Anthropology of Power and Resistance - Essay Example

Anthropology of Power And Resistance Anthropology of Power and Resistance Farzeela Faisal Standard Academia Research Anthropology of Power And Resistance The word 'anthropology' is ultimately from the Greek (anthropos, 'human', plus logos, 'discourse' or 'science'). Its first usage to define a scientific discipline is probably around the early sixteenth century (in its Latin form anthropologium). Central European writers then employed it as a term to cover anatomy and physiology; part of what much later came to be called 'physical' or 'biological anthropology. It is a field in which researchers have tended to adopt every new jargon laden academic fashion with a rapidity that borders on the unseemly from Darwinism to Marxism, structuralism to deconstructionism. (Wilcomb Washburn, American studies at Smithsonian Institution). For the understanding of anthropology of power, first we have 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'. 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 offered by institutions such as United Nations agencies and forums, multinational Non-Governmental Organizations, 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 organization; and issues of 'management'". Foucault's conceptualization of power is "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, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge, (ed.) C. Gordon. New York: Harvester/ Wheatsheaf). 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. 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. There are specific circumstances in which the anthropologist is obliged by the dynamics of the public policy process to adopt a more radical position, of the kind associated with a unilocal, univocal and unifocal form of ethnography, where the goal of 'political anthropology' is to achieve a transfer of power from the 'system' to the 'community'. For this reason, it is necessary for the discipline to develop something akin to a 'code of practice', whereby the necessity or desirability of movements between the radical and the moderate position can also be negotiated, within particular political settings, in order to avoid a breakdown in the dialogue which constitutes the discipline itself. A 'political setting' is defined here as something which is necessarily larger than a single 'community', which may be equivalent to a single jurisdiction (or nation-state), but which will normally also have some sectoral component-e.g. 'health', 'conservation', 'mining', etc On the other hand 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 rumor, gossip, disguises, linguistic tricks, metaphors, euphemisms, folktales, ritual gestures, anonymity each oral performance can 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. Different communities in multicultural environment show the desire for and the resistance to authority or representation. This paradox manifested itself in a concern for what was perceived by some members as a power grab in the class and in the relief and subsequent capitulation by most members of the group to a monological narrative voice in the ethnography. Thus the issue of the "specific strategy of authority". Ethnographers have given the idea that power relations permeate all levels of society, with a field of resistances that is coextensive with them. For those who seek to make sense of contemporary processes of cultural globalization and transnational culture flows, these theoretical developments raise a rich set of ethnographic possibilities. Rather than opposing autonomous local cultures to a homogenizing movement of cultural globalization, the authors in this volume seek to trace the ways in which dominant cultural forms may be picked up and used significantly, transformed in the midst of the field of power relations that links localities to a wider world. The emphasis is on the complex and sometimes ironic political processes through which cultural forms are imposed, invented, reworked, and transformed. Rather than simply a domain of sharing and commonality, culture figures here more as a site of difference and contestation, simultaneously ground and stake of a rich field of cultural-political practices. Relating these anthropological interests to the tenor of the times, we can say that the renewed interest in cultural plurality and relativity had two major functions. It called into question the moral and political monopoly of an elite, which had justified its rule with the claim that its superior virtue was the outcome of the evolutionary process, it was its might that made it right. If other races were shown to be equipotential with the Caucasians in general and the Anglo-Saxons in particular, if other cultures could be viewed as objects in themselves and not merely as object lessons in history, then other races and other cultures could claim an equal right to participate in the construction of a country more pluralist and more cooperative in its diversity with least resistance. In anthropology, this concern found its expression in the variety of approaches to culture and personality. These celebrated the malleability of humans, thus celebrating also their vast potential for change; and they pointed to the socialization or enculturation process as the way in which societies produced viable adults. And the adults of different cultures know how to adjust in the multi cultural environment hence eradicating the chances of resistance. Another issue in a society is the divided population in which what is good for some is irrelevant for others. This brings the precise elaboration of gendered anthropology. The historical contextualization of developments in this field is relevant for apprehending the connection between the feminist movement and scientific advancements. There are examples of cumulative knowledge, of progress as a result of criticism and of divergent views in different cultures. While exploring gendered anthropology we come across arguments about the universality of male domination gave rise to a series of new ethnographic studies of women's lives and their perceptions of their lives. Explanations for the universality of male domination