Ideology and Interest: The Dialectics of Politics

The Political Anthropology series offers a forum for the publication of original essays in the pioneering new multidisciplinary field of political anthropology. One of its major goals is to foster scholarly communication across conventional disciplinary boundaries. Volume one explores various aspects of the relationship between culture and politics. The introductory essay sets forth a conceptual framework for the study of political ideology from an anthropological perspective. The other essays include analyses of revivalist politics in Bermuda: caste, ideology, and power in Nepal; the discrepancy between the ideals and the political practice of the Sikhs in India’s Punjab; the relationship between religious models of solidarity and structures of political power in rural Bangladesh; the relations between political action and meaning in West Bengal; and the attempt by the Soviets to fabricate a new Kazakh social past.