Power is
commonly seen as the ability to influence the decision making of the other. In
Michel Foucault’s term (1983) power is a ‘set of actions upon other actions.’
He also argues that “Power is employed and exercised through a net-like
organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they
are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this
power. They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always also
the elements of its articulation. In
other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of
application” Foucault, 1980 in power/knowledge).
In turn power influences the behaviour of the other. Major anthropological
descriptions of the dynamics and institutions of power have until recently had
a markedly Western bias. Thus, other systems of power often have been described
as alternatives or variations of those found in Western industrial contexts.
Major issues informing the direction of research appear to have been influenced
by the problem of order, as first laid out by Thomas Hobbes (1651) in his
discussion of the need for the state. Undoubtedly, the centrality of this
question for early anthropologists related to the imperial dominance of the
West and the development of anthropology in such a context. An early and
important focus of anthropological inquiry concerned so-called "stateless
societies." EVANS-PRITCHARD's classic study of the Nuer (1940) became the
model for such investigation and demonstrated that the forces located in
KINSHIP and other social processes obviated any necessary need for the state in
the promotion of order. Evans-Pritchard implied that state forms are a
potential, given certain historical conditions such as invasion or colonial
conquest, of non-state systems.
Preconditions for power:
Human beings
having the capacity for symbolic interpretation of the world around them stems
the primary basis on which power rests. Their set of psychological values lead
to the emotions that makes them accountable to larger groups like kinship, tribes, and nations.
Individuals experience feel sorrow, joy or shame on behalf of the group or some
of its members. To remove uncertainty human beings tend to follow the
successful actions of others which lead to action in concert. This action in
concert results in the tendency to call for leadership and adapt to
hierarchical modes of organisation (DiMaggio, 1997). For Boudon (1994) another
major attributes of human behaviour is self-delusion. Human beings are part
rational with tendency to rationalise their own behaviour, cling to unfounded
convictions and adhere ideologies based on false assumptions.
Viewed in a
segregated manner these tendencies have significant cultural patterns without
hidden power structures of any sort being involved. However, it is more
important to understand that these dispositions serve as material for the
exertion of power. Organising mass rallies, shaping public opinion, elaborating
common symbolic systems, etc. are only possible because of common cultural and
psychological predispositions. What makes the study of power more exciting is
the fact that the tendencies of human beings discussed above are not deterministic
blueprints but are shared to varying degrees among individuals and when they
are aggregated researchers are facing an unaccountable variety of political
behaviours, mechanics of exercising power.
Early anthropologies of power:
The concept
of power is rooted from such nineteenth-century theorists of social evolution
as Sir Henry MAINE (1861), who distinguished societies organized by status and
by contract in LAW, and Lewis Henry MORGAN's (1877) distinction between kinship
and territory as the basis for the organization of GOVERNMENT. In addition it
owes much to the discussions about the relationships between moral order and
SOCIAL ORGANIZATION found in the writings of Emile DURKHEIM (1933), Max WEBER
(1968), and Karl Marx (1887). More recent infusions of theory have come from
social scientists such as Michel Foucault (1977b), Pierre Bourdieu (1977), and
Anthony Giddens (1984), who focus on the structure of POWER in society.
Power and inequality:
While most
anthropological analyses of power have investigated social stratification and
hierarchy, some have looked at forms of social organization which assure that
power is not individually concentrated, as in the industrial collectives or
collectives not organized within state societies. Just as Marx was preoccupied
with the question of how labourers came to give up their labour power,
anthropologists have studied historically, and prehistorically, the question of
how individuals might have come to dominate groups and how one group might have
come to dominate another. Archaeological theorizing of inequality has been
accompanied with methodological innovations in studying relational power over
time (McGuire and Paynter 1991).
Social
theorists Max Weber and Émile Durkheim influenced anthropological
conceptualization of bureaucratic power in state societies and the perpetuation
of institutional authority. Anthropological studies of social movements and
state-making, and of national policy, have furthered conceptualization of
institutional power and the rituals of its replication. Legal anthropologists,
too, have studied cross-culturally the different systems through which power is
legitimized, enforced, and contested.
Studies on institutional power:
Anthropologists
undertaking studies of institutional power must engage the debates formulated
within sociology about structure and agency. C. Wright Mills (1956) argued
influentially that social stratification and hierarchy are forcefully
maintained by the ‘power elite’, those who, between themselves, mobilize the
power to transcend ‘ordinary’ social environments and make decisions that
pertain to the lives of people they will never meet, in nations they might
never visit. This kind of structural analysis can be seen, for example, in
anthropological studies of the itinerant power of transnational corporations.
Class analysis has been used by anthropologists to study inequality in many
social contexts, not all of them industrialized (see, again, McGuire and Paynter
1991). Anthropologists have also argued that class analysis has its limits,
especially in contexts where exploitation is multidirectional, and have been
drawn to reformulations of historical materialism, as in Giddens’s theory of
structuration—in which ‘power is regarded as generated in and through the
reproduction of structures of domination’ (Giddens 1981:4), across time and
space, whether those structures of domination rely on the allocation of
material resources (as emphasized by Marx) or on, for example, information and
surveillance.
