Summary SANT105
Lecture 1 Power: Anthropological Approaches
Power = the influence or ability to influence others
• But there are many definitions
• Symbolic definition
• Capacity of ordinary people
• Groups and their environments
Political anthropology
• Context
• Scale
• Specificity
Western bias in the definition of power
• Non-western definitions often seen as variations
Power dynamics in studying/writing ethnography
Foucault saw power as being produced and reproduced through social interactions, power as a verb,
ever changing.
Wolf, Eric, and introduction in Akhil Guptas book. What is power? How has the anthropologist
previously studied power? Today we went through a brief introduction to how anthropologists have
previously studied power.
Power has normally been defined as the ability to influence or control the behaviours of others.
Physical domination or symbolic domination encompasses relations between individuals.
Kudzani Chiurai - artist and activist from Zimbabwe - A picture of his piece - showing different power
relations religious, violence (gun), gender relations, colour, racial hierarchies, economic (expressed
in clothes)
From a sociocultural anthropological perspective, power has been studied in a historical context and
has been a project of comparison, shed light on taken for granted truths and assumptions about
power. (Body language - sitting up straight)
Challenging normative assumptions, by looking at the context process and scale, specificities
incorporated differently into everyday life. We are looking at the context, and specificities and how
these are incorporated into everyday life, and how these can tell us something about the broader
context/power in broader life.
Wolf is concerned with different forms of power.
Thomas Hobbs - English philosopher from 1500, political theory - questioned the order of the state -
all against all. Stateless society, state of nature - all against all
1920 – Structural Functionalism
• Evans- Pritchard
, • Levi- Strauss was concerned with power beyond the state. They looked at how kinship
played the role of the state. Kinship relations such as marriage and blood were organized as
units that stabilized society. The Nuer are an example of a stateless society.
• Chance also mentioned the body analogy, from the functionalists Radcliffe Brown/Emile
Durkheim. Each part of the body, the heart, lungs, bones etc plays an important role in
maintaining the body as a system. In the same ways kinship as a system creates stability and
order in a society.
• We often see evolutionistic tendencies in earlier anthropologists' approach to studying
power which has the roots in Charles Darwin's theory on the hierarchy between animals.
Armchair anthropology with an ethnocentric attitude was something that earlier
anthropologists were affected by approaching and developing perspectives on other
societies.
• Henry Maine and Henry Lewis Morgan - evolutionistic thinkers
• Anthropologists have a lot of skeletons in the closet from the colonialism.
• Although anthropologists such as Malinowski emphasized fieldwork and moving away from
evolutionistic approaches to studying "primitive culture", he was still engaging and
interacting with colonialists.
1950s
• Emile Durkheim Max Weber Karl Marx -
• critique and distance against functionalism and towards structuralist anthropologists that
focused on cognitive structure. They argued that there are both written and unwritten rules
in grammar and that there is embedded power in both.
• In the 1950s there were TWO CHANGES. There was a rejection against evolutionistic
approaches, Franz Boas was concerned with and against racial approaches to studying
culture. There started the debate between particularism vs universalism. Even though there
were differences between the French anthropologists and the British anthropologist, there
were some fundamental methods they had in common such as long-term fieldwork and
participant observation. Former studies/Earlier studies on power have been embedded with
colonialism. Embedded with colonialism.
1960
• Processual Anthropology
• Victor Turner with his "communitas"
• Karl Marx concerned himself with the laborers (how they became a slave to/gave up their
freedom? ). He was concerned with how one group came to dominate over others. (Laborers
vs The Capitalist).
• Earlier SYNCHORNIC TO DIACHRONIC? Look this up.
• Gluckman and Turner looked at power across and throughout time. Instead of
"functionalist" or "structuralist" approaches, they were replaced with analytical
tools/analytisk innfallsvinkel like "process", "conflict" , "strategy" on thinking of power.
• Lewallen: Rejecting structuralist and functionalist approaches to power. They focused on
theories of resistance, political and social movement.
• Foucault and Bourdieu both looked at the dynamics of power. Foucault - power is
everywhere, not just in prisons, institutions, but also through language and everyday
practices (Habitus: Bourdieu). "Power not as a structure, strength, institution, (but) a
complete strategical situation."
, • Foucault (and Bourdieu?) was not just looking at (they were moving away from) the classical
binary power, which is Power vs Resistance, but also argued that there was power in social
interactions. Power is locally concentrated. Structural positions, social classes.
• The Critique of Foucault is that it is too much. The powerless have not yet been included in
the debate/discussion on the theories of power. Chance gave us an example on a
meeting/lecture were an activist said "power does not exist", one activist /person in the
crowd asked, "so then I don`t have to go to court on Monday then?"
• Is it too much to say that "power is everywhere" or that "power does not exist"? Especially
feminist theory is critical of Foucault's theories.
1970 - Post Colonialism
• Anthropologists became very critical to colonialism and colonial political systems.
