed within the political community.Both of these emphases are, in fact, important in developing a richerunderstanding of political life for cross-cultural studies. Such viewsdraw our attention to the political nature of the distribution of scarceresources in a community and push us to consider authority patternsand legitimacy, as well as conflict, as being central to allocationprocesses. We also need to realize that the definition of the relevantunit for political action may shift over functional domains or overtime,and that the matter of boundaries is often a key element of political lifeitself ( Barth 1969).While recognizing that politics most commonly exists in communities

in which order has been established and the procedures for thedistribution of valued tangible and symbolic goods have already beencreated and are being maintained, it is important, too, to realize thatpolitics sometimes is about the nature of order, the rules of allocation,and their implementation. A final area of political life concerns therelationships between communities as they interact with each other.Political order, then, should be understood as sometimes fragile, asbenefitting certain individuals and groups unequally, and as changingover time.



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With this broad view of political life in mind, a decade ago I begancoding some forty variables describing political life for half of theStandard Cross-Cultural Sample (Ross 1983). As part of this investi-gation of politics, I took the variables I had coded, along with sevencoded by Tuden and Marshall (1972), and factor analyzed them toidentify central dimensions of political life (Ross 1983). The resultsrevealed five major dimensions, which correspond to the three distinctareas that I suggest are central for a cross-cultural theory of politics:authority, conflict, and community.The two dimensions in the factor analysis that are associated with

authority describe political organization. The first, concentration ofpolitical power, differentiates societies in terms of whether or not theyhave powerful leaders who are highly differentiated from the rest ofthe population, are difficult to remove from office, and/or have fewchecks on their authority. The other, centralization and specialization,is a related dimension, emphasizing more of the formal aspects ofpolitical authority that indicate the levels of authority in a society andthe existence of distinct political institutions. Perhaps the firstdimension might usefully be seen as tapping the processual aspects ofpolitical differentiation, while the second is more closely associatedwith the formal ones. Two more dimensions describe patterns ofconflict and conflict management: one focuses on internal conflict andviolence, patterns of conflict within and between local communities ofthe same society; while the other measures external warfare andethnocentrism, violence and hostility between societies. The lastdimension refers to differences in the organization of and the feelingabout the political community. I have called it cross-cutting ties, for thekey variables in this dimension describe the ways in which loyalties aredistributed within and between communities in a society and howcommunities manage conflicts when they occur. Let me now considermore broadly the ways in which authority, conflict, and community canserve as core concepts for a cross-cultural theory of politics.

AuthorityAuthority exists in a community when there are regularized

procedures for distributing tangible and symbolic goods, which areviewed as more or less legitimate by the members of the community.This view emphasizes compliance with allocation and other decisionsbased on legitimation, but recognizes that the use of force to supportauthority may also be viewed as legitimate. Power, in contrast, resultsin compliance that is based on coercion or force alone; while influenceor persuasion produces compliance among equals that is based on

arguments or other social pressures, but not on physical force or might.



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While there is hardly enough space here to discuss authorityadequately, a few more points are important to mention. First, theestablishment of legitimate authority is a historical process for acommunity (Arendt 1958) and a psychological one for individuals.Second, affective aspects of political authority link individuals togetherto create feelings of common fate such that they tolerate short-runhardship. It helps us to understand how deep human emotional needsare associated with identification with patterns of authority and withindividuals occupying crucial authority positions in a society (Freud1922, Jones 1974). Ritual activity, including religious action, is crucialto the establishment and maintenance of political authority (Edelman1964, Shils and Young 1953, Turner 1957, 1968). Political authority isfelt on both the cognitive and affective levels and helps peopleconnect their everyday experiences and anxieties to those of thecollectivity. It often results in attachment, reassurance, and order, butsometimes it is mobilized to support change or revolution.The effect of differences in the organization of political authority is

one topic that has been extensively studied cross-culturally, ever sinceFortes and Evans-Pritchard introduced it (1940). Societies lackingcentralized political authority solve problems of political compliancein ways that are quite different from those of centralized politics. Twostriking differences are the greater use of political participation as amechanism for building support for community decisions and a

greater reliance on the kinship-based interests of community membersto gain acceptance for actions. States, as political authority systems, arevariously seen as institutions of control and exploitation (Fried 1967)made possible through the rise of technology and concentration ofresources or as systems of distribution that are able to provide morebenefits to their members than were provided by previous arrange-ments (Service 1975, Bates 1983). Cohen (1975) sensibly suggeststhat there are various cases fitting each pattern, rather than a singledominant one. Otterbein’s (1987) data, while not collected for thispurpose, allow for this same possibility.

