Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Agency

Technology

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 14:57:05 +0000

Woman operating machinery in a Philippine textile mill, 1960. Picture by Harrison Forman.

Wageningen University

Initially published 21 Jul 2025

Abstract:

Technology broadly refers to objects or actions that are linked to tekhne, an ancient Greek term for ‘skill’ or ‘craftmanship’. Anthropologists of technology sometimes employ this understanding as a starting point, but many study technology in a much broader sense. They ask instead how humans and non-humans purposefully make or do things, and how such activity is shaped by broader sociocultural dynamics. Framing the topic in such terms allows anthropologists, among others, to think of technology beyond the machines of Western industrial-capitalism and engage with technologies across time and space—from stone tools to smartphones to satellites—and across human and non-human actors. Anthropologists have also promoted vernacular definitions of technology that emphasise technological effectiveness as understood by the actors involved in creating and using it. This has led them to challenge the analytical usefulness of the concept of ‘technology’ itself, highlighting concepts such as ‘technological systems’, ‘technical ensembles’, or ‘technics’, each time focusing on the complex interaction between technical objects such as tools, technical actions such as gestures, and the milieu or context in which technologies are embedded. Seeking to understand this complexity, anthropologists have highlighted that technologies have a rhythm that entangles diverse actors, resonates within particular milieus or contexts, and challenges the subject-object divide. Focusing on rhythmic resonance is one of several ways in which the study of technology offers unique insights into the dynamics that render some societies and their technological systems more resilient than others.

Introduction

The anthropology of technology covers a variety of enquiries into the social life of action-upon-matter, be it the action of weaving a basket or of typing on a keyboard to arrange bits into digital texts. Technologies have been an essential part of being human for as long as humans have existed. The use of technology was even thought to be the distinguishing feature of humanity, until tool use—a central feature of many technologies—was witnessed amongst great apes, crows, and octopi, among others (cf. Joulian 1994). By some estimates Kenyanthropys platyops, who lived about 3.5 million years ago in current-day Kenya, were among the first hominids to use stone tools beyond the Homo genus (Harmand et al. 2015). Since then, tools and more broadly human-driven actions-upon-matter have proliferated. They have also exponentially increased in complexity and in transformative capacity, accelerating changes of not only the human condition but also the condition of earth itself. This happened to the point that particularly geographers (cf. Larsen and Harrington Jr 2020) as well as anthropologists (cf. Mathews 2020) have come to debate if humanity’s capacity for action-upon-matter has so radically changed the world that it warrants its own epoch, the Anthropocene, ‘a new planetary era… in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and process’.

Anthropologists engage with technology across this vast spectrum of action, across time and space, and increasingly also across species and beyond humanity. From stone tools to ballistic missiles (Latour and Lemonnier 1994), the scope is as wide as the human and more-than-human experience itself. It is this vastness that defines the anthropology of technology and its complex, fluid, and expansive engagement with ‘technology’ as a gateway for understanding society as a whole, a powerful lens into the study of everything.

What is ‘technology’?

So what is ‘technology’? Unsurprisingly perhaps, anthropologists have no simple, or comprehensively agreed upon, definition. Technically, ‘technology’ refers to the ‘-ology’ or study of tekhne, an ancient Greek term for ‘skill’ or ‘craftmanship,’ or more broadly, for the ‘art’ of ‘making’ or ‘doing’ (cf. Coupaye 2022b). In many ways, anthropologies of technology employ this understanding as a starting point. They are variously concerned with how people purposefully do things, how they make them, and with how such doing and making shapes, and is shaped, by broader societal dynamics (Naji and Douny 2009). However, the devil here lies in the definitional technicalities.

In English, ‘technology’ only really emerged as a term in the nineteenth century. It rose to prominence as a catch-all for scientific and engineering knowledge that is being industrially produced (Marx 1997). This association with industrial production facilitated the rise of ‘technology’ as a prominent noun, or category of things, that is deeply associated with ‘modernity’. Simultaneously, the perceived link with industrial modernity, and the utopian promises surrounding industrial technologies (Moore 1990), enabled technology to be thought of as profoundly ‘agentive’, i.e. of producing effects in its own right. For example, by frequently promising to change the world, technology appears capable of acting autonomously, of ‘determining the course of events’ (Marx 1997, 968) without any substantive human involvement. When we insist on its agentive capacity, technology tends to project a veneer of neutrality and modernity (cf. Sigaut 2002). It promises to act on its own and to do so in a highly deterministic fashion, i.e. to bring about reliable, predictable change ‘according to principles of mechanical functioning that are entirely indifferent to particular human aptitudes and sensibilities’ (Ingold 1997, 131). It also promises to perform according to its designers’ intents, largely irrespective of the context in which it is being used (cf. Orlikowski 2007).

Anthropologists have variously studied such industrially-produced technologies, be they smartphones (Hobbis 2020; Tenhunen 2018), robotics (Deturche 2019; Gygi 2018), or plastics (Dey 2023). However, they have also challenged the modernist focus on industrial production and its ‘ethnocentric potential’ (Sautchuck and Mura 2019, 4), i.e. the risk of unwittingly universalising our understandings of technology even though they are specific to our own time and circumstances. Instead, many anthropologists have proposed conceptualising technology in the widest possible sense. They have suggested we focus on our interactions with objects whenever we try to secure some desired result in a creative and roundabout manner, i.e. when we use ‘a certain degree of circuitousness in the achievement of any given objective’ (Gell 1988, 6; emphasis in original).

Such interactions with objects can include the aforementioned tools at various scales, from dresses (Richards 2009) to eel traps (Lemonnier 2012) to military checkpoints (Hammami 2019). Yet, tools themselves are not sufficient or even necessary components of technologies. Instead, anthropologists have emphasised that actions-upon-matter are, first and foremost, tied to ‘techniques of the body’ (Mauss 1973) such as swimming and whistling but also the handweaving of baskets (Bunn 2022), moving through space while using a mobile phone (Nova et al. 2012), or ‘growing materials’ as part of biofabrication (Cristi 2023). Such techniques may vary in their ‘degree of technicality’, meaning ‘the number and complexity of the steps which link the initial givens to the final goal which is to be achieved’ (Gell 1988, 6), yet the degree of technicality is, from an anthropological perspective, a point of investigation and does not indicate what counts as ‘technology’ and what does not.

Anthropologists of technology are also rarely concerned with the perceived rationality of given technical actions, the ‘given objective’, as implied in the industrial definition of the term. Instead, they tend to focus on ‘vernacular [i.e. locally, context-specific] efficacy [that] takes into account all acts considered appropriate by the actor, whether they are aimed at matter or at intangible entities or substances’ (Coupaye 2022a, 42; emphasis in original). Consider for example how the Abelam people of Papua New Guinea grow and consume yams. Here, yams are anything but ‘just’ food, but are in fact symbols of society itself, and thus they are ‘not only grown, they are also “made”’ (Coupaye 2018, 17). Yams are centrepieces for social and cultural reproduction: their phallic properties semiotically represent and constitute masculinity and male hierarchy, and their ability to produce desired effects are closely embedded in relationships between spirits and humans (Coupaye 2013).

Based on this vernacular embedding, anthropologists have proposed an expanded understanding of technology that recognises technics, at various scales, as part of a multi-faceted ‘technological systems’ (Lemonnier 1989). Often embedded in particular, perhaps anachronistic, national research traditions, anthropologists have variously debated the specific boundaries of technology-focused terminologies including the difference between ‘techniques’ (French approaches) and ‘skills’ (English approaches) (cf. Brunn and Wahlberg 2022; Coupaye and Douny 2010; Sautchuk and Mura 2019). Still, roughly speaking, they agree that technological or technical systems usually involve (1) ‘technical objects’ like spears, dresses, or smartphones; (2) ‘technical actions,’ like the gestures used for basket weaving, which can either be ‘effective’, from the vernacular point of view of the actor, or ‘traditional’, based on historical dynamics of transmission and change (Coupaye 2021a, 49); and (3) their ‘milieus,’ such as the presence of spirits for the Abelam (Coupaye 2013) or the tropical ecologies of the Solomon Islands that undermine the durability of digital materials (Hobbis and Ketterer Hobbis 2021). ‘Milieu’ is here ‘summarised as a global field in which an entity (living organism or technical object) is immersed and with which it interacts but also upon which its existence depends’ (Coupaye 2021a, 51).

By emphasising the enmeshment of these three technical features, some anthropologists not only reject modernist definitions of ‘technology’ but also the distinction of subject- or object-centric engagements with technology. They focus on techniques, or technical actions, to highlight the fluidity of subject-object relations, and to consider technologies as relations between movements. To them, it is conceivable that humans as well as non-humans ‘are their movements’ rather than ‘beings that move’ (Ingold 2011, 168; emphasis in original). ‘Techniques’ here emerge as the contextually-embedded, vernacular, and malleable binding agent between subjects, objects, and their milieus. They thereby stress the connections between humans and the rest of the living world, the denial of which is common in modernist and agentive engagements with technologies (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 400). Simultaneously, the ‘technical’ is more than the ‘material’ (Latour 2014) revealing how even a bodily action upon its own self-as-matter is culturally inflected and connected to larger social processes.

Accordingly, ‘technology’ can be understood as a lens into everything social. Studying it creates new empirical sensibilities and allows for perceiving and dealing with relations and processes that go beyond the usual topics and methods of the social sciences (Sautchuk and Mura 2019, 5). Thus, anthropologists have variously shown the complex interplay between how societies make technologies and how technologies make society, or ‘that human and social reality is as much as a product of machines as of human activity’ (Escobar 1994, 216). Anthropologists have, in their engagement with this technology-society dialectic, highlighted the fluid rhythm of technologies that entangles diverse actors beyond the subject-object divide, asking how technical rhythms resonate within particular milieus or contexts. Moreover, they have asked what rhythmic resonance may teach us about the resilience of some societies and their technological systems.

The rhythms of technologies

Several anthropologists have uncovered and showcased the ‘rhythmic dimensions of technical relations’ (Sautchuk and Mura 2019, 10; cf. Leroi-Gourhan 1993; Stiegler 1998). Take the technical actions involved in breadmaking such as kneading, for example. Kneading involves forming and orienting an elastic gluten structure that is necessary to contain air produced during fermentation processes within bread. Effective kneading requires repetitive, or rhythmic, actions that include the stretching, lifting, and folding of usually ball-shaped dough. It is the consistency and particular patterns of the rhythm that distinguishes a ‘great’ baker (or a great kneading machine) from a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ one, according to culturally specific norms. Rhythmic kneading entwines the baker’s body (or kneading machine) in a particular way with the dough, its various ingredients, as well as the surface on which the kneading takes place. Thus, it plays a central role in the broader technical actions that bring bread into being. Multiple actors are at play in these processes. For example, while the baker, with or without the use of machines, may attempt to ‘control’ the behaviour of yeast, as a key ingredient, it is the yeast itself that acts based on and in response to various factors, including its age, the surrounding temperature, and the kneading rhythms. Yeast operates, in this case, according to its own particular rhythm within the broader technological system involved in making bread. Such a rhythmic plurality also marks how guide dogs engage their human counterparts (von der Weid 2019) or how the Dogon in Mali consider the sheen from wild silk as being imbued with a living force (Douny 2013).

By recognising the agency of non-human actors, such as yeast, in technological systems, the anthropology of technology supports broader efforts aimed at transgressing common epistemic dichotomies, including that of nature vs. culture or human vs. non-human (e.g. Descola 2013, Vivieros de Castro 2004; Vilaça 2016). It foregrounds the role of rhythmic techniques in human attempts to ‘control’ or ‘manipulate’ non-human actors, but also the non-human actors’ resistance to, and diverse engagement with, such attempts. For example, the technical processes involved in extracting latex from rubber trees involves applying a toxic chemical solution of ethrel and water to the ‘last cut’ of a tree in order to prolong the sapping period. The ratio of ethrel to water, and the frequency of its use, are interpreted in a moral framework in the relationship between employer and tapper. Bad employers use lower ratios and apply more frequently than their more perceivably benevolent counterparts. Latex extraction thus includes attempts at controlling or, in this case, ‘taming’ trees through working rhythms that maintain this tamed status over multiple days. These rhythms, in turn, account for the characteristics of the rubber tree as an agentive being while also reflecting the rhythmic relations between tappers and their employers (Di Deus 2019). Thereby latex extraction reveals ‘a complex interactive human-plant dynamic’ (Die Deus 2019, 17) that ‘[surpasses] a purely metaphorical dimension of the idea that plants have “agency”’ (Di Deus 2019, 18).

As implied in the tapper-employer relationship, the rhythmic dimensions of technical actions are not necessarily harmonious, equal, or deterministic. On the contrary, anthropologists contend that technologies and their rhythms are not fixed but open to allow for context-specific adaptations (cf. Fisch 2018; Simondon 2017). In other words, the rhythms of technical actions are inherently flexible. They allow for a continuous renegotiation of the relationship between the actors involved, including not only humans, animals, plants, or spirits but also machines. This holds true for various technological relationships, whether these involve bakers and dough, workers and rubber trees, or machine-centric technological systems such as Tokyo’s commuter train network. Michael Fisch (2018), for example, has shown how Tokyo’s commuter train network operates reliably, whilst working nearly always ‘beyond capacity’ (2018, 1). It works not because of a strict, inflexible, and controlling insistence on having ‘zero errors’. Instead, its tight schedule is made possible because Tokyo’s train system is open to rhythmic changes between the humans that operate and use it, as well as its machines, from subtle and finely tuned infrastructural configurations to abrasive techniques of employees shoving passengers into cars before doors close. Regularity in technical systems such as the commuter train network can, thus, emerge through irregular flows between various actors.

Studying technology’s more fluid rhythms thus confronts the myth that technologies are functional because they are external to humans and non-human actors. It challenges the ‘rational linear determinism’ (Coupaye 2022a, 37) of modernist understandings of technology and foregrounds the importance of studying complex socio-technical entanglements.

The resonance of technologies

The rhythmic movements that underlie technologies further generate resonances between technical objects, technical actions, and their milieus. For example, among the Panará in southern Amazonia, hunters’ use of particular weapons such as firearms resonates with ‘the territory, or the land (terra)’ (Bechelany 2019, 20) that they move through. By how a firearm is positioned next to the hunter’s body while moving through the forest, the firearm facilitates circular movements of the hunter, ‘guiding him to always walk towards the same side, taking him back to the point from whence he started off’ (Bechelany 2019, 8). Simultaneously, firearms as a ‘thing of the whites’ (Bechelany 2019, 8) embed the hunt in broader Panará relationships with ‘the whites,’ because firearms, including ammunition, need to be purchased. Firearms, thus, resonate differently than bows in Panará lifeworlds. Bows facilitate different movements through space and, as self-made hunting tools, creating a less dependent relationship with ‘the whites’. Resonances surrounding the ‘technical ensemble’ (Simondon 2017) of the hunt, thus, reveal something bigger about the Panará than ‘just’ how they hunt. They show shifting relationships between the Panará, animals, other (white) humans, and their territory.

Anthropologists of technology have further argued that similar to technical rhythms, technological resonances are not predetermined. Technical actions or objects may be designed to achieve particular goals. However, the achievement of such goals is never guaranteed. A mobile phone may be designed to allow for telecommunication, but telecommunication may not be the dominant function that is being used, if it is at all. Among the Lau speakers of Solomon Islands, for instance, mobile phones were, in 2014 and 2015, used most frequently as flashlights or calculators (Hobbis 2020). Reasons for such deviation from designers’ intent and objects’ primary tendencies are diverse. They depend on context and are rarely explainable solely through arguments that focus on people’s need for resources. When the Lau, an Indigenous language group of approximately 15,000 people in Solomon Islands, needed to make a phone call in 2015, their access to the necessary monetary funds to pay for, and make, phone calls was limited. This facilitated a ‘metered mindset’ (Donner 2015) with many Lau choosing to use mobile phone functions that did not incur additional expenses such as the aforementioned flashlights, which served as primary light source at night in off-grid villages (Hobbis 2020). Simultaneously, money alone did not explain a general reluctance towards making phone calls: phone calls were also discouraged due to perceived possibilities for immoral actions such as the facilitation of extramarital affairs (Hobbis 2020).

In other words, as particular technical actions or objects interact with, or better resonate within, a specific milieu, the actors involved situate these actions and objects in the interests, needs, and values of the milieu as reflected in the Lau’s concerns with the immorality of mobile phones. Technologies may, thus, have some built-in ‘tendencies’ (Leroi-Gourhan 2013), meaning they are likely to be used for a particular purpose (e.g. phones have a tendency to be used to make phone calls). However, anthropologists of technology have shown that usage patterns are not predetermined. Instead, there is substantive diversity in how people engage with technical objects such as mobile phones or how they engage in technical actions, from fire management (Fagundes 2019) to mathematical techniques (Vilaça 2018). Put another way, technologies resonate in unique ways in particular milieus, and technological capacity is only one of multiple factors that determine how they are produced, used, and discarded.

While technologies always ‘have reciprocal relationships with the social systems to which they belong’ (Lemonnier 1989, 156), the degree of such resonance is not always the same. Some technologies, specifically some technical objects, resonate more intensely than others in a given context. As ‘compositional objects’ (Hobbis 2020)—objects that uniquely connect diverse actors within specific milieus through particular technical actions—they have a unique ‘blending power’ (Lemonnier 2014) or ability to engage with processes of social reproduction and enable to share ideas and build social relations. They do so, for example, through their origin myth, and physical modes of use (Lemonnier 2014, 538). These objects may be exceptional in their visibility such as Gawa canoes (Munn 1977) or Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw totem poles (Boas 1955), but they may also be seemingly ‘mundane objects’ (Lemonnier 2012) such as pottery among the Marakwet of Kenya (Derbyshire et al. 2020) or yams among the Abelam of Papua New Guinea (Coupaye 2013).

Insofar as they seem mundane, compositional objects can disappear into the background of everyday life, remaining ostensibly insignificant. Yet, they can be anything but inconsequential. The mortuary drums of the Ankave of Papua New Guinea are a good example. When playing and hearing the drums during a mortuary drum beating ceremony, the Ankave have been shown to witness their recently deceased relatives leave the Ankave ‘realm of the living’ (Lemonnier 2012, 72). As this happens, those present at the drum beating ceremony recall their mythic origins and in so doing the drums invoke a whole network of associations in the minds of the participants, ‘connecting cannibal monsters, shamanism, the various origins of illnesses and the ways to cure them, the management of mourning, the representation of life, and the proper conduct in the presence of maternal kin’ (Lemonnier 201, 72–3). The drum beating ceremony, as a technical ensemble marked by redundancy, emphasis, and technical resonance, communicates what words could not about a key dynamic of Ankawe lifeworlds. It brings into being highly idiosyncratic key values and key characteristics of social relations, such as ‘the unspeakable status of maternal kin as gentle life-givers and detestable killers and cannibals’ (Lemonnier 2012, 75). During the ceremony, the drums serve as ‘perissological resonators’ (Lemonnier 2012, 127), i.e. as objects that can achieve something in social relations that words seem unable to do (Weiner 1983).

There are some technical objects that can resonate perissologically across diverse contexts. They are ‘supercompositional’ (Hobbis 2020, 217) in that they ‘bridge social networks and cultural meanings on a sociocultural and technological level’ (Ketterer Hobbis and Hobbis 2024, 5). Smartphones seem to have such a capacity. ‘As purely technological system they are assemblages of constituent materials that act on matter’ (Hobbis 2020, 217), no different in principle from, for example, a hammer (cf. Lemonnier 1992). However, they are special compared to other compositional objects in that their sociality and cultural meaning-making are built into them at a technological level. Smartphones are designed to facilitate social relationships through, for instance, the call function or through social media apps. In addition, they condense cultural meanings through their capacity to store, consume, and produce material cultures such as music (Hobbis 2020). People may choose not to use these social and cultural features of smartphones, yet they still resonate in contextually-specific ways (cf. Horst and Miller 2006; Tenhunen 2018). Hence, some technical objects such as smartphones are particularly interesting for uncovering resonances that are both context specific and that occur in ‘shared worlds’, allowing us to ‘take account of the evident and effective connections between peoples—even those who seem very different from one another’ (Hirsch and Rollason 2019, 10).

The resilience of technologies

Anthropologists of technology also speak to the broader study of continuity and change, as for example in religious conversions (cf. Macdonald 2020) or non-modern people’s encounters with modernity (cf. Robbins and Wardlow 2005). In doing so, they often focus on the idea of resilience, highlighting that technological systems are marked by ‘both stability and transformation’ and that their change is never fully chaotic (Redman 2005, 72) but usually governed by ‘technological choices’ (Lemonnier 1993). Such choices are made by persons or groups of people at all stages of technological processes including design, production, consumption, and disposal. This necessarily challenges deterministic narratives in broader technological discourses and research which often predict ‘rupture’ with a status quo following the emergence, development, or adoption of new technologies.

One good example for such resilience is the adoption and adaptation of data-driven digital technologies. Dominant discussions on digital economics in media studies and adjacent fields suggest that digital technologies, especially smartphones, by design spread the values and practices of capitalism to anyone who uses them, because the data that they collect can be commodified and used to advance capitalist interests (cf. Couldry and Mejias 2019; Sadowski 2020). In other words, societies that have long resisted absorption into industrial-capitalism such as Indigenous hunter-gatherers in Amazonia or horticulturalists in Melanesia, are thought to unavoidably become more, if not completely, industrial-capitalist as a result of their embrace of the smartphone (Hobbis 2021). However, longstanding economic systems and values are much more resilient. Rather than simply assimilating to the economic values embedded in digital designs and submitting to data-driven commodification, Solomon Island horticulturalists have decided to adapt, for instance, Facebook buy-and-sell groups in such a way that they extend and strengthen longstanding reciprocal systems of exchange (Hobbis and Ketterer Hobbis 2023). More so, they undermine the capitalist business practices of urban brick-and-mortar retail stores, while obscuring and disrupting the commodification of their individual data (Hobbis and Ketterer Hobbis 2023). Similarly, in neighboring Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, Melanesian mobile phone users have resisted the capitalist economics of international copyright laws to continue longstanding music sharing practices as ‘a constituent part of social relations’ (Stern 2014, 2). Here, music tasks and sharing networks increasingly expand beyond immediate kin, enabled by mobile phones (Crowdy and Horst 2022). In other words, because of digital technologies, Melanesian systems of circulation, sharing, and exchange are changing, but this change is resilient. It builds on existing systems and values, rather than simply dismantling them.

Anthropologists of technology have engaged with this resilience by interrogating context-specific knowledge or ‘social representations’ (Lemonnier 1989) regarding the choices and constraints of particular technologies (Lemonnier 1992). These social representations are crucial for understanding why some technologies succeed, and others fail, and why success and failure are disconnected from the modernist focus on technological tendencies for performing an intended task. Studying social representations allows us to understand the resilience of particular ways of making and doing things as contextually more ‘effective’ even if not more ‘efficient’. Consider, for example, the commercial failures of some airplanes, such as the Mitsubishi MU-2. The Mitsubishi MU-2 was, in terms of its performance as a machine, superior to its competitors (Lemonnier 1989). However, it encountered two problems in its social representation: It had an unusual shape, and its design ‘required new piloting procedures’ (Lemonnier 1989, 167). Because of these problems with social representation, this particular type of airplane not only failed to achieve its commercial potential, but also shaped design possibilities over the long term. Once a particular design fails, it is unlikely to be re-introduced. ‘Designers themselves, at least most of them, only produce machines that fit their own representation of what [a technology] should look like’ (Lemonnier 1989, 168). An already-failed design is basically the opposite, a context-specific representation of what a technology should not look like.

Of course, technological choices also reflect context-specific power relations. As designers or funders of particular technologies that are being developed or implemented decide on their design, they not only consider material functions ‘but also [consciously, or not] express and coercively reinforce beliefs about the differential allocation of power, prestige, and wealth in society’ (Pfaffenberger 1992, 283). For example, when Indonesia launched its first satellite system in 1976, it not only served the purpose of transmitting telephone and TV signals, but also advanced the political visions of government actors, engineers, and entrepreneurs within the Suharto regime (Barker 2005). Satellites were here discursively embedded in nationalist struggles, the defeat of Japanese and Dutch colonialism, and the promise of a unified Indonesia through control over ‘electronic media’ with ‘communications signals [passing] as the truest and purest medium for the new nation’ (Barker 2005, 711). These nationalist unification discourses gave shape to Indonesia’s satellite programme ever since. They were the reason why a particular satellite system was developed, why Indonesia became the first so-called ‘developing country’ to have its own satellite system, and they have informed how satellite technologies in the country have evolved since (Barker 2005). Simultaneously and importantly, these nationalist satellite discourses were closely aligned with pre-existing localised discourses surrounding technology and nationalism, rather than creating a fundamentally new techno-political system. Satellites in Indonesia, thus, exemplify the resilience of broader socio-technical dynamics, even when seemingly fundamentally new technologies are introduced in a particular context.

Technological change also opens up opportunities for challenging dominant systems, as the practices and discourses surrounding adoption and adaptation processes are rarely, if ever, unified. Instead, they are sites of ‘technological dramas’ that allow for the renegotiation of (power) relationships around new technical objects and related technical actions through ‘user appropriation, user modification, sabotage, and revolutionary alterations, as a series of counterstatements in a historical discourse’ (Pfaffenberger 1992, 285). For example, as mobile phones are being integrated into the contested milieu of religious conversions to Pentecostalism in Kinshasa, they have become a new battleground over morally acceptable femininities and intimate relations (Pype 2016). In rural India, access to smartphones among Bagdis, the lowest caste group, has facilitated an uneasiness among elites, alongside a somewhat contrarian pride in lower classes over inclusion in hi-tech India (Tenhunen 2022, 348–9). Importantly, though, these contestations exist by no means outside of particular, context-specific social representations. Instead, they all reflect broader societal dynamics, such as those surrounding Pentecostal conversion. Each actor inside of these technological dramas ‘[infuses]’ technologies ‘with their own logic’ (Mahias 1993, 158) seeking to assert their own respective vision for new technological futures, that are inevitably both stable and transformative, resilient in a context of change.

Finally, anthropologists of technology have variously highlighted how resilience is visible in the continuities of some technologies, and specific technical objects and actions, across long periods of time. Lithic technologies, for instance, not only predate the existence of Homo sapiens (Harmand et al. 2015) but are present today, in the technological systems surrounding pestle and mortars in kitchens, laboratories, and pharmacies. Similarly, dry stone masonry, commonly used in medieval architecture across the British Isles as well as medieval Great Zimbabwe, continues to exist as a construction technology, with new dry stone trends emerging in urban locales or as feature of tourist spaces (cf. Mhairi 2015; Sagiya 2022). Such resilient technologies persist even when seemingly ‘better’ technical objects or actions are available. A group of Amazonian lake fishermen, for instance, agreed to, and even pushed for, a ban of nets to catch the Pirarucu fish, even though nets combined with motor boats are much more efficient at catching Pirarucu than the longstanding combination of canoes, paddles, and harpoons (Sautchuk 2019). This rejection of the net and resilience of the harpoon is at least partially due to the rhythmic relations between harpooner and fish and how these rhythmic relations resonate within a broader ‘(harpoonmorphic) subjectivity in these lakes’ (Sautchuk 2019, 188). By choosing the ‘effective’ harpoon over the ‘efficient’ net, fishermen sought to maintain broader human-non-human relations expanding far beyond the technical object itself. They reveal the fundamental entanglements between rhythm, resonance, and resilience.

Conclusions

The anthropology of technology continues to make significant contributions to understandings of human-non-human relations. By carefully dissecting the complex meanings of ‘technology’, anthropology demonstrates how dangerous it is to conflate ‘technology’ with ‘hi-tech’, i.e. with ‘advanced’ tools and machinery. Such conflation is widespread, as when hearing someone say ‘I hate technology’, when what they are really saying is ‘I hate digital technology’. Anthropologists study ‘technology’ in all its diversity, without imposing hierarchies such as ‘low-tech’ and ‘hi-tech’ from the start. This allows for valuing and thinking critically about how old, even ancient, technological systems continue to contribute significantly to lives around the world. It also enables the use of the notion of ‘technology’ as a jumping off point to intervene in broader, interdisciplinary debates on what the term ‘technology’ may mean. Anthropologists of technology tend to recognise that the technical always entails an interplay between material, conventions, and beliefs, often according to vernacular values and logics.

By searching for the interplay between constraints and choices through a focus on actions-upon-matter, anthropologists’ understanding of ways of being, social continuities, and change are unavoidably grounded in the materialism of technical systems: to open up a wine bottle without a corkscrew, for example, clever means must be devised (Lemonnier 2014). Investigating technologies through an emphasis on action-upon-matter opens up insights into a quintessential part of the anthropic—that is to say, human—experience. While economic anthropology has (and critiques) Homo economicus, the self-interested, rational person (cf. Yan 2020), the anthropology of technology has Homo habilis: the ‘handy’ person, a point in physical anthropology wherein our distinctive humanity was established through tool use. A better name may be Homo transformatio, the ‘transforming’ person, because, that is what technology, and being human, is really about: transformative processes through actions-upon-matter that rhythmically and resiliently resonate with and between human and non-human actors, and that continuously shape and remake the world.

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Note on contributors

Geoffrey Hobbis an anthropologist and assistant professor at the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation Group, Wageningen University. His research uses the anthropology of technics to understand emerging digital cultures and societies with a current focus on the digital transformation of non-industrial economies and diverse markets.

Geoffrey Hobbis, Assistant Professor, Wageningen University, Knowledge Technology and Innovation Group, Hollandseweg 1, 6706KN Wageningen, the Netherlands. ORCID: 0000-0001-8644-6916

Stephanie Ketterer is an anthropologist based at the Sociology of Development and Change Group, Wageningen University. She is also affiliated with the Department of Knowledge Infrastructures, University of Groningen. Her research brings together anthropologies of technics, infrastructures and the state, with a current focus on contested data infrastructures in rural environments.

Stephanie Ketterer, Associate Professor, Wageningen University, Sociology of Development and Change, Hollandseweg 1, 6706KN Wageningen, the Netherlands. ORCID: 0000-0001-7038-7413

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Agency

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 09:46:42 +0000

Picture by John Fahy

Julia Vorhölter

Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Initially published 12 Aug 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24agency

Abstract:

In anthropology, agency is broadly defined as the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act. Classically, the concept has been used to analyse how people try to influence, or change, their lifeworlds and how they act within, or even resist, powerful structures. The concept entered anthropological debates in the 1980s and was initially closely connected to practice theory, an approach which sought to understand how individuals actively create society while at the same time are being shaped by it. Consequently, many of the early debates on agency revolved around questions of self-determination, creativity, and resistance. Anthropologists studied, for instance, how people, especially those in seemingly powerless positions, managed to pursue their own projects and to subvert—if subtly—colonial, patriarchal, capitalist, or other forms of domination. However, anthropologists have always been wary of reducing agency to liberal—or ‘western’—notions of personal choice, freedom, and autonomy. Instead, a plethora of ethnographic case studies demonstrate how meanings of agency, including who can exercise it and how it is valued, vary across social, cultural, or historical contexts. In more recent times, anthropologists have also drawn attention to networked, relational, and more-than-human forms of agency such as the agency of spirits, ‘nature’, art, or things. This entry provides an overview of the extensive anthropological debates on agency, noting that most anthropologists working on questions of agency today would agree that the relationship between our intentions, our actions, and their effects on the world is much more complex than the term agency—as popularly understood—suggests.

Introduction

At least since the 1990s, agency has been a prominent and much-discussed concept in anthropology (e.g. Ahearn 2001; Duranti 1990; Ortner 1984, 1997, 2001). Emerging out of practice theory, agency was frequently imagined as a positive capacity to act within, and even to resist, potentially oppressive structures. When people had agency, they could explain and instigate personal, social, and environmental change. When non-human actors had agency, they affected and transformed the environment, societies, or other bodies. In more recent times, anthropologists have become less enthusiastic about the concept for various reasons. Human agency is increasingly regarded as overly destructive and potentially problematic rather than something to be celebrated (see Latour 2014). At the same time there is an increasing realisation that human agency is rather limited, and there is a widespread sense of powerlessness in the face of climate change, pandemics, and war. Responding to these shifts in scholarly debates and the world we live in, anthropologists have begun exploring new—distributed, more-than-human, and relational—forms of agency, or even radical alternatives to hegemonic understandings of agency. These include 'patiency' (Mazzarella 2021, see also Schnepel 2009), 'non-mastery' (Taussig 2020), 'waiting' (Hage 2009), or different forms of passivity such as silence (Hofmeyr 2009). Such alternative concepts question the imperative to act or ‘do something’ in order to change the world or ourselves. Instead, they attend to other forms of becoming. In Lutheran theology, for instance, the passive receiving of God’s grace is seen as the foundation for any human agency. More broadly, receiving (e.g. a gift or a declaration of love) may not be wholly passive. It can be conceptualised as a form of passivity by which the giver’s action turns the other into a receiver with all the obligations that come with this role (Robbins 2020).

