Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Self

Agency

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

Picture by John Fahy

Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Initially published 12 Aug 2024

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

Dreams

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 03:17:37 +0000

Scene from a 2018 mural depicting dream creatures and the women who paint them, by Guatemalen artist María Elena Curruchiche. Picture by UN Women/Ryan Brown

Sophie Chao

University of Sydney

Initially published 8 Aug 2024

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

Abstract:

Dreams are commonly defined as involuntary, sporadic events that occur to individuals during their sleep and that encompass visual images, cognitive activity, as well as a range of emotions, reactions, and sensations. Situated at the interstices of the real and the imagined, the meaningful and meaningless, the conscious and subconscious, and the sleeping and waking worlds, they have often been approached—if not always formally recognised—as sources of interpretive insight into the everyday lives, social relationships, psychological landscapes, and cultural worlds of those who experience them. This entry examines three prominent themes in the anthropological study of dreams as experience and dreaming as process. The first section considers dreams as manifestations of the subconscious and interior dimensions of individuals through the lens of ethnopsychology and attendant constructs of selfhood and identity. The second section considers dreams as cultural artefacts and practices through the lens of their ritualised or expert-led interpretation. The third section considers dreams through their relationship to religiosity, spirituality, and the transcendent, examining in particular dreams’ morality and function as sources of knowledge, divination, and power. The conclusion considers the methodological opportunities and challenges that arise in taking dreams seriously as objects of ethnographic analysis in light of the limits they appear to pose to the classical anthropological approach of ‘participant-observation’.

Introduction

There is perhaps no activity more private, individual, or interior than dreaming. Dreams tend to occur as involuntary, sporadic events during slumber, encompassing visual images, cognitive activity, and a range of emotions, reactions, and sensations. They are often remembered and recounted in scattered fragments or fleeting impressions rather than coherent or structured events. Their significance can seem glaringly evident, or thoroughly opaque. Some we deem meaningful, others trivial. Some dreams we are happy to share, others we would rather not reveal. Dreams, as such, sit somewhere at the interstices of the experienced and narrated, real and imagined, meaningful and meaningless, conscious and subconscious, and disclosed and concealed. Yet despite (or perhaps precisely because of) their nebulous nature, dreams have often been approached—if not always recognised—as sources of interpretive insight into the everyday lives, relationships, affects, and environments of those who experience them.^[1]

Dreams were long considered the primary terrain of psychoanalytic theory, which centres the role of unconscious mental processes in shaping human behavioural and mental states. Anthropological approaches have shed vital light on the socially and historically shaped ways that different communities understand the origins, causes, contents, contexts, and meanings of dreams, both as individual psychic experiences and as culturally situated practices, and in ways that do not necessarily correspond to scientific definitions (Lohmann 2007). The earliest reference to dreams within anthropology can be traced to the late nineteenth century scholar Edward Burnett Tylor (1871), who argued that dreaming, as a universally experienced state of reality-transcending and altered consciousness, enabled the emergence of human mythologies, cosmological frameworks, and religious beliefs worldwide. For Tylor, dreams in many non-modern societies were held to put people in touch with objectively existing souls or ghosts, while modern societies understood souls and ghosts to be the result of psychology and biology ([1871] 1920). His theories reflected a broader understanding among Victorian anthropologists that belief in the reality of dreams characterised earlier stages in the development of human society, within a three-part evolution of culture from ‘savage’ to ‘barbarian’ to ‘civilised’.

Early twentieth century dreaming studies, conducted primarily in non-Western settings and often tied to psychiatric interventions, tended to focus on the collection, classification, and comparison of similarities and differences in dream contents, or what was known as ‘dream data reports’ (e.g. Lincoln 1935).^[2]However, post-war scholars in psychological anthropology, and particularly those affiliated with the US-borne ‘Culture and Personality School’—an influential current concerned with how psychological and cultural forces shape human experience—were critical of the abstraction of dreams from their specific lived and interpretive contexts. They posited that dreams should instead be approached as expressions of collectively shaped personality traits and emotive dispositions shared by particular social groups (e.g. Eggan 1952).