Conflict

Conflict occurs in virtually all communities. What is of interest cross-culturally is the great range of ways in which conflicts are managed,once they occur. A basic distinction is between the conflicts that takeplace within preexisting rules that members of a community acceptand the conflicts that are concerned with the rules themselves. Theformer reinforce existing authority patterns, while the latter seek torevise them.

In previous studies, I investigated patterns of conflict and violencecross-culturally; several of these findings are relevant here. Analysis ofways in which high and low conflict societies differ from each other



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suggests that psychocultural patterns of child rearing are crucial in

determining the level of conflict and violence associated with a

society, while social structural factors determine whether the targets ofconflict will be inside one’s own society, in other societies, or in both(Ross 1985, 1986a). While analysis of internal and external conflictfound that the two are frequently associated, the data analysis showedthat some societies are much more clearly differentiators (likely tohave one but not the other form of conflict), while others are

generalizers (with both forms of conflict). Differentiators and general-izers do not have psychocultural patterns that are very different fromeach other, but their social structures differ greatly.Analysis of conflict at the microlevel also suggests the importance of

psychocultural dynamics. Because similar events continue to producedifferent understandings and reactions, it is important to consider theinterpretation of events as crucial steps in the conflict process. Why isit that taking an object from another is variously viewed as theft or asborrowing, depending on who does it (Yngevesson 1976)? Both

psychological and cultural processes are central here, as groups andindividuals develop understandings, sometimes but not oftenconscious, about social action, about others in their world, aboutintentions, about scarcity, and about the goals of action.

CommunityPolitical communities are defined by two elements. One is a sense of

common identity, bolstered by what some have called &dquo;linked fate,&dquo;the idea that the welfare of the community members is interdependent.Geertz (1973) suggests that community members share &dquo;schematicimages of the social order,&dquo; which need to be understood as responsesto cultural as well as social and psychological strain. Most simply, thisidentity is expressed through a common name, but it also must beadded that patterns of action linking different communities for variouspurposes-such as military action, ritual activity, or decision-making-produce other aggregations, which may be short-lived and are notalways clearly named. The other key element in community is theexistence of institutions and practices which, as Deutsch says, &dquo;moreor less insure the peaceful resolution of differences between members(1957).&dquo; These institutions and practices are partly subsumed underthe concept of authority.The question of how narrow or how wide effective communities are

becomes a crucial political variable. Both anthropological and politicaltheory has long emphasized the importance of cross-cutting ties-thelinkages of kinship, trade, ritual organization, or just friendship that canunite people in different communities in the same society. Where suchbonds are more widespread, we expect to find a greater tendency for



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higher levels of collective action to be undertaken and for disputes tobe managed peacefully within the society, along with a greater abilityto resist the pressures of outsiders.

Some Interconnections

Authority, conflict, and community can be defined at the macrolevelto compare societies and also at the microlevel within societies. Theyare conceptually distinct but empirically interdependent, so thatchanges in one affect each of the others. Investigating the dynamics ofeach concept and specifying important interrelationships among themare crucial to a cross-cultural theory of politics. For example, stronglyheld notions of community facilitate the establishment of politicalauthority. Deeply ingrained authority patterns limit the kinds ofpolitical conflict that take place. Patterns of conflict and conflictmanagement reinforce or weaken conceptions of community andaffect the likelihood of establishing authority within or betweenparticular groups. In this sense, looking at only one of these dimensionsof political life is incomplete; no one of them can be reduced to eitherof the others, and changes in any one have important consequencesfor the other two.3 3

Figure 1: The Interdependence of Authority, Conflict, and Community

Expanding Our Cross-Cultural Understanding of Politics

A crucial challenge to thinking about politics cross-culturally isfiguring out how to relate microlevel propositions about politicalprocesses to propositions that are useful in comparing politicalsystems on the macrolevel. To illustrate this question and my approachto it, this section discusses two important ways to increase our cross-cultural understanding of politics. Each combines a general concernabout how the study of politics can be effectively addressed in cross-cultural research with concrete examples of substantive questions weneed to answer for such theoretical integration to occur. What thesepoints have in common is a focus on linking political action at themicrolevel to larger comparative processes and to the ways in whichthey place the concepts of authority, conflict, and community at thecenter of the political process.



