Social Anthropology III: Legal Anthropology and Social Sanctions; Political Organisation from Band and Tribe to Chiefdom and State, Conflict and Social Control, the Nation-State and Democracy; Religion and Belief from Animism, Animatism, Manaism, Bongaism, Totemism and Taboo to Witch, Shaman, Priest, Medicine-Man and Sorcerer, Magic and Ritual; and Social Change — Assimilation, Integration, Syncretism, Dominance and Subjugation

Legal anthropology began with Henry Maine's Ancient Law (1861), which traced the movement of "progressive societies" from status, where rights and duties follow from birth and family, to contract, where they follow from free agreement. The twentieth century turned from origins to what law does. Malinowski (Crime and Custom in Savage Society, 1926) argued that the Trobrianders obeyed rules not from automatic submission to custom but because of reciprocity: the binding force of obligations lay in the mutual dependence of partners — a canoe-owner and his crew, a fisherman and an inland gardener — so that "civil law" existed without courts. Radcliffe-Brown defined law narrowly as "social control through the systematic application of the force of politically organized society" and so held that many simple societies had no law, only custom and sanction. E. Adamson Hoebel (The Law of Primitive Man, 1954), after The Cheyenne Way (1941, with the jurist Karl Llewellyn), which introduced the trouble-case method — studying actual disputes rather than stated rules — gave the definition most cited: "a social norm is legal if its neglect or infraction is regularly met, in threat or in fact, by the application of physical force by an individual or group possessing the socially recognized privilege of so acting". Leopold Pospisil (the Kapauku Papuans) identified four attributes of law — authority, the intention of universal application, obligatio (a relation between parties) and sanction — and showed that law exists at several levels at once (family, lineage, confederacy). Max Gluckman (The Judicial Process among the Barotse, 1955) found in the Lozi courts the figure of the "reasonable man" and the process of judgement; Paul Bohannan (Justice and Judgment among the Tiv, 1957; "The Differing Realms of the Law", 1965) described law as "double institutionalisation", customs restated by a legal institution; Laura Nader studied the disputing process and "harmony ideology"; and Sally Falk Moore's "semi-autonomous social field" (1973) and legal pluralism — the coexistence of state, customary and religious law, as with caste and tribal panchayats beside the courts in India — are the current frame. Sanctions, in Radcliffe-Brown's "Social Sanction" (1934), are the reactions of a society to approved or disapproved conduct: positive (rewards, honours, praise) or negative (punishments), diffuse (spontaneous expressions of approval or disapproval by the community — gossip, ridicule, ostracism) or organised (applied by recognised procedure), with satirical, moral and religious or ritual sanctions (fear of supernatural punishment, pollution) among the diffuse and penal and restitutive sanctions among the organised. Social control uses all of them: gossip and ridicule, the Inuit song duel in which disputants insult each other in verse before the community, the feud and its compensation (the Nuer "leopard-skin chief" mediating blood-wealth), oaths and ordeals, witchcraft accusations, and in India the caste panchayat's fines and outcasting and the tribal council's judgments.

Political organisation is the way a society maintains order internally, manages relations with other societies, and allocates power and authority. Meyer Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (African Political Systems, 1940) divided African societies into Group A, with centralised authority, administrative machinery and judicial institutions (the Zulu, the Ngwato, the Bemba), and Group B, "stateless" societies without them, whose order rested on the balanced opposition of segmentary lineages (the Nuer, the Tallensi, the Logoli), and noted a third, very small type in which the political unit was the kin group itself. Elman Service (Primitive Social Organization, 1962) proposed the evolutionary sequence the syllabus follows. A band is a small, mobile group of foragers, usually a few dozen people related by kinship and marriage, egalitarian, with leadership by influence and example rather than power — the !Kung San, the Inuit, the Andamanese, the Birhor — and decisions by consensus. A tribe is a larger population of settled or pastoral people, still egalitarian in principle, united by cross-cutting pan-tribal institutions — clans, age-sets, sodalities, youth dormitories — without a central authority; leadership belongs to the "big man" of Melanesia who builds a following by generosity (Sahlins, "Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief", 1963) or to mediators such as the Nuer leopard-skin chief. A chiefdom is a ranked society with a hereditary chief at the centre of a redistributive economy, ranked lineages and a permanent office, but without a monopoly of force — the Polynesian chiefdoms of Hawaii and Tonga, the Northwest Coast. A state is a society with a centralised government, a territorial basis, social classes, taxation, a bureaucracy, law and, in Max Weber's definition, a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force. Morton Fried (The Evolution of Political Society, 1967) gave a parallel sequence of egalitarian, rank, stratified and state societies, and the origin of the state has been explained by irrigation management (Karl Wittfogel's hydraulic hypothesis, 1957), by warfare in circumscribed environments (Robert Carneiro, 1970), by class conflict (Engels; Fried) and by the integrative benefits of central management (Service). Political processes are the competition for and use of power (the ability to make others act) and authority (power accepted as legitimate — traditional, charismatic or legal-rational in Weber's typology), leadership, factions and their manoeuvres (F.G. Bailey, Stratagems and Spoils, 1969), succession and rebellion — Gluckman's "rituals of rebellion" among the Swazi, in which the king's subjects annually express hostility that confirms the kingship. Conflict and social control range from the feud and the raid to warfare, and from mediation and the moot to the court. Nations and nation-states are the modern frame: Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities, 1983) described the nation as an imagined political community created by print capitalism, Ernest Gellner (Nations and Nationalism, 1983) tied nationalism to the needs of industrial society, and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (The Invention of Tradition, 1983) showed how national traditions are made. Anthropologists study democracy ethnographically — how people understand and practise elections and representation — as in Mukulika Banerjee's Why India Votes? (2014), which found voting treated as a civic ritual and a duty; the panchayats of Unit IX are the local form.