It was primarily in the late 1980s and early 1990s that dreams came to figure more prominently as objects of ethnographic inquiry and cross-cultural comparison in their own right within the work of social anthropologists, some of whom bring their social scientific analyses into conversation with neuropsychology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science (e.g. Nordin 2011; Laughlin 2011). Sometimes referred to as the ‘new anthropology of dreaming’ (Tedlock 1991), albeit not thoroughly systematised or integrated, this current recognises dreams as communicative events and legitimate modes of interpreting, inhabiting, and effecting change in the world. It draws attention to dreams as both interiorly experienced and culturally contextual social facts, often requiring multi-disciplinary analysis and attention to local psychodynamics. It also considers dreaming as a fruitful way to conduct research. Dreams can help build relations between field interlocutors and fieldworkers as dreamers themselves, allowing them to connect across different sociocultural worlds.^[3]

Drawing on ethnographic examples from diverse regions, this entry considers dreams as manifestations of the subconscious and interior dimensions of individuals through the lens of ethnopsychology and attendant constructs of self, personhood, and identity. It then approaches dreams as cultural artefacts and practices through the lens of their ritualised or expert-led interpretation. The third section examines dreams through their relationship to religiosity, spirituality, and the transcendent, examining dreams’ functions as sources of knowledge, divination, and power. The conclusion assesses the opportunities and challenges entailed in taking dreams seriously as objects of ethnographic analysis, particularly given their often-opaque nature and the limits they appear to pose to the classical anthropological method of ‘participant-observation’.

Self, identity, and psyche

Dreams play a central role within anthropological investigations into constructions of the self, identity, and psyche across individuals, collectives, and cultures, or what is referred to alternately as the field of ‘ethnopsychology’ (White 2012) or ‘cultural psychodynamics’ (Mageo 2015). Freudian psychoanalysis was instrumental in rehabilitating dreams as objects of legitimate scholarly inquiry and therapeutic intervention in the West and had a profound influence on early anthropologies of dreaming. Its influence manifests, for instance, in analyses of dreams as the disguised fulfilments of repressed wishes and as expressions of trauma, anxiety, and guilt. It also surfaces in the distinction identified by researchers between dreams’ manifest or conscious content and their latent or subconscious content, and an attention to the multiple symbolic valences of recurring dream motifs or patterns.

Exemplary of this approach is an ethnographic study conducted in the 1980s that centred on the dreams of Jovenil, a recently bereaved father among the Kagwahiv people of the Brazilian Amazon (Kracke 1981). In these dreams, Jovenil witnesses the engorged penis of a man that is snapped off as punishment for the man having slept with his own sister. Jovenil also dreams of suffering the wrath of his wife for inadvertently hunting and killing a monkey and of overturning a canoe that drowns his son, Alonzo. These events, according to anthropologist Waud Kracke, manifest Jovenil’s curiosity in the large penis of a fellow villager he beheld as a child and for which he was later castigated by his mother, resulting in sexual trauma. They also show his repressed guilt for engaging in taboo incestuous relations with a parallel cousin earlier in life, and the blame he places upon himself for the consequent death of his children as a form of punishment. In a society that prescribes that the dead must be forgotten and all memories of them eradicated, it was through the subconscious experience of dreams that Jovenil was able to work through the emotional process of mourning the loss of his children, facing his guilty conscience, and acknowledge his complicity in the tragedy.

If the example above centres on a single individuals’ multiple dreams, other early studies of an ethnopsychological bent took as their primary data a wider array of subjects and dreams to identify basic personality traits and worldviews that are shared by particular social groups, or what was then called ‘culture patterns’ (Eggan 1952, 478). For instance, ‘dream charts’ were deployed to analyse the manifest content of 334 dreams collected from men and women aged 6 to 75 years in Tzintzuntzan, Mexico (Foster 1973). Recurring symbols within these dreams, and particularly among men, include a threatening environment, impotence and loneliness, fear of embarrassment, and unpredictable futures. These repeated motifs point to anxiety over what people will say, or of being found out, as central dimensions of Tzintzuntzan cultural and gendered norms. They suggest that Tzintzuntzan people’s adherence to principles of good behaviour in waking life is driven less by their sense of guilt than by their conformity to what anthropologist George Foster calls a ‘shame culture’. Importantly, dreams’ manifest content directs attention not only to the basic tenets of ‘shame culture’ as a shared disposition among Tzintzuntzan people, but also to the disharmony or tensions that exist between this cultural ideal on the one hand, and the repression of desires that sustaining this ideal demands (Eggan 1952, 478).