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Before turning to my specific suggestions, a few general commentsabout what I am and am not trying to do are in order. First, it is not oftenuseful to see a political community as so homogeneous that system-level characteristics can be adequately described by the mean,median, or modal characteristics of its constituent parts. While thismay be the case in some situations, it may often be true that there is agood deal of internal variation, so that we may also want to knowsomething about the internal distribution of particular behaviors orvalues, not just their central tendencies. Second, as the discussion upto now has stressed, while the development of a comparative theory ofpolitical behavior requires saying something about political structure,good theory requires going beyond a concern with structure andarticulating how it shapes interests, values, and actions as part of dailypolitical life. Third, while the thrust here has been a consideration ofpolitical life as a whole, it is attention to more specific questions aboutpolitical life that are most needed. It is by addressing specific analyticconcerns that our general understanding will grow most rapidly.

Cross-cultural theory building needs to continue to appreciate thevalue of studies of political processes within communities. Theyprovide us with keen insights, providing the basis for comparativehypotheses which are far more interesting than those which are purelystructural or classificatory. One area of importance to which cross-cultural studies have not paid enough attention is the role of myth andritual in political life. While some unreconstructed hemenuticists inthis tradition have no interest in any comparative analysis, this is notalways the case, and the questions that are raised by some work in thisarea are vital for a full understanding of politics cross-culturally. It is

important to incorporate our insights about authority and power,conflict management, and subjective political identifications intocross-cultural work. They reveal important underlying dynamics,which can be effectively restated comparatively.

Similarly, understanding of cross-cultural patterns can improve ourunderstanding of political processes within single settings. Single-caseanalyses are most useful when they allow us to place our insights into abroader theoretical context. (For example, the Nuer are importantbecause they offer a model of how coalitions are built in a statelesssociety.)4 Cross-cultural analysis can be important in identifying suchbroad patterns, which locate single cases within a worldwide frameworkof human political action.

I have been particularly intrigued byways in which the cross-culturalstudy of conflict and conflict management has advanced our under-standing of ways in which different techniques and strategies areeffective and the preconditions for their adoption in new settings.Interestingly, this is one area where patterns first discussed most

seriously in small-scale, preindustrial societies are now receiving



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serious consideration in our own society. The alternative disputeresolution movement, emphasizing conflict management proceduresoutside the formal-level system, has drawn upon the work of politicaland legal anthropologists (Gibbs 1963, Nader 1969, Nader and Todd1976) to suggest the effectiveness of, the conditions favoring theadoption of, and the long-term societal advantages of conflictprocedures involving the use of negotiation and mediation as alter-natives to formal courts (Gulliver 1979).

In a similar fashion, cross-species and cross-cultural studies ofconflict and warfare have been important in locating contemporarywar in both evolutionary and comparative perspectives and in rejectingthe self-serving hypothesis that conflict in modern society is lesssevere than it was in nonhuman communities or in preindustrial, small-scale societies ( Naroll 1966). Similarly, cross-cultural studies of genderand political action are helpful, both in revealing the range of variationin the human experience and in placing individual settings in a largertheoretical context (Ross 1986b).The perspective adopted here is that the improvement of cross-

cultural theories and that of microlevel theories about politics areinterrelated. Central to the process is the explicit identification of themechanisms that underlie political action. Improvement of comparativepolitical theory suggests two different, but complementary ways inwhich this might be accomplished.

(1) Consider Political Dynamics in Terms of theMechanisms that Operate at Different LevelsWhile cross-cultural research focuses on the macrolevel, it needs to

incorporate more explicitly into its analytic focus the political processesthat arise from the microlevel. The most obvious candidates for such

incorporation that have been identified in recent years are psychologi-cal, economic, and biological mechanisms. Positing such mechanismsis hardly sufficient in the long run; researchers also need to designadequate tests to see if they are actually operating as various theoriessay they are. Such tests at the cross-cultural level are likely to beparticularly powerful ones. While cross-cultural studies have long paidattention to the identification of the mechanisms that underly variousrelationships, there has been much less attention paid to multiplelevels of analysis in those same studies.5 Naroll (1983) is an interestingexception.My own predilection, following several analyses of political conflict

and violence (Ross 1985,1986a), is to give psychocultural mechanismsa primary role here, without necessarily saying that the others areunimportant. They underlie individual and group action, and they are



