TRADITIONAL SOCIETY AS A DOMAIN OF STATE POLITICS

While in civil society state politics are thought around the concepts of citizenship and human rights, in traditional society it is culture and custom that are the operative terms for thinking politics. Both ‘rights’ and ‘culture’ are, of course, objects of struggle and are never simply given. Tradition here will be understood primarily as a produced subjectivity of state-power relations that demarcate a traditional society. Traditional society is predominantly characterised by a mode of rule that revolves principally around the institution of the chieftaincy, which itself embodies (although not necessarily exclusively) the powers of custom and tradition. In this particular domain of politics, the relations between state and people are thus thought differently from the way they are thought in both civil and uncivil societies. Here it is a certain connection with the past that governs such relations and provides the parameters within which political subjectivity is deployed, although it must be plain that these relations are contemporary with modernity, produced and reproduced to suit contemporary conditions. Because they refer to the past, it is a supposedly unchanging inherited culture – ‘the customary’ – that provides the dominant reference for politics in traditional society and not rights as such. Such relations and subjectivities are, of course, always contested and generally ‘invented’ or, perhaps better, ‘remoulded’ to suit the interests of power (Ranger, 1985b, 1993; Vail, 1989).