Colonial influence over the anthropology of power
Colonial process has considerable influence
over anthropology of power. While colonial political structures gave rise to
early anthropological studies of the distribution of power through political
systems, they also stimulated a variety of intriguing critiques, led most
notably in anthropology by Asad (1973) and those in his collection, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Writers
outside anthropology greatly influenced the way many anthropologists have
conceptualized power and powerlessness, whether between colonizers and
colonized or within societies as similar power relations, racialized, have been
enacted. Colonial and neo-colonial relations between nations became a useful
trope for anthropologists seeking to critique institutional power and the
discipline of anthropology’s epistemological role in perpetuating
institutionalized power relations. Colonial critiques made more obvious, for
example, the ways in which ‘observers’ assigned themselves the power to
summarize others’ experience (and that power was reinforced through
institutional resources and legitimacy), and the ‘observed,’ as encapsulated in
those analyses anyway, were without the power to define themselves or assert
autonomy in many other ways. A ‘reinvented’ or ‘decolonized’ anthropology was
envisioned as work done by anthropologists with diverse ethnic, class, and
political identities on not only traditional topics, but also, as Nader put it
(in Hymes 1969), ‘studying up’: to really learn how those who held
institutional power did so, and to use that knowledge to address—rather than
simply document—social inequalities.
A note on the evolution of political anthropology and anthropology of power:
There are approaches to
politics by nineteenth century evolutionists and their counterparts. British
functionalists coupling with African experience made lasting contribution on
the ways in which pre-capital, pre-colonial societies maintained power
relations. The two trends, structural-functionalism and the African experience,
came together in 1940 in a work that, at a single blow, established modern
political anthropology: African Political Systems, edited by Meyer Fortes and
E. E. Evans-Pritchard. In their introduction, the editors distinguish two types
of African political systems: those with centralized authority and judicial
institutions (primitive states), and those without such authority and
institutions (stateless societies). A major difference between these types is
the role of kinship. Integration and decision making in stateless societies is
based, at the lowest level, on bilateral family/ band groups and, at a higher
level, on corporate unilineal descent groups. State societies are those in
which an administrative organization overrides or unites such groups as the
permanent basis of political structure. This typology was later criticized as
much too simplistic, but the detailed descriptions of how lineages functioned
politically in several specific societies were lasting contributions. Social
equilibrium was assumed, so that the major problem was to show how the various
conflict and interest groups maintained a balance of forces that resulted in a
stable, ongoing social structure. The integrating power of religion and symbol
were also noted, especially the role of ritual in confirming and consolidating
group values.
A more process
oriented study is that of by Edmund Leach’s Political
Systems of Highland Burma (1954), which signaled the shift to a more process-oriented,
more dynamic form of analysis. In the Kachin Hills area of Burma, Leach found
not one but three different political systems: a virtually anarchic traditional
system, an unstable and intermediate system, and a small-scale centralized
state. Meanwhile, Max Gluckman was also breaking new ground. In his chapter on
the Zulu in African Political Systems,
in Custom and Conflict in Africa (1956), and in Order and Rebellion in Tribal
Africa (1960), Gluckman developed the theme that equilibrium is neither static
nor stable, but grows out of an ongoing dialectical process in which conflicts
within one set of relations are absorbed and integrated within another set of
relations: cross-cutting loyalties tend to unite the wider society in settling
a feud between local groups; witchcraft accusations displace hostilities within
a group in a way that does not threaten the system; apartheid in South Africa,
while radically dividing white from black, ultimately unites both groups within
themselves.
Neo evolutionists
especially in United States started more classificatory study of the different
forms of political systems. The two major evolutionary works of the period,
Elman Service’s Primitive Social Organization (1962) and Morton Fried’s The
Evolution of Political Society (1967), were more taxonomic and descriptive than
causal; the emphasis was on the characteristics of different levels of
sociocultural
integration, rather than on the factors that triggered evolution from one level
to another.
The 1980s and
1990s sees the emergence of a distinct feminist anthropology. Virtually all of
the writers in the field were examining the relative power of women. Not only
was the supposition of universal male domination challenged, but so were other
anthropological assumptions, such as the Man-the-Hunter model of physical
evolution. In addition to the expected cross-cultural statistical comparisons,
two important theoretical schools developed within feminist anthropology—one
analyzing the cultural construction of gender and the other, based on Marxist
theory, examining the historical development of gender stratification. More
recently, postmodern influences have refocused feminist studies away from
concerns with male domination to analyses of identity and the ways in which power
is subtly infused through every aspect of culture and discourse.
Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History
(1982) brought the World System perspective and so-called dependency theory
into the mainstream of anthropology. Wolf contended that all, or virtually all,
cultures can be understood only in relation to the expansion of European
capitalism over the last centuries. In a closely related development, many
researchers began to counter the natives-as-victims approach—which focused on
the destruction of tribal cultures by the spread of Western civilization—with a
new emphasis on the ways in which indigenous peoples fight back, often quite
subtly, against the dominant state, either to maintain their group identity or
to create for themselves niches of independence and pride. Political scientist
James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak (1985)
demonstrated how peasants resist—through gossip, slander, petty arson, and
thievery—the marginalization that comes with large-scale capitalist
agriculture.
Current issues in anthropology of power:
At present
anthropology of power has effectively participated in the larger domain power
with an interdisciplinary perspective. There are economists, political
scientists, cultural geographer, and historians working on the cultural
backdrop of power, which is indeed very much anthropological in nature. Following
is a list of issues which are both anthropological and have loads of scope for making
them anthropological.
Issues of legitimacy:
Among the anthropological
concerns one of the spurring areas of research is the variety of works
questioning the legitimacy of efficient use of power. Before explaining the
issues of legitimacy it is important to clarify why legitimacy is important?
While history has numerous examples of maintaining authority with threat and
terror, but the cost of constant surveillance of large groups are formidable
and next to impossible while governing larger groups. Hence, even the
autocratic rulers tend to strengthen their regime by legitimising their strategy.
Legitimacy is
inherently cultural phenomena. Legitimacy is attained and expressed by signs
and arguments, attached to religious or political doctrines, popularised
through slogans, publicised through posters, public decorations or monuments.
Perspectives of legitimacy – I: tale of origins
One of the
special type of gaining legitimacy is that of the tale of origin, linked to Weber’s (1978) concept of traditional
authority. A group claims the right to rule because its members in the past
victoriously fought a common enemy or developed common resources or founded a
kingdom or established a special relationship to a deity. The tales often becomes
poetic-mythical, full of factual errors but nevertheless remains a powerful
mechanism of maintaining legitimacy.
Perspectives of legitimacy – II: non-rational sources
Legitimacy has a
vast array of non-rational sources. Daloz (2007) for example argues that claims
of legitimacy are often associated with aesthetic appearances. Elaborate and
expensive dress, large palaces, breathtaking cathedrals all reinforce the
feeling that the powerful deserves their power. Pierre Bourdieu (1996) with his
concept ‘Misapprehension’ circles around the attempt to uncover and describe
inauthentic versions of legitimacy in a bottom-up perspective. He argues with
misapprehension members of a society are drawn into supporting present power
holders against their interest, or at least to abstain from protest. This is
primarily done by means of subtle mechanisms of persuasion. This is part of the
so called concept of teaken for grantedness as Lerner (1980) with his “just
world” hypothesis notes humans have a tendency to experience present conditions
as generally fair and based on good reasons.
Power in rituals and performances:
Rituals are
social occasions to recapitulate an ancient event. It is stylised and repeated.
Goffman (1967) finds rituals in everyday interaction, in so far as they
represent patterned ways of interaction. Alexander (2004) and Collins (2004)
finds that rituals reinforce social relationships, hence social rules and
legitimacies are also get reinforced. Religious communion, parades on national
day, weddings and funerals all have the aspect of internalisation of common
values, power structure and legitimacy.
There are
aspects of conflicts in rituals. Gomard and Krogstad (2001) argue that in many
modern democracies, election campaigns are concluded by television debates
where the main contenders fight like gladiators over the confidence of their
voters.
Power in communication:
The primary
necessity of communication in the power is to make oneself understandable in
order to impinge on the behaviour of the other. However, this does not mean
that the power exercisers must let the others know their true intentions;
rather, it requires strategic behaviour where the actor must suppress parts of
actual intentions.
Power in direct communication:
Speech acts does
not always mean exercising of power through only the said part. Grice (1989)
finds that utterance refers to the meaning implied even without being directly
expressed by the speaker. For example stating “window is open” often carries
order or request (depending on the tone/voice/relationship/hierarchy) to the
listener to “close the window.” Thomas (1996) studies the range of external
sanctions and attributes to make the speaker’s intentions understandable.
There are understudied
aspects of threats and promises, command
and subordination, normative commitments, appeals etc. lying inherently in power
in communication.
Construction of messages and world:
With the rise in
social constructivism as a powerful theoretical tool the domain power in constructing
the world and messages of the world becomes a plausible way of interpreting the
mechanism of exercising power. In this communication system, the speaker does
not make any requests or commands but pre-empts that the listener will make
decisions on his own base on the new information.
Pernot (2005)
explains this from the perspective of Aristotlian logos, pathos and ethos of speech. Logos stands for the subject matter under discussion, and how to
articulate speech to make meaning optimal. Logos
means the subject under discussion. Pathos
means the pre-emption of reactions in the audience, i.e. how to make people
listen. Ethos means the ways of
making the speaker credible.
