Political Systems of Highland Burma
by Edmund Leach · Edmund Leach
Leach's 1954 ethnography of the Kachin Hills, showing communities oscillating between egalitarian gumlao and hierarchical gumsa forms. Establishes that political systems are unstable models people argue over rather than fixed structures, a foundational critique of static functionalism.
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More resources on Political Anthropology
AnthroSource
The American Anthropological Association's journal portal on Wiley, hosting American Anthropologist and the association's section journals. Useful for searching peer-reviewed research and review articles in biological anthropology, though most full text requires institutional access or AAA membership.
Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter
Essays edited by Talal Asad examining how British social anthropology developed inside colonial power relations. Readers gain a critical account of the discipline's fieldwork practices and the political arrangements that made its knowledge of colonized peoples possible.
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An ethnography of Indonesian rainforest politics, tracing how global connections form through awkward, unequal encounters among loggers, activists, villagers, and scientists. Readers gain a working alternative to treating globalization as a smooth, uniform flow.
anthropos-lab.net
Anthropos Lab is an online resource hub for anthropology, offering scholarly content and teaching materials with a focus on political anthropology. Visitors can find articles, lectures, case studies, and curated datasets and tools for teaching and fieldwork.