More recent ethnopsychological scholarship has distanced itself from Freudian and Culture and Personality approaches to studying dreams. It recognised that such approaches risked being ethnocentric, i.e. that they often misinterpreted dreams because they stuck too closely to the cultural understandings of the analysts. Previous approaches had also assumed that cultures were largely static and that insights from one culture were widely generalisable. Working against these assumptions, contemporary ethnopsychological studies consider how cultural transformation, including processes of globalisation, colonisation, and modernisation, reconfigures the ability of individuals and collectives to reorganise their sense of self. They study, for example, how dreams that reflect back to the dreamer how their organisation of self relates to them, their body, and other beings and entities in the world (so-called ‘selfscape dreams’) relate to people’s interpretive frameworks (Hollan 2004). While such dreams may be universal in their basic orienting functions, their content varies within and across both cultures and individuals, conjuring cultural contexts that are more-than-local in their scope, sites, and subjects (e.g. Lattas 1993; Hollan 2005).

In American Samoa, for example, the dreams of young students, and their own reflections on these dreams’ significance, express their efforts to situate their selves in the context of imposed cultural shifts over a century of Christian conversion and Americanisation (Mageo 2004). In one such dream, a female Samoan’s muteness, compounded with her inability or refusal to speak either English or Samoan and her appearance as a White, blond-haired, blue-eyed three-year-old, point to communication problems, existential confusions, and forms of cultural resistance linked to Samoan girls’ shifting sexuality and gender roles. They reflect enduring traditional hierarchies on the one hand and notions of social equality and racial categories introduced by colonialism on the other. In another dream, the violent silencing and injury suffered by a male dreamer’s girlfriend embodies the challenge of reconciling the customary authority of higher-status Samoan males with the values of romantic engagement, care, and sincerity introduced by Christian missionaries, and American soldiers in WWI. In both instances, dreams and their interpretation by dreamers themselves come to constitute experiences that are creative rather than purely passive, conscious rather than purely unconscious, and generative rather than purely reflective. It is through these experiences that Samoans engage emotionally and discursively in the effects and affects of socio-cultural change and attendant forms of meaning-making.

Cultural artefacts, ritual acts, and interpretive practices

The sociocultural dimensions of dreams accrue particular prominence when dream ritualisation, communication, and interpretation form part of an established local knowledge system. Such insider or local knowledge systems offer valuable insights into how dream experiences are defined, classified, and valued across different communities as significant or mundane, empowering or perilous, or pragmatic or supernatural. They showcase how and when dreams should be communicated to others, or not, and who has the authority to elucidate their meanings. They also shed light on the diverse functions and causes of dreams, including as momentary and revelatory journeys deep into parts of the self or beyond (Mittermaier 2015; Groark 2009); as products of the intentions of the dreamer or unsolicited visitations by outside entities (George 1995; Heneise 2017); as pathways to or predicaments of past and future events (Stewart 2017; Basso 1987); as deliberately induced expressions of creative imagination or unwilled forms of external control (Herdt and Stephen 1989; Chao 2022); as guides to behaviour or reflections thereof (Ingold 2013; Pandya 2004); as experiences of diagnostic, therapeutic, anxiogenic, or punitive valences (Devereux 2023; Traphagan 2003); as expressions of resilience or rupture in the face of change (Graham 1995; Glaskin 2005); and as continuous extensions of, or radical breaks from, waking thoughts (Kracke 1981; Rubenstein 2012).