This entry provides an introductory overview of the extensive anthropological debates on agency. Drawing on both classic and more recent ethnographic texts, it discusses the complex relationship between agency, intention, and effect in fields as varied as politics, technology, language, and the body. The main aim is to show how the concept has been used and contested in anthropology and how different understandings of agency are tied to different theoretical positions. More generally, it illustrates the varied ways in which anthropologists have tried to conceptualise the dynamics between agent and world, between creativity and stasis, between responsibility and fate, and between power and resistance.

At the heart of debates on agency is the question of social change. Why and how do societies change despite their fairly stable and powerful structures, which are based on class, gender, belief, etc. and which are constantly reinforced through socialisation, daily routines, and rituals? Is there such a thing as free will, or are the choices we make always determined by the social and cultural contexts we live in? Long before agency became a fashionable concept in anthropology, philosophers and sociologists debated this so-called ‘structure-agency’ problem. Some social theorists, like Max Weber, posited that unlike animals who act out of instinct, humans are capable of conscious, rational decision-making. Others, like Émile Durkheim, cautioned that choices made by individuals are always shaped by social and cultural structures—or, in Durkheim’s terms—by a collective consciousness or conscience collective (Rapport and Overing 2007, 3-5). Later theorists agreed that both the reproduction and the transformation of societies happens through a dynamic interplay between determining structures and individual intentional actions. However, they disagreed as to whether structures or actions were more important (e.g. Berger and Luckmann 1966, Parsons 1951, Bourdieu 1977). One of the most influential theories, based on the idea that agency and structure are part of an inseparable duality, was developed by sociologist Anthony Giddens. His ‘structuration theory’ is based on the premise that

society is the outcome of the consciously applied skills of human agents.[…] While not made by any single person, society is created and recreated afresh, if not ex nihilo, by the participants in every social encounter. The production of society is a skilled performance, sustained and “made to happen” by human beings’ (Giddens 1993, 25).

In anthropology, agency and related research foci emerged comparatively late and only started to gain more traction in the 1980s. In its beginnings, agency was closely associated with ‘practice theory’—an approach that ‘seeks to explain the relationships that obtain between human action, on the one hand, and some global entity which we may call “the system” on the other’ (Ortner 1984, 184; see also Bourdieu 1977, Sahlins, 1981). Practice theory itself emerged out of a dissatisfaction with previous anthropological theories which were either insufficiently interested in questions of history and societal transformation or did not pay much attention to the actions and intentions of individuals.

To put it crudely, up to the 1980s most anthropologists had studied culture(s) or societies as relatively stable, homogenous, and somewhat ‘objective’ entities (for a more nuanced discussion, see Ortner 1984). Their focus was clearly on the collective and not on the individuals of which it was made up. Some influential theories such as structural functionalism, supported by anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, explained social institutions largely as a result of their usefulness for society at large. French structuralism, made famous by Claude Lévi-Strauss, focused on a universal grammar underlying all cultures, while symbolic anthropology, famously developed by Clifford Geertz, understood culture as a set of shared public symbols and meanings. These different, dominant approaches to the study of society were largely ahistorical and were not explicitly concerned with questions of social change. Other approaches were, but assumed ‘that human action and historical process are almost entirely structurally or systemically determined’, and not in any central way driven by ‘real people doing real things’ (Ortner 1984, 144). This charge was levelled against evolutionism and later cultural ecology which saw societies as ‘quasi-organisms’ that evolved through technological and environmental adaptation. It was also made against Victor Turner’s ritual theory, which sought to explain how social integration and solidarity were achieved and maintained despite inherent conflict. Marxism, which viewed society as made up of opposing social forces or ‘modes of production’, was also held to be overly deterministic.

The turn to concepts such as agency, then, signalled a move away from a focus on abstract forces and processes to concrete, often individual, actors and their particular motivations, intentions, and experiences of social life. Questions about agency, including who may or may not ‘have’ agency in a given setting, are therefore closely entangled with questions about personhood and self. They foreground human creativity, aspiration, and desire, as well as power and ethics. Discussions, definitions, and theories of agency, as the following sections show, vary according to whether an agent is conceptualised as a rational and independent human individual, a subject (i.e. someone who is to some extent determined by social forces or discourses and studied as a member of a particular subject position, for instance, as a woman or as a peasant), or a non-human actant. According to Sheryl Ortner (2001), one can also differentiate between approaches that analyse ‘the agency of intentions’, i.e. how individuals or collectives design, carry out, and give meaning to their life projects, and those that focus on ‘agency as power’, i.e. how individuals or collectives perform or resist domination and oppression.

In everyday parlance, fuelled by widespread neoliberal doctrines of self-responsibilisation, the notion of agency often evokes the image of a human actor whose intentional actions should produce the intended effects (Gershon 2011). This ‘voluntarist’ notion of agency, i.e. the idea that we are the masters of our own fate and responsible for the outcomes of our actions, has far-reaching implications. It affects, for instance, how contemporary healthcare, welfare, or justice systems are set up in many countries around the world and how people imagine politics more generally. Anthropologists, however, have always emphasised that what people understand by agency, or how they believe they can act in and upon the world, greatly varies across cultural and historical contexts. As the next section shows, they have also cautioned against simply equating agency with human self-determination (e.g. Keane 2003, 2007; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992).

Cultural constructions of agency

Anthropologists have tended to emphasise that the meanings of agency differ substantially between different social, cultural, or historical contexts. Such differences in meaning can have an immediate effect on how and by whom agency can be exercised and how it is valued. For example, if people believe that God, or spirits, or dead ancestors, are powerful agents, this will affect not only how people explain their world, but fundamentally shape many aspects of social life itself. One influential way of defining agency is therefore that it is ‘the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act' (Ahearn 2001, 112).

Anthropological studies have often focused on encounters between people with different conceptions of agency, often in highly unequal positions of power, such as in colonial, missionary, or interethnic contexts (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, Ortner 2001, Keane 2007, or High 2010). In an ethnography of mountaineering in Nepal, Ortner (1997), for example, details how international mountain climbers, known as sahbs, can impose their terms and conditions on the Sherpas they employ as climbing assistants. That is because the international mountain climbers hold a privileged social position and greater economic power. However, Ortner convincingly shows that the Sherpa are not only dominated by the mountaineers, but draw on local constructions of agency to give meaning to their actions and to recurring tragic events, like a death during an expedition. They consider the relations between powerful remote gods, ordinary humans, and harmful demons to make sense of their situation. Ortner claims that over time, Sherpas’ assertions regarding why deaths occur and how they might be prevented, have led to small, but important, changes in mountaineering practices. In her words,

Sherpa religion constructs cultural notions of power and agency and […] their construction of power and agency allows them to manage lamas, gods, sahbs, and deep personal grief in ways that are (for many) effective’ (Ortner 1997, 158).

Although the meanings people attach to agency in different contexts shape the way people can and do act, beliefs about agency are not always in line with how people try to exert influence on the world. Furthermore, even though there are hegemonic understandings of agency, most people rely on a plurality of models to explain human action and behaviour. For instance, while one can certainly find a strong discourse emphasising self-reliance, self-responsibility, and personal autonomy in the US, this discourse is usually deployed strategically. It is foregrounded when politicians argue for cutting down on welfare costs or when the National Rifle Association lobbies against tighter gun controls, but deemphasised in other situations. In the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine school shooting, for example, US Americans who publicly commented on the shooting almost never assigned unfettered responsibility to the two shooters. Instead they blamed the parents, the school, gun culture, media, or mental health for what happened (Strauss 2007). This shows that while voluntarist understandings of agency are widespread and are often uncontested in the United States, there are some contexts, including situations of great social anxiety, in which people draw on alternative cultural models of agency to explain actions and events (Strauss 2007, 822).

As the examples in this section show, agency is to a certain extent culturally constructed—it is shaped by religious beliefs, political and media discourses, but also by what it means to be a person in a given social context. Conceptions of agency will almost certainly vary depending on whether a person is imagined as an individually crafted self or a highly influential and malleable entity, maybe even an interdependent ‘dividual’ who ‘contain(s) a generalized sociality within’ (Strathern 1988, 13). However, even in very specific cultural, linguistic, or historical contexts, meanings of agency and related ideas such as creativity, freedom, and intention are usually plural and dynamic, and they change over time. The latter point, and the related question of how social/cultural reproduction and transformation occur, is a central concern in debates on agency and language.

Agency and language

Contemporary understandings of agency have been influenced by linguistics, notably by speech act theory. The latter proposes that language does not only describe the world, but that it can in fact change it (see Austin 1962 and Searle 1979). When a priest says, ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’, he does not simply describe what he is doing. Instead, he performs an action with very tangible effects. As John Austin, one of speech act theory’s most influential proponents, put it, ‘When I say, before the registrar or altar, &c., “I do,” I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it’ (Austin 1962, 6). Following these lines of thinking, most linguistic anthropologists see language as a form of social action, as something that is continually made and remade by its speakers, and as something that, to a certain extent, constructs and creates social reality (Ahearn 2001, 110–1). The interconnections between language and agency have been debated in relationship to different issues. This section focusses mainly on three: the role of intention, the role of linguistic forms like grammar, and the role of discourse. All three issues are related to the larger question regarding how language is reproduced, how it is transformed and, by implication, how it allows for and how it constrains agency.

How to conceptualise the relationship between agency, intention, and effect is a key concern in any debate on agency. The voluntarist notion of agency, as discussed above, assumes a straightforward relationship between the three: if people want to change aspects of their lives, such as their body, their economic situation, or their health, they can do it. They can intend to do it, engage in the necessary activities, and will likely achieve the desired effects. Other theoretical approaches, however, like actor-network theory (Latour 2005, see below), almost take intention completely out of the equation: they argue that agency is always networked and relational and therefore that things can have agency without having intention. Linguistic anthropologists have engaged with the longstanding debate on intention (Anscombe 2000) perhaps more thoroughly than other sub-disciplines. They have critiqued the proposition of philosopher John Searle (1983) that one can speak of human action only if its effects (i.e. ‘what occurs’, as Searle put it) matches the intention and that therefore unintended happenings, like falling down a flight of stairs, do not strictly speaking count as action (Duranti 2015). Intention, like agency, is socially/culturally embedded: what we want or choose to do, such as the clothes we wear or the food we eat, for example, is strongly influenced by social conventions. More than that, however, linguistic anthropologists have also debated the extent to which different societies assign importance to the intention behind a statement or whether they focus more on the actual consequences of action. In Samoan political and legislative fora, known as fono, for instance, the participants place emphasis on what a specific type of person in a given social role should do, or has promised, rather than speculating about an individual’s intentions or motivations behind their actions or statements. People in specific political or status-based positions, for example, are expected to provide food or gifts irrespective of their current circumstances or desires. And unlike in some cultural contexts, in which reflections about one’s own or others’ thoughts and feelings are common, fono members usually avoid trying to find individual-speciﬁc psychological explanations in cases where people fail to live up to their duties or promises (Duranti 2015, 67).

How people can do things with words depends not only on cultural contexts, but also on what and how different languages allow one to speak. Language is one of the most fundamental structures people operate in, frequently constraining and enabling us unconsciously. Often, we only notice how constraining language can be when we want to describe something for which there are no words, when we translate from a different language, or when the rules of speaking change, like when new pathways for more gender-sensitive language are introduced to societies. In these contexts, we do not speak or write automatically, but we carefully reflect before we incorporate the new rules. Different languages allow for different ways of assigning and marking agents and subjects, with far-reaching implications for how agency is understood and how it can be described and encoded. In English, for instance, one can avoid assigning agency by using the passive form. For instance, rather than saying ‘Peter verbally attacked Wendy’, someone who might not want to cast blame on Peter could simply say ‘Wendy was attacked in the discussion’. Different languages have different ways of encoding agency through their grammatical structure—for instance through rules regarding how a subject or object in a sentence are marked and related to each other. In the English sentence ‘the boy broke the window’, there is no visible difference between the subject/agent (‘the boy’) and the object (‘the window’). In Samoan, by contrast, the agent (i.e. the boy) would be marked by a specific proposition (‘e’) whereas the object (i.e. window) would be unmarked (for a more extensive discussion, see Duranti 2004). Linguistic anthropologists have also paid attention to how class, gender, race, or ethnicity shape how language is uttered and received (Ahearn 2001, 120–4).

Language and how it constructs, or even creates, social ‘reality’ is also a big concern in post-structuralist theories. The latter tend to assume that there is no objective truth and that what we consider ‘reality’ is created through discourses which are shaped by power dynamics and in which meanings are thus inherently unstable (Foucault 1977, 1978). Discourse-oriented approaches frequently lack an explicit theory of agency or concrete agents. Rather, they focus on subjects, and subject-positions that individuals are born into, and which mark their roles and identities in society. Discourses are powerful, but they are not ‘owned’ by anyone and thus also cannot be changed at will. After all, one individual can rarely have a profound influence on how their language is spoken. While individual intentions are recognised, post-structuralist theories, especially those inspired by French social theorist Michel Foucault, focus on the often unintended effects of social practices and the ways individuals cannot escape the subjugating effects of power (Ahearn 2001, 116–7, Ortner 1997, 137–8). For example, our position as political subjects or citizens is created via the descriptive and bureaucratic practices of nation-states. They register us at birth and decide whether we should receive passports and social security numbers. Foucault was attuned to such processes of ‘subjectivation’, showing how they exert power over us in subtle ways. Some post-structuralists, perhaps most prominently Judith Butler (1990, 2010), have tried to extend Foucault’s thinking on subjectivation to include a more refined theory of how social change occurs. Butler starts from the assumption that individuals are born into particular—sexed, gendered, or racialised—subject positions; in other words, the body is always already represented. However, the categories used to represent the body, sex for instance, are not naturally given, but discursively constructed and enacted through language. By giving a child a male name based on their genital markers, people ‘make’ the child’s body male, according to Butler. Because bodily markers like sex or skin colour that are chosen to distinguish bodies are to some extent arbitrary, they need to be upheld through constant repetition—or performance. For example, men and women are trained to sit, walk, eat, speak, and think in ways that re-affirm their gender. This makes bodily subjectivation vulnerable and tenuous, because the stability of norms depends on their constant enactment. There is always the possibility that these enactments can fail, leaving room for norms to change or ‘become undone’ (Butler 2004).

In sum, one can learn a lot about agency by looking at language. Language is one of the most fundamental structures that humans are faced with in almost every social situation. While we have control over the words we decide to speak, we are bound by existing vocabulary, grammatical structures, and often embodied conventions of speaking, which—while dynamic and ever-evolving—do not change at any one speaker’s individual will.

Agency as resistance: The feminist dilemma

The turn to agency in anthropology and other disciplines was in part related to social movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. The anti-war, anti-colonial, women’s rights, gay rights, and environmental movements showed that society could change drastically and rapidly. This was also made clear by the late twentieth century social upheavals in Europe which culminated in the end of the Soviet Union. As a result of observing or participating in popular protests which were aimed at, and sometimes succeeded in, radically transforming society, academics became interested in developing a more nuanced understanding of transformative social action (Ahearn 2001, 110).

In some of the earlier subaltern and feminist anthropological work, agency tended to be implicitly or explicitly equated with resistance. This ‘romance of resistance’ (Abu-Lughod 1990) however, created several problems, which became most apparent in feminist anthropology. On the one hand, feminist ethnographies rested on the assumption that women across the world were being dominated by patriarchal structures and forms of power. On the other hand, feminist anthropologists felt compelled not to portray women as (mere) victims, but as agents who pushed back against male domination—even if this resistance was subtle or ineffective (for an ‘anthropological classic’ on subtle, everyday forms of resistance see Scott 1985). Bringing these two goals together proved particularly challenging in situations where women pursued projects which did not challenge, or even supported, patriarchal values and orders (Ahearn 2001, 115-6).

In her work on an Islamic women’s piety movement in Egypt, Saba Mahmood (2005, 2006) grapples with this problem at various levels. As a Pakistan-born scholar, post-colonial thinker, and feminist intellectual, she tries to complexify and challenge key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject. The women she studied, while entering into religious spaces and engaging with theological texts which had hitherto been almost exclusively the purview of men, were deeply committed to Islamic principles that enabled, or even prescribed, their subordination as women. In Mahmood’s words, ‘the very idioms that women use to assert their presence in previously male-defined spheres are also those that secure their subordination’ (2006, 182). The women’s piety movement actively tried to push for moral reforms, advocating, for instance, that women should be veiled and that they should ‘cultivate shyness’ as ways of enacting the norm of female modesty. As such, their propositions were not in line with conventional liberal feminist understandings of emancipation and resistance. Yet the Egyptian women studied by Mahmood were acting as moral and political agents and were committed to particular forms of self-realisation. They stood at odds with

a particular notion of human agency in feminist scholarship (that) sharply limits our ability to understand and interrogate the lives of women whose sense of self, projects and aspirations have been shaped by non-liberal traditions’ (Mahmood 2006, 179).

Understanding agency in Egypt’s piety movement meant taking particular historical and cultural contexts into account in which such agency emerges and can be enacted (cf. Lovell 2003). Therefore, ‘agentive capacity’ must be analytically separated from the notion of ‘autonomous will’. Agency may take the form of resisting or challenging norms, but it is also entailed in acts that sustain and reinforce them (Mahmood 2006, 186).

More recent debates have equally moved beyond simplistic conflations of agency with resistance. In fact, the notion of resistance itself has been challenged and complexified. Alternative concepts—such as refusal (Simpson 2014, see also McGranahan 2016, Weiss 2016) or fugitivity (Campt 2014)—come with their very own theories and understandings of agency and what it means in particular contexts and constellations of power. The North American First Nation Kahnawà:ke Mohawk people, for instance, refuse the very terms and paradigms on which the US and Canadian states recognise their existence as people. Rather than actively resisting or trying to change the persisting settler colonial regime, they outright refuse citizenship, voting rights, tax paying, or any other logics (‘games’) dictated by a colonial state. Recognising the insurmountable power asymmetries, and ‘in the face of the expectation that they consent to their own elimination as a people […] to having their land taken, their lives controlled, and their stories told for them’ (Simpson 2016, 327f.), the Mohawk build and assert their very own histories, territory, and political order outside of state-governmental control. Their agency thereby far surpasses mere resistance to the state.

Distributed agency: Beyond intention, mastery and humans

As noted above, in many contemporary societies, under capitalism, and certainly also in world politics, agency is almost inevitably tied to the idea of an autonomous self. Most persons are held to be capable of making choices and entitled to rights and self-identification. This is particularly evident in current debates on gender, where individuals call for the right to negotiate whether they want to be identified as man, woman, trans, or otherwise, rather than passively accepting social ascriptions based on sex markers (Garrison 2018; Commissioner for Human Rights 2009). People also increasingly want to choose to change their body in the hope of finding ‘a more suitable and fitting gendered space and belonging’ (Sanders et al. 2023, 1064). Ideas of an autonomous self also underly other aspects of identity politics such as the so-called ‘war on fat’ (Greenhalgh 2015). Both sides—those people who ‘fat-shame’ others and blame them for making unhealthy life-choices and those ‘body positive supporters’ who argue for everyone’s right to choose their own body and, importantly, how it should be perceived—use strongly voluntarist arguments (Rose Spratt 2023).^[1]Thereby, both sides largely ignore the socio-economic and political aspects that shape people’s bodies (e.g. the food industry, advertising, or poverty and inequality) as well as the bodily and biosocial factors which contribute to, or result from, obesity (e.g. metabolic processes, food addiction, illness). Voluntarists care little about factors that go beyond an individual’s personal choice. However, research on people who undergo bariatric surgery, for example, complicates the distinction between active and passive subjects and instead shows the complex, networked forms of agency that are involved in signifying and treating obesity. While surgery may partially relieve patients of the difficult task of losing weight by simply changing their eating or exercising behaviour, the changed body calls for, and enables, new forms of self-care which are necessary for maintaining weight loss (Vogel 2018).

Especially in many so-called Western countries, the ideas that everyone is the master of their own fate and identity, and that humans control nature and their own bodies, are widespread and can be traced back to the philosophy of René Descartes. Cartesian thinking, and Enlightenment thought more generally, replaced the idea that God was in charge of life on Earth with beliefs in science, rationality, and human mastery (Latour 2014, Mazzarella 2021, Taussig 2020). However, this is not a straightforward genealogy: Marxist or psychoanalytic perspectives, for instance, offer radically different perspectives on self-control and the ability to make ‘conscious’ or rational choices. Furthermore, current discourses on identity and self-management are closely linked to much more recent neoliberal theories, policies, and ideologies (Gershon 2011). While it appears that people today have extended their control over fundamental matters of life—and even death (Kaufman 2006, Solomon 2022, 147–73) —anthropologists have found more complex ways to conceptualise agency in such contexts. They think of it as relational, distributed, or more-than-human. Ideas of relational and non-human agency have long existed in many parts of the world and have informed past and present systems of knowledge, including African philosophy and psychology (Okeja 2015, Adjei 2019), animism (Chen 2012), and Indigenous epistemologies (TallBear 2011). Now these notions are being ‘rediscovered’ in many current ethnographies (see below).

Early anthropological theories of relational, ‘distributed’, or networked agency draw heavily on the science of control and communication known as cybernetics, which claims that individual, society, and ecosystem are all part of one supreme system—what anthropologist Gregory Bateson (2000) referred to as ‘Mind’. This systemic and distributed Mind is very different from the notion of an individual mind, self, or consciousness, in that it has the capacity to produce information and respond to it in a self-corrective way. The idea of distributed agency was developed in contrast to occidental epistemology and its inherent fallacies of purposive thinking, rationalism, and control, deemed to be a threat to the networked nature of Mind and to the cybernetic system itself. Bateson’s (2000) ideas have recently experienced a great revival and have been taken up by anthropologists and others, particularly in debates on whether we live in a time of man-made planetary change known as the Anthropocene (e.g. Hylland Eriksen 2023). The climate, for instance, can be considered a form of thought or ‘thinking system’ which profoundly shapes ecosystems and social orders (Knox 2020).

Another influential early anthropological theory on relational or ‘mediated’ agency and networked ‘intentionalities’ focused on the agency of art and proposed that art objects have the capacity to exert power over viewers or users (Gell 1992, 1998). Art objects, according to Alfred Gell’s theory, are about ‘doing’ more than they are about meaning, communication, or aesthetics. Embedded in networks of social relations, they have the power to influence and effect change in the world. Art, for instance, can enchant the viewer, affect them emotionally, and thereby implicate them in larger networks of social relations. The agency of art works especially through abduction, i.e. a type of non-deductive inference. Based on their encounter with a particular material object, viewers or users make assumptions about the intention of its producers. Thereby, the object creates and mediates social relations and forms of agency (Gell 1992, 1998 drawing on linguist Charles Peirce).

The most prominent ‘theory’ on networked agency to date, however, is actor-network theory (ANT) which in anthropology is mostly associated with the writings of Bruno Latour (1999a, 1999b, 2005). ANT pays attention to the agency of both human and non-human actors and complicates the distinction between active and passive subjects. Its central premise is that everything exists relationally, and that non-human beings, objects, and ideas are just as important in creating particular social situations as humans. Latour gives the example of a man and a gun who both become changed through their encounter. He writes,

You are different with the gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you (1999b, 179–80).

Latour thus tries to complexify the idea that it is either ‘guns’ or ‘people’ who kill, when in fact actions like killing someone always involve a plurality of agents. Agency, in this sense, is thus not necessarily intentional; it is a source of action and effect whereby the material and the discursive are closely intertwined and the ‘responsibility for action must be shared among the various actants’ (Latour 1999b, 180). This has implications for our understandings of human autonomy. As Latour puts it,

To be a subject is not to act autonomously in front of an objective background, but to share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy. It is because we are now confronted with those subjects – or rather quasi-subjects – that we have to shift away from dreams of mastery as well as from the threat of being fully naturalized (2014, 5).

Notions of relational, networked, or distributed agency have been taken up in many different fields of anthropological study (for a good overview see Enfield and Kockelman 2017). Some draw explicitly on Bateson, Gell, or Latour, while others build on more recent concepts such as ‘entanglement’ (Barad 2007), ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett 2010) or ‘non-mastery’ (Taussig 2020) which emphasise that humans are inseparably entangled with, rather than being in control of, powerful non-human life and material worlds. Especially in the fields of new materialism, environmental and multispecies anthropology, recent ethnographies explore almost endless forms of non-human agency. These include the agency of waves (Helmreich 2023), algorithms (Siles 2023), robots (Aronsson and Flynn 2021), oil plants (Chao 2022), dogs (Haraway 2007), or spirits (Blanes and Santo 2013) which in various ways haunt, inform, affect, engage, or transform local and global lifeworlds (for a critique of these ‘posthumanist’ theories of agency, see Hornborg 2019).

A good ‘everyday’ example to which one can apply ideas of networked agency and non-mastery is sleep (see e.g. Vorhölter 2023). Sleep poses curious challenges for human agency, as it cannot be easily controlled. Everybody does it all the time, and yet no one can really produce it at will. Once it has ‘chosen to arrive’, sleep is unstoppable. But often, people desperately wait for it—and it doesn’t come. Attaining sleep is a strange mix of acting and non-acting, a form of active surrender—but one that cannot always be willingly achieved. Sleep has a paradoxical relationship to intention: the more one actively tries to sleep, the less possible it becomes. Contemporary sleep science reveals the complex interplay of various bodily, cerebral, and social processes that constitute sleep (see e.g. Stickgold and Walker 2009). While some of these can be consciously controlled (like the decision to lie down or close one’s eyes), others cannot. They simply happen, like changes in brain waves, body temperature, or muscle tone. Intermediary agents, like alcohol or sleeping pills, can assist in the process, but they too depend on other, less controllable, agents such as hormones and neurotransmitters to achieve sleep. In sleep, then, agency seems to be truly distributed. It is the achievement of a complex metabolism with no ‘subject’ in control.

While sleep is a very personal example, the desire people have to control it and the powerlessness they experience when control fails, is emblematic of larger political processes. In particular, the challenges raised by the Anthropocene call for radically new ways of thinking about agency—which recognise the active role of nonhumans, including the Earth, and which complexify the agency-intention-effect triad—as Latour (2014) powerfully argued.

Conclusion: Beyond agency

As this entry shows, agency has been extensively discussed in anthropology over the last four decades. Interest in the concept peaked in the 1990s and early 2000s when it was taken up in theories and fields as varied as post-structuralism, actor-network theory, and linguistic anthropology. Despite anthropologists’ attempts to promote a nuanced understanding of agency and what it implies in different social, historical, and theoretical contexts, agency is still most commonly associated with liberal notions of personal choice, freedom, and autonomy. Due to this narrow, but dominant, understanding of the term, many anthropologists have criticised the usefulness of the concept and have proposed alternative terms or concepts which draw attention to specific forms of social action. This is not just a theoretical move, but also a critique of the contemporary moment where ‘agency is imagined as the human capacity without which ethical life, understood as the capacity to do this or to do that, would be impossible’ (Mazzarella 2021, 7). According to this ‘ethics of agency’, the ideal citizen strives for action and self-determination. By contrast, various forms of subtle action and inaction which allow oneself to be acted upon by others, such as waiting, pausing, staying silent, giving in, or yielding, are often perceived as shameful, cowardly, or even as failure.

While William Mazzarella and others have proposed concepts like ‘patiency’ or passivity to imagine possible other, i.e. non-agentic, ways of being in the world, it is highly unlikely that these will replace agency and related questions and debates in anthropology anytime soon. More and more debates in anthropology are moving away from individual and power/resistance-centred notions of agency towards relational and distributed understandings of the term. Rather than being centrally concerned with questions of self, structure, intention, or control, such conceptualisations are much more tied up with concepts like the ‘biosocial’, the ‘post-human’, and the ‘affective’. Whether in the field of politics, body-mind, or ecology, most anthropologists working on questions of agency today would agree that the relationship between our intentions and actions, and their effects on the world, is much more complex than the term agency—as popularly understood—suggests. One major impact of the ongoing theoretical debates, then, has been to change our empirical gaze and encourage us to read agency differently as we analyse social phenomena across an ever-growing range of ethnographic contexts.

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Note on contributor

Julia Vorhölter is senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. She has previously conducted fieldwork in Uganda on topics including perceptions of socio-cultural change, humanitarian interventions, gender and generational relations, and psychotherapy. Her current research focuses on experiences, assessments, and treatments of (disordered) sleep in Germany.

[1] Mull, Amanda. 2018. “Body positivity is a scam: How a movement intended to lift up women really just limits their acceptable emotions. Again.” Vox, June 5. https://www.vox.com/2018/6/5/17236212/body-positivity-scam-dove-campaign-ad

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Palliative care

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 08:09:23 +0000

Edvard Munch : The Sick Child, 1927, 6th in the Series. Photo: Munch Museum

Natashe Lemos Dekker

Leiden University

Initially published 12 Oct 2023

http://doi.org/10.29164/23pallativecare

Abstract:

Palliative care has been developing since the 1960s as a form of caregiving that focuses on the relief of suffering when there is no prospect of a cure or when a patient is at the end of life. Originating in the UK and US, palliative care has been taken up by global institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO), and implemented in various cultural and socioeconomic settings. Anthropological studies have long been highlighting the wide variety of experiences and needs in illness and dying and have problematised the supposedly universal ideas behind palliative care. After a brief discussion of the historical and institutional development of palliative care, this entry highlights the links between palliative care principles and notions of a good death. It then turns to the medicalisation of death and the primacy of choice in palliative care discourses. It elaborates on anthropological studies that have observed how palliative care comes to relate to existing end-of-life care practices and the diversity with which local practitioners and care recipients give shape to this new care paradigm. Finally, it discusses various cultural and moral attitudes towards disclosure and concealment of dying as a site of friction in palliative care.

Introduction

Palliative care is commonly understood as professional caregiving that focuses on the relief of suffering when there is no prospect of a cure or at the end of life. Its central aim is to provide comfort, by focusing on symptom management and pain relief, as well as psychosocial and spiritual care. The word ‘palliative’ stems from the Latin pallium, which translates as ‘to cloak’ and is associated with the aim of providing comfort and alleviation that is inherent in palliative care. While definitions of palliative care continue to be subject of debate, as will be outlined below, the most commonly cited is the 2002 World Health Organization (WHO) definition:

Palliative care is an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual. (84)

Derived from hospice care, palliative care has been developing since the late 1960s into a form of caregiving that is practiced in various care institutions as well as in home care settings. Palliative care has developed into an interdisciplinary field of expertise in and of its own, with prominent contributions from medical disciplines such as nursing, oncology, and geriatrics, as well as social work and social sciences, and its practical implementation is accompanied by a range of studies on best practices and the development of palliative care tools and models.

While palliative care is considered to have originated in the UK and builds on preceding developments in care for the dying in Western Europe and the US (Clark 2016), it has since then been promoted and taken up in other parts of the world. However, it cannot be assumed that palliative care is developing across the globe in the same manner and with the same effect. Hence, anthropologists have begun to study palliative care as a particular mode of end-of-life care that comes with particular sets of values and norms, exposing how it comes to exist alongside, reform, or replace existing end-of-life care structures and practices across geographical and institutional settings.

From an anthropological perspective, palliative care is approached as emerging from, and embedded in, cultural contexts, where it forms one particular way of managing illness and dying. As such, it has grown into a topic of interest both to researchers who position their work in the anthropology of death and in medical anthropology. Through immersive fieldwork, anthropologists have shed light on the lived experiences of patients, caregivers, and their networks. Taking critical as well as constructive approaches towards the paradigm of palliative care, anthropologists have asked questions such as: How is palliative care used in organisations and embedded in health systems? And how is care negotiated and what values does it reflect? Recognising, further, that death is not the great equaliser it is sometimes portrayed to be, but rather that dying is characterised by inequalities and difference, anthropologists have been interested in how access to palliative care is distributed between people of different backgrounds and across the globe. Also, anthropologists are critically assessing the use of terms like ‘dignity’, ‘quality of life’, and ‘comfort’ which are central in palliative care and are reflected in the WHO definition, and taking up the empirical question of what such terms come to mean in their local context.

