Politics of elite culture: explorations in the dramaturgy of power in a modern African Society

Study of the instrumental role of culture in the formation of power elites as interacting cooperating, and cohesive groups has been thwarted by a number of conceptual, theo retical, and methodological issues. There are very few detailed, holistic elite studies, and these have mostly concentrated on the de scription and tabulation of quantifiable life style traits, without analyzing their dialectical interdependence with power relationships.

To overcome these difficulties, Cohen focuses on the dramatic process underlying the development of a cultural mystique in the articulation of elite organisation. The sym bolic beliefs and practices involved act to reconcile, camouflage, or mystify a major contradiction in the development and func tioning of elite groups, a contradiction between their duties to serve wider publics and their simultaneous endeavor to promote their own sectional power.

Concentrating on the detailed, experimental study of one power elite within a modern, small-scale nation-state in Africa (Sierra Leone), Cohen analyzes these processes. But his findings are systematically worked out within a general, cross-cultural comparative perspective, and he thereby further develops his earlier formulations about the instrumental functions of culture in political organizetion. Culture is analyzed in terms of symbolic forms, symbolic functions, and dramaturgical techniques. Politico-cultural causation is explored as it operates in chains of dramatic performances on different levels of social organization. Familiar, everyday symbolic events are taken out of their ordinary ideological sequences and, as Brecht would put it, thrown into crisis by showing their involvement in major power struggles.