Scholars like Lamont
(1990), Lamont and Fournier (1992) focus on the selection procedure, i.e. how
selective reading, focusing and explaining part of given fact leads to the
distinctions between worthy/unworthy, decent/indecent, high culture/low
culture, right belief/heresy, national loyalty/treason.
Appeal of messages – the efficiency in communication:
The appeal of
messages reflects its ability to speak to the hearts of the audience. Max
Weber’s (1922) notion of bureaucratisation of charisma discusses the
difficulties of striking balances between relatively abstract and generalised
message construction in addressing complex and heterogenous audiences as the
generalisation loses appeal. Addressing the deep concerns of people, often the
messages conveyed by charismatic leaders is seen as highly efficient means of
exercising control.
Power in presentation of self:
One of the major
aspects of communication termed as ethos (Pernot,
2005) concerns the speaker presenting himself or herself as a competent and
trustworthy person. Baur and Esaiasson (2001) studied the different modes of
making the self trustworthy. The major forms are: a) speaker’s lived and/or
eyewitness experience, b) speaker’s referencing of earlier success, c)
speaker’s general prestigious position in the social field. Bourdieu’s (1990) work
on symbolic capital focus on the transfer of credibility of person acquired in
one field to another. The most conspicuous example is film star’s participation
in politics and election.
Varieties power
and their location in the entire cultural field centre on the presentation and
conception self. Studies include the variations in senses and meanings of the
word charisma. In democratic countries it is difficult for a leader to strike
the balance between being a part of the voters and yet being different and
charismatic. Krogstad and Storvik (2007) with their detailed comparative
studies argue that political charisma range from outer-directed, conquering
form of charisma to more inner-directed, compassionate form. Daloz (2003, 2007)
points that while Scandinavian leaders are expected to appear in modest way,
Nigeria occupies another end of the spectrum. Here politicians must demonstrate
their power ostentatiously, by their way of dressing, their cars and their
residences.
Krogstad and
Storvik (2007) examine the connections between power and sex in politician’s
presentation of self. This ranges from most sublime way in countries like
Scandinavia and most openly in France. With the rapid spread of mass media credibility
of a politician is most commonly linked to sex appeal, and that lack of sex
appeal easily gets translated to lack of political appeal. Although less
studied, the dimensions of femininity and gender with charisma reserves
unexplored aspects of femininity in power positions.
Power in cultural formations:
Existing
cultural formations, popularly known as social structure form the necessary
context for action. Actions entail a reconfiguration of structures, and the
actions in the next round contribute to shaping the identity of the actors
themselves. The structure of dominance is studied from the lens of cultural
dominance that requires a closer examination of the larger mechanisms at work
(Mann, 1986).
Effects of cultural aggregation:
A widely studied
aspect of cultural aggregation is the focus on the ways in which individually
rational actions entail unintended, collectively irrational outcomes. Leiss et al. (1990) focus on the ways in which
because advertisements people individually make rational choices of buying a
product but it in turn lead to emergence of a commercial culture with
significant elements of irrationality.
Sheer fact of
numbers results in dominance of numerically strong group over the weak. This is
especially true in case of two tolerant religious communities cohabiting together.
Even though they are tolerant to each other isolated events of atrocities might
lead to chain of events disrupting the equilibrium (Schelling, 1978).
Cultural diffusions and power:
Social prestige serves as a crucial factor
in diffusion of cultural patterns. The mechanism of transmission of such
cultural elements involves power. One of the earlier issues of such diffusion
is that of trickling down of fashion which results in a situation where
potentially everyone buys into style originated in the most prestigious layers
of the society (Fallers, 1954).
Power and access:
Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) link the
attributes of power with the access. A well known power position is that of
gate-keeping. The gate-keepers, whether secretary to a boss, or ministers, men
of political leaders, and have a special opportunity in filtering information
flows and regulating access.
Power in public sphere:
Public sphere
represents an arena where citizens meet and exchange views on matters of common
interest. More recently, especially after the rapid spread of internet there is
over expanding boundaries and participation of public in public sphere. This
new form of public sphere is a product of what is known as medialization.
Jurgan Habermas
(1989[1962], 1994), a well known theorist of public sphere in his initial work The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere argues that the growing commercialisation of mass media has a
negative effect as it restricts the free development of civil society and
making discussing citizens to a passive audience. With similar tone Sennett
(1977) characterises the fall of ‘public men’ with the rise of media. In a
later work Further Reflections on the
Public Sphere, (Habermas, 1994) he accepts the positive roles of the media
and wide spread education in shaping public opinion. Others like, Schudson
(1995) is of the view that the development of media is core component of the
development of democracy. For Schudson economically and politically media is
dependent on its readers, listeners and spectators, something that strengthens
the power of the public. However, the power tend to flow on the opposite
direction. The media cannot dictate their audience which opinions to hold ,
their power lies in their ability to turn the attention of the public in a
given direction by selecting information, shaping perceptions and evoking core
values (McCoombs and Shaw, 1972)
Cultural power in the market:
One of the
growing and still understudied areas of research is the focus on cultural power
in markets of mass production. Due to growing affluence of the larger part of
the population, design, advertising and distribution of everyday utensils has
acquired a distinct aesthetic and cultural component. While Thorstein Veblen’s
(1994 [1889]) conspicuous consumption, originally alluding to upper classes,
has become relevant for the majority of the population in modern societies. In
a parallel process the cultural industry has taken off as one of the major
industries in the modern economy, creating a role model for larger number of
people. The result is anesthetization of everyday life on an unprecedented
scale.
