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 a92 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.!