Particularly the part where they assigned themselves to summarize others/others worlds
and worldviews and how they live. There was a crisis of representation in the
anthropologist's role in producing power. How do we write about others? Institutionalized
power? How is institutionalized power being reproduced through rituals that legitimize
them?
• Talal Assad Chance ON WRITING! Shedding light on Ethnographic Writing as an enterprise!
• And anthropological data production. Is the anthropologist part taking in reproducing power
relations? How? How do we represent others? What do we leave out when we write the
final ethnography?
• Interesting way of describing ethnography which I have never heard before: Ethnography is
a genre of writing.
1990 Post Colonialism
2010 - The Ontological Turn
We are going to be looking at formal and informal practices and draw the circle back to
contemporary issues. Questions asked in class on what is the difference between other disciplines
such as political sciences and anthropological approaches/methods to politics.
Chance said: A lot of the social scientists across the varies disciplines uses the same root- sources
such as the English philosopher Hobbes, Weber, Marx, Durkheim to draw on their theories, but what
differentiates anthropology from political scientists is the method. It lays in the space where
ethnography is made, in the day to day interactions with people and in conversation with them. Still
an interdisciplinary take on politics is important. Anthropology offers one unique point of view, that
grounds itself in the long-term field work and participant observation.
Literature Lecture 1
E. Wolf – Facing Power – Old Insights, New Questions in Pathways of Power: building an
anthropology of the modern world
In this essay Wolf argues that there are different modes of power, all pertaining to a different level
of social relations and discusses the problem of power and the problems it poses for anthropology,
as power is a very loaded and polymorphous words and makes many uncomfortable. Power is often
discussed in different ways, yet having a common core which leads away from different kinds of
power implicated in different kinds of relations. Therefore, Wolf argues for 4 different types of
power:
, 1. Embodied power - power as an individual attribute, capability, e.g., strength, knowledge,
energy, the sorts of things that enable us to do things in the world.
2. Relational power - the ability of one individual to impose their will on another. In Weber's
terms, it's the ability to carry out one's will despite resistance. Relational because involves at
least two individuals. Examples: physically dominating another person; parent-child
relationship where parent directs child to behave in certain ways.
3. Organizational/Tactical power - the power an individual or unit has over another individual
or group of individuals in relation to their control over a social setting. Not just two
individuals, but a social space with multiple individuals. Examples: teachers over students
(teachers control content and grades); boss over workers (control wages and access to
employment). So here the power is in the social organization, it is enacted through a
hierarchical social arrangement where a person or group of people are perceived to have
power over others and so people in the organization act accordingly to this social
arrangement.
4. Structural power - the power to organize (i.e., structure) social settings in which actions take
place. Not necessarily directed by an individual person or group of people, but a more
pervasive system with a history. Examples: capitalism; nation-states; imperialism. For Wolf,
structural power is a way of explaining human actions in ways that are attentive to the
interconnectedness of human societies around the world as well as remembering that
human behaviours are always situated within and shaped by histories. The power that
structures the political economy, emphasizing power to deploy and allocate social labour.
He focusses on tactical and structural power, as he believes they can help explain the world we
inhabit. Furthermore, he argues to move beyond Geertz’s experience-near understandings of
analytical concepts to a realist position, to a cumulative anthropology: use the work of predecessors
to raise new questions, which relates to the title of the chapter. Then, Wolf uses three projects and
their description to show that many anthropological projects were adventurous but not enough. The
first project is about Puerto Rico, by Julian Steward and aimed at exhibiting the heterogeneity of a
national society. However, it did not take into account the role of migration to the USA and failed to
come to grips with political and economic forces of agriculture and missed an opportunity to deal
with the interplay of hegemonic and subaltern cultural stances in Puerto Rico. The second project
looked at labour migration to towns with burgeoning mines in Central Africa, by Wilson. It, however,
remained captured by functionalism and it took the colonial system as a given. The third project is
about the national social structure in Guatemala, by Richard Adams, and looked at local, regional
and supranational power. However, it did not produce a synthesis to help a theoretical model and it
did not move towards a political-economic model of the entire ensemble and thus neglected the
cultural interplay in Guatemala. In addition, Wolf discusses organization, which is key because it sets
up relations among people through allocation and control of resources and rewards and draws upon
tactical/organizational power. Because power balances keep shifting and changing, the work of
power is never done, it operates against an entropy. In anthropology there was little concern for
how tactical power worked in shaping organizations, maintaining them, destabilizing them or un-
doing them. How do we move from viewing organization as a product or outcome to understanding
organization as a process? Then lastly, he addresses the issue of signification, as anthropology was
treated signification mainly in terms of encompassing cultural unities which have been
conceptualized primarily as outcomes of processes of logico-aesthetic integration. For Wolf, beyond
logic and aesthetics, it is power which guarantees or fails. Power is implicated in meaning through its
role in upholding one version of significance as true. Power is never external to signification; it
