The Anthropology of Power

Angela Cheater

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134650477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

An edited collection which examines the theoretical issues surrounding power, and particularly empowerment, which uses ethnographic analysis as its basis. It takes material from the Middle East, Canada, Columbia, Australasia and various parts of Europe and Africa. It looks particularly at the extent to which traditionally disempowered groups gain influence in postcolonial or multicultural settings, and at how power relates to economic development, gender and environmentalism.

Chapter 1
Power in the postmodern era

Angela Cheater

‘Empowerment’, especially when divorced from consideration of what constitutes ‘power’, seems to be a sanitised buzz-word of the mid-1990s, yet as Wright (1994: 163) has noted, the word itself has been part of the discourse of debureaucratisation for some two or more decades. From just one publisher¹ come the following recent titles: Empowerment: Towards Sustainable Development; Knowledge, Empowerment and Social Transformation: Participatory Research in Africa; Monitoring Family Planning and Reproductive Rights: A Manual for Empowerment; Empowerment and Women’s Health: Theory, Methods and Practice; Women and Empowerment: Participation and Decision-Making; Gender in Popular Education: Methods for Empowerment; World Communication: Disempowerment and Self-Empowerment. Interestingly, while in the mid-1990s empowerment is associated particularly with women, gender, health, education and development, especially in Africa, it features not at all in recent tides on Asia— presumably not because anyone thinks that these concerns are irrelevant in Asia, but perhaps because Asia’s ability to empower itself through the global economy is unquestioned. Asia’s economic approach to power may be the most effective argument against Foucault’s preference for ‘a non-economic analysis’ which sees power as ‘not built up out of “wills” (individual or collective), nor…derivable from interests’ (1980:188), ‘neither given, nor exchanged, nor recovered, but rather exercised…in action’ (1980:89) in a curiously agentless way within ‘an unequal and relatively stable relation of forces’ (1980:200).

This stress on authorless, systemic empowerment, rather than on the manipulative agents of power-building, was not quite what I had in mind when organising the 1997 ASA conference on ‘Power, Empowerment and Disempowerment in Changing Structures’ in Harare.² My own concern was much more old-fashioned, a modernist inclination within the context of changing state powers to understand ‘what power is, how it is constituted, and how it works within an allegedly postmodern world in which older rules of authority seem to have decreasing relevance’.³ I had hoped to attract papers dealing with:

the impacts of policy interventions and opportunities at state, supra-state and extra-state levels—for example, on the ways in which people evade or ignore the reach of the state in constructing economic power beyond state control; the opportunities for and constraints on ethnic, gender and other group or categorical empowerment offerred by institutions such as United Nations agencies and forums, multinational Non-Governmental Organisations, the European Union, the International Court of Justice, the Internet and the global media, among many others; the possibilities for empowerment by manipulating the interstices between local, regional and central levels of state bureaucratic organisation; and issues of ‘management’.

As reflected in this book, some conference participants shared my assumptions that power operates at the ‘hard surfaces’ of stratificatory reality (Geertz 1973) but, emphasising the limits of editorial authority and power (both used here in the Weberian sense), contributors’ rather than the editor’s choices have defined the final content of this collection.

In the two decades since transactional theory last tried to grapple with such issues, there seems to have been an unvoiced shift away from the Weberian distinction (Weber 1947) between power (as the ability to elicit compliance against resistance) and authority (as the right to expect compliance). This shift owes much to Michel Foucault and postmodernism, and possibly reflects the ongoing loss of state authority to both sub-national and global organisations. Foucault distinguishes between central ‘regulated and legitimate forms of power’ and ‘capillary’ power at the ‘extremities’ (1980:96), which perhaps refracts somewhat differently Blau and Scott’s (1963) older distinction between a ‘formal’ organisation and ‘informal’ relationships underpinning its operation. It may also parallel, while differing from, Skalník’s (1989, this volume) understanding of power as deriving from the state in contrast to authority rooted in popular approval. People’s action, connoting revolt from below against the bureaucratisation of power, and anti-judicial ‘popular justice’ are positively recommended by Foucault (1980:29, 34–5) to counter bureaucratised judicial power. Populist authority, in contrast, may initially seem oxymoronic. Yet twice in the past quarter-century, the world has witnessed the dramatic effects of such authority in action, in both cases associated with the deaths of and funerary rites for extremely popular people—Zhou Enlai in China in 1976 (Cheater 1991), and Diana, Princess of Wales in the UK in 1997. In these two very different⁴ examples (one national, the other global), popular authority expressed in mass public mourning clearly altered, in different ways, at least the symbolic expression of state-derived (including imperial and monarchical) power. Perhaps the Indian government (with Gandhi’s funeral in mind) sensed the dangers of such popular expression in pre-emptively reinforcing its authority by declaring a state funeral for Mother Teresa as a foreign yet domesticated icon of that country’s disempowered poor.

