Monday, March 28, 2005

What I said about Bernard Cohn

Here's a peak at that part of my essay:
Cohn’s 1962 article Political Systems in Eighteenth Century India: The Benares Region, attempts to understand the political structures that ruled that part of India on two levels, the Regional, and the Local.[1] Cohn focuses on this region to detail the Raja of Benares’s relationship to “his superior, the Nawab of Oudh, and his subordinates, the local chiefs or Rajas.”[2] Instead of focusing on the Nawab’s power over the Raja of Benares and his dominion over the local raja chiefs and taluka groupings, Cohn describes these relationships as being “a balancing of relative weaknesses” or what today might be called “contested” relationships.[3]
What Cohn is suggesting is that these political relationships were not necessarily bordering on anarchy, as had been suggested, but that they were highly reciprocal, complex, and developed in a way that later colonial relationships were not. More importantly, for this paper, is the fact that Cohn focuses on how political relationships were structured, but also analyses how they were legitimized in the symbolic realm. Cohn writes, “Although these societies are segmentary in their structure, culturally there are often rituals, traditions, myths, and histories through which the political order is legitimized and maintained.”[4] Cohn does not see authority in this context as a simple monopoly of wealth or violence, but also as a control of the symbolic realm. For instance, when he describes Chait Singh’s ascension to Raja of Benares, Cohn describes how the nawab “tied his turban on Chait Singh’s head and presented him with a sword. This showed that the Raja was his subordinate.”[5] The ritual creates legitimacy in this context, instead of simply being a pretext for legitimacy gained through power or coercion.
It seems highly likely, to an outsider, that Cohn’s emphasis also reveals a shift in anthropology away from a structural-functionalist model of political authority to a model that reveals what Cohn calls “deep structures”. Perhaps because of its dependence on Marxist ideas, traditional anthropology of Cohn’s time had tended to deal with religious rituals as a ploy to maintain state power. Cohn essentially argues that the rituals create authority, and therefore are a source of political power.
So, Cohn’s desire to understand pro-colonial political authority in its own context was certainly a response to an all-too-common tendency within historiography to reduce these structures to an Indian variation on a Western theme. But, it was also a response to what Cohn saw as a shift within anthropology from a functional structuralist model that analyzes how political systems operated to a more symbol-oriented analysis of “deep structures”. Cohn’s article is valuable for the way that it describes both how these relationships functioned on a pragmatic level and how they were conceptualized on a cultural level. Instead of seeing the legitimizing ritual as a detached recital, Cohn suggests that the Raja of Benares’s authority functioned on both the practical and symbolic levels.
[1] Bernard Cohn, "Political Systems in Eighteenth Century India: The Benares Region" in An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987. p. 485.
[2] ibid. p. 487.
[3] ibid. p. 489.
[4] ibid. p. 484.
[5] ibid. p. 488.

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