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also important in organizing perceptions and frames of reference forcommunities. Such mechanisms have played little role in manyanalyses of politics, as the Durkheimian injunction to reject psycho-logical explanations has indeed lingered. Humans do not just act; theyalso process actions, and this processing can have important effects onsubsequent behavior. Psychological mechanisms tell us a great dealabout what is entailed in such processes, as we inquire into motives,perceptions, and human decision-making.Economic action, while often central to human behavior, rarely

explains it by itself. Common economic situations can create con-straints, but often they do not result in common actions. Economicconditions are filtered through perceptions and ideas about actionpossibilities.6 Consciousness is a cultural product, only partially shapedby economic factors. One fault I find with economic-oriented modelsof political action, ranging from neoclassical rational choice formula-tions to many of the Marxist ones, is that they are often tautological inassuming what is rational and what is self-interest; whereas a cross-cultural analysis of the same concepts is far better able to see theseideas as social and cultural products, arising from interactions withinand between individuals and groups, rather than from influencesoutside them.

My own interest in psychological mechanisms does not mean that Ibelieve that they operate to the exclusion of other mechanisms. Onthe contrary, in several of the cross-cultural studies that I haveconducted, one of the central findings has been the fact that althoughpsychological and structural theories of authority or conflict are oftenstated in ways which emphasize their incompatibilities, the dataanalysis shows that most often they operate independently andcontribute to making an explanation complete (Ross 1981, 1985,1986a, 1986b, 1986c). Structural conditions set important limits onaction or direct it toward certain targets, while psychologicalmechanisms can provide an understanding of more proximatemechanisms at work.The construction of ideas about action begins in early learning

environments, where templates for relationships with authority, aboutcommunity, and for dealing with conflicts are developed. Objectrelations theory (Greenberg and Mitchell 1983) suggests that crucialprocesses involve attachment, identification, repression, projection,and displacement and establish a framework for the interpretation ofevents that provides the crucial linkage between culture and theindividual and places the concepts of perception and interpretation atthe center of a cross-cultural theory of political action. Interpretation isespecially important in matters of high cruciality and ambiguity forindividuals. Cruciality produces engagement, while ambiguity isassociated with anxiety and the invocation of inner worlds. Political



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matters of authority, conflict, and community often fit these charac-teristics and explain both the intensity of action and its collectivenature within closed communitieS.7The same psychological concerns are useful for thinking about three

central questions in the symbolic politics tradition which point tocrucial mechanisms underlying comparative political dynamics. First,how is political authority maintained in situations where short-runbenefits to followers are meager and where inequalities in thedistribution of benefits between leaders and followers are clear?Second, why do many conflicts end without either side apparentlyachieving the goals that at one point in the dispute each defined asvital? Third, how is it that political communities come to successfullyincorporate new groups without having to rely on coercive tactics?The answers to these three questions point to the central role of

myth and ritual as they are used to build identification with leaders andthe political community (Cohen 1969, 1974). For example, while BigMen need to constantly renew their leadership roles through provisionof tangible goods to their followers, we find that chiefs, in contrast, areable to use the symbolic power of their positions to provide symbolicreassurance to followers and thereby produce quiescence in the faceof inequality (Sahlins 1963). Symbolic attachments also shape theoutcomes of political conflict. A crucial mechanism for limiting theseverity of disputes involves emphasizing core community values insituations where strong attachments exist (Coleman 1957, Turner1957). Conversely, a central strategy for escalating conflict is bymobilizing followers in divided communities through the invocation ofkey symbols of identity and in so doing, emphasizing division anddifference (Gusfield 1963, Hegland 1983). What is crucial is thatattention be paid to the changing definition of what the politicalcommunity is and who is included in it as a question worthy ofcomparative analysis. Of course such observations complicate practicalresearch questions, such as the exact nature of the unit of analysis weare considering, for they push us to consider the possibility that therelevant unit for political action can shift across time and content areas.At the same time, perhaps, we do not simply have to accept generali-zations such as Leach’s (1954) or Barth’s (1969), that group boundariesare often shifting, but can say something more systematic about thepatterns underlying such changes. Finally, while much of the emphasisin the symbolic politics writing is on ways in which the status quo ismaintained, there are also clear situations where the focus is on changeand rebellion as well (Kertzer 1983, Hegland 1983, Gusfield 1963).The investigation made by Paige and Paige (1981 ) of reproductive

rituals is an excellent example of how a cross-cultural study canincorporate microlevel symbolic processes within a macrolevelcomparative framework. The authors’ sophisticated analysis of ways inwhich various reproductive rituals help males maintain political