were sought through the investigation of a number of analytical dichotomies, which were said to characterize gender relations in all societies. These dichotomies nature/culture, public/private were subsequently re-examined by a number of scholars who challenged both the content of the categories and their universal applicability. Variability in the content of these categories only became clear as a result of detailed ethnographic work and, through the new data made available, it became obvious that these categories were a feature of anthropological discourse rather than of the social or symbolic systems of the societies studied by anthropologists. A further point concerning the analytical dichotomies, which inform the anthropological analysis of gender and gender inequality, is that they are always hierarchically or inclusively organized. Thus, culture is superior to nature, and the public world of men encompasses the private world of women. Notions of hierarchy and encompassment, therefore, inform anthropological understandings of gender difference, of the distinction between the categories female and male, of the differences between women's and men's world-views, and of the differences between women's and men's sociological roles. According to Foucault, there is a kind of cultural domination known as techniques and technologies of the self. They permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, happiness, purity, supernatural power (Technologies of the self. In Technologies of the self: a seminar with Michel Foucault (ed. L.H. Martin, H. Gutman & P.H. Mutton), 9-15. [Expanded version in Foucault 2000: 223-51]). Due to the inequality of male and female gender, the female gender in order to be noticed, powered and appealing makes it beauty conscious. This give rise to the beauty culture and which eventually gives birth to cosmetic treatment and surgery. This beauty culture is not the same for every women, it's being effected social class difference of the women. These women's choices about appearance and behavior involve not only employment, education, and income, but also taste. Together with other traits, style and appearance preferences display a complex social identity that is both relevant for and shaped by class identity. Many critics have argued that contemporary ideals of female beauty and the work required to become ideally beautiful have long-lasting and devastating effects on women. Sensitive and compelling, these works incite outrage at the self-torture, deprivation, and mutilation women undergo as they attempt to attain hegemonic beauty ideals. Yet many women focus enormous energy on molding their bodies into the closest possible approximations of the female ideal. As they do so, they encounter representatives of commercialized beauty industries who help to shape both their appearances and their relationships to those appearances. In order to mold their bodies to their desired satisfaction level women used to exercise for hours in order to burn fats. Failing to get the objective they tend towards cosmetic surgery. Cosmetic surgery stands, for many theorists and social critics, as the ultimate invasion of the human body for the sake of physical beauty. It epitomizes the astounding lengths to which contemporary women will go to obtain bodies that meet current ideals of attractiveness. As such, plastic surgery is perceived by many to be qualitatively different from aerobics, hairstyling, or even dieting. In this view, cosmetic surgery is not about controlling one's own body but is instead an activity so extreme, so invasive that it can only be interpreted as subjugation. Even more than women who may participate in other types of body shaping activities, those who undergo cosmetic surgery appear to many observers both casual and academic to be so obsessed with physical appearance that they are willing to risk their very existence to become more attractive. Not surprisingly, cosmetic surgery has been attacked by the scores of feminist writers, who criticize bodywork generally. The beauty of images symbolizes what is now experienced as their essential lure, and plastic surgery is the cultural allegory of transforming the body into an image, an allegory that is deeply linked to the effects of celebrity culture. I find it impossible to discuss individual choice, therefore, around the issue of cosmetic surgery when the phenomenon seems to be so much more radically embedded in cultural strategies than a simple call to political resistance would address. Susan Bordo asks women to resist the cultural forces. Susan Bordo in her commentaries on cosmetic surgery, have pointed to a famous Twilight Zone episode and focuses on the actor Janet Tyler, who due to her ugliness was a symbol of terror. The doctors make every possible treatment of cosmetic surgery to make her normal so that she can be accommodated in her kind, and finally she was adjusted. Susan Bordo, from this episode condemn the society in which people all have to be alike, hence the power of the ironic contrast between the beautiful Tyler and the monstrous doctors. Yet this very episode is ironically (and interminably) complicit with the normalizing practices it condemns. It is only because of a culturally shared code of beauty that the episode works. (Flesh Wounds The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery, Virginia L. Blum, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2003). Cosmetic surgery's privileging of the face may simply be a continuation of the face's prominence in painted and photographic portraiture, the cinema, and advertising. Postmodern facility, the inhuman, surface 'mask' face evoked by Deleuze and Guattari. Donna Haraway notes the gender bias of viewing the face as a privileged signifier of humanity when she says 'Humanity's face has been the face of man'. Postmodern culture will not reinstate the White-Man face as an icon except ironically or periodically. The faces and bodies manufactured by the facialization machine of conventional cosmetic surgery reproduce the normative morphologies of race and gender familiar in Western multicultural societies, with one vital difference the surgical ideal is not the White-Man