Three definitions frame the anthropology of religion. Tylor's "minimum definition" (1871) is "the belief in Spiritual Beings". Émile Durkheim's (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912) is "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden — beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them"; its core is the division of the world into sacred and profane and the social nature of religion. Clifford Geertz's ("Religion as a Cultural System", 1966) is "a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic". Frazer defined religion as the propitiation of powers superior to man. The syllabus's six "isms" are the earliest theories of the elementary forms of religion. Animism, Tylor's theory in Primitive Culture (1871), is the belief in souls and spirits: early people, reasoning from dreams, visions, trance and death, concluded that every person has a detachable soul, extended the idea to animals, plants and objects, and from these souls developed spirits and gods — an "intellectualist" theory of religion as primitive philosophy. Animatism is R.R. Marett's answer (1900; The Threshold of Religion, 1909): before animism there was a "pre-animistic" stage of belief in an impersonal, supernatural power animating things, felt with awe rather than reasoned out — "savage religion is something not so much thought out as danced out". Manaism is the belief in mana, the Melanesian and Polynesian term for an impersonal power residing in persons and things, which R.H. Codrington described in The Melanesians (1891) and Marett made the centre of his "tabu–mana formula". Bongaism is D.N. Majumdar's term, from his studies of the Ho of Kolhan (Singhbhum) in A Tribe in Transition (1937) and The Affairs of a Tribe (1950), for the Ho belief in bonga — a supernatural power, often impersonal and diffused through nature, that can be personified as spirits of hills, forests, rivers and ancestors (the Marang Buru of the Munda and Santal, Singbonga the supreme being) — which he compared to mana. Totemism is a relation between a social group, usually an exogamous clan, and a species of animal or plant (sometimes an object), expressed in the clan's name, a taboo on killing or eating the totem, and rituals: John McLennan introduced it into anthropology (1869–70), Frazer collected it (Totemism and Exogamy, 1910), Durkheim made the totem the emblem of the clan and so of society worshipping itself, Alexander Goldenweiser (1910) argued that the traits do not cohere into one institution, and Lévi-Strauss (Totemism, 1962) dissolved it into a way of classifying — natural species are chosen not because they are "good to eat" but because they are "good to think". Many Indian tribes have totemic clans: the Oraon (killi), Munda, Ho and Santal, the Bhil and the Gond. Taboo (Polynesian tapu, reported by Captain Cook in 1777) is a prohibition backed by supernatural sanction, on contact with sacred or polluting persons, things and acts; Frazer, Freud and Radcliffe-Brown theorised it, and Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger, 1966) read pollution as "matter out of place", the dangerous residue of a classification.