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control over women and their offspring shows both the underlyingpolitical nature of a great deal of ritual activity and the political needsthat are met through the acceptance of, and participation in, rituals.Another area where ritual behavior might fruitfully be investigated isdispute management, in order to better understand the politicaldynamics both of communities where mediation and third-partynegotiation are successfully used as conflict management strategiesand of those where self-help or adjudication is more common. I wouldhypothesize that there are fundamental differences in symbolicprocesses between communities in which each type of strategy isdominant (cf. Nader and Todd 1976).

(2) Reformulate Key Political Processes in Cross-Cultural Terms;They Can Reveal Important Underlying Mechanisms, WhichEnhance Our UnderstandingOne analytic challenge that cross-cultural research presents is the

restatement of questions at a sufficiently general level so that they canbe examined in a variety of contexts. Engaging in this process canfrequently sharpen our understanding in important ways. To illustratethis point, consider Axelrod’s stimulating work on the evolution ofcooperation (1984) and visualize how a cross-cultural analysis mightenhance our understanding of his central problem: how and whycooperation develops in a world with no central authority.8 Axelrod’sframework is broadly comparative-as any framework which comparesbacteria and nations in the same chapters must be. But it is also

psychologically anemic, and I want to suggest ways in which cross-cultural analysis can be helpful in exploring his fascinating question.

Axelrod’s study of cooperation begins with a round-robin computertournament in which the contestants are programs playing the&dquo;prisoner’s dilemma game.&dquo;9 To win in this game, the program mustaccumulate the highest point total across rounds. The winner is thesimplest program, one consisting of four statements: Tit for Tat. Itsdecision rules are very simple: cooperate on the first move and thenreciprocate on every move thereafter. Tit for Tat never has the highesttotal in any single round-it cannot achieve that-but it gets thehighest total score across rounds. Axelrod then published his resultsand ran another tournament with even more entrants, and, once again,Tit for Tat emerged victorious.

Axelrod’s definition of winning-the highest point total acrossrounds-is clear but hardly culture free. His definition is certainly un-American. It is like saying that the baseball team that scores the mostruns in a season is the champion, irrespective of how many wins it gets.Last year, the Minnesota Twins were outscored by their opponentsduring the season, but they won the World Series. In 1960, the NewYork Yankees outscored the Pittsburgh Pirates 55 to 27 in the World



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Series, but lost, four games to three. Winners, in Axelrod’s contest,have the highest absolute point totals, but their relative totals may notbe very different from those of other contestants. In his game, 400 to395 is better than 375 to 300, but it is not clear that, presented withsuch choice, all humans would actually choose this way, at least not inall cultures.

Why does Tit for Tat do so well? Axelrod tells us that it does sobecause it is&dquo;nice, reciprocal, forgiving, and clear.&dquo; All of these motivesare inferred from the actions of the other entrants, which, in fact,depend on psychological and cultural frameworks. There is goodreason to see the strength of the inferences about such motives asvariable, and, hence, we need to inquire more into how real playerscome to draw inferences about these motives, which will shape futurebehavior on the basis of past actions. Lebow and Jervis, for example,considering deterrence in international relations, remind us thatbehaviors which may be intended as nice, reciprocal, forgiving and,especially, clear are often subject to systematic misperception (Jervis1976, Lebow 1981, Jervis, Lebow and Stein 1985). Why is this so, andwhen is it most likely to be the case? They emphasize the impact ofdomestic political pressures.Another reason for misperception is cultural context. The Yanomamo

(and others) seem to operate in a nasty world, in which neither thespirits, the deities, nor other humans can be assumed to be nice. Onemust be ever vigilant; there are treacherous feasts and people out totake what one has. Among the Mbuti or ! Kung, different assumptionsabout the world are common and may lead to different inferences anda far more &dquo;benevolent misperception.&dquo;When Axelrod asks, late in his book, how we should increase the

likelihood of cooperation, his first answer is: &dquo;Don’t be envious.&dquo; Iunderstand this in one of two ways: follow the example of MotherTheresa and change our moral outlook on life or, as a cross-culturalist,think about the kinds of institutions and practices that increase thelikelihood of low envy in interpersonal and intergroup relations. Envy, Imust note, is closely tied to the psychology of identification. Increasingcommon identification within a community should, in the language ofAxelrod’s prisoner’s dilemma game, make absolute gains moreimportant than relative ones. What sorts of institutional arrangementsand practices make this more likely? Cross-cultural materials offers uscases which can provide the basis for testable hypotheses, as well assuggesting new ones.