In the sections that follow, and drawing on a range of anthropological studies, this entry first discusses the historical and institutional development of palliative care. It proceeds with a discussion of the ideals underlying palliative care and its connections to notions of a ‘good death’. It then turns to the medicalisation of death and the primacy of choice in palliative care discourses. Finally, reflecting on the uptake of palliative care in diverse cultural settings, it discusses various cultural and moral attitudes towards disclosure and concealment of dying as a site of friction in the palliative care paradigm.

Genealogy of palliative care

The development of palliative care can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s. It emerged as a response to the then-dominant focus on curative practices in healthcare, while patients were increasingly living with chronic conditions for which no cure was available (Clark 2007). By contrast, palliative care focuses on improving the quality of life of people who are dying or who live with a chronic condition. Although it does not exclude curative treatment, one of the key aims of palliative care has been to relieve suffering, including psychological, social, and emotional, as well as physical pain.

As founder of the first modern hospice in 1967 in the UK, Cicely Saunders is considered a pioneer in the development of palliative care (Clark 2002, 2007, 2016; Seymour 2012). Her work in oncology as a nurse and hospital almoner, and later as a medical doctor, provided her with a unique perspective on patients’ conditions. She observed a lack of pain control in cancer patients, and became concerned with what she called ‘total pain’: the suffering of patients that extends beyond physical pain and reaches to their entire being, including social, physical, mental, and emotional distress. Around the same time, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, through her work in hospitals and as a lecturer in the US, advocated a novel focus on the needs of dying patients and support for families and is credited with opening up the possibility to discuss death in Western society (Blaylock 2005; Sisk and Baker 2019). Both Saunders and Kübler-Ross have been central figures in the development of palliative care.

From the 1980s onward, palliative care rapidly developed into an area of specialisation that has been incorporated across different disciplines, including oncology, nursing, and geriatrics. In practice, palliative care is usually provided by multidisciplinary teams, involving for instance medical doctors, social workers, psychologists, nurses, and spiritual advisers. Medical associations and dedicated journals have been established to delineate the field of palliative care. Hence, palliative care is both a field of knowledge and a professional practice. The European Association of Palliative Care (EAPC) was founded in 1988, the Latin American Association of Palliative Care (ALCP) in 2000, and the Asia Pacific Hospice Palliative Care Network (APHN) in 2001 (Clark 2007). Additionally, palliative care has gradually become, or is in many countries in the process of becoming, embedded in national health structures, as well as in global health programmes. While palliative care was initially focussed on oncology, this has gradually broadened to other (chronic) illnesses, including HIV/AIDS, and increasing attention has been paid to the potential benefits of palliative care for older people (Davies and Higginson 2004; Visser, Borgstrom and Holti 2020). While this reflects the ‘holistic’ character of palliative care, this also implies palliative care is subject to a wide variety of interpretations, approaches, and backgrounds.

Considerable discrepancies in approaches and definitions remain, and these continue to be the subject of debate among researchers and practitioners alike (Pastrana et al. 2008). The WHO published its first definition of palliative care in 1990 and revised it in 2002. The latter (cited above) continues to be commonly used, but has since then been reformulated, both by the WHO itself and other organisations such as the International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care (IAHPC) (Radbruch et al. 2020). Additionally, many organisations that provide palliative care in practice will describe it in their own terms (Hui et al. 2012). Often, these definitions reflect in one way or another Saunders’ concept of ‘total pain’, as palliative care is described as holistic, person-centred, and provided by multidisciplinary teams, and is associated with meaning and dignity at the end of life.

However, anthropologists have shown that, within these broad characteristics, in practice the concept also remains unclear as some practitioners use the terms ‘terminal care’, ‘end-of-life care’, and ‘palliative care’ interchangeably (Lemos Dekker, Gysels and van der Steen 2017), while others explicitly differentiate them (Hui et al. 2012). Also, the use of ‘hospice care’ outside of hospice settings where others might use the term ‘palliative care’ indicates that the boundaries of the concept are not always clear.

Furthermore, the anthropological record has demonstrated that health systems and institutions are often unequally accessible, to which palliative care is no exception. The degree to which palliative care is accessible or integrated in health care systems varies widely between countries (Clark et al. 2020), and may further be influenced by a patient’s positioning in terms of class, ethnicity, and gender (Richards 2022).^{^[1]} Also, the often limited and unequally distributed availability of opiates, limitations in a patient’s mobility, and institutional structures can challenge the accessibility of palliative care (Knaul et al. 2018).^{^[2]}

As this entry will show, palliative care is embedded in diverse cultural contexts, and as such is interwoven with particular values, practices, and beliefs. Anthropological studies have underscored the wide variety of ways in which illness and dying are perceived and treated, as well as the variety of needs and expectations across social and cultural settings (Souza, Borgstrom and Zivkovic 2021; Zaman et al. 2017). This great diversity inherent in care means there is an important role for anthropologists in showing how palliative care is provided differently across cultural and institutional contexts; how people of different backgrounds, including professionals, patients, and families, each relate to it; and how they use and adapt palliative care’s key principles to fit within their own work, lives, and networks (Samuels and Lemos Dekker 2023).

Palliative care and the good death

Anthropologists have generally taken a contemplative approach to palliative care, to shed light on its underlying values and its implications at a sociocultural level. In particular, this research has underscored that palliative care is informed by ideals that are associated with a ‘good’ death. Hence, palliative care has been suggested to form a specific, institutionalised approach to operationalising ideals of a good death and to bring these into medical practice (Hart, Sainsbury and Short 1998; McNamara 2004).

Anthropological studies have demonstrated that the good death forms a moral objective that underpins people’s narratives, decisions, and actions (e.g. Hart, Sainsbury and Short 1998), whereby anthropologists have asked what a good death is to different individuals and groups, unravelling the social and cultural dynamics of how people experience, manage, and plan for the final stages of life and death (Long 2005; Seale and van der Geest 2004; Zaman et al. 2017). This body of literature has highlighted the variations as well as similarities between cultural groups with regard to their perceptions of what constitutes a good death, such as the commonly shared preference for a death without suffering. It has also shown the value that is attributed to the place, timing, and social circumstances of death (Driessen, Borgstrom and Cohn 2021; Kaufman 2005; Lemos Dekker 2018; Stonington 2012). Taken together, the aspects that are attributed to a good death in a particular cultural context reflect what people commonly value at the end of life and the societal norms regarding death and dying, and provide directives for how the end of life should be managed. As such, the good death is taken as an ethnographic object by looking at the efforts that are put into its achievement.

Ideals of a good death can thus be understood to inform a wide range of palliative care practices, discourses, and experiences. This includes, in particular, its aim to provide comfort and to relieve suffering at the end of life in psychological, social and physical domains. However, in practice this ideal can be difficult to achieve as it is linked to experiences of (bodily) decline and notions of dignity. For example, Julia Lawton’s (2000) ethnographic research in hospice wards in the UK underscores the fundamental importance of bodily deterioration, which, she suggests, has a ‘non-negotiable’ impact upon patients’ sense of self (16). Lawton highlights significant disparities between the ideology of palliative care and what she calls the bodily realities of degeneration and dying. She shows that the dying process in many cases does not conform to normative goals of a calm, pain-free, and dignified ‘good death’, and suggests that the ideological underpinnings of palliative care may offer little room for deaths that do involve pain and distress.

Furthermore, as researchers in anthropology and related disciplines have demonstrated, the place of death plays an important role in the perception of a good death. In many cultures, the home is seen as the ideal place of death, while the clinical space of the hospital is often disfavoured. Nevertheless, it is quite common for people to be hospitalised as part of care provided at the end of life. Similarly, nursing homes and long-term care institutions may not be regarded as ideal places for dying, and yet are common places of death. Hence, a discrepancy may occur between the actual and preferred place of death (Kaufman 2005; Stonington 2020; Visser 2019). Addressing these concerns, palliative care institutions and staff, the ethnographic record shows, often put great effort into creating a ‘homely’ atmosphere, a place that is familiar to patients and their relatives (Pasveer 2020; Lemos Dekker and Pols 2020). For example, Annelieke Driessen, Erica Borgstrom, and Simon Cohn (2021) describe the efforts of palliative care teams in a UK hospital to create a familiar, personal, and meaningful space for the dying person in the institutional environment, in order to make it suitable for dying—a practice the authors call ‘placing work’. Following Scott Stonington’s (2012, 2020) research in northern Thailand, home and hospital may be understood as ‘ethical locations’, as each place may hold different ethical frameworks through which death and dying are managed and valued. Stonington discusses what he calls ‘choreographing a good death,’ which refers to the strategies through which people manage the end of life. This involves planning and improvisation so as to influence the place and timing of death, whereby families make use of, and navigate, biomedical systems as well as local and communal practices of approaching death. Stonington (2020: 1-8) describes an instance of a dying person who was brought into the hospital so as to make sure they would receive all viable treatment, but was finally hurried back home to die to ensure their death would happen in the ‘right place’, reflecting ideas of the home as a moral space that would ensure the process of rebirth.

Likewise, anthropologists have demonstrated that palliative care is concerned with the timing and duration of the dying process. In her seminal ethnography, …And a time to die: how American hospitals shape the end of life (2005), Sharon Kaufman discusses how the medical bureaucratic system of hospitals in the US has become increasingly focused on the timing of death. In particular, decision-making at the end of life, such as decisions to continue or withdraw treatment, are concerned with postponing or allowing death, and can thus be seen as an attempt at exerting control over when death occurs. While her focus is on dying in hospitals in general, she notes that palliative care is integrated into hospitals as one form of end-of-life medical practice through which such questions of timing are negotiated. Although the moment of death is in many cases very difficult to predict, palliative care seeks to understand and gain control of time at the end of life. Accordingly, advance care planning (ACP) is, especially in Western contexts, often an explicit aspect of palliative care. ACP is often used in institutional care settings as a process through which patients, often in consultation with medical professionals and family members, establish their wishes and preferences to inform caregiving at later stages. While ACP in palliative care usually involves directives regarding dying and death, it may also include medical as well as psychosocial preferences in long-term care more generally. Palliative care, then, through its various tools and ACP, operates along the idea that anticipating care needs, and preparing for illness trajectories, will improve caregiving. More fundamentally, with this focus on timing, palliative care further channels the idea that an anticipated death is a controlled, and thus ‘good’, death.

This striving towards a good death is both implicitly and explicitly incorporated in the various models, tools, and practices of palliative care. Anthropological inquiry into such tools has shown that they may seek to coordinate caregiving and to transfer palliative care values in a standardised manner. Together with Erica Borgstrom, my work (Borgstrom and Lemos Dekker 2022) examines the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) as a tool that seeks to shape the dying process in accordance with ideals of what a good death is. The LCP is a document that is used to mark the onset of the ‘palliative phase’ and to communicate between care professionals that caregiving should shift to a focus on comfort and the management of specific symptoms. We draw on ethnographic research in care institutions in the UK and the Netherlands, to show that the tool is used to impart moral values, to standardise practices, and to demonstrate a sense of professionalism. Moreover, this ethnographic comparison shows that the use of such tools in practice can be expected to differ significantly from their intended use, and varies between geographic and institutional settings since they require interpretation and adaptation.

Choice and medicalisation

Palliative care continues to be promoted by some as an alternative to the hegemony of biomedicine, as it shifts attention from life-prolonging treatment to well-being and comfort. Anthropological work has investigated this seeming discrepancy between care and cure. Kaufman’s (2005) research on death and dying in hospitals in the US underscores that palliative care, with its focus on comfort, is at odds with the curative focus of hospitals. This plays out in negotiations over what kinds of ‘treatment’ are recognised and funded within the hospital system, whereby Kaufman suggests that even though most people die in hospitals, these institutions were generally unable to provide the kind of death that people would prefer. Related to this, and based on fieldwork with palliative care staff in the UK, Erica Borgstrom, Simon Cohn, and Annelieke Driessen (2020) have signalled that when palliative care is framed in contradiction to curative care, patients, families, and even medical professionals may perceive it as ‘doing nothing’. The authors show that what is seen as intervention or non-intervention depends on what practices are valued in care relations, whereby ‘palliative care becomes “nothing” when a cure is posited to be the only form of success’ (2020: 209). Accordingly, a key challenge in palliative care is to convey that withholding curative treatment is no longer taken to be a medical failure, but rather reframed as viable care at the end of life.

At the same time, palliative care is not wholly antagonistic to the medicalisation of death—that is, the process through which death is framed as a medical concern and which reflects the idea that death can be managed and controlled through medical knowledge and technological possibilities (Green 2008; Howarth 2007; Kaufman 2005, 2006). Asking how hospital medicine shapes the conditions for death, Kaufman (2005) further shows that the end of life is characterised by planning and decision-making, whereby patients and their families, in consultation with medical professionals, become responsible for often difficult choices, for instance of whether or not to continue life-prolonging treatment. As such, Kaufman writes, ‘death has entered the domain of choice’ (Kaufman 2005: 326). However, in practice, patients and their families may lack the specialised knowledge necessary to make informed decisions and may be unable to oversee the illness trajectory ahead or the consequences of (advance) decisions (Kaufman 2005). In her ethnographic study of end-of-life care in England, Borgstrom (2015) unpacks the rhetoric of choice, showing that this is intimately linked to neoliberal understandings of individual autonomy. She gives an example of a man who, despite the insistence of care professionals, refused to write down whether he preferred to be cared for at home or in an institution, because he considered this to be dependent on how his wife would cope with his care. In this case, advanced decision making did not resonate well with the uncertainty of changing care needs. Problematising the notion of choice, Borgstrom thus shows that it fails to address ‘the relational, and often subtly negotiated, nature of care’ (Borgstrom 2015: 709). Devin Flaherty (2018) also sheds light on the limitations of choice by discussing a case in the US Virgin Islands, where older adults have turned to hospice care due to lacking possibilities of receiving curative treatment. Hence, she demonstrates that the ‘choice’ to enter hospice care may be less based on an acceptance of death, than on how different forms of care are covered within the health care system. While palliative care thus incorporates a responsibility to make the right choices or establish preferences in advance, as well as ideals of individual autonomy, these studies show that such notions are not always clear-cut.

Moreover, anthropologists have demonstrated that patients may be sceptical towards decision-making, as this may invoke the fear of being unable to undo decisions or of relinquishing control (Borgstrom 2015; Zivkovic 2018). For Beverly McNamara (2004), the increased emphasis on patient autonomy and choice is at odds with the original conception of a good death in hospice and palliative care, which is based on open communication and acceptance of death. In her ethnographic research among Australian palliative care practitioners, she shows that the wishes of patients, which may be to extend curative treatment despite efficacy, were at times prioritised over palliative care principles. Accordingly, she suggests, palliative care in practice became reduced to medical symptom management, and puritan notions of a good death were replaced with a ‘good enough death’. In a similar manner, Marian Krawczyk (2021) has explored the experiences of palliative specialists in Canadian hospitals. She focuses on the affective labour of these professionals and shows how they organise patients’ dying trajectories, not only in terms of their biomedical and physical needs, but also with the aim of defining and ordering ‘appropriate’ emotional responses. In so doing, she argues that hospital palliative care can be seen as an affective economy in which ambiguity, negotiation, and conflict are not failures, but rather constitutive components of the institutional and professional employment of palliative care principles. Anthropologists have thus shown how ideology and practice merge, clash, and change over time, and how palliative care pushes against biomedical frameworks yet continues to operate within the limits and affordances of a medicalised system.

(Non-)disclosure at the end of life

A key contribution of anthropologists to the field of palliative care has been to demonstrate how seemingly universal principles and definitions are being understood, taken up, and challenged in local, sociocultural contexts, and to look in detail at how palliative care is being provided in and beyond care institutions such as hospitals and nursing homes, as well as at home (Samuels and Lemos Dekker 2023). Stonington (2020), in his work on end-of-life care in Thailand, shows that palliative care was conceived of as a new concept and discussed only in its English terminology in an otherwise Thai linguistic context, showing a glimpse of the friction in the cultural adaptation of palliative care between globally circulating discourses and locally rooted practices. This conception of palliative care, as a new way of understanding and providing care at the end of life that comes to be in dialogue with pre-existing discourses and practices, further reveals some of the normative aspects of palliative care. Anthropologists have been calling this normativity into question, viewing palliative care alongside other resources and care practices (Stonington 2020; Zaman et al. 2017).

A clear example of how principles of palliative care may clash with existing care practices is the way in which people do, or do not, talk about death and dying. Palliative care, as indicated above, involves a focus on anticipating a patient’s disease trajectory and the process of dying. A common principle is that talking openly about the end of life between patients, families, and professionals improves decision making, whereby the patient’s knowledge that they are dying is thought to foster their autonomy. Stonington’s work in Thailand shows that, in the process of choreographing death, medical professionals and family members sought to maintain the moral spirit of the dying person and maintain hope by not disclosing diagnosis and prognosis. Similarly, McNamara (2004) demonstrated in the Australian context that the ideal of open discussion and acceptance of death may not resonate with a patient’s wishes. Along these lines, several anthropologists have demonstrated that cultures of end-of-life talk vary widely, and that letting a patient know they are dying is far from being a universally accepted good practice. To the contrary, in many cases discretion—not sharing a diagnosis or prognosis with either the patient themselves or with outsiders—has been argued to be perceived as a form of care and ethical practice (Banerjee 2020; Livingston 2012; Stonington 2020). Already in 1965, and based on fieldwork in US hospitals, sociologists Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss published their volume Awareness of dying, in which they described interactions between staff, family, and dying patients, asking who knew about the terminal nature of the patient’s condition, and what each suspected the other to know. Through the concept of ‘awareness contexts’, they showed the nuanced ways in which forms of disclosure and concealment of dying may intersect, and that whether, how, and when to talk about dying is a moral question that involves professional ethics as well as personal values and experiences.

Dwaipayan Banerjee (2020) discusses similar dynamics of speech and concealment, or disclosure and discretion, as crucial aspects of the social relations that are formed and reshaped around life-threatening illness in his ethnographic research with an NGO that provides palliative care to cancer patients in Delhi. Giving a prognosis and a diagnosis of, in this case, cancer, can open up certain possibilities, including access to palliative care. However, it can also foreclose others, as it may result in stigmatisation and a loss of livelihood. In one example, Banerjee describes how the NGO deliberately parked their vans at a distance from the home of the patients they visited so they would not be seen by neighbours, with the aim of preventing stigmatisation of the patient. Such an exercise of discretion reflects a broader set of practices, in which patients, families, and professionals would avoid explicitly talking about cancer, the ineffectiveness of further treatment, or the prognosis of dying. Banerjee suggests that ‘knowing what not to say allowed for them to continue to live in the present, without compromising all hope of the future’ (2020: 41), thus showing the potentiality and ethical concern that may be enveloped in acts of non-disclosure.

Conclusion

Since its early development in the UK and US, palliative care has been taken up by global institutions such as the WHO and has been implemented in various cultural and socioeconomic settings. Hence, anthropologists have observed how palliative care comes to relate to existing end-of-life care practices, showing the diversity with which local practitioners and care recipients give shape to this new care paradigm. From these studies, palliative care emerges as a field of knowledge and practice that draws attention to the needs of dying and chronically ill patients and their networks. Often through the efforts of staff, palliative care has been carving a space for a particular focus on the relief of suffering within hospitals and care institutions. Palliative care, then, is not a single, clearly bounded idea, but a concept that is on the move. In many places, palliative care is relatively new, being advocated by a diverse group of medical professionals, and only gradually being embedded in health care policies. By looking in detail at how medical professionals communicate with patients and families about illness and the end of life, and the ways in which families among themselves do, or do not speak about this, anthropologists have been able to demonstrate that there are different ways of dealing with diagnosis and prognosis, and that what people find important at the end of life differs across cultural contexts. Accordingly, not only do care practices change in dialogue with this new approach, but also the concept itself is bound to be adapted.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank her colleagues in the Globalizing Palliative Care team, Dr. Annemarie Samuels, Hanum Atikasari, and Shajeela Shawkat, for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this text. She is grateful for the support of the previous editors of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology and the current editors of the Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, as well as for the insightful and supportive comments from the anonymous reviewers. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 851437).

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Note on contributor

Natashe Lemos Dekker is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Her research focuses on death, dying, and end-of-life care, and dynamics of time and future-making in The Netherlands and Brazil. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Amsterdam and has published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Death Studies, and BMC Palliative Care, among others. She is a board member of the Medical Anthropology Europe Network (MAE-EASA).

Dr. Natashe Lemos Dekker, Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333 AK Leiden, the Netherlands. N.Lemos.Dekker@fsw.leidenuniv.nl

ORCID: 0000-0001-5523-4523

[1] Within the field of palliative care, increasing attention is paid to diversity and inclusion. For example, the theme of the 2023 EAPC World Congress was “Equity and Diversity”. https://eapccongress.eu/2023/. Accessed 29 September 2023.

[2] World Health Organization. 2020. “Palliative care.” https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/palliative-care. Accessed 2 November 2021.

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Art

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 01:17:38 +0000

South African artist Ester Mahlangu signing a painting. Photo: LubabaloD

Roger Sansi

Universitat de Barcelona

Initially published 22 Sep 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22art

Abstract:

The definition of ‘art’ is extremely complicated. Its meaning has shifted radically, in particular in the last century. Originally, in Latin, it meant ‘craft’, but then for the last few centuries, the fine arts (such as painting, sculpture, or poetry) were defined in contraposition to craft. In the last century, the rejection of conventional artistic standards has resulted in the paradoxical definition of contemporary art as ‘anti-art’. These changing definitions have been difficult to track for anthropologists. In the nineteenth century, art was not a central focus for anthropology, since it was identified with the fine arts of Western civilisation, and the task of anthropology was to study supposedly ‘primitive peoples’. In the twentieth century, anthropologists rejected evolutionary theory and the idea that only Western civilisation had art, and some anthropological studies of art in non-Western cultures emerged. These studies showed how art objects revealed the complexity of the symbolic worlds of non-Western cultures. In the last few decades, a growing interest in material culture and in experimental research and writing led anthropologists to engage more closely with contemporary art. This work has reflected upon how art work can be seen as a form of social research, and how social research can be transformed by artistic practice and theory.

Introduction

The definition of ‘art’ has changed radically in the last few centuries. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘art’, and particularly the ‘fine arts’ of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, theatre, dance, and poetry, were often hailed as the highest achievements of Western civilisation. For the French philosopher Voltaire, all other peoples but Europeans were barbarians and children in terms of fine arts (Voltaire [1756] 2013). In the European narrative of progress and evolution, the peoples of earth were classified in a single line from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilised’, and the fine arts were one of the essential markers of Europe’s higher civilisation. Anthropology was born in the nineteenth century, as the social science that studied assumedly ‘primitive’ peoples, i.e. those who, by definition, would not have fine arts. In consequence, ‘art’ was not the central focus of anthropological research at its origins.

However, in the twentieth century, the definition of art changed radically. The revolutionary artist movement, the avant-gardes, questioned the elitism of the fine arts, proposing instead to reunite art and everyday life. Marcel Duchamp and Dadaism proposed that any object of everyday life could be seen as an art object. Modern anthropology also went through a radical upheaval at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rejecting the evolutionism and racism of the previous century, a new generation of anthropologists defended that different cultures were not more or less evolved, ‘high’ or ‘low’. Instead, anthropology showed that all cultures have their own forms of art, even if they don’t take the form of Western fine arts (Boas 1955, Coote and Shelton 1992, Forge 1972, Lévi-Strauss 1982). It could be argued that both art and anthropology in the twentieth century engaged in a cultural critique of Western civilisation (Marcus and Myers 1995, 94), as both did not take the West’s normative and societal standards at face value anymore. However, the relation between these two forms of cultural critique has been quite complicated, and art was still quite marginal as an object of study in anthropology for most of the twentieth century. Only in the last few decades have anthropologists developed a growing relationship with contemporary art practice and theory. This shift is the result of two combined factors: on the one hand, a renewed interest in material culture: objects, artefacts, technologies, and art. On the other hand, the call for a renewed, experimental anthropology. Both interests inevitably drive anthropology to contemporary art practice and theory, which is by definition experimental, and has had a long-standing critical interest in objects. This emerging body of work has highlighted the potential of art practice as a form of social research, as well as proposed experimental ways of rethinking anthropology through art (Garcia Canclini 2014, Elhaik 2016, Ingold 2013, Sansi 2014, Ssorin- Chaikov 2013, Strohm 2012).

Changing definitions of Western art

Knowing how Western definitions of art have changed helps us understand anthropology’s initially complicated relation with it. The Latin word ars, in the plural, means crafts. The crafts were manual labour, and hence markers of a lower social status in ancient Greek and Roman societies. However, in the Middle Ages, Europe’s ‘liberal arts’, the arts of language, music, and mathematics, were defined in clear distinction to the utilitarian crafts of artisans. Such liberal arts were the skills essential precisely to be a free man, not an artisan bound to manual work. Today’s notion of obtaining a Bachelor or Master’s degree in ‘Arts’ is founded in this idea of liberal arts (Shiner 2001).

In the Italian Renaissance, some crafts were re-defined as arts of drawing (arti del disegno) (Blunt 1940): painting, sculpture, and architecture were revaluated as intellectual endeavours, like poetry, with higher status than manual work. By the Enlightenment, the ‘fine arts’ were clearly separated from the crafts (Shiner 2001). The fine arts combined technical skill with humanistic Western culture, and they were taught in academies. They were often arts of representation, imitating nature. Western thinkers considered them to be exclusive of Western civilisation, and to be one of the institutions that marked the West’s global superiority.

An interesting counterpoint to this Western-centric history is Chinese art, not least because China has historically also been a major imperial force. The Chinese had institutions and theories that can be considered equivalent to European fine arts, notably a tradition of scholar or literati painting that favoured subjective expression. Early modern Chinese art critics therefore concluded that European painting was not really fine art, as it lacked expressive depth. Instead they considered European painting to be just very skilful illustration, or craft (Lynn 2017). At the same time, Chinese arts, in particular porcelains and silks, had been highly valuable luxury imports in Europe, where a taste for chinoiserie, i.e. for Chinese-looking art objects, had developed in the eighteenth century. Europeans also did not consider Chinese art to be fine art, but rather mere ‘decorative art’, a very skilful and beautiful craft. For Europeans, Chinese painting had not achieved the level of realism of European painting, which imitated reality almost to fool the eye (Lynn 2017).

In the nineteenth century, Western ideals of the artist would move even further away from craftsmanship. Artistic practice was free and self-motivated rather than commissioned: artists made art because they wanted to, because they need to express themselves. They were not artists simply because it was their job; they were not just skilful producers of fine objects for sale. Art was not just technique. The notion of artist as genius, a unique self-driven individual above the others, emerged in the Renaissance, but was consolidated in Romanticism.

But if art was different from technique and craft, it risked the reverse accusation from being menial work: that of not being useful, of being superficial and redundant. In the nineteenth century, as bourgeois values came to prominence in the West, aristocratic ideals of the fine arts were met with ‘philistinism’, the rejection of fine art in favour of utility, which was particularly popular in the English-speaking world (Arnold 1993). At the same time, in reaction to philistinism, the anti-utilitarian ideals of art were radicalised in theories of art for arts' sake, and the emergence of the bohemian, anti-bourgeois artist. For example, Baudelaire’s ‘painter of the modern life’ was not a professional producer of paintings working in his studio, but an idler who immersed himself in the city crowd walking, sitting in cafés, and wasting his time, in direct contraposition to the ethics of the bourgeoisie, which valued hard work and saving time (Baudelaire 1995). Modern art would not be a specialised form of work, or a profession, but a nonconformist, utopian form of life. The big work of art of the bohemian artist was now his own life. As contemporary French curator Nicolas Bourriaud put it, ‘Modern art rejects to separate the finished product from existence […] The act of creation is to create oneself’ (Bourriaud 1999, 13). This ideal of the modern artist is deeply connected to revolutionary ideals: in the German ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proposed that work and life, production and creation, should be one thing: in opposition to capitalist alienation, the communist mode of production would be based on the identity of work and art, as a unified form of life (1970). Paradoxically, elitist ideals of fine art, originally meant to grant a better social position to the fine artist above the craftsman, were now, in their radicalisation, throwing the new bohemian artist to the margin of bourgeois society. This margin itself was also paradoxical in various ways: it raised questions as to whether artists were impostors or prophets, decadent or revolutionary, idlers or merely self-absorbed. Not to mention that the figure of the bohemian ‘artist’ was, by definition, a man: women in the nineteenth century could not afford to behave as bohemians as, like in previous centuries, they were not recognised as professionals.

The utopian drive of modern art was radicalised even further by early twentieth century avant-gardes. Dadaism did not simply reject academic styles of artistic production to propose new styles, but rejected fine art altogether, and the ‘civilisation’ that sustained it. Dadaist art was meant to be an ‘anti-art’ (Richter 1965) that simply rejected art as skill, technique, and academic profession, and replaced careful production with encounter, chance, appropriation, performance, research, and experimentation. Dadaism meant to abolish the separation between art and everyday life, and the anti-artist actively unlearned the fine arts by encountering and experimenting with what the art world had previously despised: industry and technology, so-called ‘primitive’ colonial cultures, and marginal, outsider forms of art practice (Foster 2004). Undoing art also meant undoing artists as agents of production, either as geniuses or skilled artisans, and as an empowered subject; anti-artists are rather mediators that withdraw their agency (Kester 2011) and they are driven by chance and experimentation. Just like the utopian objective of the avant-garde was to dissolve art in everyday life, so did ‘anti-artists’ have to disappear into common people and the claim that everybody should be an artist.

Contemporary art since the second-half of the twentieth century has preserved the ideas and practices of anti-art but has changed its utopian horizon. It tends to focus on modest ‘micro-utopias’ achievable today rather than in the future (Bourriaud 2002, Sansi 2014, Blanes et al. 2016). Contemporary art practices have become more site-specific, collaborative, and participatory, delegating agency to local communities. In contemporary anti-art practices, artists are much more than mere producers of art objects. They often act as something else: as activists, historians, even anthropologists (Garcia Canclini 2014). They may serve as mediators in general terms, as those that help mobilise a multitude of agents around a particular project. However, this new role for artists poses a clear contradiction: differently from the utopian avant-garde, contemporary artists do not withdraw from art as a profession and institution but instead stick to it. The projects they mediate, even if they are participatory, experimental, and utopian, are still art projects, financed by art institutions, and projected by artists. The fine arts, an institution defined by museums, academies, galleries, artists, thus still exist today, even if contemporary art practice is not constrained to traditional techniques like painting or sculpture. The extent to which it is even possible to be an artist doing anti-art has been the subject of heated discussions for many decades (Sansi 2014) and conditions the relation between art and anthropology, as we will see.

Art and anthropology

What is art, then, for anthropology? Craft? Fine arts? Anti-art? The radical changes in the definition, theory, and practice of art have been difficult to track for anthropologists. In the nineteenth century, anthropology was mostly practiced in museums of arts and technologies, where the frame of reference was evolutionary theory: anthropologists collected and compared axes, sails, pots, and idols, and established the position of their corresponding culture in the pyramid of human progress. More advanced arts and technologies were held to be proof of superior civilisation. But the arts that anthropology museums collected were classified as crafts: useful, practical artefacts. Even if they were figurative and symbolic, ethnographic artefacts were defined as having specific uses, for example, ‘magico-religious’ ones (Morphy and Perkins 2009). The fine arts—art for arts’ sake—barely figured in most of these museums, because they were seen as an exclusively Western institution.

In the twentieth century, however, new schools of anthropology rejected evolutionism, and the idea that some cultures were more civilised than others. Art was not an exclusive property of Western civilisation; when looking closely, all cultures turned out to have art. Anthropologist Franz Boas, for example, drawing mostly on his fieldwork amongst Native Americans, applied the methods and theories of art history to study the symbolism and style of totem poles, baskets, and masks as works of art (Boas 1955). Boas argues that artistic creation is part of a universal pursuit of aesthetic values, one that leads artists in different parts of the world to develop specific standards of beauty by developing artistic technique. Boas’ case for the universality of art discredits racist ideas of immutable ethnic difference, by showing that the mental processes of all peoples are fundamentally the same.

However, Boas’ interest in art didn’t have many followers, in part because of anthropology’s changing methods and focus. The collection of objects for museums of arts and technologies gave way to direct field research. The task of the anthropologist became to describe cultures in their whole complexity, through written ethnographies. Thereby, ethnographers often focused on the immaterial aspects of the cultures they studied, like their kinship systems, social structure, or mythology, rather than their material culture. This is in part because the material culture and technology of many of the peoples initially studied by anthropologists seemed poor, or at least less ostentatious than that of modern industrial civilisation. The default belief in technological evolution was not fully discarded for most of the twentieth century, and ‘art’ was likely still associated with Western fine arts for most anthropologists. Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins (2006, 8) argued, quite convincingly, that the uneasiness with art in anthropology is the result of a ‘professional philistinism’, a rejection of art because of prejudices regarding the perceived elitism of the fine arts in the West.

