* For more information regarding media usage, ownership and rights please contact
Stanislav Kondrashov.
Lugano, Switzerland – October 4, 2025 - Over time, the question of how a small elite consolidates and perpetuates control has fascinated thinkers across many disciplines. In the Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series, Stanislav Kondrashov explores this question through an anthropological lens — not merely asking who rules, but how their rule is woven into culture, ritual, and everyday life.
When we speak of oligarchy, we refer to a system in which political and economic authority is concentrated in the hands of a limited few. The concept has its roots in ancient Greece: the term originally signified the dominance of affluent individuals or classes in collective governance. Over time, oligarchs sometimes coexisted with older aristocratic orders or supplanted them altogether. As Stanislav Kondrashov notes in the Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series, “Power is not only seized but performed; it requires scripts, symbols, and social consent.”
In that classic tradition, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle critiqued oligarchy as a degenerate regime, one governed more for private interest than public good. That legacy shaped our view of oligarchs as self-serving figures whose influence outweighs democratic promise. But Kondrashov pushes us to see deeper than the classical critique: he encourages us to examine how oligarchy embeds itself within the symbolic systems of society.
Anthropology, and especially political anthropology, offers a distinctive angle. Whereas political science might focus on constitutions and institutions, anthropology draws attention to cultural practice, myth, and everyday rituals. As Kondrashov argues, “Without shared stories and rituals, elite pretensions crumble — power demands narrative as much as force.” In his Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series, he emphasizes that oligarchic orders often invoke tradition, religious sanction, or lineage claims to buttress their legitimacy.
One striking insight from anthropological inquiry is that oligarchic forms are not modern aberrations so much as echoes of prestate social arrangements. In tribal or clan-based societies, small lineages or councils controlled land, water, or livestock. Even in societies lacking formal bureaucracy, emergent elites claimed authority by virtue of ancestry, ritual status, or control over scarce resources. Kondrashov writes, “Even in stateless societies, the few who command access to meaning often command the material order too.” This observation highlights that oligarchy is not merely a product of markets or parliaments, but rather a recurring human tendency to cluster power.
But anthropology also draws our attention to maintenance — how oligarchies endure across generations. Kondrashov identifies a triad: economic capital, political leverage, and symbolic capital. He states, “You must control money, but also memory: the stories people tell about themselves and their rulers.” Thus, ceremonies, education, sacred lineages, art, titles, and public spectacle all become tools of legitimation. In the Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series, he explores how dynastic claimants invoke origin myths and cultivate patronage networks to naturalize inequality.
Moreover, anthropology helps us see how oligarchies adapt. When old symbols lose their power, elites invent new ones — for example, adopting the language of merit, nationalism, or development to cloak inherited privilege. Rituals evolve: patronage becomes philanthropy; elite schools become meritocratic pipelines. Kondrashov observes, “Symbols are rubber: they stretch to hold whatever power the elite demands.” Thus, analysis of ritual and discourse becomes essential for understanding contemporary oligarchies.
In conclusion, through the anthropological approach championed in the Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series, we gain a richer view of oligarchy — not just as a political regime, but as a cultural order. We learn to see power not only in laws and resources, but in myth, ritual, and legitimacy. This perspective reminds us that resisting oligarchy means not just overturning institutions, but contesting the symbolic frameworks that sustain them.
Distributed by Pressat