Envy may be lower when there is high cooperation in subsistenceactivities and sharing of what is available, e.g., among the ! Kung andsimilar foragers, but also among pastoralists such as the Maasi, theKipsigis in East Africa, and even perhaps the Kurds. Envy may be lowerwhen there is little direct competition between individuals and strong



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social pressures against those who excel or boast a kind of leveling.Both the Navajo and the Norwegians, I am told, think that being at themean is desirable and that personal achievement is not.Envy may be lower when there is relatively high political participation

by many and a reluctance to grant much independent authority toindividual leaders, as among the Semang in South Asia or among nativeAmerican groups such as the Apache or Comanche (except duringwarfare). In these cases, participation builds commitment to decisionswhen they are made and loyalty to the community (Ross 1988b). Envymay also be lower in societies whose socialization practices emphasizewarmth and trust, strong father involvement with children, and little orno sense of the world as an arbitrary and capricious place, as among theTrobriand Islanders and the Papago Indians.

If these and other hypotheses are correct, we should find realdifferences in how people from different cultural settings respond tothe prisoner’s dilemma game, as Axelrod sets it up, and to othersituations where cooperation and conflict are among the possibleresponses. Cross-cultural analysis can test and extend such ideas, andthrough such extensions we can also learn more about the underlyingmechanisms, not just the results.

Summary and Conclusions

I have tried to make three main points. The first has been to

emphasize the need for a more sophisticated view of politics, onewhich is useful for comparative and cross-cultural analysis. The greaterattention to processes over structures that political and anthropologicalanalyses of politics have given has certainly increased our under-standing of political action, but it has made comparison acrosssocieties more difficult to conceptualize and conduct.The second point has been to stress the fact that authority, conflict,

and community are central analytic concepts for political analysis.Each is partially dependent upon, but cannot be reduced to, theothers. Furthermore, these are concepts which can be identified onseveral levels-the individual, the group, and the society-allowing forthe development of a theory that integrates cross-cultural under-standings with those from other levels.Third, I point out that by utilizing these concepts and by being

attentive to questions of cross-level integration, cross-cultural analysisof political life can make several important contributions. It can offer agreater understanding of important political processes by placingthem in a worldwide context; it can yield additional understandingthrough the reformulation of key political processes in cross-culturalterms; and it can better inform our understanding of political processes



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within single settings. To accomplish this purpose, cross-culturalstudies of politics need to be more attentive to ways to integrate theinsights gained from the analysis of political processes within individualcommunities or in settings below the societal level, and they also needto be attentive to mechanisms which operate at each level. Cross-cultural researchers are often timid about suggesting more explicitconnections and linkages. They should not be.

Cross-level theoretical integration is both challenging and rewarding.Naroll’s (1983) book on social problems is effective because he isexplicitly interested in ways in which findings from different levels ofanalysis and different settings point toward similar insights. His

discovery that people without social support networks are at risk isobvious at one level, but his presentation of the variety of mechanismsat work, his gathering of so much disparate evidence within a commonframework, and his forceful presentation of the broad relevance of hisfindings all show the power that cross-level integrated data and theorycan havesThe comparative study of conflict and cooperation would benefit

from a similar research strategy. While Axelrod focuses our attentionon the dynamics of cooperation, he says far too little about the varyingcultural conceptions of such cooperation, and he has no data to testalternative mechanisms underlying the patterns that he uncovers.Envy, which is central to his argument, is perhaps a human universal, inthat it occurs in all societies, but it is one whose intensity andmanifestations may vary widely. The investigation of the sources ofsuch variation are what cross-cultural research can best study, and in sodoing it can help us develop a more sophisticated understanding ofpolitical life than we now possess.