Yet if Foucault’s conceptualisation of power does not allow for the idea of popular authority, it is by no means incompatible with the constructions of Earth (1959, 1966, 1967), Bailey (1969) and other transactionalists:

individuals…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…the vehicles of power, not its points of application.

(Foucault 1980:98)

There is also a hint here of that contemporary usage of ‘empowerment’ which implies the drive by individuals, singly or in combination, to get what they want. Moreover, consonant with transactionalist principles, Foucault (1980: 99) advocates an ‘ascending’ analysis of power focusing on its ‘techniques and tactics of domination’ (1980:102)—which initially seem to contradict any bottom-up analysis.

But such an approach helps us to understand how socially equal individuals (academic colleagues, for example) can exercise power over others and for themselves —and get what they want when they want it—merely by ignoring the normal rules of polite social interaction; for example, by barging into a group and interrupting its conversation in mid-sentence, such that those hamstrung by their own internalised rules of politeness do not even voice their upset at such rudeness, but meekly resume conversing when the interruption withdraws. And of course, were the interruption a child (and therefore not the social equal of conversing adults), this example would be one of domination exercised from below. Perhaps the mid-1990s concern in some British circles with lack of manners reflects precisely such empowerment, by the overthrow not only of (class-defined) politesse, but more broadly of collective agreement on socially appropriate behaviour. Changing habitus must, by definition, disempower those who operate by the rules of an older habitus undergoing replacement (Bourdieu 1977). Further along the scale from impoliteness, insults absorbed without retaliation likewise disempower their recipients, and come close to an official New Zealand definition of bullying as ‘the power…to hurt or reject someone else’.⁵ While such mundanities of power at the personal level might be thought unworthy of societal recognition, publicising previously suppressed conflict may encourage individual ‘victims’ to empower themselves, for, as Miller (1976:127) notes, ‘It is practically impossible to initiate open conflicts when you are totally dependent on the other person or group for the basic material or psychological means of existence.’

Returning to Foucault—who might well disagree with the above—he himself is not entirely consistent in his various descriptions of power. ‘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).

Perhaps for these reasons, many anthropologists interested in applying Foucault’s concepts have diplomatically avoided his descriptions of power, and instead concentrated on his idea that power is vested, even created, in discourses of ‘truth’ or knowledge rather than in any Weberian command of (potential) force.

[R]ules of right…provide a formal delimitation of power;…effects of truth that this power produces and transmits…in their turn reproduce this power. [M] anifold relations of power which permeate, characterise and constitute the social body…cannot themselves be established, consolidated or implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse.

(Foucault 1980:93)

Many have, therefore, sought to disseminate alternative, non-scientific, local knowledges as one form of exercising power (Foucault 1980:34): it is always possible that these, too, may become powerful ideas. ‘[I]t is really against the effects of the power of a discourse that is considered to be scientific that the genealogy [as “anti-science”] must wage its struggle’ (1980:84). In this ‘struggle’, though, Foucault’s shifting conceptualisations of power may be ignored completely and elided into the notion of empowerment through discourse. As Gordon (1980:245) has noted, Foucault sees discourse as ‘a political commodity’, and ‘the articulation of discourse and power as a phenomenon of exclusion, limitation and prohibition’, so the link between discourse and (dis)empowerment is easily made.

Freely available words and their changeable meanings have thus been shifted to central stage by Foucault and his followers, not as the purveyors of information as any basis of power (Foucault 1980:34; Edwards 1994:205), nor as used by The Good Soldier Svejk (Hasek 1973), nor as vehicles of ‘semantic creativity’ in their power to name, define, objectify or translate and thereby impose meaning (Parkin 1982:xlvi), but in ways curiously reminiscent of cosmologies that attribute magical power to words (see, for example, Kendall 1982:199). The term ‘empowerment’ as used in the 1990s seems above all to be about being vocal, having a right to ‘voice’. The constantly repeated rhetorics of public policy and institutional good practice⁶ seem designed to strengthen individual choice within the market, and to weaken dependency, merely byverbal reiteration. Pop singers talk confidently of changing meaning through the words of their songs and the (global) impact these have on the popular imagination. They ignore the point made by Yelvington (1996:329), regarding flirting, that:

[in such] contestations over consciousness…systems of meaning can…be analysed in terms of power relations [which]…are…constructed in pitched battles to decide meaning and interpretation. These battles are won and lost and the victor gets to determine the terms of the armistice, at least temporarily, when systems of meaning are created and enforced by groups with the most power.