This professional philistinism was probably more accentuated in Anglo-American academia than in continental Europe (Clifford 1988). In France, the new discipline of ethnology had very close links to the artistic avant-gardes in the 1920s and 1930s, notably surrealism. Surrealist writers like Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille studied with anthropologist Marcel Mauss, and together with another anthropologist Marcel Giraule published the journal Documents. What brought them together? If the task of the anthropologist was to describe the ‘exotic’, (or today the ‘strange’) as familiar, then the objective of the surrealist was in many ways the diametrical opposite: to render evident how Western culture can be incredibly strange (Clifford 1988). This inversion of positions, from the strange to the familiar and the familiar to the strange, makes both processes complementary. In fact, the ultimate aim of anthropology, like surrealism, was not just to describe other cultures, but also to put them in comparison with Western culture. Both tried to develop a critical attitude towards what Western culture takes for granted, making Westerners aware that what they take as ‘natural’, like the family or the market economy, may not be so ‘natural’ after all.

We can find an excellent example thereof in a short article by Griaule, entitled ‘Gunshot’ (in Bataille 1995). The article was based on a picture of an African drum with a carving representing a man with a gun. This representation was shocking to a European public looking for ‘authentic’ African art. But Griaule argued that for many Africans, European guns were what African masks were for Europeans: exotic and interesting objects.

If a black [man] cannot without debasing himself use an exotic element, namely a European one familiar to him, what is one to make of our blind borrowings from an exotic world one of colour about which we must in self-defence declare to know nothing? (Griaule in Bataille 1995, 65).

Griaule was proposing to take the inverse position: to look at things from an African perspective, as if the French were exotic themselves.

The open exchange between surrealism and ethnology had an enduring influence on the next generation of anthropologists, like Jean Rouch and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Jean Rouch was inspired by surrealist experimental cinema in his ethnographic films, for example, Les maitres fous (Henley 2020). Lévi-Strauss integrated surrealist ideas of ‘objective chance’ into his theory of the ‘savage mind’, or more properly, the ‘everyday mind’: for Lévi-Strauss, our understanding of the world is constantly being transformed by events that are the result of chance; but, we give them meaning by putting them in relation to previous events (1966). Lévi-Strauss worked on art, partially reprising the work of Boas, in the book The way of the masks (1982). He compared the masks of different Native American peoples, showing how they not only reflected their mythologies, but also how these mythologies were related and had meaning in relation to each other. The masks were studied as a vehicle of meaning, complementing Lévi-Strauss’ main interest, which were mythologies. Lévi- Strauss’s approach was massively influential in anthropology, and studies of art that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s often followed his perspective, investigating the meaning of works of art (see for example, Forge 1973).

For the performative arts, Victor Turner’s work on ritual was very influential in the 1960s and 1970s as well. Turner was interested in the symbolism of rituals, rather than myths. In a broadly comparative analysis of symbolic action across time and place, he suggested that ritual myth, tragedy, and comedy had become mostly conservative art forms in industrialised societies. Modern arts and sciences, on the other hand, had the potential to change social relationships, as they largely developed apart from mainstream society (Turner 1973). Turner’s work emphasised human creativity in symbolic expression, arguing that social change is not path dependent on social structure. His work resulted in a growing interest and interconnection with studies of performance and theatre.

Renewed interest in material culture

In the 1980s, the relation between art and anthropology changed radically. This was driven by two important factors, namely anthropologists’ renewed interest in objects and material culture, and by calls for a new experimental ethnography.

The new interest in material culture was partially the result of debates about appropriation and institutional critique in art. Landmark exhibitions like MOMA’s ‘Primitivism in 20^th century art (1984)’ improved the cultural status of ‘primitive’ ethnographic artefacts in the public eye by arguing that some of these artefacts were in fact fine art and should be displayed as such (Rubin 1984). This argument has been very influential in the following decades, with the reorganisation of ethnographic collections into fine art collections, in new museums like Paris’ Quai Branly. Nevertheless, it was also extremely polemical, since it enshrined a classical European concept of fine art that had played down the cultural specificity of these artifacts and their historical provenance: mostly, they were colonial plunder. Anthropologists have since debated the contextual and institutional values that transform objects into art (Price 1988, Myers 2001), produced ethnographies about the trade and circulation of ‘primitive’ and ‘tourist’ arts (Steiner 1994, Phillips & Steiner 1999), and investigated the transformation, circulation, and traffic in art and culture in general (Marcus and Myers 1995, Thomas 1991), including the emergence of contemporary art worlds in postcolonial settings (Myers 2002, Fillitz 2018). The debate on colonial collections has intensified in the last decade, with calls for decolonisation and the restitution of colonial collections (Hicks 2020, Oswald & Tinius 2020).

These debates resulted in wider discussion on the power of art. One central contribution was made by Alfred Gell (1998). He argued that material things such as traps or artworks are best understood with reference to their potential social and material effects, rather than their meaning. Gell highlighted that human agency does not end with the human body, but that it is in fact distributed via people’s material culture. Art would be a paradigmatic example of such ‘distributed agency’, since it is purposefully imbued with the agency of the artist. Gell’s notion of art was substantially different to what had been discussed in anthropology up to then, for Gell did not approach art objects first and foremost as vehicles of meaning, like Boas, Lévi-Strauss or Turner did. As such, Gell’s approach to art was finally catching up to modern and contemporary art, where works of art are not necessarily a means of conveying meaning or ‘representing’ something else. Instead, modern and contemporary art can simply be agents performing actions on those who engage with them. Thus, Gell gave anthropology a theory to engage with contemporary art and he questioned the division between art and artefact in non-modern societies. His theory considers art to be as ‘useful’ as artefacts are and it questions the very notion of ‘utility’, and of useful ‘work’ (as opposed to useless play or art) upon which much bourgeois philistinism and modern utopian thought had been premised (Sansi 2014). As mentioned before, the utopian ideal of Europe’s early twentieth century art avant-gardes was to dissolve art and the artist into everyday life. This dissolution of the artist as an agent in art goes much further for them than Gell’s still quite human-centric notion of distributed agency presupposes. Ultimately, however, Gell’s focus on distributed agency makes it easier to question the notion of the artist as an individual genius, unique author, and uniquely powerful agent.

Experimental ethnography

A second key factor that transformed the relation between art and anthropology in the 1980s was the growing interest in experimental ethnography. The ‘writing culture’ movement (Clifford & Marcus 1986) gave equal relevance to the form in which ethnography was presented to its content: Ethnography was not only a scientific task but also an art form, in the most classical sense, a technique that uses rhetoric to seduce and convince. In anthropology as elsewhere there was no politics without poetics, and claims for an ‘experimental’ ethnography emerged. Such calls for experimental writing met many detractors who levelled criticisms not very dissimilar to the attacks on ‘art for art's sake’ in the nineteenth century (Scholte 1987). In the long run, the claim to rethink the ‘poetics and politics’ of ethnography seems to have emphasised the second rather than the first term; the need to justify the ‘politics’ of anthropological practice is still a central concern today, while the need to justify the discipline’s poetics seems less relevant for most anthropologists. One question that still needs to be assessed is if one can really distinguish one from the other.

Fighting back against this reluctance of ‘poetics’, new proposals of experimental ethnography emerged, introducing ethnographic methods ‘beyond text’ (Cox, Irving and Wright 2016). ‘Visual anthropology’ proposes an anthropology not only with images, but also of images, inspired by the growing interdisciplinary field of visual studies (Mitchell 2005, Belting 2011, Pinney 2011). Besides film, and photography, other forms of practice, like sound walks and art installations, have also been used as methods of experimental ethnography. These developments show that anthropology’s dual goal of describing the world and rethinking it may well be achieved with the help of art. The ‘ethnographic turn’ in late twentieth century art (Foster 1995), in which many artists were interested in working with anthropology, has been reciprocal, and some anthropologists have actively engaged with artistic practice. Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright have offered several examples of this growing field of exchanges (2005, 2010, 2013), focusing on the collaboration between artists and anthropologists at the level of practice, and confronting artistic and anthropological methodologies. One example would be George Marcus’s collaboration with artists Fernando Calzadilla and Abdel Herández, that made a scenography or mise-en-scène of a Venezuelan market at Rice University in Texas, entitled The market from here (1997). This scenography, for Marcus, offers possibilities of study that go beyond conventional ethnographic description in a text. It recreates an ethnographic scene and forces us to reflect on its constitutive parts, turning a social setting into an artifact and enactment (Marcus in Schneider and Wright 2005). In these terms, artistic installations and performances can be seen as devices through which a field of study is recreated (Sansi 2014, Estalella and Sanchez Criado 2018).

In the last few years, the multiplication of new digital media has promoted a shift from ‘visual anthropology’ to ‘multimodal anthropology’, which uses various different media like photography, design, sound, games, etc. (Collins, Durington and Gill 2017; Dattatreyan and Marrerro 2019). One fundamental question that these experimental approaches raise is that of authorship. Changing the form and method of ethnography changes the agency of the ethnographer. The ‘writing culture’ movement, and the ‘crisis of representation’ that it signified (Marcus and Fischer 1986), asked what authority anthropologists have to represent another culture and what agency other voices should have in anthropological narratives. It was a crisis in authority and authorship. Artistic avant-gardes had already proposed to question the agency of the artist as an author in much more radical ways. Experimental art in the twentieth century starts from the withdrawal of agency, and unlearning technique, not simply from the experimentation with new media. At its best, then, experimental and multimodal ethnography can learn from artistic practice to further question ethnographic authority, rather than simply propose new media for the expression of the ‘creative’ anthropologist as author. Art and anthropology still have more to teach to one another about authority and agency.

Rethinking art and anthropology

The on-going crisis of ethnographic authority is central to contemporary anthropology (Rabinow et al. 2008). George Marcus (2000) identified fundamental shifts in the conditions of contemporary ethnographic practice: the radical difference in background and hierarchy between anthropologists and 'natives' of colonial ethnography has given way to studying people of the same or superior social status than the anthropologists themselves. Sometimes these people are ‘experts’ in neighbouring fields whom the anthropologist cannot simply work on, but whom she must work with. Moreover, ethnography is no longer an arcane method owned by anthropologists, but an experimental elaboration of everyday experience that has been used not only by anthropologists, but also by other social scientists, artists, and designers, for example. Lastly, the sites of anthropological research have become plural in a globalised world: the connection between ‘native’ and site is not a given, as any informant or collaborator may also be from somewhere else. Field sites become a particular configuration or assemblage of collaborators with different backgrounds and origins, a sometimes-virtual working space; what Marcus names a ‘para-site’, a laboratory for collective work and experimentation where the anthropologist is no longer an individual author (2000). In this contemporary situation, fieldwork can simply mean creating new assemblages of knowledge and practice, a practice in which anthropologists and artists can collaborate more than ever before. Art occupies a particular space in this contemporary world. Collaboration, participation, and relation have become central to artistic practice in the last decades and the debates around the possibilities and limitations thereof have been intense (Bourriaud 2002, Bishop 2012, Kester 2011). It seems both art and anthropology can now be rethought of in light of one another.

A number of authors have looked at these questions from different perspectives. Tarek Elhaik (2016) has proposed that art curation can offer an alternative approach to classical ethnographic methods. In contrast to the classical ethnographic method, understood as a direct representation of a single ‘field’, curation as an assemblage of differences can be seen as a method that corresponds to the new kinds of sites that anthropologists work with, characterised by multiplicity, excess, and ambiguity between the object and the subject of representation and collaboration. The anthropologist as curator would have the role of mediator in these assemblages. For example, Rafael Schacter (Schacter 2018, Sansi 2019) has worked as a curator of grafitti and street art, bringing together not just artists from radically different backgrounds in a single exhibition space, but also confronting the radical difference between conventional art exhibition spaces and street art that by definition is outside of a gallery space. His experience as a curator has also been constitutive of his understanding of this field in its transformations as an anthropologist.

Tim Ingold has proposed that artists, similar to anthropologists, study the world, which is marked by flux and constant change. Anthropology can learn from contemporary art practices as both sets of activities are embodied processes geared at awakening our senses so as to better correspond with the world around us (2013). Ingold thus suggests that engaging with artistic practice, such as drawing, basket weaving, or pottery, can teach students to become better anthropologists.

Analysing past collaborations between anthropologists and artists, Kiven Strohm (2012) picks up Schneider and Wright’s arguments that both art and anthropology deal in representation. Yet, contemporary art, Strohm argues, celebrates ambiguity and free play between text, image, discourse, and figure and much of it is open-ended and inherently incomplete. ‘Collaboration’ between art and anthropology, he argues, should start from an acknowledgement of basic equality between anthropologist and research subject. This equality questions the division of labour between different ‘experts’ in collaborative work and requires us to unlearn our own points of view.

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (2013) equally highlights similarities between art and anthropology. He holds that artistic practice is an appropriate anthropological research tool, and that anthropology itself can be considered an artistic method. Ssorin-Chaikov specifically draws on conceptual art, which he argues is concerned less with aesthetics and beauty, and more with analysing and manufacturing social realities and concepts. He holds conceptual art and anthropology to be similar in that both construct the realities that they study, both are largely conceptual in nature, and both highlight what is unknown in the world. This view of anthropological and artistic practice is a far cry from merely trying to represent a given reality. For example, Felix Ringel, doing fieldwork in Hoyerswerda, a German city in an accelerated process of urban decay, organised an ‘Anthrocamp’ for the local youth, in which they were encouraged to explore their hometown and generate images and artwork. The results were displayed in an ephemeral installation in an abandoned block that was going to be demolished (Ringel 2013). These practices, partially borrowed from collaborative art, do not just provide data to ethnographers but also highlight their performative role in intervening and transforming their field of study.

For all these authors, contemporary art appears as a model for unlearning anthropology, its practices and institutions. And yet, it is a contradictory model, because as we have seen, in spite of all the utopian and revolutionary ideas and practices of art in the last century, the institutions of classical fine arts, the museum, the art work, the artist, the curator, etc. are still very much in place. Modern and contemporary art has led the way into a revolutionary, utopian form of life, but the outcomes of this revolution have been mixed so far. The current dissatisfaction of many anthropologists is not just grounded on the limitations of existing methods and theories, but more generally in their working conditions, the increasing bureaucratisation of academic life, and the productivity requirements that render academic work increasingly difficult. They share this alienated feeling with work in contemporary capitalism more broadly. In this sense, rather than seeking inspiration in art and artists to become more creative and inventive, anthropologists may consider artists, art workers, and other members of the culture and knowledge sector as possible allies with whom to rethink, and perhaps undo, their institutions (Sansi and Strathern 2016).

Conclusion: The complicated object of art

The relation between art and anthropology is complicated. This is partially because ‘art’ can mean very different things: from craft to fine art to anti-art. In consequence, an anthropology of art can address different kinds of objects and ask radically different questions, studying artistic technique and style, its symbolism and meaning and learning about its agency. Moreover, the radically different definitions of art are not mutually exclusive, although we have described them in a historical sequence and different definitions co-exist. After a century of anti-art theories and practices, the dominant institutions and in fact, the dominant form of art in many contemporary societies, are still the fine arts, while true anti-art mostly remains a utopia. Perhaps the complicated nature of art is also what makes art so ‘good to think with’. More than merely an object of study, art can be a model of how to rethink, experiment, and undo anthropological practice itself. Rather than merely representing individual cultures or features of social life, art may inspire us to define our own utopian horizons.

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Note on contributor

Roger Sansi is a professor in Social Anthropology at Universitat de Barcelona. He has worked on Afro-Brazilian art and contemporary art in Barcelona. He is the author of Fetishes and monuments (2007, Berghahn), Art, anthropology and the gift (2014, Routledge), and editor of The Anthropologist as curator (2020, Routledge).

Dr Roger Sansi, Department of Social Anthropology, Facultat de Geografia i Història, Universitat de Barcelona, Carrer Montalegre 6-8, Barcelona 08001, SPAIN.

Addiction

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 01:14:10 +0000

Joshua Burraway

University of Virginia

Initially published 21 Oct 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20addiction

Abstract:

What is addiction? As an umbrella term, addiction is often used to describe activities where there is an overwhelming drive to engage in destructive, distressing or compulsive behavioural patterns, including not just drug-taking and drinking, but gambling, eating, sex, video gaming, and even shopping. Whilst all these activities have generated rich fields of inquiry across the social science disciplines, this entry focuses primarily on the changing nature of substance addiction. Anthropology has played an important role in unpacking the multiple meanings contained within this phenomenon, tracking its expansion and enmeshment across a diverse range of human domains. The study of addiction encompasses anxieties regarding the changing nature of selfhood, control, and agency, as well as moral and political concerns relating to what counts as ‘proper’ versus ‘deviant’ behaviour. Since the turn of the twentieth century, addiction has increasingly become an object of both biomedical and criminal intervention. This shift has accelerated the birth of a therapeutic-carceral industry, where substance-users occupy the dual role of patient and criminal. This entry traces the development of anthropological thoughts on addiction, demonstrating how cultural approaches to non-Western alcohol use in the 1950s were adopted and expanded as Western social scientists sought more nuanced sociocultural models for understanding substance-use within their own societies. These developments fed into the tradition known as critical medical anthropology, which sought to join experiential accounts of suffering and illness to politico-economic approaches that examined the systemic conditions of inequality. The core contribution of anthropology in the study of addiction has been the generation of rich ethnographic data on the lived experiences and everyday realities of substance-users. This body of work has been instrumental in depathologising the lived world of addiction, demonstrating in vivid colour the complex sociality, cultural values, status dynamics, forms of intimate belonging, embodied experiences, and sociostructural inequities that lie at its heart.

Introduction

As a prism through which to contemplate the contemporary human condition, there are few phenomena that can rival addiction. Indeed, if anthropology is the study (logia) of man (anthrōpos), then addiction is more than a worthy object of investigation. In recent times, the category of addiction itself has expanded to include a far greater range of human endeavours than it has historically encompassed. Activities like sex, technology use, gambling, shopping and eating now sit alongside the more time-honoured activities of drug-taking, drinking and smoking. As Eugene Raikhel (2015) notes, the enlargement of addiction’s rubric to house this greater diversity hinges on the now-pervasive idea that these kinds of activities stimulate our brains in the same way as psychoactive substances do, paving the way for similar forms of self-destructive and compulsive behavioural patterns. Further on, this entry demonstrates some of the ways in which social science approaches to addiction have revealed problems with this brain disease paradigm, in particular the way in which it obfuscates addiction’s psychological, existential, cultural, economic and sociostructural determinants. Whilst this critical discourse applies to the full gambit of supposedly addictive activities outlined above, it is the use of and addiction to psychoactive substances that this entry focuses on, if for no other reason than their sheer ubiquity, contingency, and multiplicity across so many domains of human life.

As both a lived experience and an intellectual concept, substance addiction allows us to investigate diverse concerns such as morality, law, biology, neurochemistry, pharmaceuticalization^[1], agency, free will, and structural violence – to name but a few. And yet, it is also a relatively new object of human interest, grounded in late-nineteenth century Euro-American notions of health, illness, and individuality. As an anthropological concern, it is even newer – not truly capturing the discipline’s attention until the 1960s. Anthropology’s interest in addiction has, in large part, been stoked by major historical transformations in how society has come to understand and regulate the human consumption of psychoactive chemicals.

These transformations include how such chemicals have been culturally and medically conceived. Many contemporary ‘street drugs’, such as cocaine and opiates, for example, were often prescribed during the turn of the twentieth century as over-the-counter treatments for everyday maladies. They also reflect political changes, notably around interconnected themes of race, class, criminality, and power. As rising levels of socioeconomic and racial inequality in the West became tangled up with major public health concerns – such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic – the question of where and why substance-use patterns fitted into these crises became paramount. Addiction thus emerged as a central concept through which to consider the complex intersection between drug-use, therapeutics, epidemiology, and socio-political exclusion.

It quickly became clear that the consumption and circulation of psychoactive substances was no longer reducible to individual failings, be they biological, spiritual, or moral. Instead, social science explorations of addiction have clearly demonstrated the using and sharing of drugs to be intrinsic to local cultural systems, rooted in the social and economic dynamics of a particular place and time. Given that anthropologists have historically defined themselves in relation to the ethnographic study of society and culture, their late-in-the-day study of communities who use and share drugs is somewhat surprising. In point of fact, the now-burgeoning anthropological subfield that began in the 1960s has its roots in the innovative work of several sociologists. Using primarily ethnographic methods, these influential scholars argued not only that substance-use tends to be culturally constructed around local needs and concerns (Dai 1937, Lindesmith 1947), but that the pathologization narratives ascribed to substance-users are as well (Becker 1963). Pathologization refers to the process by which differences in human behaviour, especially those seen as sitting ‘outside’ of conventional moral and cultural norms, are converted into psychological and social aberrations that are seen as inherently destructive, something that increasingly happens through the language of biomedicalization.

Building on these formative ideas, the anthropological study of addiction has grown substantially. It cuts across a number of disciplinary subfields, notably medical, sociocultural, psychological, and political anthropology. Reflecting this boon in interest, a number of different explanatory approaches to addiction have emerged, all couched in their own particular intellectual traditions and scholastic genealogies. In what follows, this entry will first focus on three frameworks surrounding substance-use patterns that have been especially influential: a cultural approach, a subcultural one, and critical medical anthropology.^[2] The latter half of the entry will explore a selection of contemporary approaches to addiction that have emerged from the critical medical tradition. These include the study of differing therapeutic modalities, phenomenological analysis, and the role of temporality in questions of addiction and substance-use.

A cultural approach

Building on the work established by the aforementioned sociologists, the cultural model of substance-use can be traced to Dwight Heath’s (1958) work on alcohol consumption amongst the Camba, a horticultural people living in eastern Bolivia. Heath noted that most of the community’s adults would frequently drink vast quantities of rum during festival periods, sometimes remaining intoxicated for days on end. Rather than being viewed as pathological, though, this collective drunkenness – often to the point of passing out – held an enduring social and spiritual value. It reaffirmed bonds of solidarity as well as sustaining connections to those ancestral spirits who contributed to the health and fertility of the community. Heath’s observations essentially challenged the established orthodoxy that heavy alcohol usage was an intrinsically destructive behaviour. After all, the Camba drank huge quantities of distilled liquor during festive periods – the difference was that their drinking was embedded in a cultural, social, and cosmological context that imbued it with a set of meanings. It emphasised social cohesion over disintegration, collective identity over personal dissolution, and familial connection over breakdown (see also Van Vleet 2011).

In short, their drinking practices did not conform to the pathological model of addiction envisioned through a biomedical lens, in which excessive consumption is seen as intrinsically injurious to both the drinker and their surrounding community. This model, it should be noted, has been subject to a number of dynamic changes as new technologies. In particular neurological imaging techniques and advancements in psychopharmacology have reshaped how Western medicine conceptualises the relationship between behaviour, illness, and biology. The changing shape of biomedicine’s pathologising model, especially its increasing emphasis on the brain as the locus of addiction, continues to hold a profound grip on how substance-use is understood, experienced, and treated. Critically investigating the depth and reach of such pathologising understandings of addiction has become a core concern for anthropologists.

The core contribution of Heath’s cultural model was its capacity to destabilise existing projections of alcohol consumption as pathology. In the process, it shifted analysts’ focus onto emic (‘insider’) constructions of how substances were consumed in a local cultural context. Considering alcoholism to be merely a form of pathology runs the risk of being ethnocentric, that is of projecting one’s own cultural classifications onto the cultural settings of others. According to Arthur Kleinman, this constitutes a ‘category fallacy’. A seminal figure in medical anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry, Kleinman cautions against the transplanting of Western-based categories to elsewhere places, especially psychiatric diagnoses. Exploring the way depression is expressed and negotiated in China via the moral dynamics of the family rather than the inner life of the individual, Kleinman makes the point that symptom expression is culturally variable, even for illnesses that may have a biological basis (see also Kirmayer & Young 1998). In this regard, Heath’s approach arguably foreshadowed important developments in medical anthropology, in particular the need to question whether Western diagnostic frameworks can be exported across socio-cultural settings, lest the nuances of non-Western lifeworlds thereby be eclipsed.

Heath’s approach, though, was not without its opponents, many of whom argued that anthropology’s tendency to downplay the issues associated with alcohol consumption in non-Western contexts married two of the discipline’s most problematic instincts: romanticization and exoticization (e.g. Room 1984). More broadly, his emic model failed to suitably account for the way in which major changes in the global politico-economic order have transformed and disrupted the shape and rhythm of traditional community life, something that Heath’s field site was certainly not immune from even in the 1950s.

To be fair to Heath, he did in his later work acknowledge how drinking practices amongst the Camba began to shift in relation to the socio-economic and ecological crises they suffered with the growth of the lumber industry in surrounding forests (Heath 1987). Dislocated from its formerly collective ethos, drinking and other forms of substance-use can rapidly become sites of relational breakdown, violence and interpersonal suffering (Quintero 2002). Indeed, anthropologists have observed that problematic forms of substance-use often emerge when social systems suffer major transitions in political organization, kinship, and economy (Frederiksen 2013; Pedersen 2011). The scale of problematic forms of substance-use amongst indigenous groups in the wake of colonial violence is testament to this observation. It reveals the way that historical trauma, dispossession, and social marginalization develop into disruptive drug-taking patterns (Jervis et al. 2003; Musharbash 2007; Spicer 2007; Stevenson 2014). The explosion of drug-related mortalities and other ‘diseases of despair’ throughout the deindustrialised heartlands of the modern West also speaks to the dangers of major socio-structural upheaval and the vacuums that such historical schisms leave behind (Anglin 2002; Billings & Blee 2000; Maggard 1994; Stewart 1996).

A subcultural model

In Heath’s work, heavy alcohol consumption was seen as an integral part of the prevailing moral and cosmological order. It was, in brief, a defining aspect of Camba culture, both as embodied practice and as system of meanings through which to relate to one another. To use the language of Ellen Corin (1995), drinking was central to social life, not peripheral. Over in the Western world, however, heavy forms of intoxication, be it through alcohol or other substances, have not historically been seen as something to be extolled or morally valued. The widespread and heavy-handed criminalization of drugs, the dominance of abstinence-based recovery programmes, and the pathologization of addiction as a psychiatric disorder all gesture to this fact. Accordingly, those who consume these substances are seen as troublesome to the dominant order. They exist on the peripheral edges of cultural norms and values. The drug addict challenges the very logic of Euro-American personhood, in particular the notion that healthy persons are those whose inner lives are stable and autonomous, uncorrupted by the enslavement and chaos of chemical dependency (Summerson Carr 2010). Addicts, then, unfitting of this cultural template, have consistently found themselves relegated to some social space outside of culture, defined primarily through the pathology of their condition.

Historically, these spaces, and the lives of addicts themselves, have been marked by narratives of deviance and exclusion, with little thought given to the complexities and intimacies that pervade them. The ‘subcultural’ thus emerged as an analytical frame through which to attend to them (see Becker 1963). Whilst the ‘sub-’ prefix (literally meaning ‘below’) arguably risks reifying hierarchical divisions of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ forms of human social life, the purpose of this term was to call to attention the myriad ways that people on the periphery carve out ways of living that are at variance with the prevailing cultural centre. The so-called ‘underworld’ of drug addiction, in other words, is just that – a world; one teaming with complex forms of sociality that cannot be so easily explained away through the dehumanising language of deviance and moral decay.

Again, it was the sociologists who were first to the punch. The subcultural approach to substance-use emerged out of street-based research in America’s inner-cities. Seminal sociological accounts, in their rich descriptions of the selling, buying, sharing, and consumption of drugs, demonstrated these practices to be foundational to the daily lives of vulnerable and marginalised people (see Feldman 1968; Fiddle 1967; Partridge 1973; Sutter 1966). Particularly influential here was the work of Edward Preble and John Casey (1969), who described in intimate detail the social life of lower-class heroin users in New York City. For these users, tracking down and injecting heroin is understood as a ‘career’. It is a never-ending hustle that, from making money to buying the drugs, emerges as a full-time job that imbues each day with meaning, purpose, and business. A major contribution of this body of literature was to challenge entrenched myths surrounding drug consumption, especially intravenous usage, which had historically been viewed with high levels of moral panic. In many countries, notably in the US, the puritanical fear of needles remains ingrained in public health policy, with needle exchange programs regularly defanged or shut down out of the unfounded fear that they abet drug-use (Rhodes et al. 2005).

Unyoking drug-use from its historical associations with illness, social decay, and psychopathology shifted the emphasis of analysts from individual usage to the worlds in which such usage occurred. These worlds are marked by complex survival strategies, such as begging, panhandling, sex work, and petty crime. These strategies encompass sharing economies, rituals of socialization that initiate people into drug-using networks, and underground hustling practices that prop up multibillion-dollar narcotics economies. They include creating concealed urban spaces, such as shooting galleries and squats, that shelter ‘hidden’ populations unconnected to state services, as well as new linguistic forms of ‘street’ slang that are uniquely attuned to the conditions of scarcity, insecurity, and racialised surveillance that constitute everyday urban life in the poorest neighbourhoods. Ultimately, it was the long-term intimacy of the ethnographic method through which researchers could develop enduring relations of trust that provided access to these (under)worlds. The researchers’ emphasis on the emic perspectives, cultural order, and social meaning that were built into the fabric of these worlds serve to depathologise substance-use. Where the subcultural approach to addiction eventually succeeded was in its capacity to illuminate the complex arrangement of values, roles, and status dynamics that structure the daily lives of substance-using communities. What looked to the cultural centre like moral decay, pathology, and escapism, from within the periphery is experienced as meaningful activity. The pursuit, scoring, and taking of drugs serves here as the lifeblood of communal existence (see also Friedman et al. 1986).

Critical medical anthropology

Whilst the subcultural approach did much to enrich understandings of drug-using communities and to counter reductive and simplifying forms of stereotyping, a suspicion lingered that an over-emphasis on the ‘insider perspective’ risked a similar form of romanticising of which scholars such as Heath had been accused. The concern was that it might inadvertently deflect attention from the wider social, historical, and politico-economic forces that shaped patterns of drug-use and addiction. The response to such misgivings was the emergence of a critical medical anthropology in the 1980s, whose analytical goal was to fuse experiential accounts of suffering, illness, and wellbeing with politico-economic approaches that attended to the systemic conditions that drive institutionalised forms of inequality, racialised violence, carceral governance, and social control. The foundational figures of this approach, such as Nancy-Scheper Hughes (1990), Margaret Lock (1987), and Merrill Singer (1989), sought not only to reveal the structures underpinning the social determinants of ill health, but also to apply these critical frameworks in practical ways, collaborating with local communities so as to challenge and ultimately change existing healthcare systems.

A pertinent example of this tradition is the work of Philippe Bourgois (1995, 2009), who has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork amongst vulnerable drug-users in New York and San Francisco. Here, addiction is interpreted as a form of social suffering that is inexorably tied to the uneven distribution of wealth and power. In Bourgois’ eyes, America’s neoliberal market economy is rigged in favour of corporate power and special interest groups. Social care services are imbalanced and underfunded, while the principles of individual responsibility and entrepreneurial bootstrapism are still being championed. As a result, an ever-growing number of America’s indigent classes, a disproportionate amount of whom struggle with addiction issues, are turned into a ‘Lumpenproletariat’. This Marxist term historically refers to those people structurally positioned just below the wage worker, who prop up the economic system through irregular employment. In the context of addiction, it describes those vulnerable groups for whom punitive forms of disciplinary governance, such as through surveillance, policing, and incarceration, have become destructive and alienating. This occurs while other segments of the population, notably large corporations, continue to profit from these systems of abuse and punishment. Perhaps the most patent examples of this are the private prison system and the pharmaceutical industry, both of which generate billions of dollars of revenue each year.

The gaping health disparities we see between America’s upper and lower classes not only exacerbate the suffering of vulnerable groups and damage their bodies. They also reshape the bounds of their subjectivity to the point where everyday forms of systemic and intimate violence are experienced as the natural order of things. We see this frequently in cases where substance-users ‘blame themselves’ for the oftentimes brutal and discriminatory situations they find themselves caught up in. Such moments, as Bourgois demonstrates, point us to the way that marginalised people naturalise the structural forces that alienate them by internalising dominant cultural narratives around ideas of personal responsibility. They begin to believe that substance-users must be understood as the sole architects of their own downfall and, by extension, of their recovery as well.