Notes

1An earlier version of this article was presented as the Presidential Addressto the Society for Cross-Cultural Research, Annual Meeting, El Paso, Texas,February 19-21, 1988. I wish to thank Katherine Conner, Roger Cobb, andAlan Zuckerman for their comments and suggestions, which have helped meclarify my ideas.

2This is especially true of many, but not all, of Boas’s students working inNorth America. Perhaps this lack of interest is partially a function of their data-gathering techniques. Relatively few of these students engaged in extendedfieldwork, as British social anthropologists after Malinowki did. Many workedintensively during the summers, often interviewing older individuals abouttheir memories of earlier practices or collecting artifacts. Because so many ofthe native American societies had been severely weakened by that point, fewanthropologists saw them as functioning societies, and hence gained fewinsights into the complex dynamics of daily political life. The work of Lowie

(1927, 1948), is an important exception.



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3The content of an effective cross-cultural theory of politics focuses on thespecific dynamics between the three concepts. Some of the discussion belowsuggests the kinds of propositions I have in mind, but the main purpose of thispaper is less to suggest the content of a theory than to address ways toapproach it.

4I always like to remember that Przeworski and Teune (1970) argue that thegoal of comparative research is to replace proper names with variable names.

5Good examples of such considerations are found in Otterbein andOtterbein’s (1973) study of family structure, child rearing, and value orien-tations, both in a local community and cross-culturally. The Whitings have, ineffect, pursued this same interest in the identification of multilevelmechanisms in their different pieces on male gender identity conflict over theyears (Whiting, Kluckhohn, and Anthony 1958, Whiting 1965, Whiting andWhiting 1975a, 1975 b).

6While there clearly is a fit between the economic organization of a societyand the psychocultural patterns found in it, the fit is frequently far looser thancultural materialists such as Harris (1979) would have us believe. Hendrix(1985), for example, reviews many of the relationships between subsistencepractices and child rearing in Barry, Child, and Bacon, (1959) and reminds ushow weak most of them are, even though they may be statistically significant.Rather than thinking about a single personality pattern, appropriate in anysociety with a particular mode of production, it is more helpful to think about arange of personalities, which can operate effectively and complement eachother (Ross 1986a).

7The Whitings designate illness and religion as two domains in which

projective behaviors can be investigated. My argument is that aspects ofpolitical life involving authority, conflict, and community often fit in the

projective domain as well (Whiting 1980).BAxelrod’s game theoretic framework allows him to avoid asking very many

analytic questions about the concept of cooperation itself. Rather, it is simplydefined by his payoff matrix. In fact, the concept is both complex and difficultto define in some ways, much as the concept of altruism is in sociobiologicaltheory. If, for example, actions are undertaken out of individuals’ self-interest,then we hardly need the concept of cooperation (orthat of altruism) to explainthem. It is important that we not necessarily view cooperation as the oppositepole of conflict. Each of these is a separate phenomenon, whose relationshipsto one another can vary. In the discussion below, I raise no questions about thenature of cooperation itself, but rather try to use it as Axelrod does and suggesthow cross-cultural analysis might further understanding on his own terms.

9The variations in the structure of the prisoner’s dilemma game arenumerous, although the basic structure is quite simple. Two players mustindependently choose whether or not to cooperate with each other, and thesize of their gains and losses depends both on their own choices and on thoseof their opponents. The dilemma is that while in any single move, the greatestgain for any player can be achieved through noncooperation, the greatestcollective gain is achieved through joint cooperation. The greatest losses areregistered when a player cooperates but the opponent does not. Thus,cooperation is risky.



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10After undertaking cross-cultural analyses of conflict, I became interestedin ways in which my findings might be linked to explanations developed atother levels, in order to help understand particular cases. Two cases that I amworking on at present are Northern Ireland and Norway, one a communitywith especially high levels of conflict and violence and the other one with verylow levels (Ross 1988a). Severe communal conflicts in Ireland are attributedto key historical events, social divisions, economic inequalities, or the person-alities involved. From an explanatory point of view, such elements may benecessary, but they are hardly sufficient to explain the persistence of irishviolence. My cross-cultural work has pushed me also to consider the role ofperceptions and ideas about how each party to the conflict interprets it. Hereintegration of deep-seated fears and projective aggression into an explanationis important. Similarly, many of the dynamics operating in the Irish case areclearer when we see parallels between it and other severe, ethnically-basedconflicts, such as those in the Middle East, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Cyprus.

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