Shifting the goalposts of meaning, then, for Yelvington presumes a prior capacity to make new meanings stick. Similarly, for Parkin (1982: xlvii), ‘performative language’ as ‘being’ ‘entails questions of personal autonomy, self-definition, and power, which only some in any society can ask and answer’. But for Parkin, speaking is also implicated in the ongoing construction of status and the ‘apprehension’ of the power of discourse.

Wikan (1993:206, 193) has also expressed scepticism about words and what they convey: ‘wordstuck…anthropology’s romance with words, concepts, symbols, text and discourse may be counterproductive’ in understanding precisely how intersubjective communication of meaning occurs. Not only do words express and reinforce the existing power of representative spokespersons (usually older males) to define what is; not only are precise words frequently misleading in their literal meanings; not only do people change their minds and re-word at will, but, above all, Wikan argues, the power of ‘resonance’ as the fusion of emotion and rationality is what ‘evokes shared human experience’ (1993:208) and the transmission of meaning. Conveying meaning, as Kendall (1982:205–6) indicates, may be indirect, involving encoded or concealed challenges to existing influence in apparently simple messages. Thus relaying greetings also relays knowledge of social relationships with political potential.

Pro-Foucauldian analysis after Foucault seems largely to have ignored, rather than refuted, such points, particularly Scott’s observation (1985, 1990) that currently disempowered people subvert dominating structures and relationships and come some way towards achieving their goals precisely by not voicing their resistance to hegemonic power openly, but by exercising some other capacity or resource.

Patterns of domination can…accommodate…resistance so long as…[it] is not publicly and unambiguously acknowledged…voice under domination…[includes] rumour, gossip, disguises, linguistic tricks, metaphors, euphemisms, folktales, ritual gestures, anonymity…each oral performancecan be nuanced, disguised, evasive, and shaded in accordance with the degree of surveillance from authority to which it is exposed…the particularity and elasticity of oral culture… allows it to carry fugitive meanings in comparative safety.

(Scott 1990:57, 137, 162, original emphasis)

Scott’s view of surveillance, as a challenge to be outwitted, thus differs from Foucault’s concern with its ‘productivity’ (1980:119) as a power mechanism which ‘permits time and labour, rather than wealth and commodities, to be extracted from bodies’ (1980:104) through ‘social production and social service’ (1980:125). But these differing views of Foucault and Scott are not incompatible: unvoiced, suppressed conflict and indirect manipulation are, according to Miller (1976), the strategies used by women to cope with their gendered dispowerment in modern America, where Foucault’s view of their surveillance as subordinates is equally applicable.

A focus on capacities or resources, including social networks, leads to the hard question of whether there is a quantum of power. The liberal democratic view (at once Parsonian⁷ and postmodern), of power as infinitely expansible, is that of the free market: when the cake is expanding and empowerment is vocality (through ballot box or communications media), questions of quantum and distribution are more easily fudged. The zero-sum view of power is more likely to be found among those competing for some,⁸ whether they define it as based on guns (James, this volume), land and land-based resources (Filer, Hopa, this volume) or access to state-controlled resources (Al-Rasheed, Gaidzanwa, this volume). As Wright (1994:163) has already indicated, the term ‘empowerment’, when used in the 1970s with reference to the Third World, was initially understood as ‘the development of economic activities under the control of the weakest…so that they had their own resources for development’. At least in its zero-sum conception, power clearly implies control of resources rather than—or in addition to—’voice’.

To those using the zero-sum conception of a fixed quantum of power, a Foucauldian approa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Anthropology of Power
• ASA Monographs 36
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Power in the Postmodern Era
• Chapter 2: Empowering Ambiguities
• Chapter 3: The Discursive Space of Schooling: On the Theories of Power and Empowerment in Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism
• Chapter 4: ‘Father did not answer that question’: Power, Gender and Globalisation in Europe
• Chapter 5: The Reach of the Postcolonial State: Development, Empowerment/ Disempowerment and Technocracy
• Chapter 6: The Guardians of Power: Biodiversity and Multiculturality in Colombia
• Chapter 7: The Dialectics of Negation and Negotiation in the Anthropology of Mineral Resource Development in Papua New Guinea
• Chapter 8: Land and Re-Empowerment ‘The Waikato case’
• Chapter 9: Indigenisation as Empowerment?: Gender and Race in the Empowerment Discourse in Zimbabwe
• Chapter 10: Exploitation after Marx
• Chapter 11: Evading State Control: Political Protest and Technology in Saudi Arabia
• Chapter 12: Authority Versus Power: A View from Social Anthropology
• Chapter 13: Speaking Truth to Power?: Some Problems Using Ethnographic Methods to Influence the Formulation of Housing Policy in South Africa
• Chapter 14: Machiavellian Empowerment and Disempowerment: The Violent Political Changes in Early Seventeenth-Century Ethiopia