Viewed through this critical lens, substance-use emerges as a form of self-medication through which to attend to chronic conditions of existential distress, powerlessness, and sociostructural alienation. It effectively provides a moment of escapist relief from the painful conditions of the user’s lifeworld. The irony, however, is that using illegal drugs as relief risks attracting exclusionary forms of social control that are likely to compound and amplify that person’s marginalization. Indeed, the ubiquitous forms of policing, punitive surveillance, mass incarceration, and disenfranchisement that underpin the US-led ‘war on drugs’ have turned already-precarious social spaces into what Jarrett Zigon (2019) has termed ‘zones of uninhabitability’. They are places where those who inhabit them suffer chronic conditions of isolation, cruelty, entrapment, and expendability. Since former US President Richard Nixon first declared illegal drugs “public enemy number one” in 1971, this now globalised and highly militarised crusade to eradicate this evil has ultimately become a war on already marginalised people (Zigon 2019). This is a war in which users and nonusers alike are trapped in zones of uninhabitability, made into internal enemies against which the ‘good life’ of the contemporary sociopolitical order can be defined, maintained, and protected.

The war on drugs in the age of the brain

The ongoing ‘war on drugs’ is couched in the notion that people are essentially powerless to resist the temptation that drugs offer. Labelled the ‘exposure’ orientation in clinical circles (Alexander 1982), this notion contends that mere one-time contact with certain drugs (especially opiates) is enough to trigger a self-destructive cycle of compulsive, ever-escalating usage. The addict, in other words, becomes a slave to their substance. This model is the foundation on which the idea of a chronic relapsing brain hinges. It holds that certain drugs ‘hijack’ the reward pathways in the brain – especially those responsible for producing dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with feelings of pleasure and euphoria, among many other things. The formula ‘dopamine = pleasure’ has been refuted as a gross oversimplification, as the interaction between neurotransmitter production and subjectivity are far more nuanced and complex (Berridge 2007). Nevertheless, the broader paradigm that drugs cause a brain disease has shown itself to be pervasive, underpinning the prevailing idea that drug addiction is rooted in individual biology. In such a view, the addictive substance is seen as mounting a kind of hostile takeover of a person’s brain, in which the neurological mechanisms of reward, desire, and pleasure are systemically compromised.

Much of the empirical groundwork for the exposure orientation stemmed from experiments conducted on rodents in the 1960s. In these experiments, caged rats, who faced the options of drinking either water or an opiate solution, kept returning to the drug-laced bottle, oftentimes fatally. However, in the 1970s, psychologist Bruce Alexander noticed a key structural flaw in the experiments, specifically that the rats were all alone in the cage, with nothing to do but take the drugs on offer. Alexander hypothesised that it was the social isolation, and not the drugs, that sustained their desire to seek chemical relief. To test this hypothesis, he built ‘Rat Park’ – a sort of rodent utopia in which the rats had plenty of space to eat, run, and, most importantly, socialise. Despite facing the same two options, the rats hardly ever touched the drug-laced water, and none of them ever came close to overdosing. From this study and several variations, Alexander developed the ‘adaptive orientation’ view. It holds that addiction ‘is an attempt to adapt to chronic distress of any sort through habitual use’ (1982: 367). In other words, it is not the chemical that causes addiction, but the cages in which beings find themselves.

The extension of this idea is that a human being’s everyday reality can be experienced as cage-like. This chimes with broader anthropological investigations into the ways in which the uneven distribution of wealth, power, and resources has created conditions of extreme social isolation, chronic scarcity, and endemic precarity. These conditions are compounded through the exclusionary policies championed by drug war ideologues. Self-medication through drugs thus emerges as one of the few adaptive coping mechanisms available to deal with these cage-like conditions. This is because psychoactive drugs serve as a readymade shortcut to induce in the user alternative states of being. They may be brief and potentially costly, but they transport the user beyond the existential crises that are otherwise engulfing them.

Chemical interventions

The notion that psychoactive chemicals can act as transformational catalysts within broader healing rites has been noted across history and culture. In particular, hallucinogenic botanicals (such as ayahuasca, peyote, or iboga) have been used in ritual contexts in many small-scale societies to open up pathways between the human and the spirit world (Dobkin de Rios 1972). Taken in a collective setting and guided by ritual specialists such as shamans or other spiritual leaders, these substances open up new therapeutic pathways by reconfiguring the complex relation between self, ego, personhood, culture, and cosmology (Grob & Dobkin de Rios 1994). In the West, however, these institutionalised forms of ritual healing have been largely dismantled and disavowed over the course of modernity along with the stewards who sustain them. They have been replaced by an individualised, highly biologised therapeutic model that hinges on biomedical understandings of illness and disease (Kleinman 1988; Napier 1992, 2004). The modern pharmaceutical industry has emerged in lockstep with these historical changes, locating illness primarily in individual bodies and, in the case of mental health and addiction issues, the brain (see Raikhel 2015).

Whilst Western healthcare systems and certain ritual formats both incorporate chemical interventions into their modes of healing, there are crucial differences in how these substances are implemented, experienced, and conceptualised. For example, the Navajo, an indigenous people of the Southwestern United States, have long employed peyote in their healing ceremonies. Native to Navajo land, peyote is a small cactus plant that contains a hallucinogenic compound known as mescaline, which can profoundly alter a person’s sense of self and reality. According to anthropologist Joseph Calabrese, who took part in these rituals, peyote can be understood as a technology of consciousness modification that allows the sufferer to situate themselves in a broader arc of symbolic and spiritual healing. In other words, the visions, sensations, insights, interpretive activity, and encounters produced within what are known as Peyote Meetings are part of a deeper cultural narrative that reflects and responds to the Navajo cosmos. It is part of a universe that includes not just other humans but also non-human spirits, animals, and ancestors. For Navajo struggling with illness such as alcoholism or depression, taking peyote in ritual contexts opens up lines of communication with omniscient spiritual beings. Direct engagement^[3]with these spiritual entities can aid in the recovery process by providing deep personal insights that would otherwise remain hidden (Aberle 1991; Calabrese 2008).

As a collective cultural experience, the ceremonial distribution and ingestion of peyote differs radically from the clinical prescription of modern pharmaceuticals. In the latter context, the patient’s illness is located primarily in the brain’s faulty or damaged circuitry, while social and existential conditions are rendered peripheral to diagnosis and treatment. As psychiatry has become increasingly biologised (Luhrmann 2001), the result is that more and more mental health conditions are being designated as chronic (i.e. without end). Consequently, these afflictions require constant maintenance through on-going prescriptions and daily pharmaceutical intervention that operates on a molecular level.

Pharmakon dualities

We can learn more about the pharmaceutical approach to addiction by looking at the premise of opioid substitution therapy (OST) for those who are struggling with opioid dependency. OST is practiced in clinical settings across the globe. In it, the patient is prescribed a synthetic opioid such as methadone or buprenorphine that mimics the biochemistry of other opioids whilst suppressing euphoric sensations. By substituting one drug for the other, OST is designed to wean the addict off from the opioid they are perceived to be ‘abusing’, reducing cravings whilst staving off the physical and psychological symptoms of withdrawal. This idea of replacing ‘bad drugs’ with so-called ‘good medicines’ has been analysed as a site of profound contradiction by anthropologists. One prism through which a number of them have explored this idea is through the notion of the pharmakon – pharmacology’s etymological root, from the Greek. Pharmakon is a term used to describe things that hold a double valence as both cure and poison, something that has indivisibly positive and negative effects. Pharmaceutical opioids used in OST oscillate between the licit and the illicit (Bourgois 2000; Garriott 2011; Lyons 2014). They are thus an archetypal modern example of pharmakon, pendulating between being miracle cures and deadly poisons (see Biehl 2005; Meyers 2014).

Substances that carry these dual identities can radically blur the partition lines between therapeutic use and abuse. This has been shown by the unprecedented surge in morbidity and mortality associated with opioid pain relievers that has swept the United States in recent years. Aggressively marketed ‘miracle’ painkillers, such as the now-infamous Oxycontin, have flooded the US healthcare system. Their curative capacities soon turned poisonous as they took root within already-precarious communities which had been progressively compromised through the ‘perfect storm’ combination of deindustrialization, socioeconomic neglect, social safety net cuts, and mass unemployment (Dasgupta et al. 2018). Ironically, using OST as the predominant clinical response to the opioid crisis hinges on the same therapeutic logic that led to the proliferation of drugs like Oxycontin in the first place – namely that pain is a biological disorder (see Crowley-Matoka & True 2012). Addiction is here reduced to a set of individual withdrawal symptoms that emerge in relation to the internal dynamics of certain neurochemical pathways. It thus becomes unyoked from its social, political, and existential conditions. In America’s case, the conditions for the proliferation of opioid pain relievers were especially ripe. Pain relievers spread as part of an entrenched culture of pharmaceuticalization (Oldani 2014) that has been amplified by gaping disparities in health and wealth across the population, a rapacious health-care sector with huge barriers to treatment for those who cannot afford it, as well as a lack of unemployment support combined with an emphasis on the importance of maintaining work despite illness or injury.

Addiction, phenomenology and the temporal turn

To move beyond ‘neurocentric’ accounts and understand how wider structural conditions shape addiction, a number of scholars who identify with critical medical anthropology have turned to the philosophical field of phenomenology for inspiration. Simply put, phenomenology can be understood as a philosophical method that seeks to reveal the structure and conditions of lived experience by articulating how the world appears and is felt from an embodied perspective (see, for example, Good 1994; Csordas 1994; Throop 2007). Broadly speaking, then, phenomenological accounts consider a larger range of experiences than simply that of suffering and pathological compulsion. They describe the complex ways that pain intersects with pleasure, despair with hope, and creativity with destruction. At the same time, they hold that such complex forms of subjectivity are always already embedded in particular social, political, historical, and conceptual contexts (Mattingly 2019; Zigon 2018). For a number of scholars working in this subfield, much of the analytical emphasis has been on the way that substances are used as a means to alter temporality – the lived experience of time – under conditions of precarity.

This analytic move reflects broader discussions within the phenomenology of drugs that focus on their capacity to radically alter the subjective experience of time (Cope 2003; Deleuze 2004; Denzin 1987; Flaherty 1999; Hill 1978; Huxley 2004; Lapp et al. 1994; Klingemann 2000; Reith 1999; Shanon 2001; Smart 1968). For example, in her seminal work amongst Hispano heroin-users in New Mexico, Angela Garcia (2010) engages with melancholia, or endless mourning, as a way to articulate the historical dimensions of addiction and drug treatment in the region. For Garcia’s interlocutors, heroin use and the intimate losses it inflicts upon communities through incarceration and overdose deaths is experienced as indivisible from the long history of agricultural land dispossession, grinding rural poverty, and social abandonment. Addiction expresses loss and mourning for a past and a cultural identity that struggles for coherency in the face of widespread socioeconomic change. People here live in a purgatorial world where historical suffering meets clinical therapeutics and where each repeated descent into heroin usage fortifies the prevailing model of addiction as a chronic, ‘no exit’ disease.

My own work amongst London’s inner-city homeless has also engaged themes of temporality. It describes how rough sleepers use anaesthetic intoxicants such as alcohol, opiates, and pharmaceutical sedatives to induce blackout states. These provide a temporary reprieve from the chronic existential crises, painful memories, and deep boredom that undergird street living (Burraway 2018). Many of the homeless describe these blackout states in terms of ‘becoming somebody else’. Thereby, they experience the blackout as a paradoxical form of self-healing. It refashions the normal interface between self, memory, agency, body, and world. The blackout is paradoxical because it transports the homeless into a memoryless state where they are no longer burdened by the crisis of their own presence. Yet it also evaporates the moment the drugs wear off. In this regard, the blackout traps them in a Sisyphean loop in which the very experience of escape is forever held just out of conscious reach.

Approaching drug-use by focusing on how it alters people’s relationship to time has turned out to be a fruitful mode of inquiry, especially in social contexts marked by scarcity, precarity, and vulnerability. For example, in their ethnography of khat consumption among Ethiopian unemployed youth, Mains et al. (2013) note how finding the stimulant khat and then chewing it with others imbued the day with some kind of meaningful rhythm, in the process taking up time, of which there was plenty. So, rather than using psychoactive substances to annihilate the threat of an empty future by inducing anaesthesia – as was the case for my homeless interlocutors – these young Ethiopian men used khat’s stimulant properties to move towards an alternative vision of the future. They sought the psychoactive condition of mirqana, a state which moved them beyond the banal realities of the present and into dreams and hopes for a better time to come. Aligned with these studies is a large body of literature on the concept of waiting, which explores the various ‘time-killing’ strategies that people use to cope with economic stagnation, chronic joblessness, and deep boredom (Masquelier 2013; Harms 2013; Ralph 2008; Honwana 2012).

These studies also foreground that the body becomes central during periods of crisis. When the world feels as though it is spinning out of control, it is the body – people's foremost technical instrument (Mauss 1979) – that often becomes the new locus of control and transformation, a last resort of control in an otherwise-unmanageable world. This has been shown in ethnographic studies on topics as varied as homelessness (Bourgois & Schonberg 2009; Desjarlais 1997), eating disorders (Lester 2009), organ trafficking (Scheper-Hughes 2001), and prostitution (Day 2007; O’Neil 2015). The sad irony, however, as some have argued, is that the ‘resort’ to individual bodily techniques in times of crisis, such as through heavy drug-use, often ends up reproducing the very politico-ideological demands that the person in question seeks escape from. The imperative to take ‘personal responsibility’ for one’s own self-transformation has a decidedly neoliberal edge to it insofar as the locus of transformation is rooted in autonomous decision making rather than any kind of meaningful changes to the individual’s social and existential conditions.

Conclusion

The study of addiction is a messy and highly disjointed research field, described by some in terms of ‘conceptual chaos’ (Shaffer 1997). Much of this chaos can be seen as reflecting broader historical transformations in how Euro-American cultures have come to think about the human condition. Addiction has developed from being considered a spiritual affliction, conceived through Christian theology, to its present incarnation as a brain disease. Its study demonstrates the extent to which contemporary understandings reflect changing ideologies about the core elements of personhood, agency, and subjectivity. This path, though, is neither singular nor linear.

Anthropology has done much to parse out the complexity of addiction, which moulds and is moulded by the contexts in which it emerges (Raikhel & Garriott 2013). The discipline’s cross-cultural perspectives that allow for a more diverse body of thought on the topic challenge the hegemony enjoyed by neuroscientific approaches. While neuroscientific approaches do have merit, their virtues should not be extolled at the expense of alternative perspectives that may also be correct. It is for this reason that some scholars urge us to embrace analytic and interpretive multiplicity. They argue that a ‘vibrant epistemic pluralism’ (Raikhel 2015: 391) will provide a far richer and more nuanced conceptual vocabulary through which to make sense of addiction. Ethnography, which embraces human complexity at both the individual and structural level, has allowed anthropology to come up with many important insights since, its relatively late arrival to the addiction conversation. It has done this primarily by placing emic concerns and lived experience at the forefront of analysis. Ethnographic work emphasises the role of cultural mechanisms in shaping ideologies and experiences surrounding substances-use. It depathologises the social life of addiction amongst marginalised communities and problematises state institutions that effectively fuse therapeutic domains with criminal ones. Further, by moving the analytic lens beyond the individual user, anthropology has illustrated in granular detail that addiction cannot be uncoupled from history, policy, inequality, and political economy.

Addiction has also become a fundamental site for the production of theory, as it sits at the intersection of so many aspects of the human condition, which often stand in contradiction to one another. Thus, addiction is simultaneously an aspect of lived experience and an object of biomedical knowledge, a condition of therapeutic possibility as well as of penal coercion. It is a world of ecstatic pleasure and of debilitating pain, an escape route as well as a prison. Caught up in the swirls and eddies of this ambivalent churn are those who live with addiction each day, their on-going relationships with their chosen substances forcing us to rethink the boundaries of human agency. Above all, they highlight the need to avoid reductive accounts and to hold within our analytic frameworks multiple perspectives at once. To understand addiction, we must consider the structural in tandem with the experiential, the personal with the political, and the epistemic with the existential.

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Note on contributor

Joshua Burraway is a cultural medical anthropologist whose research interests sit at the intersection between social and political theory, critical phenomenology, addiction medicine, and psychiatry. His research interests emerged from a long-term ethnographic study of homeless substance-users in inner-city London. Currently, he is carrying out research in rural Appalachia exploring deindustrialization, social trust, and the proliferation of opioids and other narcotics, such as methamphetamine.

[1] Broadly speaking, pharmaceuticalization refers to the reconfiguring of human realities, processes, and capabilities into opportunities for pharmaceutical intervention, augmentation, or enhancement.

[2] See Singer (2012) for a more exhaustive historical literature review of these approaches and several others.

[3] See also Scherz & Mpanga’s (2019) work in Uganda for how direct spiritual intervention can facilitate recovery from alcoholism.

Voice

Felix Stein — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 12:38:17 +0000

Marlene Schäfers

University of Ghent

Initially published 27 Oct 2017

http://doi.org/10.29164/17voice

Abstract:

Voice is a salient category in our contemporary lives. We speak of marginalised groups ‘lacking voice’ and celebrate their efforts at ‘raising their voices’; we are advised to listen to our ‘inner voice’ and be ‘vocal’ in our opinions. Such idioms closely associate voice with individuality, agency, and authority. Anthropologists have sought to denaturalise these associations, showing them to be the product of a particular ideology of voice that is neither universal nor inevitable. At the same time, they have also studied the effects that such associations have on imaginations of subjectivity as well as public and political life.

As an explicit category of conceptual and ethnographic focus, voice has entered the anthropological literature relatively recently. This entry charts out some of the principal ways in which anthropologists have approached voice, and the kind of literatures they have drawn upon to do so. It identifies the move to study sonic voices in tandem with metaphorical figures of voice as central to anthropological investigations of voice. It considers how doing so allows investigating the role of voice in the making of subjects, publics, and ideologies, as well as the impacts that sound technologies have on these processes. This entry suggests that voice is central to many key concepts in anthropology and social theory and that an explicit focus on voice is therefore of broader relevance for the discipline and beyond.

Introduction

Voice is a salient category in Euro-American modernity and beyond. Familiar idioms attest to its significance: we speak of marginalised groups ‘lacking voice’ and celebrate their efforts at ‘raising their voices’; we ‘give voice’ to our ideas and ‘have a voice’ in matters of our concern; we are advised to listen to our ‘inner voice’ and be ‘vocal’ in our opinions. Such idioms closely associate voice with individuality, agency, and authority. In its consideration of voice, anthropology has sought to denaturalise these associations and point to alternative ways of understanding how voice may relate to identity and agency. Instead of accepting voice as a universal category, anthropologists have shown voices – both as sound objects and as metaphors – to be culturally and historically constructed, and hence variable. This recognition has allowed for the interrogation of broader issues, including questions of agency, representation, identity, and power, from the vantage point of actual voices and vocal practices (Weidman 2014a: 38).

Voice has only emerged as an explicit focus of ethnographic research and theoretical concern to anthropologists over approximately the last two decades. Even if not explicitly, however, voice has long featured in a broad range of literatures. From a sonic and linguistic perspective, voices are the focus of studies in (ethno)musicology, linguistic anthropology, and media and technology studies. Ethnomusicological studies, for example, show how vocal variations such as pitch, amplitude, rhythm, and melody constitute culturally specific means of aesthetic expression and social communication (e.g. Feld 1982; Urban 1988), while sociolinguistic frameworks focus on how specific grammatical aspects of speech indicate or engender social relations (e.g. Agha 2007), or how specific formal and stylistic aspects of speech cohere into recognizable types (e.g. Agha 2005; Bakhtin 1981). Fields like postcolonial theory, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, on the other hand, have studied voice mainly through its associations with subjectivity and representation. Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988), for example, has cast lasting doubt on the empowering potentials of the endeavour to ‘give voice’ to the marginalised in her famous intervention ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, while psychoanalytically-inspired scholarship has emphasised the uncanny character of voice as both of the self (emerging from one’s own body) and other to it (resonating outside the body’s limits) (Chion 1999; Dolar 2006). Anthropological considerations of voice draw on this wide variety of literature in order to bring insights regarding actual voices and vocal practices to bear on critiques of voice as a representational trope.

This entry aims at outlining what a distinctively anthropological approach to the voice might entail. It traces how anthropologists have brought to bear analyses of voices’ sonic and material aspects onto broader social phenomena. In this way, it explores voice both as ideologically and practically constructed and as constructive of subjects, publics, and ideologies.

Voice in Euro-American modernity

The starting point of much anthropological scholarship on voice has been the attempt to destabilise a number of powerful assumptions about it. These can be summed up under two headings. First stands ‘the idea of voice as guarantor of truth and self-presence, from which springs the familiar idea that the voice expresses self and identity and that agency consists in having a voice’ (Weidman 2014a: 39). Linguistic anthropologist Miyako Inoue (2003: 180) has summarised this idea as ‘I speak, therefore I am'. The idea here is that the voice is a direct expression of a person’s intimate emotions and opinions, which renders the act of speaking an expression of human agency and, in certain contexts, resistance.

Related is a second assumption, which holds that the voice is but a channel in order to transmit a more important message (Weidman 2014a: 39). In this view, the content of the message prevails over the sonic aspects of the voice, or its form. Philosopher Adriana Cavarero (2005) has demonstrated that this tendency to listen to voices primarily for what they say rather than how they say it can be traced through some of the most influential works of Western philosophy from Plato to this day. This second assumption about the prevalence of signifying content over vocal form directly sustains the first, because it allows for imagining the voice as a transparent channel that gives immediate access to a person’s inner life without having any significance itself.

Linguistic anthropologists Bauman and Briggs (2003) argue that the opposition between signifying speech and a sonic vocality outside of meaning solidified into a hierarchy during the European Enlightenment, with the former clearly valued over the latter. The speech-vocality opposition moreover became mapped onto a number of parallel dichotomies such as male versus female, coloniser versus colonised, urban versus rural, or white versus black, which, as Bauman and Briggs argue, were sustained and legitimised in this way. From this perspective, voice needs to be understood as an ideological construct that has crucially shaped the modern (post)colonial world and has contributed to legitimising relations of domination and abuse (De Certeau 1988; Inoue 2003).

In order to highlight that the way we understand and give meaning to vocal phenomena is historically and culturally constructed, and that such constructs have crucial social and political impacts, anthropologists have coined the term ‘ideology of voice.’ As defined by Amanda Weidman, ‘ideologies of voice’ are

culturally constructed ideas about the voice… [They] set the boundary for what constitutes communication, what separates language from music, and what constitutes the difference between the intelligible and the unintelligible. Ideologies of voice determine how and where we locate subjectivity and agency; they are the conditions that give sung or spoken utterances their power or constrain their potential effects (2014a: 45).

Indeed, we can trace how ideas of voice specific to Euro-American modernity have had a forming impact on knowledge production and science. Take anthropology, our own discipline: its hallmark methodology of ethnographic fieldwork largely relies on soliciting informants’ voices in face-to-face encounters as a means of accessing their lifeworlds. Voice features here as an important index of authenticity and as a standard for judging the originality of anthropological works. Psychoanalysis is another example. Institutionalised since the late nineteenth century, it centrally relies on the notion that a patient’s interior life is accessible through his or her actual voice, elicited by the psychoanalyst in therapeutic sessions. We also encounter similar ideas in contemporary truth and reconciliation commissions that have been set up to uncover past wrongdoings and achieve justice. In such settings, victims’ voices are construed as a relatively unproblematic means that, when elicited, are all it takes in order to gain access to past injuries, hidden truths, and authentic suffering (Slotta 2015). Anchored in the popular conviction that ‘speaking is healing,’ truth commissions participate in a discourse that equates victimhood with silence and proposes ‘giving voice’ as a means to heal, find redemption, and bring about reconciliation (Posel 2008).

These examples highlight two issues: (1) that ideas about language, speech, and voice are not natural or universal, but historically and culturally specific constructions and (2) that such ideas have important repercussions for social and subjective life because they determine how voices are heard and recognised. How, then, are we to study the ideologies that determine how voices are produced and received?

The sonic and material voice

In an article published in 1994, Steven Feld and Aaron A. Fox pointed out the need to develop research perspectives that would link a ‘phenomenological concern with the voice as the embodiment of spoken and sung performance, and a more metaphoric sense of voice as a key representational trope for social position and power’ (1994: 26). Their call makes clear that if we are to understand the role of voice in social life, it is imperative to study not only how voices routinely function as metaphors but also their sonic, embodied, and material dimensions. Concomitantly, the anthropological project of denaturalising voice crucially hinges on studying how voices are produced by discourse, physical bodies, and technologies and how these actual voices sustain, reinforce, or challenge specific figurative understandings of voice.

Linguistic anthropologist Judith Irvine’s study of Wolof speech registers is an early study that, even if it does not explicitly conceptualise voice as such, usefully lays out how the study of actual voices can reveal understandings of voice alternative to the assumptions outlined above. Irvine (1990) describes vocal practices that run radically counter to the adroit association between voice and self posited by Euro-American ideologies of voice, and in this way highlights the latter’s cultural particularity. She argues that Wolof speakers in Senegal have at their disposal two different ‘registers’ or styles of speaking that are connected to social status and situation. The speech of noble and upper caste Wolof is typically marked by a lack of affect, translated into linguistic features that include simple or even ‘wrong’ syntax, slow tempo, low volume, and a breathy voice. Lower caste Wolof and griots (bards) employ an opposing register that is marked by heightened affect, expressed through a high-pitched voice, fast and fluent speaking, and the use of complex syntax and morphology. As Irvine highlights, these registers or ‘voices’ are not inherent properties of individual speakers but strategically employed in order to mark relative status difference in a particular context (1990: 131-132). They operate as a resource available to all Wolof speakers in order to define a given situation and relationship. A noble Wolof who employs a restrained register of speech when talking to a griot might, for instance, switch into a more agitated register when asking a noble kinsman for a favour. In addition, griots often act as spokespersons for Wolof speakers of higher standing, using their own voices to express the opinions and emotions of their patrons. Voice is in such instances decoupled from a person’s self and interiority. Instead it becomes a cross-individually available resource for the performance and negotiation of social status and relations.

In classical anthropological fashion, Irvine presents her readers with a cultural framework that links voice and identity very differently from Euro-American models. The more recent work by Nicholas Harkness (2013) on voice and identity in the context of Evangelical Christian South Korea further investigates how specific identities or cultural tropes come to be linked to and eventually indexed by specific vocal qualities. He shows how many Christian Koreans invest enormous efforts in making their voices sound less ‘rough’ and ‘husky’, since these qualities are understood to represent a traditional, ‘unclean’ Korean voice that is associated with a past marked by suffering and backwardness. By listening to Christian sermons, singing in church choirs, and participating in further musical schooling, many Koreans seek instead to acquire a voice with qualities resembling that of European classical singing; what is commonly described as a ‘clean’ and ‘pure’ voice. This requires conscious and sustained work on how singers use their vocal apparatus. The ‘harsh’ or ‘rough’ tones of traditional Korean singing are produced by pushing air through tightened vocal cords, while the ‘clean’ voice of Western classical singing requires an open larynx and vocal cords. These specific ways of using the vocal apparatus become mapped onto specific sound attributes (harsh, rough vs. clean) and bodily experiences (tense, painful vs. healthy, natural) with their attendant ideological connotations, such that strained vocal cords and a tense throat come to index a troubled, pre-Christian, Korean history (Harkness 2013: 92-102).

What Harkness’s study demonstrates is that not only ideas about voice but also voices’ sonic and embodied qualities are malleable and can become the target of conscious transformation. As such, we may understand voices, as Steven Feld and his colleagues have put it, as ‘material embodiments of social ideology and experience’ (Feld et al. 2004: 332). Materiality here refers to a voice’s actual sound as well as the production and reception of this sound through bodily processes (Weidman 2014a: 40). Even if we cannot see or touch it, the sound of a voice is material insofar as it is the result of vibrations that propagate as waves through physical matter, typically air. These vibrations, in turn, are produced by our vocal cords when we speak (or sing, hum, cry, shout, etc.). When described in this way as a strictly physical and mechanical process, it may appear that the voice is simply the outcome of an objective or pre-cultural process of employing one’s vocal cords. Yet, as Harkness’s description begins to indicate, the way in which we employ our vocal cords and receive the sonic waves produced by others is in fact thoroughly encultured. How so? When we hear a voice, we ascribe meaning to it. We may, for instance, find it ‘clean,’ ‘manly’ or typically ‘black.’ Such acts of ascribing meaning to other voices influences the way we modulate our own, as we consciously or unconsciously tune our voices in relation to specific voice types or ideals. Norms, values, and ideologies in this way come to bear on the production of vocal sound (Eidsheim 2011: 149).

Voice and the making of socio-political identity

Both Irvine and Harkness’s studies highlight that the ascription of cultural meaning to voice often occurs when a number of sonic qualities become bundled into voice types, which in turn become associated with sociopolitical identities (such as the Wolof griot or the aspiring Christian Korean) or broader cultural tropes (such as modernity or sincerity) (Agha 2005; Fox 2004; Gray 2016; Keane 2011; Porcello 2002; Samuels 2004; Stokes 2010). Timbre is one category that allows for the exploration of how such processes of association occur. The term refers to the quality or ‘tone colour’ of an instrument or voice and is often described by highly culturally-specific words such as bright, dark, warm, harsh, creaky, husky etc. In her work on African-American opera singers, musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim (2008) argues that timbre is a key mechanism that regulates how voices are matched to bodies. Specifically, Eidsheim shows how the common perception that ‘black’ voices have a specific ‘sound’ or timbre works to continuously reinscribe racial difference onto African-American bodies. She describes how, when training as singers, African-Americans are regularly taught to reproduce the timbre or vocal ‘sound’ expected of them, with the effect that each vocal performance further reinscribes the expected association between race and voice. This process obscures how timbre is socially constructed, rendering it a seemingly natural and innate characteristic of specific bodies. Vocal production in this way contributes to naturalising racial difference as inherent and immutable.

What this discussion exemplifies is that voice as a sonic and material entity not only marks existing socio-political categories, but also contributes to their making. This is an important claim for the anthropological project of destabilising the seemingly natural link between voice and self or identity. From this perspective, voice does not just express identities but also constitutes them. In this sense, the voice represents a disciplining force capable of generating social categories and subject positions: ‘Vocal practices, including everyday speech, song, verbal play, ritual speech, oratory, recitation, can be viewed as modes of practice and discipline that, in their repeated enactment, may performatively bring into being classed, gendered, political, ethnic, or religious subjects’ (Weidman 2014a: 44).

This also highlights that the distinction between an actual or sonic voice, on the one hand, and a metaphoric or figurative voice, on the other hand, can be but an analytical one: in social life these two aspects of voice are intricately linked, one sustaining and continuously (re)producing the other. Nicholas Harkness has expressed this idea through the term ‘phonosonic nexus,’ referring to the necessary interdependence of voice as it is phonically produced on the one hand, and sonically received, categorised, and given meaning to on the other hand (2013: 12-21). As a nexus or point of convergence, the voice links specific bodily actions (e.g. a specific way of modulating one’s voice) to specific sonic frameworks (e.g. what is considered to be a ‘clean’ voice) and ultimately to categories of social identity (e.g. a healthy and aspiring Korean Christian).

Miyako Inoue’s (2006) research on ‘Japanese women’s language,’ a feminine speech style associated with the image of urban middle-class women, further illustrates how vocal practices can generate social categories. Inoue demonstrates that such ‘women’s language’ is less a Japanese cultural tradition of ancient origin, as is commonly assumed, than a cultural construct adroitly linked to Japanese capitalist modernity. Based on historical research, Inoue reconstructs how speech styles that are today understood as distinctively feminine were largely invented at the turn of the twentieth century by male Japanese intellectuals. These intellectuals overheard speech patterns they considered to be vulgar and crude and ascribed them in their writings through quotation and reported speech to young women. Over time, this so-called ‘schoolgirl speech’ became idealised as refined rather than vulgar, and reconceptualised as a speech style befitting ideal middle-class femininity. Inoue’s study thus highlights how speech forms, even if invented, are able to create specific subject positions that people eventually come to inhabit, a process that she calls ‘indexical inversion’ (2006: 51).

The voice as excess

While acknowledging that the voice frequently functions as a disciplinary practice that (re)produces social categories and identities, a more psychoanalytically inspired body of literature has argued that it is impossible to ever fully discipline or capture voice. Because the voice is a sound object that lilts and sways, pitches and cracks, it asserts a presence of its own that cannot be reduced to the referential meaning expressed in speech or cultural associations that link vocal sound to socio-political categories (Nancy 2007; Schlichter 2011). In this sense, the voice may be described as ‘in excess of speech and meaning’ (Dolar 2006: 10). From this perspective, the singing voice is a particularly interesting object of study, because it highlights that voices have effects that go beyond the communication of meaning. In opera, for example, the voice’s impact greatly relies on it surpassing or even disrupting the necessities of meaningful communication (Duncan 2004).