The main power
component lies in the process of branding of commercial goods by means of
symbolic connotations. Through advertising campaigns the brand name is connoted
to youthfulness, playfulness, sophistication or seriousness, depending on the
target group. The crucial link in branding is the combination of confidence –
the customer presumes that the soft drink will be of the same quality tomorrow
that it is today – and identity – the quality and characteristics of the
product spill over to the customer herself. These presumptions are reinforced
by the observation that large groups of consumers think the same way.
Future directions of anthropology of power:
The above
discussion represents major areas where research work on power has been done
and still growing. These issues are mostly taken up from the studies which
concentrate on the 20th century power relations. The dynamics of
information technology and internet in the twenty-first century certainly opens
up new avenues of research.
Global market dimension of power:
 |
| While Dell says it gives your data more protection is exercises power by means of indirect threat that with the absense of Dell your data might be lost |
 |
| CocaCola in Facebook shows how many likes it has. |
One of the
obvious aspects of changing cultural power relations all over the world is the
diffucion of branded consumption goods. The same jeans, snickers, hamburgers,
soft drinks, watches or their pirate imitations are offered almost everywhere
in the world. The few international corporations controlling the symbolic
capital of international brands exert a formidable power in global market
segments. Gereffi (2005) gives a descriptive analytical study of how the
corporate power not only concerns the distribution of goods charged with
symbolic messages, their production is globalised in chains of manufacturing as
well. There are arrangements of countries hierarchical order where low-wage
countries make up long hierarchical production chains. The parallel rise of
media communication funded by these corporations, where no corner of the world
is remote enough to receive a satellite signal to listen to pop music, see
Hollywood movies, and soap operas contributing to the process of increasing
commodification and for Larkin (2002) the growing homogenisation. On the other
side, there is rising discomfort among many who suffer from the feeling of
cultural inferiority. Henceforth, for Gray (2004) the fundamentalist movement
like Al-Quaida is not a traditional one, rather, it is acutely modern
phenomenon.
Internet and power
The power
dimension in society has gained newer dimensions with the rise in internet
usage. Internet has greatly facilitated the organising of social movements. Scholars
mostly focus on the major strategies, or major strategic uses of internet in
the dimension of power. Kolb (2005) and Porta at al. (2006) notes one of the major strategic use of internet in
social movements is to gather mass support, organise rally, and spread news. Vegh
(2003) focus on the exercise of power through hacktivism in cyberwars by attacks
on websites. A third and much less studied dimension is the growth of
discussion groups radically beyond physical boundaries but creating newer and
micro boundaries based on particular taste and openion. For Engelstad (2009)
this area needs much detailed studies in near future.
Few contemporary theories of power:
Although there
is immense and growing scope for anthropologists to explore some, or all of the
above mentioned fields of power, yet what seems from the bulk of ethnographic
materials is that early Anthropologists concentrated on the types of
pre-industrial political systems, evolution of states, religious issues in
politics and much later process theory and action theory. Issues of social
movements, gender issues in power, ethnicity and nationalist issues of identity
in the context of globalisation are gaining attention in much recent period.
Reflections on a few contemporary theories of power:
Several contemporary theories growing
outside the strict domain of anthropology has significant influence on the
anthropological concept of power.
Concept of Hegemony in anthropology and power:
Hegemony, the
concept of totalizing power (in which the state and/or a popular majority
dominate, through every means, ‘civil society’) articulated by Gramsci (1971),
provided anthropologists with a way to think about pervasive institutionalized
power. The Subaltern Studies group (Guha and Spivak 1988), worked through a
critical deconstruction of colonial historiography to recognize the powerful
ways in which colonial subjects had been left without a voice in strategic
discussions of their identity, resources, and future. Earlier, as anthropologists
in the US and in France rethought the political role of intellectuals in
reaction to their nations’ protracted war in Vietnam, the concept of hegemony
became a way to think about how the state did indeed have agency, through a
militarized institutional apparatus, to repress—ideologically, socially, and
physically– those citizens who held contradictory views about state actions.
That was also a time when, in anthropology, theories of resistance took their
cue from political movements.
Foucaultian influence over anthropology of power:
The social
theorist who has most shaped anthropologists’ recent discussions of power is
Michel Foucault (1977, 1980), although not all those writings influenced by him
reproduce Foucault’s views of power.
