Human Security and Social Anthropology

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Theoretical concepts go in and out of fashion so discreetly as to be almost unnoticed in the social sciences. For a hundred years, Herbert Spencer's conceptual pair, structure and function, was de rigueur, even if the definition shifted somewhat, although not as much as the term 'race'. Spencer's pair of concepts can now finally be proclaimed dead as a dodo, half a century after the fruition of Talcott Parsons' ambitious structural-functionalist theory of society – at the time familiar to every sociologist and many other social scientists, today ignored by everyone except the historians of the discipline. The 1960s and 1970s saw the phenomenal resuscitation of the entire menu of century-old Marxist terms – surplus value, infrastructure, contradiction, Asian mode of production and so on – but apart from a handful of Marxist words which have deservedly entered the everyday language (such as ideology and exploitation), this jargon has become virtually obsolete again. 'Culture', used in the anthropological sense, has been with us for over 130 years now, since Tylor, but many shift uneasily in their seats whenever it is used without a ritual invocation of inverted commas.

THE CONCEPT OF HUMAN SECURITY

The key concept in this book, 'security', is not a technical term and can therefore, being part of everyday language, be expected to outlive most more specialised terms. Even with the rather vacuous qualifier 'human' ahead, the term is almost impossibly vague and wide-ranging. Introduced as an applied social science term by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in one of its annual Human Development Reports (UNDP 1994), the term 'human security' is meant to humanise strategic studies, to anchor development research in locally experienced realities, and to offer a tool to gauge the ways societies function seen from the perspective of their inhabitants.

Attempts to clarify the meaning of the concept, to operationalise it for use in empirical research, have been met with hostility and scepticism among some scholars, while others defend its place in the analytical vocabulary of the social sciences (see Alkire 2002, and the debate in Security Dialogue 2004). Some deem it hopelessly fuzzy and impossible to use in actual research; others have claimed that it adds little to extant terminology. It could nonetheless be argued, and in this book we do argue, that the term 'human security' has an important job to do in reorienting social theory and building bridges between the different social sciences. In social anthropology, it may in fact turn out to be a concept which has been needed for some time, a concept that can enable anthropologists to update and rephrase some of the classic problems of the subject without bringing in the excess baggage from functionalist thinking, notably the problems to do with social cohesion and integration, stability and collective identity. The eclectic methodology of contemporary social anthropology moreover makes it eminently suited to grapple with a multistranded concept like the one of human security. Anthropologists collect their data in both systematic and unsystematic ways, and may regard a passing anecdote or a chance event as being just as valuable as the results of structured interviews. We relate to media, statistics and history writing; we collect life stories and sit in at public meetings and rituals; and we do our best, within the bounds of ethical guidelines and common decency, to peek over our informants' shoulders to see what they are up to when they think nobody is watching. Unlike many other scientists, anthropologists impose rigour on their material largely during analysis, not during data collection. As the late Eric Wolf famously said, anthropology is 'the most scientific of the humanities, the most humanist of the sciences' (1964: 11).

What anthropologists look for when they sift and sort their diverse materials, are indications of patterns and regularities which can enable them to weave their strands into a tapestry. Asking for the ways in which people under different circumstances strive for security, and conversely identifying the factors that render them insecure, may offer a promising framework for future anthropological research. Using human security as a unifying concept for a variety of research projects, which we have endeavoured to do in this book, can help to counter internal fragmentation and to redirect theory in necessary directions. Donna Winslow notes that: 'the human security approach parallels the shift in economic development and international law from instrumental objectives (such as growth, or state rights) to human development and human rights' (2003: 5). From the viewpoint of the anthropologist, this reads like a shift from the harder sciences of economics to the kind of qualitative approaches we represent.

Although the concept of human security, as it is currently used in the worlds of development studies and peace and conflict research, was introduced as late as the mid 1990s, it can be used to address questions which are as old as the social sciences themselves. The modern social sciences grew out of the frictions and tensions arising from the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, and questions to do with insecurity were at the core of the early grand theories. Marx famously spoke of alienation under capitalism, and Ferdinand Tönnies introduced the dichotomy between the tight moral community...