Leadership Lessons From the Swat Pathans: Anthropology and Global Leadership

Although there are relatively few works on global leadership in social and cultural anthropology, nonetheless, scholars of global leadership can learn a lot from key works in the discipline. In this chapter, I consider the ways in which anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s explored the dynamics between leaders and followers and the influence of culture on preferred types of leadership, and how more recent anthropologists have been applying critical and postcolonial approaches to globalizing cultures and movements. Although anthropologists take a global focus, including in business, they do not often consider leadership as an exclusive phenomenon, but only in a holistic perspective. On the other hand, global leadership studies tend to take larger scale and theory-focused approaches, which tend not to produce the sort of insights that a longitudinal qualitative study can develop. I consider ways in which ethnographic methodologies and critical approaches to leadership can add to our understanding of global leadership and, conversely, ways in which a focus on global leadership can add to anthropologists' understanding of contemporary social and political movements. I conclude by considering how the two disciplines might engage in fruitful collaboration.