Ethnographic studies of dreams among the Yolmo of north-central Nepal illustrate the value of attending to local understandings of dreams’ sociocultural significance as categories of experience and modes of practice (Desjarlais 1991). According to one study, conducted in the late 1980s, dreams do not exist for Yolmo as a unitary entity, but rather in three distinctive forms—auspicious, inauspicious, and seemingly insignificant—that manifest in particular dream events. While villagers can articulate these basic distinctions, it is primarily Buddhist spiritual leaders and priests, such as lamas and shamans, who have the authority and expertise to determine what particular dreams signify and to heal those who experience them. They do so by drawing on a ‘dictionary of dream symbols’ (Desjarlais 1991, 215) that identifies and indexes a wide, complex, yet finite range of dream images and meanings that are collectively recognised but also vary in significance depending on the dreamer in question.

In contrast to the notion of dreams as reflective of the individual’s self, psyche, and past, many Yolmo believe that dreams predict events that will impact those around the dreamer in the course of their future waking life. For instance, a tree falling in one person’s dream indicates that one of their close relatives will imminently die (Desjarlais 1991, 216). Another key facet of Yolmo dream knowledge systems pertains to the sustained enculturation in editing, remembering, communicating, and thus in some ways creating dream stories that begin in the early stages of life. Throughout this process, Yolmo not only come to terms with the distresses expressed in their dreams, but also actively ‘make their dreams mean what they want them to mean’ (Desjarlais 1991, 221). What this study offers is an approach to dreams anchored first and foremost in the knowledge systems of dreamers themselves—one that uncovers dreams’ divinatory functions as well as their positioning with local structures of expertise, processes of skill acquisition, and understandings of meaning-making as a concomitantly symbolic and strategic endeavour.

Other ethnographic accounts attend the embodied and ritualised dimensions and protocols of dreams and dream-sharing as collective—rather than individuated—practices that serve to guide everyday social activities. One such case centres on dreaming among the Ongee people of Little Andaman Island and its role in determining communal hunting and gathering practices in daily life (Pandya 2004). Within these dreams, shared sensations of smells help to inform conscious and practical decisions by Ongee groups around what plants or animals should be sought out in the forest, where, and when.^[4]This olfactory dimension stems from the Ongee perception of dreams as moments where individuals’ internal bodies (enteeah) collect the smells left behind or imprinted upon their external bodies (mateeah) in waking life, in a process known as dane korale, which translates literally as ‘a spider making its web’ and is also the Ongee term for ‘dreaming’ (Pandya 2004, 143).

Ongee practice a ritualised form of dream-sharing by participating in lengthy and highly stylised discussions and singing before falling asleep on concentric and mutually facing platforms, in which they describe what they did in the day and what they dreamt of the previous night. Olfactory references identified across different individuals’ dreams, such as the smell of ripe jackfruit, bring these individuals to form groups and look for jackfruit in the forest together. The discovery of ripe jackfruit validates the dreams shared, producing what Ongee call ‘dream success’ (eneyemaga-tegebe) (Pandya 2004, 140). The collective, rather than individuated, nature of dream images and smells thus works hand in hand with Ongee’s collective interpretation of these dreams’ meanings and their implications for shared daily activities. While Ongee have since experienced a transition from circular open campgrounds to private enclosed quarters, and from forest-based subsistence to plantation labour, this ritualised, sensory, and collective ethos persists. People no longer dream or discuss the familiar scents of plants and animals. Instead, their collective dream-sharing rituals speak to experiences of, and guidance found in, the novel smells of plantation foremen and buzzing helicopters.

If symbolism and sensoriality play an important role within some cultural understandings of dreaming, other anthropological approaches invite a more radical appraisal of the primacy of acts and processes of interpretation. They focus less on the instances and categories of imagery and meaning and more on the activities involved in determining and consolidating dreams’ social significance. One example of this are the new dreams of ‘being eaten by oil palm’ (dimakan sawit) experienced by the Marind people of West Papua, Indonesia (Chao 2022, 183–200), wherein sleeping individuals become violently possessed by an introduced cash crop that is rapidly taking over their lands and forests in waking life. These dreams act as cultural critiques of the plantation as a newly established mode of economic production in the region, and they resonate with the new sensory experiences of Ongee community members.

