If Obama's "You didn't build that" is structural functionalism, Romney's "We built it" is Barthian transactionalism.

The sprawling academic debate that ensued is detailed here, but a sketch of it gives a different perspective on why people might be having trouble relating to Romney, and Romney to people.



Transaction, stated Barth, is "the process which results where the parties in the course of their interactions systematically try to assure that the value gained for them is greater or equal to the value lost." Reflecting back on his work later, Barth explained that "not all social relations are constructed in this way, but many certainly are." Not for nothing was transactionalism also known as "methodological individualism."

Transactionalism has implications for leadership. In places where there's free choice, at least, there's no real reason to stick to your group. The Pathans were more tied to their khan, or caste leader, than one another. "Many of the politically active individuals in Swat clearly recognize the distinction between private and group advantage," wrote Barth, "and when faced with a choice they tend to consider the former rather than the latter."



Boiled down, authority "is built up and maintained through the exercise of a continual series of individual choices." A leader, in other words, has to constantly display his worthiness. From there easily flows the idea that, because everything's a free transaction, power ends up where it belongs.

Moreover, transactionalism suggests that societies are the most stable and harmonious when groups don't compete to make their livings, instead occupying their own economic niches. It's a construction that sheds light on why Romney's comfortable taking about the poor and middle class as "them." There's nothing wrong with them, necessarily; they're just doing their own thing.



A History of Anthropological Theory explains further: "Social relationships are 'generated,' sustained, and changed as a result of the economic choices made by individuals, each of whom has learned to play and manipulate the 'rules' of a social 'game.'" It also helps explain Romney's disdain for the 47% of Americans who, in his flawed thinking, refuse to play the game. He literally has no way to understand them.

At the height of its influence, transactionalism had its followers, but also its strong critics. Barth would argue that transactions aren't everything. But by reading his work -- and, frankly, listening to him lecture; he was a professor of mine -- they sure seemed to be the key to understanding why societies exist as they do. Barth's critics argued that he was wrongly reducing humans to transaction-executing machines. And that he was doing it because he was mistaking the perspective of a few in Swat Valley for the lives of people writ large.