Two of his
writings a) Discipline and Punish
(1977) and b) Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings have influenced and shaped whole lot
anthropological discussions of power. His more recent publication with
neologism “governmentality” which discusses the essential nature of power in
governing virtually every human affair gives a new dimension to the study of
power.
Concept of power in Discipline and Punish:
In his Discipline and Punish Foucault begins
with an agonizingly detailed account of a public torture that took place on March
2, 1757, in the plaza in front of the main door of the Church of Paris. Over a
period of hours, the accused’s flesh was torn with red-hot pincers and upon the
wounds was poured “molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur
melted together,” and then his limbs were pulled off by six horses. Finally,
his still living body was thrown on a fire. The crime that justified such grisly
spectacle was an attempted assassination of the king of France, within who
resided the power of the state. Public torture was thus a form of ritual that
symbolically reaffirmed and restored threatened sovereignty. In the
preindustrial economy of France, society was based on a personal relationship
between the sovereign and his subjects. Within the theatre of pain, spectators
were not mere observers, but were active participants in the re-establishment
of order.
Jump ahead 80
years—the period of the French Revolution. Foucault quotes from the rules
governing a prisoner’s day. Gone is any deliberate attempt to inflict pain.
Rather, what we see is dreary regimentation, based on the belief that the
prisoner can be redeemed through control of his most minute behavior.
Incarceration becomes the primary means not so much of punishment but of
transformation. Public execution continues, but without the torture, and its
meaning has radically changed. State killing is no longer an affirmation of the
power of the king over his subjects, but has become a morality play in which
the public is instructed in proper behavior.
This does not
mean that the state has become more benign or less repressive, but only that a
new political economy has brought about an alteration in the way that power
functions. For Foucault, this was a crucial transitional period, when the
mechanisms of power assumed a “capillary form of existence...where power
reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts
itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes
and everyday lives. The eighteenth century invented, so to speak, a synaptic
regime of power, a regime of its exercise within the social body, rather than
from above it” (Foucault 1980: 39). In the world of feudalism, serfs could be
easily regulated from above, but industrial capitalism required that the
individual regulate himself. This would be accomplished through a process of
disciplinary observation, or surveillance, which was aimed not only at the body
but also at the subject’s very soul (a term Foucault takes seriously to
represent the psyche, personality, consciousness, and subjectivity of the
individual). The quintessential model of surveillance is found in Jeremy
Bentham’s design for the panopticon prison, a circle of cells built around a
central guard tower. In concept, each inmate is visible every moment. Of
course, in practice every convict could not be under the guard’s gaze at all
times, but the possibility and illusion of constant surveillance would be
sufficient to induce proper prison behavior. Here we have an inversion of
visibility. In the days of the sovereign, it was the powerful that were most
visible; now the subject is visible and power is hidden.
Power in Power/Knowledge:
‘Power in the
substantive sense, “le” pouvoir, doesn’t exist…power means…a more-or-less
organised, hierarchical, co-ordinated cluster of relations’ (1980:198), despite
the fact that it ‘is never localised here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never
appropriated as a commodity’ (1980:98), never alienable or transferable.
Foucault rejects what he calls the juridical/liberal/economic view of power as
‘that concrete power which every individual holds, and whose partial or total
cession enables political power or sovereignty to be established’ (1980:88).
Yet he sometimes reifies power as beyond individual or even collective control:
‘the impression that power weakens and vacillates…is…mistaken; power can
retreat…reorganise its forces, invest itself elsewhere’ (1980:56).
In contrast to
the binary views of power articulated by so many, whether cast in terms of
gendered power relations focusing on patriarchy and those oppressed by it, or
domination and resistance, Foucault saw power as being produced and reproduced
through constant social interaction, from many different directions. He
countered arguments about power as constituted through structural positions
between individuals or social classes with arguments about power as being
problematic, contested, and requiring constant, disciplined persuasion to
convince those construed as powerless of their powerlessness and those
construed as powerful of their powerfulness. Although he wrote about
institutional sites as important for reproducing power relations, Foucault
(1981:93) described power as ‘not an institution, and not a structure; neither
is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one
attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society’.
Influenced by Foucault’s analysis, Kondo (1990:307) stated in her ethnography
of the crafting of identity in Japan that power is ‘creative, coercive, and
coextensive with meaning’. A view of power as not simply embedded in structural
relations—maintained by force of one kind or another—but also as constituted
through language and everyday practice (Bourdieu 1991) engendered many
ethnographies exploring the specific, historicized ways in which power has been
constructed and challenged in different social contexts (cf. Comaroff 1985).
