7 Stratagems and Spoils E G. Bailey In 1963 I watched on television in America an enquiry by a committee of their Senate into a criminal organization called cosa nostra (‘our thing” or ‘our affair’). A man named Vallachi, once a member of the organization, had been persuaded to ‘sing’, and for several days a large television audience watched and listened while he spoke in an unassuming, undramatic, friendly, indeed almost homely fashion, about the techniques of crime, about the contests for gang leadership, about violence and about murder. The ‘Vallachi hearings’, as they were called, aroused a great deal of local interest. Much of the cross-examination was reported verbatim in the newspapers, especially those parts which enlivened local history by revealing that it was in the nearby town that X had arranged for the murder of Y or that one of the leaders of cosa nostra (which the newspapers also called the ‘Mafia’) had been a locally resident and apparently respectable businessman. The television performances gripped their audience because they showed a contest between Vallachi and his cross-examiners, because they were about life-and-death struggles for power in the criminal world, and because they revealed a degree of organization in that criminal world, which, although revealed many times before, continued both to frighten and to fascinate. The casting too, if one may put it like that, was good: particularly striking were Vallachi’s patient and good-humoured explanations to one of his senatorial inquisi- tors who appeared to be slow-witted. Finally there was always the chance that the cosa nostra might silence Vallachi by murdering him: it might even be seen on the television. At first sight it is the history (and possibility) of violence which fascinates in an affair like this. But interest was in fact sustained not by the stories of murders and massacres but by the revealed orderliness of the criminal world. Of course one quickly understands that large scale rackets have to be run on businesslike principles. But beyond this, even when cosa nostra leaders fought and murdered one another to From Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Polities (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1969), pp. vii-viii, 1-7.STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS 91 gain supremacy, they seemed to do so in predictable ways, even, one might say, according to the rules of their game. Certainly, leaving aside the question of how consciously the gangsters themselves thought in terms of right and wrong conduct within their own world, the manoeuvres in which they engaged were capable of being analysed. Indeed, for a tantalizingly brief moment, there appeared on the television screen charts which showed the process by which one leader replaced another. Those charts, of which had no more than a glimpse and have never seen again, started this book. After looking at them for a few seconds, and taking in the pattern of competitive interaction which they pictured, I had the strongest of feelings that I had scen them before. At first I thought they might have been in a newspaper report of an earlier day’s hearings; but this was not so. Then I realized that while I had not seen those particular charts before, I was familiar with the pattern of interaction which they described. Not long before I had been arguing about it with some of my colleagues and with students: it was a pattern of contests for leadership described by a Norwegian anthropologist, Fredrik Barth, writing about the Swat Pathans, who live near the north-western frontier of Pakistan. The people of Swat and the crim- inals of the American cosa nostra arranged their violent successions in broadly the same fashion. So what? What does it matter to any civilized person if they do? What conceivable benefit, intellectual or otherwise, can be got out of knowing a fact like that? The behaviour of murderous ruffians, whether they belong in the backward mountain vastnesses of Asia or in the barbarous enclaves that remain in our civilized societies of the west, may be of use to the world of entertainment, but it has nothing to do with the world of science and learning. Social anthropology, it seems, picks on the exotic and the eccentric and the deviant and the aberrant: it cannot deal with the normal and the usual. The subject is, as one particularly obtuse critic said, merely barbarology; and my implied excitement at discovering the Pathans behaved like the cosa nostra gangsters would have confirmed him in this view. Games, Fights and Politics ‘To make a beginning, think of politics as a competitive game. Games are orderly. Although the competitors are matched against one another, and may even dislike one another, the fact that they are playing a game means that they agree about how to play and what to play for. They agree that the prize is worth having and they accept some basic rules of conduct. A game is not a game if the outcome of the contest is certain: consequently the players must, within limits, be evenly matched. The weaker player should have, as we say, at least a sporting chance of winning. Furthermore, conduct which would make it impossible to play the game again is forbidden. Although particular opponents may be eliminated (and elimination is, of course, defined by the rules of the game), the total elimination of all opponents would mean that the game could never again be played. In short, rules are an essential part of games: indeed, in a sense a game js a set of rules, for it can only be defined by a statement of these rules. Up to a point, this is true of a political structure: this, too, is a set of rules for regulating competition: beyond that point politics ceases to be a competition and becomes a fight, in which the objective (we cannot call it a prize, as we can in a92 F. G. BAILEY game) is nor to defeat the opposition in an orderly ‘sporting’ contest, but to destroy one ‘game’ and establish a different set of rules But, it may be objected, the comparison between a game and politics is inept because politics is a serious business, while games are, by definition, trivial. Dejected losers are comforted, and puffed-up victors deflated by being told ‘It’s only a game’; meaning that games are a side-affair which are not to be compared with, nor allowed to interfere with, the serious side of life, with education, with making a living, and so forth. Sometimes people say of politics that it too is only a game: but this is only said in moments of anger or cynicism and the claim has an air of paradox not present when applied to actual games. On the other hand there is a sense in which politics are secondary. When politics interfere with raising families or producing enough to eat, then people say that something has gone wrong with that political structure. This can happen when politics has ceased to be an orderly competition and become a fight: when conflict takes place without the control of an agreed set of rules; when, it seems, few holds are barred because the fight is to decide which set of rules will in future regulate political competition. Some of my readers may already be thinking that ‘real politics’ - the politics which matter ~ are what I have just been calling fights. The day-to-day routine of West- minster, the complex but almost wholly predictable manoeuvres of American pres- sure politics certainly have an intellectual fascination. Yet, somehow, they seem less important than those occasions when history leaps suddenly in a new direction — the coup of 1967 in Greece, the Congo disorders or the less violent emergence of other new nations, the Russian Revolution and so forth. But what is the meaning of ‘important’? Coups and revolutions are certainly more violent and more dramatic than the Westminster routine. But surely it is impossible to assert, in any absolute sense, that they are more important. Importance is relative to the values of whoever is making the judgement: it is not an attribute of events themselves. Furthermore, understanding and analysing routine and relatively orderly politics is nor an entirely different business from making sense of revolutions. In both, one has to ask questions about leaders and how they attract and hold and reward followers, how they take decisions and how they settle disputes among their follow- ers. In both kinds of conflict there is an idiom of confrontation and encounter. Moreover, even in revolutions, some holds are in fact barred because, for one reason or another, they damage the attacker as well as his victim. Even in ‘real politics’ — the politics of coups and revolutions ~ there are rules of how to get things done. These are not rules in the sense of moral directives mutually agreed between the contestants, but rules which recommend courses of action as being effective. These same ‘pragmatic rules’ (to be described shortly) exist also in orderly politics... Let us begin by looking at an example. How to Play and How to Win In the autumn of 1935, when Harold Nicolson was about to become a candidate for Parliament, he went to see his cousin.!