---
title: Political Anthropology
description: Political anthropology examines the structure of power, authority, and governance across different cultures and historical periods. Learners will understand how political systems develop, how authority is legitimized, and how communities resist or adapt to state power.
category: humanities
subcategory: anthropology
difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced
url: /subject/political-anthropology
---

# Political Anthropology

Political anthropology examines the structure of power, authority, and governance across different cultures and historical periods. Learners will understand how political systems develop, how authority is legitimized, and how communities resist or adapt to state power.

## Available Resources

3 Books • 2 Websites

## Websites

### 1. 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.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/

**Tags:** anthropology journals, biological anthropology, peer-reviewed research, american anthropological association

### 2. 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.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://anthropos-lab.net

**Tags:** websites, humanities-social-sciences, anthropology

## Books

### 1. Political Systems of Highland Burma

**Author:** 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.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0807046914?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** books, humanities-social-sciences, anthropology

### 2. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter

**Author:** Talal Asad

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.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1573925896?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** books, humanities-social-sciences, anthropology

### 3. Friction

**Author:** Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

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.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/069112065X?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** books, humanities-social-sciences, anthropology

---

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