Anthony Wallace (Religion: An Anthropological View, 1966) grouped religious organisation into four types of cult: individualistic (each person dealing with spirits directly), shamanic (part-time specialists for clients), communal (lay groups performing rituals for the community — rites of passage, harvest festivals) and ecclesiastical (a full-time professional priesthood in a bureaucratic church). E.E. Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) drew the classic distinction: witchcraft (mangu) is a substance in the belly of the witch, inherited, acting without rite or even intent, while sorcery is the deliberate use of magical medicines; he showed that Azande beliefs are logical within their premises, explaining not how a granary collapsed (termites) but why it fell on that person at that moment. Magic, in James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890), rests on two principles of "sympathy": homeopathic or imitative magic, by the law of similarity — like produces like, so that an effigy pierced injures the person it represents; and contagious magic, by the law of contact — things once in contact continue to act on each other, so that hair, nail parings or a footprint can be used against their owner. Frazer set magic, religion and science in an evolutionary sequence, magic being false science that tries to compel nature where religion propitiates. Types of magic are also classified by purpose — productive (fertility, rain, hunting), protective (amulets, charms) and destructive (black magic, sorcery) — and as "white" (beneficial) and "black" (harmful). The approaches to magic are the intellectualist (Tylor, Frazer: mistaken reasoning), the emotionalist and functional (Marett; Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, 1925, who observed that the Trobrianders used magic for dangerous open-sea fishing but not in the safe lagoon, so that magic relieves anxiety where knowledge fails), the sociological (Durkheim, Mauss: magic is individual and has no church; religion is collective), and the symbolic and performative (Stanley Tambiah, 1968, 1973: magical acts are persuasive, performative speech, not bad science). Ritual is formal, prescribed behaviour on occasions not given over to technological routine, with reference to beliefs in mystical beings or powers (Victor Turner). Rituals are classified as rites of passage (van Gennep), rites of intensification that reinforce the group at seasonal crises (Chapple and Coon, 1942 — harvest, sowing, first fruits), calendrical rites and rites of affliction; Durkheim saw in them the "collective effervescence" that renews society, Radcliffe-Brown (The Andaman Islanders, 1922) the expression and transmission of social sentiments, and Turner (The Forest of Symbols, 1967) the multivocal symbols — the Ndembu milk tree — that condense many meanings.

Social change is the alteration over time of social structure — groups, institutions, relations — and of culture, and anthropology describes it through a set of basic concepts. Assimilation is the process by which a group loses its distinctive culture and identity and is absorbed into another, usually dominant, one — the "melting pot" ideal of American immigration, and the fate of many small tribes on the plains of India. Integration is incorporation into a wider society, its economy and polity, while retaining a distinctive identity and culture — the ideal of cultural pluralism. In India the two, with a third, were argued over for tribal policy: Verrier Elwin's The Baiga (1939) proposed protecting tribal peoples from outside exploitation in something like a "national park", which his critics called isolation; G.S. Ghurye (The Aborigines — "So-called" — and Their Future, 1943) called the tribes "backward Hindus" to be assimilated; and Jawaharlal Nehru's "Panchsheel" for tribal development, set out in his foreword to Elwin's A Philosophy for NEFA (1957, second edition 1959), chose integration — development along the lines of the people's own genius, respect for tribal rights in land and forest, self-government through their own institutions, and no over-administration. Syncretism is the blending of elements from different religious or cultural traditions into a new whole: the Afro-Catholic religions of the Americas (Vodou, Santería, Candomblé), and in India the cults of pirs and dargahs worshipped by Hindus and Muslims alike, Satya Pir of Bengal (Satyanarayan to Hindus), the Meos of Mewat and the Bauls. Dominance and subjugation name relations of power in which one group controls another economically, politically and culturally — colonialism, conquest, caste dominance, the control of tribal land by outsiders — together with the resistance they provoke; Antonio Gramsci's hegemony (domination by consent as well as force) and Ranajit Guha's "dominance without hegemony" for colonial India are the key concepts, and Srinivas's "dominant caste" (Unit IX) is its village form. The approaches to change are several. Evolutionary approaches see change as directional development — unilinear in the nineteenth century (Morgan, Tylor), multilinear in Julian Steward's version (Unit VIII). Diffusionist approaches explain it by the borrowing and spread of traits. The functionalist approach sees societies in equilibrium, with change coming from outside and producing adjustment; Malinowski's "three-column" analysis of culture contact (The Dynamics of Culture Change, 1945) set the European influence, the African reaction and the reconstructed past side by side. Conflict and Marxist approaches locate change in contradiction and struggle. Modernisation theory (Daniel Lerner, W.W. Rostow) described movement from tradition to modernity, applied to India by Yogendra Singh (Modernization of Indian Tradition, 1973) and qualified by Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph (The Modernity of Tradition, 1967); dependency and world-systems theory (Andre Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, Eric Wolf) located the underdevelopment of the periphery in its relation to the core. The Indian processes of Sanskritisation, Westernisation and modernisation, universalisation and parochialisation, and the Nature–Man–Spirit complex are taught with Unit IX.