Foucault’s work has drawn anthropological attention to the relational aspects
of power, with a concentration on the contexts of actions and interpretations,
and away from structural control of resources by individuals with fairly static
institutional authority. Some critics of Foucault think that attention has
strayed, in the late 1980s and 1990s, too far from structural power; some
feminist theorists, for example, have argued that Foucault and other writers of
postmodern social criticism have—while meaning to eliminate ‘big
stories’—replaced binary structural models of power which have been useful for
theorizing oppression (especially by those working to understand the social
mechanism of their own disempowerment) with a less useful totalizing model of
over determination (e.g. power is everywhere, thus what social site does one go
about working to transform?). They also argue that, once again, the ‘powerless’
have not been left space, or agency, in the discussion to articulate their own
theories of power. (This, of course, has continued to happen despite the
actions of any social theorist.) The
historical focus that Foucault brought to his discussion of the disciplining of
bodies and minds through hospitals, prisons, courts, and schools, has had its
effect in medical, legal, and educational anthropology, or at least coincided
with trends in these and other areas of anthropological study, as more
anthropologists have turned from synchronic ethnographic studies to diachronic
discussions of social institutions. For example, Emily Martin’s comparative
study of birthing practices (1987) demonstrates the institutional ways in which
women are empowered or disempowered in relation to control of their own bodies
and actions. Anthropologists have been informed, also, by researchers working
in sociology and other disciplines on collective—or participatory—research
strategies that challenge the epistemological leverage of an ‘expert,’ whether
the researcher or some other person asserting ‘legitimate authority’ in a
social setting, and recentre the ‘subjects’ of study as those with the power to
legitimize research design and documentation.
Power in Governmentality:
The lectures of
1978 and 1979 focus on the "genealogy of the modern state" (Lect.
April 5, 1978/1982b, p. 43). Foucault coins the concept of
"governmentality" as a "guideline" for the analysis he
offers by way of historical reconstructions embracing a period starting from
Ancient Greece through to modern neo-liberalism (Foucault 1997b, p. 67). The semantic
linking of governing ("gouverner") and modes of thought
("mentalité") indicates that it is not possible to study the
technologies of power without an analysis of the political rationality
underpinning them. But there is a second aspect of equal importance. Foucault
uses the notion of government in a comprehensive sense geared strongly to the
older meaning of the term and adumbrating the close link between forms of power
and processes of subjectification. While the word government today possesses
solely a political meaning, Foucault is able to show that up until well into
the 18th century the problem of government was placed in a more general
context. Government was a term discussed not only in political tracts, but also
in philosophical, religious, medical and pedagogic texts. In addition to the
management by the state or the administration, "government" also
signified problems of self-control, guidance for the family and for children,
management of the household, directing the soul, etc. For this reason, Foucault
defines government as conduct, or, more precisely, as "the conduct of
conduct" and thus as a term which ranges from "governing the
self" to "governing others".
The concept of
governmentality has correctly been regarded as a “key notion” (Allen 1991, p.
431) or a “deranging term” (Keenan 1982, p. 36) of Foucault’s work. It plays a
decisive role in his analytics of power in several regards: it offers a view on
power beyond a perspective that centers either on consensus or on violence; it
links technologies of the self with technologies of domination, the
constitution of the subject to the formation of the state; finally, it helps to
differentiate between power and domination. There are several aspects of the
concept of governmentality that needs attention:
- Introducing the problematics of government Foucault takes up this question. He now underlines that power is foremost about guidance and “Führung”, i.e. governing the forms of self-government, structuring and shaping the field of possible action of subjects. This concept of power as guidance does not exclude consensual forms or the recourse to violence, it signifies that coercion or consensus are reformulated as means of government among others, they are rather “elements” or “instruments” than the “foundation” or “source” of power relationships (Foucault 1982a, pp. 219-222).
- Governmentality is introduced by Foucault to study the "autonomous" individual's capacity for self-control and how this is linked to forms of political rule and economic exploitation. In this regard, Foucault’s interest for processes of subjectivation does not signal that he abandons the problematics of power, but on the contrary, it displays a continuation and correction of his older work, that renders it more precise and concrete.
- Foucault introduces a differentiation between power and domination which is only implicit in his earlier work. He insists that “we must distinguish the relationships of power as strategic games between liberties – strategic games that result in the fact that some people try to determine the conduct of others – and the states of domination, which are what we ordinarily call power. And, between the two, between the games of power and the states of domination, you have governmental technologies” (Foucault 1988b, p. 19). It follows that Foucault identifies three types of power relations: strategic games between liberties, government and domination.
Power as
strategic games is a ubiquitous feature of human interaction, insofar as it
signifies structuring the possible field of action of others. This can take
many forms, e.g. ideological manipulation or rational argumentation, moral
advice or economic exploitation, but it does not necessarily mean that power is
exercised against the interests of the other part of a power relationship; nor
does it signify that “to determine the conduct of others” is intrinsically
“bad”. Moreover, power relations do not always result in a removal of liberty
or options available to individuals, on the contrary power in the sense
Foucault gives to the terms, could result in an “empowerment” or
“responsibilisation” of subjects, forcing them to “free” decision-making in
fields of action.
