SPECIAL SECTION: ELEMENTARY WORDS OF POLITICAL LIFE Towards a critical ethnography of political concepts Anastasia P ILIAVSKY , King’s College London Judith S CHEELE , EHESS: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales This special section approaches “politics” from a specifically ethnographic point of view. It does this by privileging ethnograph- ically derived political concepts rather than more familiar preestablished and supposedly universal categories of political anal- ysis. This introduction offers a general theoretical framework for doing this, and establishes a shared language of analysis. It situates current developments in relation to the history of political anthropology and of the broader discipline, and proposes a definition of the domain of political anthropology through an emphasis on politics as collective ethics. It then reflects on the relationship between language and concepts, and the articulation of different “global” hierarchies of value. Keywords: political anthropology, political theory, concepts, language, hierarchies of value In 2008, Bjørn Thomassen (2008: 263) pointed towards a “paradox” in current political anthropology: while the discipline as a whole had grown increasingly “political,” political anthropology itself had “faded away,” due to its “implicit refusal to define the political” as anything other than life itself (Candea 2011: 310; see also Curtis and Spencer 2012). Having set aside the excesses of an earlier, functionalist tradition, and eager to refute it, political anthropologists since the 2000s have tended to draw pri- marily on European political theory in their analyses (Marcus 2008: 61), understood to be more appropriate for the recognition of power relations on all levels, and for anthropology’s own difficult position within them. The very categories that used to be at the heart of polit- ical anthropology were now seen as the tools or even the results of political domination leading to misrecognition (of power as “authority,” for instance). However produc- tive (and necessary), this shift ultimately resulted in a conceptual distancing of political anthropology from ethnography—from the ways in which people, the world over, conceive and carry out their political lives. This shift in analytical vocabulary has had two effects. On the one hand, it has diminished the potential for po- litical anthropology to contribute anything of substance to political philosophy. Despite calls for “cosmopolitan political thought” (Godrej 2011) and the growing dissat- isfaction with uniquely text-based projects of comparative political theory (Jenco 2007: 744; Thomas 2010: 672), few political theorists today look to political anthro- pology for conceptual insights, even as they are drawn towards ethnography as a method (Schatz 2009; Longo and Zacka 2019; Simmons and Smith 2019). On the other hand, the confidence (or should we say arrogance) with which midcentury anthropologists dismissed West- ern political philosophy as Eurocentric folklore (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940: 4) has vanished. Today, polit- ical anthropologists are closer to the historical anthropol- ogists of the 1960s (Cohn 1980), who treated ethnography as “reservoirs of raw fact” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012: 114) rather than the source of analytical insights. As a result, plenty of good ethnography stands alongside, or is improbably squeezed into, a (rather limited) set of an- alytical terms derived from Western folk models: state, liberalism, public sphere, civil society, governmentality, or whatever else. Should this have been the case in any other domain, it would have caused outrage among anthropologists. There is something about the language of politics, however, that HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, volume 12, number 3, winter 2022. © 2022 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press for the Society for Ethnographic Theory. https://doi.org/10.1086/723216 2022FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 12 (3): 686–700