Towards an Operational Social Anthropology

<p class=ql-align-justify></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>In volume 1 Professor Verdon sought to identify what crippled social anthropology's original project that of understanding sociocultural variability. He found its cause in a universal Aristotelian cosmology that renders groups ontologically variable to their principles of social organization by defining them in terms of behaviour regulation. </span></p><p class=ql-align-justify></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>In this second volume he develops a cure to that cosmological malaise: to define groups outside all behaviour regulation and to define a separate group for every type of activity (unifunctional groups). From these two new cosmological requirements he sets out to define all the main concepts of social anthropology in what he calls an 'operational' language (defined with respect to anthropology's aims not as entities with intrinsic anthropological attributes): groups corporations descent territoriality lineages segmentation sovereignty and so on. </span></p><p class=ql-align-justify></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>He then applies this language to 'translate' classical ethnographies operationally. He first chose the most famous ethnographies of so-called segmentary lineage societies the Nuer (Sudan) Tallensi (Ghana) and Tiv (Nigeria) and then added the Berbers from the Rif (Morocco) the Yao (Malawi) and Australian Aborigines. All those societies were described as having descent groups. Translated operationally ONLY ONE of them retains descent groups (the Tallensi). This leads him radically to transform the ethnographic landscape of social anthropology. Where all ethnographers saw descent groups almost everywhere he finds them to be rare occurrences now replaced with clientelistic social formations. </span></p><p class=ql-align-justify></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Overall setting out to define a set of etic (objective) concepts he discovers that this language actually yields much better emic approaches to social organization (an approach closer to the actors' subjective experience). </span></p><p></p>