Government
refers to more or less systematized, regulated and reflected modes of power (a
“technology”) that go beyond the spontaneous exercise of power over others,
following a specific form of reasoning (a “rationality”) which defines the
telos of action or the adequate means to achieve it. Government then is “the
regulation of conduct by the more or less rational application of the
appropriate technical means” (Hindess 1996, p. 106). For example in his
lectures on the “genealogy of the state” Foucault distinguishes between the
Christian pastorate as a spiritual government of the souls oriented to
salvation in another world and state reason as a political government of men
securing welfare in this world. In much the same way disciplinary or sovereign
power is reinterpreted not as opposite forms of power but as different
technologies of government.
Domination is a
particular type of power relationship that is stable and hierarchical, fixed
and difficult to reverse. Foucault reserves the term “domination” to “what we
ordinarily call power” (1988b, p. 19). Domination refers to those asymmetrical
relationships of power in which the subordinated persons have little room for
manoeuvre because their “margin of liberty is extremely limited” (1988b, p.
12). But states of domination are not the primary source for holding power or
exploiting asymmetries, on the contrary they are the effects of technologies of
government. Technologies of government account for the systematization,
stabilization and regulation of power relationships that may lead to a state of
domination (see Hindess 1996; Patton 1998, Lazzarato 2000).
Pierre Bourdieu’s and possible anthropology of power:
For Bourdieu,
the crucial question faced by the social sciences is one of power: How do
hierarchical social systems maintain and reproduce themselves over time?
Obviously, in modern democratic societies, social status is not maintained by
force, nor is it—a la Marx—essentially a matter of economics, of who owns the
means of production. Indeed, teachers, artists, writers, and other
intellectuals are often represented in the status hierarchy at much higher
levels than might be predicted by their incomes or political power. The answer
lies partially in that all cultural symbols and practices embody social
distinction and thus help to determine the hierarchies of power.
Crucial to this
analysis is that culture itself is a form of capital, just as are money and
property. Cultural capital is manifested in several different ways. It can be a
largely unconscious set of predispositions that emerge from socialization into
a particular class: ways of speaking and writing; a general awareness of how
society works; preferences for certain types of art, music, and literature; and
even posture and stride. Cultural capital can also be objectified in published
books, in the possession of scientific instruments that require specialized
knowledge, or in paintings that one has produced. Finally, cultural capital
includes such things as graduate degrees or licenses to practice medicine that
have been achieved within an educational credentials market. Side by side with
such cultural capital is social capital: kin relations, circles of friends, and
influential old-boy networks. Cultural capital, like economic capital, is a
limited and often-scarce resource. One inherits a certain amount of it from
one’s parents, but much has to be attained and maintained through intense
competition throughout life.
Those with the
most and most valued cultural capital at once reflect the norms of society and
establish those norms. It is they who have the capacity to impose a
taken-for-granted worldview on the rest of society. For the middle classes and
under classes this worldview—an unquestioned acceptance of hierarchies of power
and of inequalities—is close to what Marx refers to as “false consciousness,”
but it does not necessarily emerge from nor is it reproduced among the wealthy
alone. This is why Bourdieu puts such an emphasis on intellectuals; in France
he finds in writers, artists, musicians, and philosophers the means of creating
and legitimizing power. The social conditionings implicit in such
legitimization are embraced within the individual’s habitus. Bourdieu (1990: 53) defines this term in The Logic of Practice, rather
confusingly, as:
“Systems of durable, transposable dispositions,
structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that
is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations
that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a
conscious aim at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to
attain them.”
In other words,
habitus is Bourdieu’s solution to the perennial problem of structure versus
agency: how does society determine or at least circumscribe individual behavior
when individuals are ostensibly free to act of their own accord? Why does the
behavior of individuals follow statistically predictable patterns? For
Bourdieu, social reality is objective and subjective, simultaneously in-here
and out-there. Habitus is the largely unconscious internalization of the
objective norms and rules of society that suggest how we might act within any
given situation. It is not determinative, because norms and rules are not rigid;
indeed, it may be conflictive; contested; and, within limits, malleable. In
fact, in situations in which action is highly regulated, as in a prison or the
military, habitus may play little or no role because decision making is
minimized. Most human action does not result from consciously selecting among
all possible alternatives, but is, rather, the result of mental habit. Given
any situation, habitus will provide a framework that will direct action within
a very limited number of improvisations.
Further reading:
Cheater, A. (Ed.).(1999). The Anthropology of Power: Empowerment and
Disempowerment in Changing Structures. London: Routledge
Clegg, Stewart R., and Mark Hangaard
(eds.), (2009). Handbook of Power. London:
Sage.
Lem, W., and Leach, B. (2002). Culture, Economy, Power: Anthropology as
Critique and Praxis. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Lewellen, T. C., (2003). Political Anthropology: An Introduction. London:
Praeger
Writer's comment:
A smaller version of Anthropology of Power was published in this blog: http://sumananthromaterials.blogspot.in/2011/09/anthropology-of-power.html. This is a revised and totally updated version. The readers who intend to prepare a material for their Under-graduation course can follow the earlier version. For Post Graduates I must recommend you to go through this updated version.