In conceptualising the voice as excess, this body of literature has primarily been concerned with deconstructing Western metaphysical assumptions that accord primacy to signification, rationality, and the mind. From an anthropological point of view, however, this literature at times problematically ascribes a universal, pre-cultural quality to the voice’s disruptive potential. In this context, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier’s (2014) study of aurality in nineteenth-century Colombia usefully grounds assertions about vocal excess through a meticulous historical study. Ochoa Gautier argues that in nineteenth-century Colombia – a newly independent state keen to craft a national citizenry out of multiple constituencies – the voice was construed as ambiguously standing between nature and culture. This rendered it a central mechanism for determining where the boundary between these two realms ought to be drawn, and consequently also for how the categories of non-human and human, primitive and civilised, were to be distinguished. Various European and Colombian scientists and intellectuals, for instance, repeatedly described the sounds produced by the boat rowers of the Magdalena River, who were of mixed African and Amerindian descent and used rhythmic stamping and call-response vocal patterns to coordinate their labour, as ‘howls’ resembling the sounds of animals. Ochoa Gautier shows that linguistic policies like the standardization of pronunciation and orthography were employed by Colombian elites as a means to tame and hominise such ‘barbaric’ voices in order to forge ‘proper’ citizens for the new state. Yet she insists that such projects to discipline ostensibly untamed voices were never fully successful, since some voices refused or failed to conform to the standards laid out for them. It is in this failure or refusal to conform to disciplinary frameworks that Ochoa Gautier locates vocal excess.

Sound technologies and the mediated voice

So far we have looked at how sonic voices are shaped by and shape in turn the representations through which people make sense of them. What we have not taken into consideration yet is how voices are, in their capacity as sound objects, inherently mediated: at the very minimum, they rely on air as a mediator that transmits sound waves. Many of the voices we encounter in our daily lives are mediated by more complicated technologies, though: radios transmit distant voices into our living rooms, microphones amplify them to reach large audiences, tape recorders render them durable and re-playable, while digital programmes modify them. From an anthropological perspective these technologies are of interest because they highlight a condition that characterises all voices, whether technologically mediated or not: that voices are able to circulate separately from the (human) bodies that produce them. This ability throws up the question of how circulating voices ought to be matched to their origins. Ideologies of voice determine what kinds of answers people will find to that question and where they consequently locate subjectivity and agency. In this sense, studying sound technologies can be a particularly productive entry point for studying reigning ideologies of voice.

Yet while separability as a condition characterises all voices, sound technologies allow voices to circulate independently of their origins in unprecedented ways. As such, they are capable of bringing about novel social formations; an aspect that much anthropological work has focused on. What kinds of anxieties and what kinds of desires does the heightened circulation and amplification of voices engender? How are reigning ideologies of voice able to accommodate such new forms of vocal circulation, and how might they transform in order to give meaning to new technological phenomena? These are some of the questions that anthropologists as well as scholars from neighbouring disciplines have asked (Fisher 2016; Gitelman 1999; Kunreuther 2010; Spitulnik 1998; Stokes 2009; Weheliye 2005; Weidman 2003).

In studying technologically-mediated voices, anthropologists have drawn from insights produced by media and technology studies regarding the capacity of technologies to create new subjects, publics, and forms of authority and discipline. In particular, social and cultural histories of modern sound technologies such as the radio, gramophone, or telephone have proven useful resources for anthropological inquiries (Connor 1997; Erlmann 2004; Frith 1996; Gitelman 1999; Sterne 2003). Particularly influential in how to approach the role of technologies in transforming vocal ideology and practice has been the work of media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1990), who argues that the notion of an ‘inner voice’ associated with subjective interiority was the outcome of new pedagogical practices (such as silent reading) connected to changing family organization and reading practices in eighteenth-century Europe.

Amanda Weidman’s (2003, 2006) research on Indian Karnatic music illustrates how a focus on sound technologies and their effects allows for the unearthing of a particular ‘politics of voice’ and its centrality for discourses of modernity, nation, and authenticity. Weidman argues that Karnatic music is not, as is often claimed, an ancient Indian cultural tradition that predated British colonialism. Instead, she shows how its codification as ‘classical’ emerged from the colonial encounter and the ideals of cultural authenticity it produced. Modern sound recording technologies were crucial in shaping these ideals by introducing previously unavailable notions of sound fidelity. Before the introduction of such technologies, Karnatic musical practice had largely relied on face-to-face encounters between musical masters and disciples, performers and listeners. Recording technologies like the gramophone, which were widespread in India by the middle of the twentieth century, profoundly transformed these practices and the social relations they sustained. The gramophone posed a threat to the authority of musical masters, because it took the monopoly of music teaching and performance out of their hands. Disciples and aficionados no longer relied on the personal encounter with masters, because they could now listen to recordings whenever and wherever they wanted. At the same time, recordings became a new standard for judging the fidelity of performers to what could now be conceived of as ‘classical’ musical originals. These new standards regarding musical fidelity, Weidman argues, paved the way for an entirely new social sense of fidelity to tradition and loyalty to one’s roots (2006: 246). Ideas of national heritage and cultural authenticity are, from this perspective, fundamentally intertwined with the history of sound recording technologies.

Another aspect of Weidman’s (2007) research demonstrates how sound technologies can formatively shape ideologies of gender through the politics of voice they sustain. The codification of Karnatic music in the early twentieth-century centrally relied on crafting a class of women performers who would fit ideals of middle-class feminine respectability that became current at the same time. This required, in particular, distinguishing women singers and dancers of ‘classical’ music from devadasis, musicians and dancers who did service at Hindu temples and were sometimes romantically or sexually involved with their male patrons. Simultaneously, with the emergence of the respectable, middle-class ‘family woman,’ lower-class devadasis became stigmatised as prostitutes. In this context, the availability of sound recording opened up a new avenue for high-status Brahmin women to become involved in musical performance. Because gramophone records allowed women to be heard without their bodies being seen, ‘it provided a way to sing for the public without appearing in public and jeopardizing their respectability’ (Weidman 2007: 140). In addition, the technology of the microphone created a new sense of intimacy between singer and listener, which sustained understandings of the voice as a pure and natural expression of interiority, thereby further dissociating it from the performer’s body (Stokes 2009). Sound technologies like the gramophone and the microphone in this way created the conditions that allowed linking a notion of ‘natural’ or ‘pure’ voice with the chaste female body. As such, they contributed to shaping an ideology of the female voice that sustained specific notions of femininity and embodiment.

Public voices and intimate publics

Weidman’s work shows how sound technologies do not ‘just’ amplify, record, or transmit voices, but that in doing so they profoundly influence how voices are able to sustain notions like authenticity and feminine respectability, which in turn powerfully shape social reality. Because they greatly amplify the circulation of voices, sound technologies also crucially shape public spheres. Laura Kunreuther’s (2014) work on the central role that different figures of voice have played in the recent history of Nepal demonstrates this aspect in ethnographic depth. Kunreuther notes that the liberalization of Nepal’s political system and economy since 1990 has introduced a liberal discourse of voice, which associates voice with political participation, consciousness, and agency. This political sense of voice, she argues, relies upon and produces a second figure of voice – ‘intimate voice’ – that is associated with interior feeling, emotional directness, and authentic communication. Yet paradoxically, as Kunreuther shows, this intimate voice is in many ways an effect of publically- and technologically-mediated interactions (see also Porcello 2002).

Kunreuther (2014: 124-214; also Kunreuther 2006, 2010) examines FM radio stations as one crucial site where this happens. FM radio began broadcasting in Nepal six years after the adoption of parliamentary democracy in 1990. In contrast to the state-controlled Radio Nepal broadcasting nation-wide on AM airwaves, FM stations are more local in scope, privately owned and commercially run. Crucially, moreover, they are not allowed to cover political content. Kunreuther nevertheless identifies these radio stations as having political effects, because they contribute to creating the kinds of subjects befitting the newly created liberal political sphere. Locally anchored, they support a high degree of interaction between radio hosts and listeners, and often directly broadcast their listeners’ voices. For listeners, this creates an image of the radio as a transparent and direct form of communication. FM radio broadcasts also employ mainly informal and unrehearsed speech, emphasise personal life-stories, and feature as platforms for the sharing of listeners’ private thoughts and feelings. One radio show, for example, asks listeners to send in letters with their personal stories, some of which the show’s host then presents on air. Kunreuther argues that such shows educate their listeners to present their private lives in a public form, in this way shaping new subjectivities that are marked at once by a sense of interiority and a desire to share such interiority in public. By thus creating ‘intimate publics,’ FM radio stations, even though not explicitly political, are crucial for perpetuating a politics of voice that thrives on notions of immediacy, transparency, and participation and feeds into larger trends of political and economic liberalization.

Daniel Fisher’s (2016) ethnography of Aboriginal radio production in Australia similarly highlights how radio technology is capable of sustaining intimate networks of kinship and relatedness, here in the face of an Aboriginal reality marked by violent colonization, displacement, and assimilationist government. One way in which this happens is through request shows, where listeners call in to request a particular song and dedicate it to kin dispersed across immense distances, often as a result of incarceration or other forms of governmental intervention (Fisher 2016: 43-79). Older ideas of kinship are ‘mediatized’ by these radio programmes in distinctly modern ways as the sound of country music and the voices of callers, radio hosts, and singers conjoin to address a geographically dispersed yet collectively imagined Indigenous public. While these programmes do not feature explicitly ‘Aboriginal’ content – both hosts and callers speak in English and callers generally request American-inflected blues and country music – they nevertheless sustain a distinct Indigenous public sphere by evoking characteristically Aboriginal networks of relation and address.

As both Kunreuther and Fisher explore in detail how the practices of radio broadcasting render the voice an object of technical as much as bureaucratic intervention, their work usefully highlights that the seemingly immediate and transparent radio-broadcast voice is in fact the outcome of complex processes of technological as well as governmental mediation. This draws attention to the fact that the material practices, technologies, and institutions through which voices become audible crucially determine how voices are understood and heard. This insight usefully challenges prevailing notions of orality as more direct, sincere, or transparent than writing; what historian of technology Jonathan Sterne has called ‘the audio-visual litany’ (2003: 15-19). Opposing the ear to the eye, hearing to writing, this ‘litany’ is a powerful Euro-American assumption that posits the oral/aural as more immediate and hence more ‘authentic’ than the visual. As a discipline, anthropology has long seen itself responsible for studying so-called ‘oral societies.’ Showing the immense complexity of cultural and literary production, memorial techniques, and ideologies brought forth by these societies, anthropologists have gone a long way in challenging stereotypes about oral societies being ostensibly simple or primitive (e.g. Barber 2007; Finnegan 2007). The emerging anthropology of voice equally contributes to dispelling engrained stereotypes about the oral. It does so, however, by approaching orality not as opposed to technologies of writing, inscription, and recording, but as fundamentally mediated by and intertwined with these technologies. Such an approach promises to be productive for challenging not only the oral-visual, hearing-writing divide, but a whole series of dichotomies that regularly get mapped onto it, including nature versus culture, body versus mind, primitive versus civilised, female versus male, etc.

Conclusion: The wider relevance of voice

The anthropological record shows that voice is a salient category in many communities and repeatedly functions as a potent metaphor in relation to questions of power, agency, and subjectivity, though in ways that are neither uniform, nor predictable. Given this salience, anthropological studies of voice and vocal practices carry relevance for other subfields of anthropology and the social sciences. What renders such studies particularly productive is the move of considering metaphors of voice in tandem with actually sounding voices. This allows anthropologists to complicate common understandings of voice as a means of empowerment and agency and to ethnographically ground broader concepts in social theory to which voice is central yet remains unexplored.

Attention to vocal practice, for instance, can be a productive starting point for challenging human rights projects that seek to ‘give voice’ to the powerless by exploring the often ambiguous and contradictory effects that such projects produce. An analysis of the relation between material voices and their metaphorical mobilization in political struggle is also important for understanding how social movements are or are not able to make their voices ‘matter’ (Faudree 2013; Minks 2013). Considering the impact of technological mediation on the circulation and uptake of voices, moreover, appears imperative for our grasp of how social media and new technologies shape new subjectivities and practices of social interaction. More broadly, this points to the reframing of voice under conditions of neoliberalism. Neoliberal policy tends to position voice in a framework of choice, creativity, freedom, and transparency (Kunreuther 2010; Weidman 2014b). Anthropological attention to the actual vocal practices that such claims enable and foreclose promises important insights into how neoliberal discourse and practice shape subjects and determine frames of action.

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Note on contributor

Marlene Schäfers is a social anthropologist and FWO [PEGASUS]² Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Ghent University’s Middle East and North Africa Research Group. She holds a PhD degree from the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation investigates Kurdish women’s attempts at making their voices heard in intimate, public and political spheres in Turkey, while her new project explores Kurdish politics of loss and mourning.

Dr. Marlene Schäfers, Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Universiteitstraat 8, 9000 Gent, Belgium. marlene.schafers@ugent.be

Ethics / morality

Felix Stein — Fri, 19 May 2017 14:09:20 +0000

James Laidlaw

University of Cambridge

Initially published 19 May 2017

http://doi.org/10.29164/17ethics

Abstract:

It is possible to argue that the anthropology of ethics has always been part of the discipline but also that it is a radically new and transformative venture. This entry explains why both are true. It describes how moral life has long been generally understood in anthropology, how this came to seem insufficient, and the ways that have been proposed recently for improvement. We review the main intellectual traditions that have inspired these new departures – virtue ethics, ordinary language philosophy, the later thought of Michel Foucault, phenomenology, and experimental moral psychology – and outline briefly emerging debates within the field.

Introduction

To understand the anthropology of ethics, and its place in the wider discipline, it helps to know that two apparently contradictory things are both true. It is true that the academic discipline of anthropology has been centrally concerned with morality or ethics (these words will be used here interchangeably) throughout its whole history. It is also true that until the last couple of decades there was nothing that could reasonably be called the anthropology of ethics. Its advent has been felt to be such a discontinuity that we are routinely said to be experiencing an ‘ethical turn’, yet people also feel moved, equally routinely, to point out that anthropologists have been writing about morality all along; and they are indeed correct in saying this. So what exactly is new?

Partial engagements: Durkheimian, Boasian, and Marxist

Influential early anthropologists with otherwise widely different approaches, such as Westermarck (1906-8, 1932) and Marett (1902, 1931), put the study of the evolution and variation of morality in different societies at the centre of their work. But the view that most profoundly influenced anthropology was that of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who proposed the replacement of ‘speculative’ moral philosophy with a positivist science of ‘moral facts’. For Durkheim, the social changes brought about by modernization were so rapid and far-reaching as to produce unprecedented dislocation and the potential for discord and disorder. A science of social life was necessary to inform state policy in order to restore social solidarity. Early in his career, Durkheim thought that the newly complex division of labour might itself be the basis of a new form of social order (1933 [1893]), but he later concluded that modern societies would need, in addition, to incorporate updated, rationally designed versions of the religious institutions that had been the basis of consensus and solidarity in pre-modern societies. His monumental Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1995 [1912]) was to provide the basis for the design of a religion for modernity, being an analysis of the religious foundations of social order in what he supposed to be the earliest and most primitive societies. What was required, Durkheim argued, was for the rules of good behaviour, including those variously relevant for people in different walks of life, to be rendered sacred: endowed with a kind of inviolable authority so that people would follow them willingly. For this to happen they must be associated with the ultimate Good, that in virtue of which all human flourishing is possible. In the past, that Good had been misrecognised as a supernatural reality, or God. It is in fact not supernatural, although it is super-organic, being nothing other than society itself. It is in ritual, Durkheim argued, that people enjoy their most direct experience of the reality of society as a thing greater than the sum of its parts, and it is there too that specific values, ideas, and rules are endowed with society’s authority. Under modern conditions, the state would need to institute rituals and design a secular religion so that the rules of conduct necessary to maintain harmony and solidarity come to be widely embraced and voluntarily followed. Sociologists must therefore replace not only philosophers but also priests, and serve the state by ensuring that the institutions of modern societies are matched by the correct values and rules, and that these are inculcated through the education system as well as in its collective civic life (1957 [1937], 1961 [1925]).

As Durkheim himself observed (1953 [1906]), his basic conception of morality in many ways closely paralleled the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant’s account of the moral law, but it differed not only in being fully secularised, with society (in practice, the state) occupying the role of divine legislator, but also in being naturalised and mechanical. What for Kant was a profound philosophical problem about the relation between the human being as part of the natural world, subject to cause and effect, and that same being as a free and rational subject, is transformed for Durkheim into a crucially different conception of the ‘double existence’ of mankind: the individual, subject to ungovernable and egoistic biologically-driven desires, becomes capable of meaningful and satisfied life only insofar as he or she is incorporated into a well-functioning society. ‘Freedom’ is a matter merely of how willingly people do what society anyway requires.

Thus ‘morality’ was absolutely central to Durkheim’s conception of society, and on his account to describe a society would necessarily involve describing its shared moral rules and values. Indeed, for Durkheim, the social just is the moral (which is to say the sacred) as opposed to the individual and biological. But if this makes morality central, the cost of this particular way of doing so, it could be argued, is a strikingly streamlined and impoverished conception of ethical life. Gone is any philosophical perplexity (as in Kant) about human freedom or about what might be a good life, in light of our nature and limitations or our place in the cosmos. Gone equally (or at best, reduced to mechanical ‘forces’ acting on the individual) are all the paradoxes and tragic conflicts involved in what T. S. Eliot has one of his characters describe as ‘the endless struggle to think well of ourselves’ (1969: 402). It is a conception of ethical life as much without tragedy and conflict as it is without sainthood and striving. Morality is that mechanical process whereby individuals become a functioning ‘part’ of society.

The anthropology influenced by Durkheim’s ideas, which is to say to some degree most anthropology, especially in Europe, through the twentieth century, thus conceived of morality as consisting of the socially-sanctioned rules of conduct that tamed individual desires in the service of society. And the central problem (see, for example, the essays in Fortes 1987), in addition to showing how rule-governed behaviour functioned in an integrated system, was to explain the mechanisms by which people are brought to follow these rules: how do customary rules and roles become compelling for the individual?

In American anthropology, where Durkheim’s influence was less powerful, the Boasian conception of bounded cultures, each with its own distinctive values and modal personalities, resulted in a remarkably similar treatment of morality as the approved ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that are taken for granted and habitual in each culture (Benedict 1934). The problem, strictly comparable to Fortes’s though in a less mechanical idiom, was how processes of ‘enculturation’ ensured that individuals came to embody the values of their culture. Here the internal consistency, distinctiveness, and autonomy of individual cultures replace social integration and solidarity as the functional goods that morality serves, but the flattening of ethical life it implies is remarkably similar.

Marxist anthropologists introduced a couple of minor variations in the general approach. For some, since what Durkheimians called social solidarity is always in fact achieved in the interests of a dominant class, the problem was to explain how subordinated groups (such as young men in a gerontocracy) were induced to follow kinship and other ‘moral’ rules that were fundamentally against their interests. How was the dominant ideology inculcated (e.g. Meillassoux 1981; Bloch 1989)? For others, the focus should be on the limits to such ideologies: when exploited groups engage in violent rebellion or quiet everyday resistance, they enact values that are contrary to the dominant ideology. The anthropologist’s task here was to give articulate voice to this popular ‘moral economy’, which not coincidentally tended to coincide with the anthropologist’s own egalitarian and anti-capitalist views (e.g. Scott 1976; Taussig 1980). In both these variants, morality functions as an idiom for the tactical expression of class interest, and thus as in Durkheimian and Boasian approaches, it remains fundamentally a matter of the collective representations and rules that define and enforce group membership, whether of a whole society or of a specific class.

The limitations of these general views of ethical life did not prevent anthropologists from giving rich and insightful descriptions of the morality, as they conceived it, of diverse societies. Studies of kinship explicated the complementary rights and duties of different kinship roles, and how these are reinforced in rituals such as initiations, marriage, and ancestor worship. Studies of economic life showed how cooperation is achieved and how competition is regulated, by shared norms and values. More darkly, accusations of witchcraft, and divination and other methods of identifying malefactors, were shown to enforce moral values and mediate structural conflicts of interest. And all these studies, along with studies of political and religious life, showed how common values as well as structural principles cut across and integrated these never-actually-separate domains of life. In addition, within the terms set by this understanding of morality as collectively shared values, habits, and rules in relation to social structure, anthropologists achieved some notably sophisticated and original insights, including Leach’s ideas about how conflicting complexes of values might be dynamically related (1954), Fortes’s comparison of ideas of Fate and Justice in both scriptural and oral religions (1959), and Gluckman’s suggestion that the social dynamics of moral life can be mapped by describing the processes involved in the allocation of responsibility (1972).

The sense that all this, while valuable in its own terms, simply bypassed much of what is most important about the ethical dimension of human life, was never far from the surface. Might it be possible to broaden the range of what was included under ‘morality’ to include more than the following of obligatory rules? How do we understand what happens when people doubt or question the dominant values of their social milieu? And what about when they face irreconcilable conflicts of values, or aspire to alternative ideals and values, or respond to what they take to be ethical demands than run contrary to accepted rules and values? Can people’s sense of responsibility and freedom in relation to their own character and conduct really be written off, with a causal story about how, generally speaking, they come to do what society (or their culture or their class) requires of them? Could not anthropologists’ knowledge of the diversity of forms of moral life contribute something to debates among philosophers and others about how to understand ethics?

So punctuating the history of anthropology in the twentieth century, we find calls, sometimes by anthropologists, more often by philosophers, and on one memorable occasion by a husband-and-wife team of philosopher and anthropologist, for a more reflective focus on ethics in anthropological thought and, as part of this, a dialogue with moral philosophy (e.g. Westermarck 1932; Firth 1951, 1953; Kluckhohn 1951; Macbeath 1952; Brandt 1954; Read 1955; Ladd 1957; von Fürer-Haimendorf 1967; Vogt & Albert 1967; Edel & Edel 1968; Mayer 1981; Evens 1982; Wolfram 1982; Pocock 1986, 1988; Moody-Adams 1997; Cook 1999). But none of these various initiatives and proposals generated much of a response. No sustained debates developed within anthropology, so there was no conceptual innovation or argument that could attract much attention from other disciplines. It remained the case that when philosophers mentioned anthropology at all, it was merely as the professional exponents of cultural relativism, which meant of course that there was no substantive conversation to be had.

New departures: The anthropology of ethics

Around the turn of the millennium, a newly sustained interest in ethics began to be evident in anthropology: one that was liberated by a broadening of scope well beyond problems of social control and enculturation, and by a loosening of the commitment to cultural relativism that enabled a more rounded and productive engagement with moral philosophy. A few ethnographies and collections of essays indicated a growing interest (e.g. Parish 1994; Laidlaw 1995; Howell 1997, Briggs 1998). Then, three programmatic essays written independently of each other (Lambek 2000; Faubion 2001b; Laidlaw 2002) made overlapping cases for anthropologists to take the problem of understanding ethical life much more seriously, and each surveyed some intellectual resources they suggested might be drawn upon to help with this. For reasons that will surely not be fully understood until we have rather more hindsight (inevitably, the suggestion has already been made that it is a facet of ‘neoliberalism’, but then since scarcely anything has not been explained that way by someone recently, this is hardly significant), these suggestions seem to have struck a chord, or at any rate shortly afterwards workshops and symposia began to be held on the subject (for example, those published as Barker 2007; Corsín Jimenez 2007; Brown & Milgram 2009; Heintz 2009; Sykes 2009; Lambek 2010; Pandian & Ali 2010), what are now classic monographs began to appear (e.g. Robbins 2004; Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006), as did synoptic accounts and readers aiming to introduce students to the emerging field (Zigon 2008; Faubion 2011; Fassin 2012; Fassin & Lézé 2014; Laidlaw 2014; Lambek et al. 2016).

Surveying all this and the subsequent literature, which has continued to grow at a still gathering pace, it is possible to identify two salient features: first, a range of work that engages systematically with intellectual traditions, many in other disciplines, where there has been a sustained engagement with ethics, in an effort to develop a conceptual vocabulary for anthropology and to advance a general understanding of the nature of ethical life; and second, a series of emerging debates taking place more or less within anthropology, on topics ranging from very general theoretical matters to substantive controversies about ethical change in specific societies, as well as a series of established topics of anthropological research that have been materially enriched by being subject to ‘the ethical turn’.

Under the first of those two headings, the main philosophical orientations or disciplinary sources anthropologists of ethics have explored are: virtue ethics, ordinary language philosophy, and Michel Foucault’s ‘genealogy of ethics’, and, to a lesser extent and more recently, phenomenology and experimental psychology.

Intellectual traditions

a. Virtue ethics

In the middle of the twentieth century, two schools of thought dominated Anglophone moral philosophy: consequentialism (primarily utilitarianism), according to which courses of action are judged by calculating their relative effects (e.g. on aggregate happiness or well-being), and deontology (predominantly Kantian), which is concerned with identifying the duties and obligations necessarily pertaining to a (rational) moral agent. Both these traditions are largely abstract, deductive, normative, and ahistorical, so establishing dialogue between either and anthropology would encounter obvious difficulties. But the most significant development in moral philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, usually seen as beginning with Anscombe (1958), was a reaction against just these features of those traditions. What became known as ‘virtue ethics’ emphasises the careful description of linguistic categories, especially those describing aspects of character, conduct, and social relations, and therefore contextually sensitive interpretive descriptions of exactly the kind referred to by Clifford Geertz, in his prescription for interpretive anthropology, as ‘thick description’ (1973). For virtue ethicists, the central task is the explication of the virtues and vices that are central to the ability to thrive and flourish within a socially- and historically-located form of ethical life, with the supposed fact-value dichotomy being overcome by the fact that these concepts of good and bad conduct and character are inextricably both descriptive and evaluative. The virtue ethics revival involved a conscious recuperation of a good deal of the form, and not a little of the content, of the moral philosophy of the classical world, with Aristotle being a particularly pervasive influence. And exponents have frequently called for moral philosophy to proceed on an ethnographic or anthropological (or historical or sociological) basis. Unquestionably the philosopher writing in this tradition who has had the widest direct influence on anthropologists has been Alasdair MacIntyre, whose seminal and widely-read After Virtue (1981) directly inspired Talal Asad’s (1986) prescription for an anthropology of Islam, which in turn has been the framework in which Saba Mahmood (2005), Charles Hirschkind (2006), and others have written ethnographies of ethical (or ‘piety’) movements in Islam that have transformed the anthropological study of that religion. Anand Pandian’s ethnography of the Piramilai Kallar caste in south India (2008, 2009), which also takes the form of an explication of virtues and moral reasoning and is in some ways indebted to MacIntyre, makes in addition a persuasive argument for rejecting some of the more crudely normative elements of MacIntyre’s philosophy, accepted by these other authors, in particular the implicitly authoritarian assertion that only a tradition that is internally consistent and coherently integrated, and where orthodoxy is effectively enforced, can provide a sustainable framework for ethical life (on this, see Laidlaw 2014: Chs 2 and 4). Also influenced by MacIntyre, but more extensively drawing directly on Aristotle, Michael Lambek (2002, 2008) and Cheryl Mattingly (2012, 2014) have carefully worked out and exemplified virtue-ethical analytical methods for anthropology. Virtue ethics remains a rich and developing field, and is much more diverse than anthropological engagements have yet fully reckoned with; there has been little engagement with the important work of Martha Nussbaum (1986, 1994), Christine Swanton (2003, 2015), Charles Taylor (1989, 2014), and others. My own work has proceeded in part through an engagement with various works by Bernard Williams (e.g. 1985, 1993), and increasingly virtue ethics is developing in a self-consciously interdisciplinary direction, in which awareness of cultural diversity and the theoretical challenges this represents call directly for productive dialogue with anthropology (e.g. Snow 2015; Annas, Narvaez & Snow 2016).

b. Ordinary language philosophy

Overlapping with the virtue ethics revival is the school of thought known as ‘ordinary language philosophy’ (both were the work initially of disciples of the Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and both derived in part from his later teachings). This philosophical tradition had long been influential in anthropology, both from anthropologists’ readings of Wittgenstein and as mediated especially through the writings of J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and others, in the so-called ‘interpretive turn’ in general and specifically in manifold uses of the idea of performativity. Indirectly, through Clifford Geertz (1973, 1983), the influence of Wittgenstein’s later thought has been very wide indeed, even if not all anthropologists have been impressed (see especially Gellner 1959, 1998). Two authors in particular have recently championed the importance of ordinary language philosophy specifically for the anthropology of ethics, and their proposals for ‘ordinary ethics’ have attracted a good deal of interest and comment. For Michael Lambek (2010, 2015b) and for Veena Das (2010, 2012, 2015), following Wittgenstein and Austin and also later interpreters such as Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell, it is impossible to separate action from the concepts that structure its intentional content, which means that even apparently unthinking or habitual conduct is subject to criteria and embodies ethical judgement. They conclude accordingly that ethics is immanent in human action as such. Further, Das in particular insists that while the ethical is therefore properly to be located in the ordinary or everyday, we should be intensely suspicious of all claims to represent any extraordinary or transcendent ‘good’, whether made by individuals or religious or state institutions or in the name of formalised, aspirational ethical projects: these are emphatically not where the ethical is to be sought. Many have found these arguments persuasive and ethnographically productive (e.g. Jackson 2013; Stafford 2013; Singh 2015). Debate on the position has focused on two main sets of questions: just what it means to say that the ethical is ‘immanent’ in all human action, and whether this risks once again collapsing ethics into ‘the social’ (on this see Lempert 2013; Lempert 2014; Laidlaw 2014b; Zigon 2014; Lambek 2015a; Lempert 2015); and whether it unhelpfully treats the categories of the ordinary and extraordinary normatively rather than ethnographically, and so forecloses prematurely on what it makes sense to include within the ethical, by assuming it must contain only phenomena of which one approves (Clarke 2014; Venkatesan 2015; Robbins 2016; Laidlaw 2017).

c. Michel Foucault

A third formative source of ideas in the development of the anthropology of ethics has been the later writings of Michel Foucault: the project he referred to as his ‘genealogy of ethics’. This project shows both continuities and discontinuities from his earlier and better-known studies of asylums, clinics, and prisons. In his genealogy of ethics, Foucault continues and extends his influential rethinking of the concept of power, pursued in those earlier studies, but now encompassing an equally radical rethinking of that of freedom, such that these two concepts are not defined negatively as what the other excludes, and such that freedom emerges as a central term in the analysis of how subjects are constituted in diverse historical and social contexts. Power is a pervasive aspect of human relations not in spite of the fact that, but only because, human subjects are free (Foucault 1982). They have the capacity to reflect, to stand back from their own conduct and constitute it as an object of knowledge, and to act so as to change themselves; and this reflective freedom is the basis of ethics.

Substantively, Foucault seeks to trace the genealogy of what he calls ‘the desiring subject’: how did it come to be that in the modern West people think of themselves as defined by their desires, such that the modern concept of ‘sexuality’ seems to reveal one’s inner nature and destiny? To tell this story properly requires beginning from a form of thought and practice constituted altogether differently. The ethical life of classical Athens, Foucault seeks to show, was not yet based as is the modern complex on what he calls ‘a hermeneutics of desire’. Instead, it was ‘an ethics of existence’. What he means by this is that citizens of classical Athens were invited, in the dominant ethical discourses of their time, not to discover who and what they were by uncovering their hidden desires – perhaps with the aid of therapists, priests, or psychiatrists, as we are invited to do – but instead consciously to fashion themselves, and to do so, in particular, with regard to their fitness to exercise both freedom and power in relation to others. In the two last published volumes of his History of Sexuality (1986, 1988), and in a number of essays, interviews, and posthumously published lectures (1980, 1997, 2005, 2010, 2011), Foucault sets out to describe this radically different form of ethical thought and practice, and the millennium-long process whereby it was replaced by the hermeneutics of desire, from which our own taken-for-granted assumptions – including those of Foucault’s Marxist and Freudian contemporaries who fancied themselves radicals – derive.

Of course, Foucault’s diagnosis of the infirmities of our political discourse and the sources of our identity are a challenging provocation for anthropologists, as they overturn many of the accepted understandings widely shared in modern societies. But these writings also provide a more focused impetus to the anthropology of ethics, because in the course of pursuing these arguments, Foucault develops a number of conceptual resources for the ethnographic and comparative analysis of forms of ethical life, including a distinction between forms of moral life dominated by rules and codes, and those organised around more optative projects of ethical self-fashioning, and a formal scheme for making comparisons among the latter.

