An Anthropologist’s Perspective on Minimal Government. Power and Politics Among the Pygmy Peoples

Abstract

The present study is based on the results of the author’s own research conducted in 1999 in the district of Lomié in south-eastern Cameroon verified by scientific literature pertaining to Pygmy communities and the libertarian discourse. The study presents how anthropological research may be used both in political and applied science and analysed from a different, more practical perspective. The author refers to Clastres’ dual concept of separating the categories of ‘power’ and ‘politics’ and Lasswell’s interpretation of politics as the domain of deciding who gets what, when and how, illustrating it with the example of Pygmy communities. The Pygmy society has no central power institutions, but does know mechanisms of leadership which may be described as a ‘minimal government’ relating to ‘emotional management’. In choosing a leader, a community grants him not ‘power’, but ‘prestige’. Such a person becomes a kind of a coordinator, an official responsible for his actions and the entire group (community), as well as for the completion of the project; this may be called “communal control and exploitation of the environment”.