face but the White-Woman face. (Balsamo, Anne (1996), Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women, Durham and London: Duke University Press). Haraway emphasizes, feminist humanity 'must, somehow, both resist representation, resist literal figuration, and still erupt in powerful new tropes, new figures of speech, new turns of historical possibility'. (Haraway, Donna J. (1992b), 'The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate Others', in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, London and New York: Routledge.) Anthony Giddens combines an old school, 'classical' sociological style with a very contemporary awareness of changes in society, and he is happy to mix new theories with more established sociological perspectives. According to him: Human agency (micro level activity) and social structure (macro level forces) continuously feed into each other. The social structure is reproduced through repetition of acts by individual people (and therefore can change). In the case of gender this form of social reproduction is particularly clear. Women who choose not to shave their legs or armpits may be singled out in a similar way, treated as deviants for ignoring a social convention about feminine appearance. He also said: 'Society only has form, and that form only has effects on people, in so far as structure is produced and reproduced in what people do'. (Giddens, Anthony and Pierson, Christopher (1998) Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity). While these attacks may be well deserved, the cosmetic surgery industry is expanding rapidly nevertheless. Board-certified plastic surgeons performed more than 2.2 million procedures in 1999, a 44 percent increase since 1996 and a striking 153 percent increase since 1992. Liposuction, the most common cosmetic procedure in the United States, was performed 230,865 times (up 57 percent since 1996 and 264 percent since 1992), at a cost of approximately $2,000 per patient. Breast augmentation, with its price tag of nearly $3,000, was the second most common procedure, at 167,318 (a 51 percent increase since 1996). Blepharoplasty (eyelid surgery), the third most common, was performed on 142,033 patients at a cost of just under $3,000, followed by facelift (72,793) at over $5,000, and chemical peel (51,589), at nearly $1,300. Ninety percent of these operations are performed on women. In the cosmetic surgery clinic, women learn that the medical industry can provide remedies for the hooked or wide noses and the almond-shaped eyes that indicate ethnicity. Prior to entering the physician's office, women are undoubtedly aware that such features are considered "defects"; however, it is only in the clinic that they become aware of modern medicine's techniques for solving their "problems. " Cosmetic surgery can also repair the signs of aging with face-lifts and eyelifts and the markers of childbearing with tummy tucks and breast alterations. Moreover, surgery not only corrects physical flaws; it can also, according to one of John Norris's advertisements, provide the opportunity to "look like the person you really are. " Cosmetic surgery is not only related to the beauty perfection of women but it has superseded the anatomical comparison of races and makes it extinct. The use of the knowledge and the practices of human genetics as part of cosmetic surgery make this possible. This type of cosmetic surgery is becoming the major part of the modern biological anthropology. At times the cosmetic surgery gives the internal empowerment and confidence to some women but at the same time it wages a constant battle within the woman she wants to be and what her culture demands. Most often, women's moral identity incorporates definitions and feelings of self constructed in relation to an abstract ideal of bodily perfection and perfectibility, which is produced and disseminated by electronic and print media. To control women, by making her to tend towards the cosmetic surgery, is to define women's moral worth, that is, their goodness or badness. Through body rules and practices, women are divided into polar moral types: good women and bad women, respectable women and unrespectable women, madonnas and whores (Lerner G. 1986 The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press). These moral dichotomies revolve around the imperative for female bodily control: appearance, sexuality, reproductive capacity, movement in space and time. According to Foucault, corporal punishment is inconsistent with the modern desire to be refined and enlightened (Foucault M. 1977. Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon). If we go into deeper sense of the impact of cosmetic surgery, we get to the fact so called "dominant significations" which are able to subvert alternative ways of speaking, thinking and acting, give rise to "symbolic violence (exercised in formal terms)". Formal in this context means that the "force of the universal" is united with the "force of the official". (Matthew Adamson, Pierre Bourdieu; Stanford University, 1990) Furthermore, It is in this cultural context that women's identities and deepest sense of moral worthiness are forged and are most clearly and consistently the locus of controlling images and messages of perfection and perfectibility. As Bordo observes, "femininity has come to be a matter of constructing the appropriate surface self" (Bordo S. R. 1989. "The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault". In A. M. Jaggar and S. R. Bordo (eds.), Gender/ Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowledge, New Brunswick, N.J. Rutgers University Press). Societal control of women via bodily control is heightened considerably in modern consumer societies in which the body is co modified, images of perfect bodies abound and bodywork has become a sign of moral worth for whole segments of society. (Glassner B. 1988. Bodies. New York: Putnam). 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Gimlin, Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2001. Karen A. Callaghan, Ideals of Feminine Beauty: Philosophical, Social, and Cultural Dimensions, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT., 1994. Read More