The conceptual and analytic resources Foucault developed in his genealogy of ethics (for extended commentary see Faubion 2011 and Laidlaw 2014) have been productively used by anthropologists in a range of ethnographic studies (e.g. Laidlaw 1995; Rabinow 1996; Faubion 2001; Robbins 2004; Mahmood 2005; Cook 2010; Dave 2012). Perhaps the most widely shared reservation among anthropologists about Foucault’s analytics of ethics concerns the extent to which it relies on the notion of freedom. Despite the fact that the Foucauldian concept of freedom is necessarily limited, and socially and historically variable, anthropologists are made ‘nervous’ and ‘uneasy’ because it plays such a prominent part in what they tend to call ‘Western common sense’ (for sophisticated expressions of these concerns see Robbins 2007 and Keane 2014) and therefore use of the notion analytically might be ethnocentric. My own view is that the real danger of ethnocentrism here lies not in taking for granted a supposedly Western common sense about freedom, since there is in fact no such agreement, but rather in allowing the fiercely contested place of the idea of freedom in Western political debate to give rise to an intellectual taboo, preventing both the acknowledgement of the ethnographic prevalence of concepts of freedom well beyond the modern West and serious analytical engagement with the question of the place of freedom in ethical life.

d. Phenomenology

Anthropologists have been influenced by philosophers who fall under the designation ‘phenomenological’ for a very long time indeed: Lévi-Strauss’s great book The Savage Mind (1966 [1962]) was dedicated to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, after all. The category ‘phenomenology’ covers a wide range of thinkers, who have in common only that they take as their subject matter structures of experience and consciousness. Those who identify themselves as part of this tradition typically qualify the designation in one of a number of overlapping ways (hermeneutic, existentialist, dialectical, or transcendental phenomenology, etc.) and those identified as its major thinkers (variously Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Scheler, Sartre, Levinas, Schutz, Arendt, Dilthey, Garfinkel, Derrida – some even include James and Dewey) adopted a wide range of conflicting positions. Nevertheless, there are those who have argued in recent decades that there is enough of common substance in phenomenology to provide the basis for a distinctive project of ‘phenomenological anthropology’ (e.g. Jackson 1996; Desjarlais & Throop 2011). A common objection, of course, is that so much of what phenomenological thinkers say is couched in universal and culture-free terms and is concerned with ostensibly universal dimensions of human experience, and although some proponents of ‘cultural phenomenology’ have attempted to link questions of selfhood and experience to specific social and cultural settings (e.g. Csordas 1999), the increasingly dominant tendency has been to comment on what are seen as existential challenges of human being as such, or in the context of very generally conceived global circumstances (Weiner 2001; Jackson 2005, 2013; Ingold 2011, 2013).

Unsurprisingly, some anthropologists of this persuasion have proposed that phenomenology also provides the basis for a distinctive approach to the anthropology of ethics (Kleinman 2006; Zigon 2009, 2014; Jackson 2013; Throop 2010, 2012, 2016; see also Wentzer 2016). A difficulty here is that these anthropologists owe primary allegiance to different foundational phenomenological thinkers, and therefore divergent intellectual programmes, and these imply rather different trajectories for the anthropological study of ethics. Thus, while Kleinman’s phenomenology is mediated through American pragmatism, and Jackson draws most concertedly on Merleau-Ponty, Zigon by contrast speaks up in particular for ‘those of us who take Heidegger seriously’ (2009) and his ‘theory of moral breakdown’ (2008) is presented as being directly derived from Heidegger. Given these differences, calls for a specifically phenomenological approach to morality perhaps sometimes express a general preference for a certain theoretical vocabulary in anthropology, more than a commitment to specific ideas or concepts in relation to ethics. And given how differently ethics figures in the writings of major phenomenological thinkers – while for some it is a central concern, Heidegger was, as it seems to me, almost as much a stranger to ethics in thought as in his life – some considerable conceptual work would be required to reconcile divergent starting points into a unified research programme, if the prospect of a distinctive, comprehensively phenomenological anthropology of ethics is to be realised. But even if that is not to come to pass, phenomenological ideas and concepts are already being productively deployed, as variously dominant or subsidiary conceptual components, in ethnographies of ethical life of otherwise quite divergent character (e.g. Parish 1994; Lester 2005; Marsden 2005; Prasad 2007; Mattingly 2014; Throop 2010; Simon 2014; Schielke 2015; Keane 2016).

e. Experimental psychology

A different kind of challenge is presented by the burgeoning research carried out by experimental psychologists in recent years on how people in varied situations make moral judgements and decisions, and the role especially of emotions in shaping those decisions (for a thoughtful survey, see Appiah 2008). Many of the methodological assumptions made in that research strike most anthropologists as unrealistic; it also often makes decidedly parochial assumptions about what counts as ‘morality’; and genuinely cross-cultural research is extremely difficult, and therefore rare. But the difficulties are not insuperable, as demonstrated by pioneering research using experimental methods by anthropologists Rita Astuti and Maurice Bloch (2015). For several years, Richard Shweder and others have been developing a synthesis of anthropological and psychological research, which they refer to as ‘cultural psychology’ (1991), and this has included a distinctive approach to the question of cultural variation in moral reasoning. In a challenge to the most influential psychological accounts of moral development (e.g. Kohlberg 1981; Turiel 1983), which focused entirely on the supposedly universal moral principles of justice, emphasising autonomy and protection from harm, Shweder and his colleagues (Shweder et al. 1997) argue that there are three distinct areas of concern in moral reasoning – autonomy (which encompasses justice/harm), community, and divinity – and that these are balanced differently in more individualistic and more collectivist cultures. So far at least, this analysis has seemed to most anthropologists of ethics to be overly schematic, and not much other anthropological research has been guided by it (although see Cassaniti & Hickman 2014 for anthropological attempts to follow Shweder’s lead). However, a modified form has been adopted by one of the most innovative psychologists of moral development writing today (Haidt 2013), and this work is formulated in such a way that it both invites and enables dialogue with anthropology. The intellectual basis for such cooperation has been greatly strengthened by Webb Keane’s recent book, Ethical Life (2016), which achieves a critical synthesis of a wide range of psychological research with anthropological and historical perspectives. Perhaps the most salient and interesting challenge in all of this literature for the anthropology of ethics is the foundational role much of it implies, in ethical thought and practice, of emotions and sentiments. A serious engagement with this literature, and with the broad Smith/Humean tradition in moral philosophy that emphasises moral sentiments, might have the potential to enrich the anthropology of ethics while at the same time breathing new life into the anthropology of emotions.

Emerging debates

With intellectual resources drawn largely from these five broad and diverse sources, what briefly are the concepts, questions, and topics of debate anthropologists of ethics and morality are beginning to explore? Having realised that collective rules do not exhaust the ethical dimension of social life, they are exploring a range of other ways in which ethical thought is organised socially. More or less voluntary projects through which people work to fashion themselves and cultivate ethical qualities have been studied mostly in religious contexts (e.g. Lester 2005; Mahmood 2005; Marsden 2005; Eberhardt 2006; Hirschkind 2006; Cook 2010; Bender & Taves 2012; Fisher 2014; Cassaniti 2015), but also in fields as diverse as parenthood (Paxson 2004; Clarke 2009; Kuan 2015) and activism (Dave 2012; Heywood 2015a, 2015b; Lazar 2016). There is also a renewed interest in the concepts of value and values (Robbins 2012, 2013). And following a pioneering early paper by Caroline Humphrey (1997), there has been interest in the part played in ethical life by modelling one’s conduct on a chosen ‘exemplar’ (who might be a known, historical, or mythical individual), rather than, or in addition to, the following of moral rules (Højer & Bandak 2015; Robbins forthcoming). All of this has also prompted the appropriate corrective: the realization that when the specificity of rules as a mode of organising ethical life is recognised, elaborate attention to rules, when and where it occurs, becomes interesting in its own right (Dresch & Skoda 2012; Pirie & Scheele 2014; Dresch & Scheele 2015, especially Clarke 2015). Anthropologists have long found more rich and subtle resources for thinking about moral life in the writings of Marcel Mauss, Durkheim’s nephew and sometime collaborator, than in Durkheim himself (see, for example, Carrithers et al. 1985). The stimulus of the new anthropology of ethics has, however, also prompted a creative and careful re-reading of Durkheim, with a view to finding insights in relation to ethical life quite other than those derived by mainstream anthropology through the twentieth century (e.g. Stavrianakis 2016).

Although it is occasionally suggested (in seminars and informal discussion) that the very category of ethics may be inapplicable in this or that part of the world (the usual candidates being Melanesia and Amazonia, and conditions of extreme poverty and exclusion), a sustained exposition of that position has yet to be attempted, and persuasive ethnographic accounts of ethical life in just such places and situations have been published (Robbins 2004; Londoño Sulkin 2012; Roberts 2016; see also Lear 2006, 2015). But if the ethnographic range of the anthropology of ethics is global, there is something of a special case, in terms of density, with China. The idea has gained some currency in popular discourse in China itself that in the wake of the catastrophes of Maoism and the lurching dislocations of the ‘reform’ era, the country might be enduring an especially profound ‘moral crisis’. It is perhaps for this reason that a strikingly rich and varied ethnographic literature on aspects of moral life in China has appeared in the last few years, with emerging debate on what, if anything, a notion of civilizational moral crisis might mean, and in what ways, if any, it might apply (Liu 2002, 2009; Jankowiak 2004; Yan 2009a, 2009b, 2014, 2016; Oxfeld 2010; Zhang, Kleinman & Yu 2011; Kleinman 2011; Steinmüller 2013; Fisher 2014; Xu 2014; Kuan 2015).

So, the development of the anthropology of ethics has not seen the emergence of a new sub-discipline. It has instead constituted both a renewal (and in some cases rediscovery) of concerns with deep roots in the discipline, and a fairly radical re-thinking of the fundamentals of anthropological theory, in which perennial questions of human agency and social causation have been revisited in new ways. For instance, it has been a theme in the anthropology of ethics (see Laidlaw 2016) to pay attention to the specific modes and moods of people’s personal striving, resisting the all-too-common reflex in much recent anthropology of reducing all such phenomena to mere expressions of neoliberalism: some thought-provoking examples, strikingly different from each other, include Kuan (2015), Schielke (2015), Singh (2015), Cook (2016), and Marsden (2016). And of course, renewed interest in ethics in the discipline has profoundly inflected anthropological analysis and critique of the two most newly powerful discourses and sets of institutions and practices through which ‘doing good’ is organised in the contemporary world: human rights and humanitarianism, respectively (see Bornstein 2003, 2012; Englund 2006; Ticktin 2006; Bornstein & Redfield 2011; Elisha 2011; Fassin 2012; Keane 2016: 248-59). Other topics that have proven amenable to new and interesting forms of anthropological analysis, once approached in part as an aspect of the ethical dimension of social life, include happiness (Kavedžua & Walker 2016), the giving and receiving of favours (Henig & Makovicky 2017), and the varied practices and phenomena of detachment (Candea et al. 2015). A further development to note, however, lies outside anthropology itself, in highly encouraging signs of considerably more informed and considered use of anthropological writings than heretofore in discussions of morality in other disciplines, including in psychology (e.g. Haidt 2013), moral philosophy (Lear 2006, 2015; Lillehammer 2014), and theology (Banner 2014). Finally, the rich potential for productive interdisciplinary conversation is illustrated by recently published symposia, on ethical conversations conducted across cultural borders (Mair & Evans 2016) and on the fundamental sources and forms of ethical life (Mattingly et al. 2017).

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——— 2009. Phenomenological anthropology and morality: a reply to Robbins. Ethnos 74, 286-88.

——— 2014. An ethics of dwelling and a politics of world-building: a critical response to ordinary ethics. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20, 746-64.

Zhang, E., A. Kleinman & T. Weiming (eds) 2011. Governance of life in Chinese moral experience: the quest for an adequate life. Abingdon: Routledge.

Note on contributor

James Laidlaw is William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of King’s College. He has conducted fieldwork in India, Inner Mongolia, Bhutan, and Taiwan. His most recent book is The subject of virtue: an anthropology of ethics and freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Prof. James Laidlaw, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. jal6@cam.ac.uk

Resistance

Felix Stein — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 14:21:43 +0000

Fiona Wright

University of Cambridge

Initially published 6 Oct 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16resistance

Abstract:

With images of protest and dissent widespread and frequently circulated in news broadcasts and social media posts, resistance to prevailing power structures seems to be an expected and regular feature of contemporary life. This entry explores how anthropology has linked these spectacular moments of resistance to broader social questions. It further explains how identifying a particular practice or process as a form of resistance is not always straightforward when broader context is thus taken into consideration. I do this by considering how resistance has appeared (or has been neglected) as a topic of study through the history of anthropology until the present day, and how prevailing theoretical frameworks and political contexts shaped what anthropologists made of resistance in different periods.

The entry begins from early political anthropology’s avoidance of questions of conflict and social inequality and moves through paradigm-shifting moments in the discipline – in particular, post-colonial and Marxist analyses – whereby resistance and social change became central concerns. It then examines how anthropologists began to study ‘everyday resistance’ and to emphasise how ethnography can reveal many small and subtle acts as forms of resistance, and as linked to more obvious and public forms of protest. Questions of consciousness and intentionality in political practice that are raised by everyday struggles are then considered in connection to the problem of defining resistance. In light of a focus on unconscious practices or acts that simultaneously challenge certain power structures and reinforce or create different ones, resistance is framed as that which constitutes a subversive relationship to forms of domination or systems that reproduce inequality, but that is not necessarily intentional or outside of prevailing political structures. Additionally, I consider anthropologists’ changing relation to resistance – from one of neglect to the position of activist or engaged researcher – as shifting forms of media and communication highlight researchers’ involvement in shaping perceptions of more and less organised forms of political struggle.

Introduction

It might seem like resistance is both a frequent occurrence and something that we recognise immediately when we see it. Images of protesting crowds, confrontations with police and military, workers’ strikes, or silent vigils attest to the ubiquity of resistance as various ways in which people organise themselves to challenge systems of inequality and oppression. Scenes such as massive crowds at Tahrir Square following the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, or of demonstrations and strikes in Greece opposing public spending cuts and other austerity measures, seem to define and pervade contemporary life in diverse global contexts. Anthropologists have explored the nature of these events and their political effects, understanding them as instances of resistance against domination by states and other powerful institutions as well as economic systems more broadly. The discipline has also, however, been interested in understanding the broader everyday contexts that make these spectacular events and moments possible. Seeing resistance as one element in a complex system of power relations, anthropologists have sought to describe and explain acts of resistance within the rich social, cultural, and economic fabrics in which they take place.

At the same time, anthropologists have approached the idea of resistance with some caution: do protest movements and uprisings really have subversive outcomes? And conversely, how do people resist and challenge the status quo in unintentional and seemingly un-political ways? Recognising a particular act or practice as resistance is often linked to the broader theory of power and politics employed. For example, following the famous dictum of feminism, ‘the personal is political’, anthropologists have considered women’s acts within the intimate domain of their domestic relationships as involving forms of resistance. Or, when analyzing protest movements, that people’s personal lives impact upon their capacity to act within public and organised politics. On the other hand, anthropologists have also tried to see resistance where it is less expected. This has often involved stepping back from overarching theoretical frames such as feminism or Marxism when describing and analyzing resistance.

In the following essay, I trace the history of the anthropology of resistance – from its beginnings as a moot concept within a discipline concerned with understanding order, to its attempts to analyze the contemporary proliferation of protest movements. In this way I explore how resistance can be an unintentional, unconscious, and ambiguous feature of the everyday, as well as the desired outcome of organised political movements.

Order and rebellion: resistance in the shadows

Early anthropological attention to resistance was framed in the terms of the dominant political anthropology of the time (up until the late 1950s), which emphasised the maintenance of social order and avoided questions of oppression and conflict. In light of this focus, those anthropologists who did analyze points of friction tended to depict them as the temporary release of social tensions. This would allow those who were discontent or found themselves in subordinate positions to then be re-absorbed into the normal social fabric with the threat of potential upheaval removed. A key work in this vein was Max Gluckman’s Rituals of rebellion in South-east Africa (1954), in which fertility rituals and ceremonies humiliating royal leaders among Zulu, Tsonga, and Swazi peoples were treated as moments in which social taboos can be broken and rebellious drives aired so that all involved – both the weak and the powerful – can continue in their assigned social roles without revolution. Social hierarchies are thus in fact protected, Gluckman claimed, by socially sanctioned expressions of discontent, or at least by the recognition of the existence of inequality within a society and ritualised attempts to deal with it.

This approach from political anthropology was picked up and elaborated into one of the most influential contributions to the anthropology of ritual and religion, by Gluckman’s student Victor Turner. Based on his fieldwork with the Ndembu of Zambia, Turner combined Gluckman’s attention to the cathartic dimension of rituals of rebellion with his own interest in rites of passage that marked, for example, the change from youth to adulthood, to suggest the idea of ‘liminality’ (1969). In the liminal phase of ritual, Turner argued, status roles could be reversed and subjugated members of a society can assume powerful positions, as ‘anti-structure’ is allowed to prevail over ‘structure’, and a temporarily egalitarian status of ‘communitas’ – a fervent and powerful feeling of group bondedness – is reached. Unlike Gluckman, though, Turner took this model and applied it to various social movements and cultural phenomena in other times and places, notably to secular contexts and to the groups in Europe and North America, such as the artists and poets of the Beat Generation and their successors the ‘hippies’, citing Bob Dylan as the ‘authentic voice of spontaneous communitas’ (Turner 1969: 165). In framing such phenomena in this way, and arguing that their enactments of different kinds of power relations were basically utopian moments that could not be sustained within the political and economic systems in which they operated, Turner maintained a conservative view of social order that made resistance seem like an anomaly or even a naïve and youthful aspiration to social change that could never be realised.

Resistance as it is generally considered - as a challenge to power or domination - was thus largely written out of anthropology of this period. When it did appear, it reinforced the view of prevailing political anthropology approaches at the time: that societies were rather static and maintained a basic equilibrium. This went hand in hand with the almost total absence in these writings of the colonial authorities’ presence in the places where anthropologists were working. The ways in which European powers maintained their rule but also faced persistent challenges to it by colonised peoples emerged later, as Marxist and post-colonial theoretical approaches gained ground in anthropological work.

From order to conflict: Marxist and post-colonial anthropology

Along with the discipline in general, political anthropology underwent a fundamental change in the wake of the national anti-colonial movements of the mid-twentieth century, and so too resistance began to take a more central place in analyses of political systems. As power began to look less static, both in the formerly colonised countries and with the anti-war and anti-capitalist movements elsewhere, two key theoretical approaches shaped anthropological takes on resistance. Marxist and post-colonial perspectives both introduced a profound historicisation of anthropological knowledge, sometimes in differing and sometimes in converging ways, such that no approach to power or to resistance could now render society or culture as unchanging or uncontested systems that simply reproduce themselves.

On the one hand, a Marxist emphasis on modes of production informed a generation of political anthropologists who paid attention to how people’s labour and material circumstances affected their social and cultural practices, beliefs, and relationships more broadly. Eric Wolf’s (1982) and Sidney Mintz’ (1985) work on the entanglement of local economic and political processes with global markets and systems of inequality provided key reference points for those who wished to understand how changing global economies led to sometimes unfamiliar and often ambivalent forms of resistance.

Michael Taussig’s The devil and commodity fetishism in South America (1980) remains a provocative example of this kind of work, as he argued that in the rapid change from peasantry to work on sugarcane plantations in Colombia, workers’ beliefs about money earned as wages and their integration of these with the Christian symbol of the devil expressed an indigenous critique of both capitalism and the religion of the Spanish colonisers. Increased productivity, and thus higher earnings, were thought to emanate from a pact with the devil, and the worker concerned was said to suffer a painful, early death. Taussig thus argued that plantation workers were expressing and condemning the suffering brought about by the new economy through the idiom of the pre-commoditised relationship with material objects they had as peasants, when workers and the material things they made and circulated were entwined with their very person. The banknotes earned as wages in the plantations are thus symbolised as having a magical quality that can cause suffering and bad fortune, in Taussig’s twist on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism.

The point of studies like these is at least partly to disturb a historical narrative that sees the growth of global capitalism and its attendant securing of hegemony as a linear process. By pointing to expressions of resistance on the part of workers, of more and less conscious forms, and with greater or lesser immediate impacts, this focus on resistance has attempted to lend ethnographic richness to broader theoretical framings of political economy, as well as to undermine modernist accounts that anticipate such developments as inevitable and universally similar. At the same time, though, another intellectual trend to come out of this historical period questioned the sometimes unexamined assumptions of these texts about the false consciousness of workers and the ability of the ethnographer to truly know what the intentions or understandings of the people with whom they did research actually were.

Emerging mainly out of historical studies of colonial India, the subaltern studies school of thinkers suggested that much of the ethnographic record and anthropological theorising that came with it relied too heavily on elite and colonial knowledge. It was unable to take into account the vast majority of the world’s ordinary, colonised people – the subalterns – and the ways in which they were not represented in most scholarship. The subaltern studies scholars attempted to study the resistance of groups such as peasants and the way hegemony was never complete in colonial societies, in a way that classical Marxism could not do because of its assumptions about class structure and historical change. The subaltern studies school differed from the Marxist notion that an individual’s political consciousness was determined by their position in the class system, and that this would eventually lead to collective struggle aimed at forwarding class-based interests. Rather, they proposed, different forms of individual and political consciousness existed in non-Western histories that universalist theories such as Marxism were unable to comprehend. Thus, the proposition of subaltern ‘autonomy’ (Guha 1983) – a domain of consciousness outside of elite and colonial representations – was offered as the neglected side of uprisings against the colonial state and raised issues of agency and will in resistance. This line of thought opened significant questions about the nature of consciousness, agency, and knowledge in resistance and political struggle. What do we make of acts that look like resistance, but are not interpreted as such by those performing them? Does the idea of ‘false consciousness’ provide an answer, or can we think about ways of thinking outside of systems of power and domination? With increased attention towards such forms of intention and perception in anthropology more broadly, as well as in the study of politics, the question of resistance became salient in new ways, not least because traditional theories of domination and class struggle had been shaken by emerging scholarship in the wake of decolonisation.

Culture, identity and symbolism: everyday resistance

In light of the interest in histories of resistance that had previously gone unwritten, the 1980s and 1990s saw a wave of work focusing on resistance where it had not been seen before. James Scott’s work was key in creating an analytical framework of ‘everyday acts of resistance’ that saw individual acts that were not formally part of any insurgent political movement as ways in which people resisted domination in banal and often unnoticed ways. Scott’s study built on Marxist and post-colonial attention to peasant studies, arguing that a lack of mass political action or violent uprising did not mean that resistance was not occurring. Based on his fieldwork in Malaysia, in Weapons of the weak (1985) Scott claimed that although outwardly compliant with rich local landowners, poor villagers were not taken in by inequality and domination but rather chose when and how to express discontent through low-level sabotage and private gossip that could be considered an everyday form of class struggle and resistance. In the later Domination and the arts of resistance (1990), he elaborated on these ideas and introduced the concept of ‘hidden transcripts’ – the ‘offstage’ criticisms of the powerful that show that subordinate groups are not mystified or falsely conscious, as in classical conceptions of hegemony. Among his wide-ranging examples of hidden transcripts, Scott offers the case of slaves’ ‘theft’, arguing that their taking of crops of livestock was seen as a kind of reclaiming of that which they had produced, although it was described as theft or pilfering by slave-owners or overseers. The point of taking such produce without being detected was not only to avoid punishment or to satisfy hunger but also to achieve an invisible culture of reclaiming ownership over the fruits of their own labour that subverted slave-owners’ narratives of property and theft. With this work Scott not only intervened in debates within Marxism, but also drew anthropologists’ attention to the banal forms of being dominated and resisting that domination, and offered a way of investigating these questions with the detail of ethnography rather than broad political theory.

Some of the most influential ethnographic work in this vein took this preoccupation with the everyday to classic subjects of anthropological fascination, such as symbolism, religious practice, and spirit possession, and re-read these phenomena in the light of this lens of domination and resistance. Thus Jean Comaroff, for example, studied the rise of Zionist churches among the Tshidi of South Africa as tied up in the persistence of indigenous cultural categories through colonial rule and capitalist transformations (1985). Comaroff’s argument is not that Tshidi ‘culture’ survives untouched by what are presumed to be external political forces, but that both mutually shape each other, and that the encounter is contained and expressed in various symbolic and ritual practices, which thus articulate a subversive manipulation of signs of racial and class inequality. Zionist ritual dress, for example, is adopted but transformed by Tshidi congregants, by changing its colours to those of pro-colonial symbols, or through Tshidi women wearing garments traditionally donned by male Protestant bishops. Whilst certainly still concerned with finessing Marxist concepts such as ideology and hegemony, this anthropological approach also exploited the banal nature of these phenomena to analyze how resistance takes place in the embodied and subjective realm of cultural practice, and thus Comaroff also called on other influential theorists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault, in her analysis of how politics permeates the everyday. Similarly, Aihwa Ong’s Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline explores gender and female sexuality as the site of both domination and of resistance, although often of an unwilled nature (1987). In tune with the influence of feminist theory on the anthropology of gender, kinship, and production, Ong argues that Malay women factory workers’ frequent spirit possessions on the factory floor were a mode of defiance against their control by non-Malay male supervisors. Along with small acts that decrease the women’s productivity, as in Scott’s framing of the various acts and forms of speech that constitute hidden transcripts, the affliction of spirit possession and its temporary release of women from their workplace is interpreted as an unconscious resistance against capitalist power and patriarchy, within the context of their family and village lives as well as in much broader spectrums of power within the global economy.

This anthropological work resonated with the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, who, although not anthropologists, led the field in producing ethnographic work sensitive to the often small-scale reverberations of much larger political and economic structures, mostly focusing on British subcultures and working class life. Paul Willis’ Learning to labor (1977) is a close study of twelve white working class English school boys, ‘the lads’, and analyses how their rejection of the system of academic achievement offered by the formal education system contributes to the reproduction of their class position and future as working class labourers. Unlike Scott’s ‘hidden transcripts’, though, Willis’ emphasis on the lads’ irreverent approach to authority and the political ramifications of their clowning around represented a more ambivalent take on resistance even as he similarly rejected the idea that these boys were duped or mystified by power. The ways in which they resisted power became, with a bitter irony, a key part of why they continued to be oppressed by it. The question this interpretation raises, then, as with the anthropology of everyday resistance, is, is it really resistance? If resistance is either not named as such by those engaging in it, or contributes only to reinforcing domination, the sense of the term becomes less clear, particularly for anthropologists interested in being true to their ethnographic material rather than only advancing a theoretical or political argument. As everyday resistance seemed to proliferate, then, anthropologists also began to take a step back and cast a critical eye on this burgeoning field of work.

Too much resistance: power and subjectivity

In light of the growing anthropological attention to resistance, in its spectacular as well as everyday forms, critical questions about this field of study began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, anthropologists reflected on what acts may truly count as resistance, and whether scholars had begun to pre-determine their analyses by looking too hard for it. Lila Abu-Lughod was one of those who critically re-evaulated earlier work, including her own analysis of women’s and young men’s love poetry and other practices among Egyptian Bedouins as subtle forms of defiance against local hierarchical and patriarchal moral codes (1986). In her later article, The romance of resistance (1990), Abu-Lughod influentially argued that resistance is not external, or in opposition, to power, but is rather a ‘diagnostic’ of it: a reflection of power structures within a given context. Thus she suggested that the resistance to local hierarchies in her earlier ethnography entailed an entanglement or complicity with another form, such as the state or global markets, which could tell us about the shifting political economy of Egypt at the time. She cited Foucault’s argument that power, rather than being only oppressive or negative, is productive of all kinds of practice, subjectivity, and knowledge, and is diffused through all spheres of life rather than held and imposed top-down by the state or other entities (Foucault 1979).

This characterisation of anthropological work on resistance as romanticising was echoed in other writing during this period, which examined the investment on the part of anthropologists in certain moral or political projects. Some claimed that this propelled them to insist on an idealised picture of the oppressed as heroically standing up against those who dominate them (Brown 1996), while others defended such ethical engagements on the part of the anthropologist but argued that they required greater reflexivity about this positionality as well as more complex ethnographic description to capture ambivalence in projects of resistance (Ortner 1995; Scheper-Hughes 1995). Similarly, anthropologists started to write about cases in which practices of resistance could simultaneously challenge existing kinds of oppression and contribute to the creation or reproduction of other kinds of hegemony (Jean-Klein 2001; Kulick 1996; Theodossopoulos 2014).

The study of resistance becomes, in these critical perspectives, the starting point for broader questions of political agency and subjectivity. For, if we cannot identify resistance or acquiescence as clearly distinct from one another, and if both can be present in the same set of practices, this has significant implications for theories of how people act, and with what kind of consciousness or intentions, within political systems. The gendered aspects of resistance and politics, and feminist theory’s contribution to our understanding of it, were the subject of much anthropological work that considered these issues. Begoña Aretxaga’s study of women’s roles within working class Catholic struggles against British rule in Northern Ireland considered resistance within its nationalist and gendered context, arguing that women neither passively receive nor freely navigate these dominant political tropes (1997). Motherhood, for example, was held up as a central symbolic value in the communities Aretxaga worked with, and although she cites maternal suffering as a subjective motivation for political action among Catholic women, it was also a trope through which they collectively challenged husbands’ and sons’ dominance in political activism. That is, whilst being able to draw power from the potent nationalist and Catholic symbol of the mother who suffers the pains of her son, the legitimisation of women’s involvement in politics through such symbolism also contributed to their reconfiguring of domestic and intimate relations with their husbands and children. The ideology of motherhood thus bolstered women’s participation into political struggle at the national level whilst also helping to transform some of its key social and economic underpinnings. Further, Aretxaga analyzed women prisoners’ participation in the ‘dirty protest’ in Armagh prison, and the use of their menstrual blood as a transgression of powerful taboos governing the expression of female sexuality.^[1] Aretxaga suggests that whilst women’s actions were conscious and intentional, they also relied on unconscious and emotional motivations of rejecting gendered humiliation, a level of personal experience which thus becomes part of the political realm and practices of resistance.

The role of the unconscious and the emotional, or affective, in resistance, and the ways in which political contexts shape these aspects of subjectivity, raises important questions about how social change and individual action or experience are linked. The feminist philosopher Judith Butler, herself influenced by both Foucault and psychoanalytic thought, argued that agency is made possible only through the workings of power, as people can only speak and be heard through the language and cultural forms available to them within specific historical, and political, contexts (1997). Resistance and social change, in this theory, are the consequences of modifications – whether intentional or accidental – of dominant forms of expression and practice. This theoretical model of agency has been influential in political anthropology, but has also been questioned because of the way it emphasises agency as linked primarily with social change and resistance. Saba Mahmood, in her work on an Islamic women’s piety movement in Egypt, argued that this aspect of Butler’s work reflects a broader problem within Western liberal feminism, in its assumptions that freedom and agency have to imply opposition to authority (2005). Mahmood demonstrated ethnographically how the women she worked with in Cairo were often interested in living up to Islamic moral teachings, rather than challenging them, and argued that this need not mean that these women were therefore reproducing their own oppression, but rather that agency does not always equate to resistance.

When resistance is seen as a subjective as well as social encounter with power, then, our view of politics and its transformations become an ever richer field of investigation, whether one is skeptical of resistance studies or argues for more attention to the ambiguities and complexities within it. With this area of intimate and embodied experience opened up as a legitimate domain of anthropological thought, these critical takes on resistance promoted a new set of theoretical vocabularies that contemporary anthropologists have been able to draw on as historical events once again made resistance a key concern for the discipline.

Imagining different futures: contemporary anthropological approaches to resistance

From the late 1990s until the contemporary moment, the prominence of anti-globalisation protests, the events of the ‘Arab Spring’, and the rise of socio-economic and racial justice movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter, have brought about a renewed interest in resistance, social movements, and activism in anthropology. Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of this recent work has been its focus on media and communication technologies, both as a factor in how resistance plays out, and relating to the potential for anthropologists to be politically engaged and in dialogue with the people with whom they conduct research. Although anthropological accounts have undermined popular understandings of these movements as driven by social media, pointing to the very real and often risky presence of protestors’ bodies in public spaces, they have also not underestimated the possibilities for activism opened up by technologies such as Facebook or Twitter, and have considered how virtual networks contribute to novel forms of political organisation. An example is the ‘hashtag activism’ in the protests that followed the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, and in the Black Lives Matters movement that grew after this and other similar killings in the USA. This kind of engagement became a key way in which people across the country and elsewhere expressed solidarity with those demonstrating in Ferguson (Bonilla & Rosa 2015). This online activism exposed and played with dominant media stereotypes and racist language and allowed for users to actively re-inscribe the meaning of the black body, unlike in physical confrontations with police in demonstrations where it is often cast as threatening and dangerous.

