How can anthropologists help politicians?
Anthropologists study the way in which the world is perceived from the perspective of different human beings. To an anthropologist, the political sphere represents a unique environment through which to analyse the behaviours of certain humans, which in this case is our elected representatives. But can anthropologists help our politicans? The Silent MP had a call with Professor of Political Anthropology, Emma Crewe, to find out.
‘I want to begin to explore how we can support politicians as individuals, but also how we can support their relationships’, Emma starts. To do this, she says, we have to understand how different each aspect of a politician’s role is from each other. Politicians are lawmakers, constituency workers and, if in opposition, scrutinisers of the government. Yet, these roles are completely entangled within each other. They all require different performative skills at different times, and each politician may handle them completely contrarily to the next. So, we also need to understand how very different politicians are from each other.
Through her anthropological lens, Emma exposes the essence of political performance as one in which politicians are able to change how they act, depending on who they talk with. Politicians are shapeshifters, she came to realize. ‘The good politicians, [those that] do really well in the eyes of each other’, Emma tells The Silent MP, ‘are the ones that develop a skill at shapeshifting’.
To better understand this phenomenon, Emma developed a framework we know as the ‘3 R’s of politics’: rhythms, riffs, and rituals. The first aspect of the framework is rhythms, which help us to understand the performative aspects of the political experience. The patterns each individual politician forms in terms of what they do, and how they navigate time and space, is their rhythm. How often do you return to a constituency, or attend committee meetings? Are you more likely to be seen at a hospital, or a trade union? The rhythm created by a politician is reflective of both the unique nature of the job, but also their own personality and background. Emma tells us that, for example, female politicians tend to spend more time at constituent surgeries than male politicians do.
Simultaneously, politicians develop and perform what are known as riffs. These are improvisations, as one may see a riffperformed by a jazz guitarist. Yet rather than communicating a set of musical notes, political riffs allow us to make sense of an ideology, before communicating it through policies and arguments. Riffs are improvised for different audiences, their content often described in different formats and at various lengths, but always containing the same core message. For example, a riff on pension reform; you may have a one-minute version, a five-minute version, and a sixty-minute version, all conveying the same argument, tailored for each person or audience you may encounter. We employ this technique to create a sense of continuity in our ideas, whilst also reinforcing connections to certain ‘owned’ issues, or the party line.
Our final aspect of political shapeshifting concerns the rituals and symbols of politics. ‘The more a political or legal process is ritualised, the more significant it is’, Emma explains. Rituals exist in everyday politics, within debate on policy and law-making, whilst on exceptional occasions it can entail rather ceremonial rituals of status. Rituals reaffirm hierarchies, Emma explains, and is Parliaments’ way of saying who, and what, really matters.
So how does this help a politician?
Emma’s work reaffirms the existing notion that politics is intensely performative. Therefore, to cope with the various stresses of parliamentary life, politicians have learned to shapeshift. Knowing you are a shapeshifter and developing the self-awareness to map out your own rhythm’s, riffs, and rituals is one way to enable you to handle your unique shapeshifting moves, making it work for you in ways that are balanced and sustainable. This is vital, Emma points out, as politicians ‘are like us, but the dial is turned up’.