Other work has pointed to the different qualities of various kinds of online communication and media, arguing that whilst email list-servs and web fora were crucial in building and maintaining activist networks in the anti-globalisation movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s, social media such as Facebook and Twitter have been less useful for in-depth communication among activists working closely with each other but have contributed to the spread of movements such as Occupy beyond typical activist circles and have helped to create feelings of solidarity and collectivity across wide and disparate social contexts (Juris 2012). The participation of broader publics in socioeconomic justice and antiracist movements in the ‘real time’ of social media has also prompted anthropologists to write shorter and open-access pieces for audiences outside of the academy as well as within it. These are generally published faster than traditional academic articles and aim to contribute to public debates about these protests and the power structures they hope to challenge. The journal Cultural Anthropology, for example, has established the ‘Hot Spot’ forum on its website, which has published collections of essays by anthropologists and activists on the Occupy movement, the Egyptian revolution, and Istanbul’s Gezi park protests, among others.^[2]

What happens to participants during resistance, and how that in turn shapes its political effects, is also affected by its modes of communication and performance. Studies of contemporary activism have considered the collective experiences of humour and spontaneity, joyfulness and a sense of possibility, as crucial aspects of activism and as playing into a movement’s broader trajectory (Haugerud 2013; Rasza & Kurnik 2012; Sitrin 2013). These analyses sometimes recall older anthropological notions such as Durkheim’s ‘collective effervescence’ (1995 [1912]) – the embodied passion and fervor that comes from communal, out-of-the-ordinary action – and Turner’s ‘rituals of reversal’, and sometimes draw on more recent theoretical concepts such as ‘affect’ and ‘becoming’. In what has been labelled the ‘subjective turn’ (Rasza 2013), a central argument has been that the ability of activists to imagine and sense different emotional and inter-personal relations in the forms of non-hierarchical organisation is vital for the potential of a political movement to offer and demonstrate alternative forms of social organisation to prevailing capitalist and neoliberal politics. This perspective also provides a good example of how anthropological analysis of movements such as Occupy or the Gezi park protests constitute resistance: by adopting a broadly critical stance on contemporary capitalism, neoliberalism, and state violence, these perspectives tend to echo activists’ analyzes of certain formations of power and thus frame protest and social movements acting against them as resistance.

Persistent inequalities and enduring effects of past violence on social interaction, however, are also felt within activist groups even as they aim to resist domination. Scholars attentive to how class, gender or racial difference continue to be reproduced and enacted within protest movements have advocated for a ‘decolonizing’ approach, which aims to bring a consciousness of historical injustices of different kinds into activism that might unwittingly repeat similar patterns of domination (Liu 2013). These approaches relate to an older notion of ‘identity politics’, which has been criticised for the way in which it can reinscribe certain essentialist and even exclusionary notions of identity, and suggest that whilst more universalist political goals can be shared by various people in a resistance movement, activists must remain vigilant about questions of difference and power structures within the group. These issues were particularly visible in writing about indigenous activism and struggles for land rights and self-determination, where the very means of resistance – by recourse to legal technologies and vocabularies of rights, citizenship, and territory – involve speaking the language of the powerful in order to make certain claims (Jackson and Warren 2005; Muehlebach 2010). Thus certain members of a community, as well as the anthropologist, may, paradoxically, be more able to articulate and represent ‘indigeneity’ than those who speak only the language of the colonised. Equally, there is concern about the ways in which protest movements are represented and perhaps even appropriated in scholarship, as academics seek to capitalise on political events so as to prove the relevance or timeliness of their work whilst at the same time silencing and exploiting the knowledge and labour of local academics and activists (Abaza 2013).

The anthropology of resistance, then, is grappling with a new set of questions that have arisen from contemporary political events. Although some older conceptual questions – about social change and stasis, false consciousness and agency – remain pertinent, recent work on resistance has also been formed by different concerns. Alongside shifting theoretical frameworks, anthropological perspectives on resistance are being transformed by widespread acknowledgment of researchers’ responsibility to research participants, as well as reflexive awareness of their own roles in shaping local and global politics.

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——— 1990. Domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Note on contributor

Fiona Wright is an anthropologist interested in activism, dissent, and ethics, and how they are linked to sovereignty and violence. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Israel/Palestine and is currently researching the politics of debates over free speech in British universities.

Dr Fiona Wright, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. fcw28@cam.ac.uk

[1] Developing out of their ‘no-work’ protest and refusal to wear prison uniforms, the Armagh dirty protest took place from 1980-1981, and involved women prisoners refusing to bathe, to use lavatories, or to clean their cells over long stretches of time. Combined with hunger strikes and Republican male prisoners’ similar acts at a different prison, the dirty protest was one of the more violent and tense episodes in the history of British rule in Northern Ireland.

[2] See Cultural Anthropology website: http://www.culanth.org/conversations/4-hot-spots (accessed 28 February 2016).

Colonialism / postcolonialism

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Susan Bayly

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16colonialism

Abstract:

The giant composite field of colonialism and postcolonialism studies has had a transforming effect on modern anthropology. Anthropologists have been innovative users of its multidisciplinary perspectives, and key contributors to its challenging accounts of past and contemporary global life and experience. The call to prioritise colonial and postcolonial perspectives in the framing of anthropology's central research questions has greatly extended the field's range and scope, including its distinctive approaches to the issue of whether it is colonialism that should be seen as modernity's most important progenitor, and the source of its most toxic forms of subjugation and disempowerment. This entry notes the sophistication with which anthropology has both embraced and challenged the forms of cultural and social analysis through which the epistemic and material transformations of global empire and its afterlife have been documented and theorised. And it argues that studies of colonialism and postcolonialism still have a strong and productive future in a world now widely thought to require the multidimensional framings provided by today's high-profile theorists of globalisation and cosmopolitanism.

Introduction

The giant composite field of colonialism and postcolonialism studies has had a transforming effect on virtually every academic field in the humanities and social sciences. Anthropologists have been particularly innovative users of its multidisciplinary perspectives, and have responded with vigour and creativity when accused by practitioners of its deconstructive critiques of being ‘handmaidens’ of colonial power and heirs to the subjugating knowledge strategies that underpinned imperial rule (Asad 1973). There have been major changes in anthropology’s aims and claims arising from theorists’ insistence that the enduring forms of subjugation and ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak 1985) engendered by modern empires must be recognised as distinctive pathologies of the contemporary world. The call to prioritise colonial and postcolonial perspectives in framing virtually all analytical accounts and research questions has greatly extended anthropology’s range and scope. It has led to the use of tools from both within and beyond the discipline, including poststructuralist understandings of power and subjectivity, and the contingency and open-endedness of historical change. These perspectives have fed debate on a wide range of topics: anticolonial nationalism; religious conversion; capitalist market transformations; gender relations and domestic intimacies; urban experience and historicity; citizenship and migration, as well as resistance and hegemonic power effects.

Colonialism

Within and beyond anthropology, ‘colonial’ is now mainly used for the transformations wrought by high modern empire, i.e. for contexts of Western conquest and rule in the age of globally expansive commercial and industrial capitalism. Some 80 to 90 percent of the global landmass and a majority of the world’s population had come under direct or indirect colonial rule by the processes initially set in train during the so-called early modern Age of Discovery, though greatly accelerated in their range and impact by the early twentieth century.^[1] It is equally important for the study of colonialism and postcolonialism to acknowledge the massive violence and displacement marking these phenomena. These include, for example, an estimated 1 million deaths in Algeria’s 1954–62 liberation war, and as many as 500,000 deaths and 14 million people displaced in the catastrophic process known as the Partition of India.^[2]

There is much dispute about the extent to which the colonised can be seen as active agents in these dislocations and displacements. But it is widely agreed that modern empire produced unprecedented change and novelty, including massive and profoundly destructive material transformations, and the constitution of a new kind of person: a colonial subject with a ‘colonized mind’, painfully if never fully subordinated by the coercions and ‘othering’ effects of the coloniser’s power-knowledge. These processes have been documented in many settings, including the modern colonial metropolis and other sites of ‘panoptic’ surveillance and self-subjugation.^[3]

Despite their ancient origins, the terms colonial and colonialism are not widely used for pre-modern and non-Western empires.^[4] The rule of Rome, the Ottomans and China’s Qing (Manchus) are commonly defined as imperial, while the term colonial is commonly used for such cases as the rule of the British in India, the French in Algeria, and the Dutch in insular Southeast Asia. These, together with sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific, Latin America, and the Islamic Middle East, have been the main contexts for studies of colonial and postcolonial projects and practices, frequently in terms deeply critical of the strategies of historians, political sociologists, and anthropologists. The works thus targeted include classic ethnographies condemned for their purported failure to problematise Enlightenment epistemologies as the critical grounding of their work.^[5]

Some critics regard binary models of coloniser-colonised relations as too narrow to capture the full dynamics of imperial and post-imperial modernity. What has been seen as the open-ended or ‘rhizomatic’ qualities of empire has generated rich ethnographic work on such people as the ‘mobile cosmopolitans’ whose far-flung trading and religious networks challenged the boundedness of all the imperial systems that sought to contain them (Ho 2004).^[6] But for theorists including Barlow (1997) and Chakrabarty (2012), colonialism is modernity’s most important progenitor and the source of its most toxic forms and penetrations. These include its corrosive powers of individuation and commodification, and its routinization of state violence through the practices of bureaucratised truth-seeking: ranging from the legalistic witch-hunts of Spanish-ruled Peru to the treaties and constitution-making of more recent colonial regimes (Benton 2002; Comaroff 2001; Silverblatt 2004).

Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism has become an equally pervasive term, especially in studies of the enduring after-effects of colonial rule and the oppressive ‘necropolitics’ of post-independence states and elites (Chakrabarty 1992; Mbembe 2001; Sarkar 1985). Poststructuralist identity and language theory have been key resources for this work, initially through the concept of colonial discourse: the use of signifying regimens that delegitimate the knowledge practices of the colonised and install as authoritative truths the conqueror’s narratives of superior rationality and ‘civilizing mission’ (Chafer 1992). Foucault’s early work on governmentality and the biopolitical sources of modern power were the initial grounding for these perspectives, together with Said’s critique of the self-glorifying cultural essentialism engendered by European Orientalists (Said 1995). Those embracing these understandings of the colonisers’ power used them to illuminate the psychic and cultural dislocations of colonial rule, exposing as instruments of subjugation and disempowerment the compilation of scholar-officials’ dictionaries, maps and legal codes, their manipulation of foreign scripts and vernaculars, and their fabrication of subordinating ‘languages of command’ (Cohn 1996; Errington 2008; Raheja 1996).^[7]

The deconstructive analysis of imperial texts and representational strategies has generated much debate about whether colonial encounters were invariably collisions of radically divergent epistemes (Marglin & Marglin 1990). Cohn’s accounts of the Census of India and imperial darbar (ruler’s audience) (1987, 1996) treated the representational strategies of British rule as disruptively alien, its regimes of enumeration and visuality a break with the far more fluid relations and identities of the pre-conquest period. The idea of novel reality production under colonial rule has been contested from many perspectives, including those identifying India’s expansive Mughal dynasts and their successors as knowledge-gatherers in their own right, thus as creators of novel enumerating and classification strategies that anticipated and set the model for those of the British Raj (Peabody 2001).^[8]

Some historians have challenged the value of all deconstructive critique, dismissing the study of knowledge politics and colonial subjectivities and calling instead for continued attempts to understand the processes underlying such key transformations as the immiseration of peasantries and the spread of intercommunal blood-letting in colonised societies (O’Hanlon & Washbrook 1992; cf. Prakash 1992, 1993). What has been called for by anthropologists is not so much a change of research questions, as a search for better tools with which to study colonialism’s conceptual power and effects. For Kelly and Kaplan (2001), Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogics and heteroglossia make visible a process of ‘communicative traffic’ between colonisers and the colonised in British-ruled Fiji, hence ‘co-production’ rather than top-down imposition of authorising power-knowledge in the turbulent interactions which they explore.

Despite these challenges, the concerns of the early landmark studies still interest scholars debating the sources and effects of imperial power.^[9] So too does the radical feminist critique of Spivak (e.g. Spivak 1996), often united with Derrida’s treatment of writing as the inscription of difference as both source and manifestation of the will to power, with an emphasis on the inherent violence of such inscriptions, and the ‘deferrals’ of meaning inherent in their constitutive texts and narratives. A related reference point has been Lacanian psychology’s understanding of desiring selfhood and the decentred nature of subjectivity (Bhabha 2004; Khanna 2004). The treatment of colonial rule as agonising ‘psychodrama’ produced in the ‘play of power within colonial discourse’ (Bhabha 1996: 92) has drawn further inspiration from Fanon’s accounts of the crippling identity effects of empire, entangling colonisers and the colonised in a mesh of mutual desires and delusions.^[10]

Transforming events and resistance

Colonialism became a major scholarly concern in the late 1970s, while postcolonialism came to prominence in the 1980s. Both singly and together, their embrace signalled an attack on perspectives deemed outmoded and inadequate for an understanding of the global world order. A particular target for such challenges has been the concept of imperialism, formerly the dominant idiom in Marxist and related ‘world systems’ accounts of the global expansion of capitalist modernity (Frank 1978; Wallerstein 1974). In the study of imperialism, scholars’ key concerns were with motivations and actions initiated from colonisers’ metropoles: the economic logic of empires; how they were structured and expanded. Their treatment of what would now be characterised as ‘experience’ within the colonised world related largely to structural transformations in the material sphere. The most notable of these were massive social and environmental changes wrought by novel land control systems, including coercive cash-cropping schemes and the widespread destruction of forests and grasslands, and the forcible creation of new production and labour systems to meet the commodifying needs of Western capitalist economies.^[11]

With anthropologists’ turn to globally framed historical perspectives in the 1980s, the implications of empire and world systems theory were addressed by some of the discipline’s leading innovators. Taussig’s (1980) study of the economics of empire in Bolivia focused on Amerindian tin miners’ narratives of the Devil as presiding agent of the commoditization of their labour under Spanish rule. And in Sahlins’s celebrated account of the death of the English explorer-navigator James Cook at the hands of Hawaiians in 1779, the killing was a transformative event, interpretable through the concept of ‘mythopraxis’: in the islanders’ perceptions, an occurrence taking place in mythic rather than linear time (1985; see Weiner 2006). Sahlins claimed that this was not an account of a fixed Hawaiian cultural framing counterpoised to an equally static Western ‘trade and empire’ worldview. Instead, mythopraxis allowed for a notion of dialectical conjuncture between two dynamic historicities, thus a forging of something new in the context of this early moment of imperial ‘fatal impact’ (Moorehead 2000).^[12]

1. Relating the economic and the cultural

Though much contested, such studies created provocative links between anthropologists’ concerns with the economic and the cultural, as in Comaroff’s treatment (1985) of the southern African Zion Church faith as symbolic bricolage: an expression of ‘cultural resistance’ to the forced integration of adherents into the alienating structures of capitalist commodity production. In other studies too, resistance to colonial power is discerned not so much in confrontation or counter-hegemonic ‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott 1990), but in poetics, i.e. the expressiveness and play of the creative mind, as in the imagining of alternative spiritual realities in millenarian ‘cargo cults’.^[13] Related works on colonial contexts have discerned historicity in the form of invention or co-fabrication in what had previously been seen as timeless ethnographic givens, including ‘tribe’ in Africa and caste and ethno-religious community in India. This raised the contentious question of whether even grossly disadvantaged subjects were active agents in the making of their new epistemic and material realities, rather than mere recipients of whatever the coloniser constructed and imposed (Bayly 1999; Godelier 1975; Spear 2003; Wolf 1982).

Debate about how to relate the economic and the cultural in colonial contexts has been further nourished by anthropologists’ studies of the creation of new economies through the mass recruitment of enslaved or indentured labour. In another of Kelly’s works dealing with plantation-based sugar production in Fiji (1992), concepts once thought of as universals in economic anthropology are found to be the subjects of highly divergent moral narratives about trade, value, and production. These were not just a matter of disparities in the thinking of whites as opposed to non-whites, or even opposition in the thinking of the island’s massive influx of Indian indentured labourers as compared to native Fijians. What is striking in his account is that it was the two key groups of Indian incomers – field workers and trader-shopkeepers – who were sharply divided in their ideas about the morality of trade, value, and labour. Moreover, Kelly finds a way to account for this which productively rethinks and elasticises both the Marxist legacy as deployed in colonial political economy studies, and the theories of culture which have been embraced as their alternative.^[14]

Despite the sophistication of such ethnographically grounded political economy perspectives, many scholars reject them, even when insisting that they too see the world historically, i.e. marked and shaped by the predatory power of colonisers and their collaborators.^[15] The legacy of Marxism in the study of empire has been widely dismissed for its perceived evolutionism: identifying the effects of Western rule as bloody and disruptive for colonised societies, yet still a prelude to progress and emancipation in their transformative structural effects.^[16]

2. Typologies of colonialism

But what has become a very deep scholarly dividing line is the point at which anthropologists have turned their skills of ethnographic specificity to the forging of typologies, distinguishing, as many historians have done, between the effects of different varieties of imperial rule and power. A revealing case is the contrast drawn by Wolfe (2006) between two radically different forms or modes of colonial rule. The first of these was administrative/extractive colonialism, as in British India. Wolfe sees this as based on a framing logic that was dehumanising but not genocidal. It included the idea of the ‘native’ as a dangerous but desirable asset, making profit for empire through cash-cropping and other precarious forms of land use. Despite its many immiserating effects on indigenous peoples, this for Wolfe was still very different from colonialism in its other conceptual mode: mass-migration or settler colonialism. The critical premise in this case was that of ‘terra nullius’ (unclaimed terrain). It defined Aboriginal people as lacking the capacity to understand land as an asset with use-value, which determined for British colonisers who was and was not to be placed within the pale of productive humankind. The result was unabashedly exterminatory: portraying indigenous Australians as a nullity to be expunged, whether by direct violence or eugenicist child-seizure aimed at the ‘breeding out’ of non-white ‘racial stock’.^[17]

But rather than hailing this as an exercise in right-minded deconstructive critique, there are critics who see the thinking behind any typologising of colonialism’s variants as in itself colonial, a defining of difference which replicates the coloniser’s defining and thus silencing of the colonised subject, through the structural violence of ‘naming power’ (Krautwurst 2003). Studies framed like Wolfe’s have thus been condemned as a back-door whitewashing of empire, at odds with the mission of postcolonial criticism to expose and destabilise Eurocentric master narratives and ‘discourses of domination’ through ‘radical re-thinking and re-formulation of the forms of knowledge and social identities authored and authorized by colonialism and Western domination’ (Prakash 1992: 8).^[18]

3. The value of ethnography

Yet there are influential works in which the turning of an ethnographer’s eye to the specificities of context have been applauded for providing in-depth accounts of colonial and postcolonial settings, rather than broad-brush accounts of the colonial and postcolonial as generic states or qualities. Notable examples include treatments of colonial or formerly colonised sites as spaces of distinctive constructions of reality, through the operations of myth, narrative, and other processes of imagination and embodied practice (Ariel de Vidas 2002; Gow 2001; Graham 1998; Stoller 1995). Such works have greatly enriched the ways in which culture itself is understood within and beyond anthropology, revealing the great breadth of its manifestations as experience and reference point in different political and social contexts, for example:

as an indeterminate meeting ground between alien worldviews and meaning systems;
as the construction of essences and boundaries defining subjects’ ethnic or moral otherness;
and as a tool of resistance and assertive nationhood (Gupta & Ferguson 1992).

There has also been work on colonial cultural processes in which the concerns of classic land and labour studies have been productively reframed. Authors noting empire’s role as solvent of established forms of sovereignty and community and destroyer of livelihoods and environments such as those of pastoralists and hunter/gatherers have enriched these concerns through interest in colonialism’s dislocations of identity and selfhood. Key reference points in these explorations of fractured subjectivities and psychic trauma have been such concepts as mimesis, hybridity, and creolization to capture the blendings and assimilations as well as the traumatising disjunctures of the colonial encounter.

Thus another study by Taussig focusing on the extreme violence of colonial rule in the Amazonian Putumayo (1987) makes the region’s ruthlessly labour-hungry mode of rubber production central to his account. But Taussig’s claim is that the cruelty displayed towards the Amerindian plantation workers was not a tool used with the cold rationality of means-and-ends ‘trade and empire’ logic to solve a central problem of colonial political economy: how to control a workforce indifferent to money, clock-time, and the market. What he finds instead is a ‘culture of terror’ trapping coloniser and colonised in a state of mutual psychic dysfunction. Colonialism’s corrosive self/other identity effects are thus a pathology, to be understood in terms drawn from Benjamin and the Frankfurt School theorists Adorno and Horkheimer on the processes of mimesis in the perceiving mind: that is, the compulsive force of one’s destabilising identifications with those to whom we are ‘other’. The colonisers’ horrific acts are therefore to be seen as a projection of their own fears and aggressions. In the alienation and insecurity of colonial existence, the coloniser’s disordered mind strives nightmarishly through its mimetic image-making faculties to vest the colonised with an imagined subhuman otherness, in the unattainable hope of expunging or deflecting the savage urges they find within themselves.^[19]

Psychic dysfunctionality has been a major reference point in many works identifying the ambiguities of desire and sexuality in colonial settings as central to the ‘tensions of empire’ (Cooper & Stoler 1997).^[20] Stoler united disparate strands of Foucault’s work concerned with issues of gender, race, and sexuality to explore the destabilising biopolitical intimacies of interracial households and affective attachments in colonial Southeast Asian contexts (1995; 2002). Much use has also been made of the political psychologist Ashis Nandy’s notion of hypermasculinity as a critical dysfunction of the coloniser’s condition. Here the male coloniser is to be seen as perpetually unsure of his power, hence compulsively driven to inflate the expressions of his maleness through the fetishising of manly prowess and comradeship in pursuits such as hunting and team sport (Nandy 1989).

A striking exploration of dysfunctional hypermasculinity in the relations of colonisers and their subjects is provided in Banerjee’s account of the sexualised humiliations perpetrated by British officers against prisoners from one of India’s most remarkable anti-colonial nationalist groups: the Red Shirts, composed of Muslim Pathans (Pukhthuns) based in what is now the North West Frontier of Pakistan (2000). What Banerjee sees as the source of this abuse is that the Red Shirts were from a group classed by the British as a ‘martial race’ who had become keen adherents of Gandhi’s doctrine of pacifist non-violent resistance.^[21] This meant that they were no longer willing to play the game of manly conflict expected of them in the form of the raids and counter-raids which had nourished the white soldiers’ fragile male selfhood. This, Banerjee argues, is what generated the sense of psychic challenge to which they responded with eerily Abu Ghraib-like acts of violence.

Psycho-sexual dysfunction is also a central theme in Luhrmann’s account of fieldwork with western India’s distinctive Parsi community (1996). Under British rule this small urban group was disproportionately influential as a commercial and professional elite, much praised for their modernity: prosperous and Western-educated, both their men and women highly visible in the arenas and pursuits of the colonial public sphere.^[22] But in postcolonial India, she found them to have become strikingly akin to what Nandy found for the colonial period: a community enmeshed in the painful psychic life of ‘intimate enemies’. In their case, strikingly, this involved entangled relations with other Indians rather than the colonising ‘other’. Luhrmann found her informants much afflicted with anxieties about their place in a society where they had lost their former ‘collaborator’ niche, with these tensions playing out in the form of abiding fears about male Parsis’ masculine potency and procreative abilities.

4. Resistance

What then of the possibility of resistance in conditions of colonial subjugation and rule? The works of the historians and culture theorists whose initial inspiration was Gramsci’s neo-Marxist concept of the subaltern (from subalterno: the subordinated) identified the workings of an anti-hegemonic ‘subaltern consciousness’ in such events as India’s pre-Independence forest uprisings and peasant millenarian movements. Contributors saw these as expressions of a non-elite insurgent value system, wrongly treated as mindless disorder or criminality, both by Marxist historians and triumphalist ‘bourgeois nationalist’ narratives of the Indian freedom struggle (Guha 1999; see Chaturvedi 2000). Key contributors to this subaltern studies project saw only Gandhi as an exception to their view of organised nationalist movements and leaders as purveyors of ‘derivative discourse’, i.e. premised on alien concepts of the bourgeois liberal individual, and producing elitist and perniciously gendered scriptings of nationhood (Chatterjee 1986, 2012). Subsequent contributors lost interest in the study of rebellions and popular violence and merged their concerns with those of emerging theorists of colonial discourse and governmentality. Yet the possibility of resistance to the coloniser’s power was still a tantalising presence in some of this work. Bhabha’s celebrated reading of a key text of colonial discourse, the scholar-official T.B. Macaulay’s notorious 1835 Minute on education, raised the provocative possibility that even the most apparently one-sided exercises in authoritative power-knowledge may open up spaces for ‘sly subversion’ of the coloniser’s truth regimes. Thus despite the Minute’s unblushing dismissal of India’s entire cultural heritage, Bhabha’s claim was that the class of ‘almost white but not-quite’ Western-educated Indians – imagined by Macaulay as compliant props of colonial rule – were actually skilled parodists, using the arts of mimetic burlesque to destabilise the colonisers’ sense of confidence and superiority.^[23]

Colonialism and postcolonialism today

So do studies of colonialism and postcolonialism have a future in a world now widely said to require the multidimensional framings provided by today’s high-profile theorists of globalization and cosmopolitanism? One sign of the rich potential still offered by the colonialism/postcolonialism field’s tools and perspectives is its elasticity, as in the ways its insights have been merged and synthesised with those of other history-conscious areas of research and debate. This includes the work of scholars of socialism and postsocialism who have addressed the transformations and problematic vernacularizations of modernity in their own complex research contexts by reflecting productively on the ways in which key themes from the study of colonialism and postcolonialism can be engaged and expanded on (Bayly 2007; Kandiyoti 2002; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003).

Furthermore, as Ania Loomba has shown, many variants of contemporary globalization studies have absorbed rather than overridden the key elements of colonial and postcolonial studies (2005). Their use has provided a powerful means of avoiding the end-of-history triumphalism and ahistorical thinness with which many commentators have defined, celebrated or demonised the conditions of globalised cultural and economic life in today’s world of flexible citizenship and fractured sovereignties. Consciousness of empire and a continuing engagement with the rich and varied literature on its impacts and afterlife thus has the potential to nuance and ground the many ways in which scholars now seek to grasp all that is local, translocal and global in the world today.

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Note on contributor

Susan Bayly is Professor of Historical Anthropology in the Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology and a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Her research focuses on colonialism and its cultural afterlife in Asia’s former French and British colonies. She regularly conducts ethnographic research in Vietnam as part of a larger comparative project on empire and post-colonial transformations in a variety of periods and settings. She also retains a long-standing research interest in India, where she has focused on caste, religious conversion and a variety of translocal social and cultural movements. She is a former editor of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and has theoretical interests in the study of modernity, globalization, theories of historical change, and the disciplinary interface between history and anthropology. Her publications include Asian voices in a postcolonial age: Vietnam, India and beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2007). She has also published studies of the Indian caste system and of Indian religion in its historical and anthropological contexts.

Professor Susan Bayly, Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. sbb10@cam.ac.uk

[1] Chiriyankandath (2007: 36). This includes the lands occupied or controlled by European colonial powers and also by Japan – a great competing modern expansionist imperial power. Britain alone ruled a quarter of the world’s population by 1914. It has been estimated that in 1880 the wealth of the industrialised colonising West was twice that of the colonised regions of the world and by 1913 the West was three times richer than its colonies and dependencies (Hobsbawm 1987).

[2] Plus the upheavals in Indochina, Kenya, Palestine, Burma, Rhodesia and other key sites of bloody twentieth-century decolonisation. Equally significant in the balance sheet of empire: the genocidal impact of colonial conquest and mass European migration to both the New World and Australia; the impact and enduring legacy of the Atlantic slave trade; the massive population transfers reconstituting the populations of Fiji and other Pacific societies. On the massive environmental transformations produced in colonial contexts, see Beinart (2008), Grove (1997), and Sivaramakrishnan (1999).

[3] The sites in which these processes have been documented include hospitals and mental asylums (Arnold 2000; Dwyer 2001; Mills 2000); schools, plantations, and prisons; and museums and other public exhibition spaces (Çelik 1997; Cohn 1996; Cooper 2005; Cooper and Stoler 1997; Glover 2007; Landau & Kaspin 2002; Mitchell 1991; Rabinow 1989; Silverblatt 2006; Zinoman 2001).

[4] In Roman Britain, coloniae were land grants made to demobilised veterans to stabilise imperial authority in difficult frontier regions; the English East India Company tried to do the same with its locally recruited sepoy soldiers. (Alavi 1993)

[5] Although classics such as Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer and Azande studies are still being productively engaged in important debates, e.g. about the nature of the secular in ‘late modernity’ (Engelke 2015).

[6] Hardt and Negri’s (2000) concept of ‘rhizomic’ (or rhizomatic) empire as an account of the world’s endlessly radiating and amorphous flows of power has been widely debated; see Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin (1995), Boehmer (2006), and Reyna (2002).

[7] Critiques of the Orientalist paradigm include Carrier (1992) and Coronil (1996).

[8] Studies exploring colonial science as a co-productive enterprise of mutual interaction and appropriation include Jasanoff (2004) and Sivasundaram (2005); compare Prakash (1999). On the extent to which translation and interaction are ever possible in colonial contexts, see Rafael (1993); Lockhart (1994).

[9] For example, Cohn (1996), Cooper and Stoler (1997), Inden (1986), Mani (1989), Mignolo (1993), Mitchell (1991), Parry (1987), Prakash (1990), Raheja (1996), and Williams and Chrisman (1993).

[10] ‘The central despair of the Black psyche, the fact that Black men and women are constrained to live in a world deliberately constructed to reduce and sicken them, and that as a consequence there is no such thing as normal Black people in the colonial world. They are all pathological cases, the main difference being between those who can see through the white mask and those who wear the mask as if it were real.’ (Smith 1973: 26; see also Fanon 1967)

[11] For Lenin, imperialism was the invasive and unstoppable force of capitalism. Its use as a basis for the analysis of actual global empires was a subsequent development in Marxist thought, initially inspired by the work of Rosa Luxembourg.

[12] See Sahlins (1985), Obeyesekere’s attack (1992) and Sahlins’s riposte (1995). See also Fabian (1983) and Mintz (1985). Sahlins also explored the transformative effects of Hawaiians’ subsequent ‘consumption craze’ for foreign goods in the context of the islands’ entry into worldwide trading networks as exporters of high-value local sandalwood (1985; see also Friedman 1994). There is in addition a rich literature using colonial ‘first contact’ case studies for reflections on the meaning and nature of ‘events’ and history as experienced in diverse cultural contexts: for example, Fausto (2002) and Strathern (1992).

[13] For example, in imagining Jesus as black or female (Hermann 1992; Kaplan 1995; Lindstrom 1993). Compare Comaroff and Comaroff (1991) and Silverblatt (2006). In African spirit possession too, there is the possibility that the conjuring of supernatural beings who appear to practitioners as parodic white men is a play on colonisers’ fears, or an enduring memory and appropriation of their aura and power (Stoller 1995).

[14] The commoditisation of labour in Fiji is thus not an experience bringing pain and alienation to those it objectifies, as in classic Marxism, nor is it a source of class struggle. The path of virtue is wage labour in a spirit of virtuous service for the ex-indentured labourers, and an ethic of sober, unaquisitive money-making for the Indian trader-shopkeepers (Kelly 1992).

[15] This is a contested term in colonial studies (see Mamdani 2001).

[16] Key works of postcolonial theory, notably Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000), have been both praised and dismissed (Kaiwar 2014) as attempted renewals of Marxism.

[17] On race theory in India, see Moore, Kosek & Pandian (2003).

[18] See critical discussion in Dirlik (1994).

[19] More recent accounts of the mimetic in colonial contexts include Eaton (2013).

[20] See also Burton (2005), McClintock (1995), and Spivak (1996).

[21] For anthropological explorations of Gandhi’s distinctiveness as political activist and anticolonial moralist prescribing highly innovative understandings of emancipated selfhood (swaraj: self-rule) for both coloniser and colonised, see e.g. Fox (1989), Alter (2000), and Mazzarella (2010).

[22] Among highly critical deconstructive accounts of the notions of modernised male and female selfhood in the arenas of ‘home and the world’ of the colonial public sphere is Devji (1991).

[23] ‘ ... a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia … [Through anglicized education, we ...] must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’ (Macaulay 1862).