Rather than focusing their discourses on the contents or events of these dreams, or attributing a therapeutic or cathartic value to dream experiences, Marind affirm it is primarily through the oral transmission of dream narratives to and with others that collective healing takes place. For instance, knowledge of kith and kin who have recently been ‘eaten by oil palm’ brings people to travel the landscape to their encounter. Shared dream experiences prompt villagers who are in conflictual relations over land rights to reconcile with one another, or enable starcrossed lovers whose marriage is proscribed by customary law to sustain a different kind of intimate relationship through dream story-telling. In contrast to traditional dreams, whose significance was arbitrated by medicine-men (messav) (Chao 2022, 188–9), new dreams of being eaten by oil palm are open to each and everyone’s interpretation, creating an egalitarian ethos that in turn allows for the participation of women, children, youth, and elders across rural and urban divides. What dream experiences mean, in other words, matters less than what dream sharing does as an exercise in mutual trust-building and as an acknowledgement of shared vulnerability to the attritive forces of plantation capitalism across waking and sleeping worlds.

Another example of how dream interpretation processes come to produce meaning, identity, and consciousness derives from studies of ‘dreamwork groups’ in the United Kingdom (Edgar 1999). These are groups in which six to twelve people share and interpret their dreams in a structured manner. Studying these groups showed that the ways in which dreams are discussed, embellished, and censored depend heavily on social and interactional group dynamics, such as their members’ degree of mutual familiarity, friendship, and shared values.

These dynamics produce dream interpretations that, over the course of conversations initiated by the dreamer but primarily shaped by the group’s questions, suggestions, reservations, and encouragements, become vastly different from the originally recounted experience of the dream and also mutate when dreamwork groups’ composition changes over time. It is through this situated and collective ‘cultural reworking’ of dreams (Edgar 1999, 39), involving the consciousness of both the dreamer and group, that new kinds of mental and affective connectedness are generated and the grounds for individual self-realisation actualised.

Transcendent encounters, spiritual power, and beyond-human knowledge

A third prevalent motif in the anthropology of dreaming pertains to its relationship to religiosity and the transcendent, notably as a source of cosmological knowledge, divination, and power across time. In some contexts, dream experiences and their revelations are intrinsically connected to spiritual understandings of consciousness, cognition, and salvation (e.g. Young 1999). In other contexts, dreams are seen as tied to prophetic figures and events in the past that in turn motivate religious and political movements in the present (e.g. Edgar 2011; Mittermaier 2011). Religious authority can be premised on the ability of select individuals to travel in time in the pursuit of sacred knowledge or to access extra-human powers and entities including spirits, gods, ancestors, and the deceased (e.g. Alatas 2019). Dreams may act as informal yet powerful ‘technologies of governmentality’ that self-regulate individuals’ conscience and conduct in everyday life (Eves 2011). They may also constitute sources of ‘liturgical novelty’ when creatively and contextually interpreted and acted upon by recognised experts (McGee 2012). While revelatory dreams may come to chosen humans through the agency of more-than-human beings, they can also be intentionally sought out and cultivated by human dreamers, including in the form of volitional or lucid dreaming, and through rituals, prayer, and trance- or vision-inducing substances, notably hallucinogenic plants (e.g. Hurd and Bulkeley 2014; Brown 1985).

One example of the cosmological and temporal dimensions of dreams is found among the Bardi Aboriginal people of the northwest Kimberley region of Western Australia (Glaskin 2005). As with many Indigenous Australian Peoples, the Bardi identify the creative period in the past during which ancestral beings gave shape to the world (or ‘Country’), as ‘the Dreaming’. Local terms for this period include buwarra, which translates as ‘dream’. While ‘ordinary’ dreams are experienced by ‘ordinary people’, particular individuals in the community, known as jarlngungurr (Glaskin 2005, 303), can communicate with ancestral figures, as well as the spirit beings and the deceased from the Dreaming. They do so through dreams that are initiated by these other-than-human beings and through which knowledges are revealed to the human dreamer. While these knowledges have existed since time immemorial, they inform contemporary ritual and ceremonial life in novel ways, including in the form of new songs, dances, designs, and more, pointing to the integration of tradition and innovation, and past and present, in both the dream form and its real-world ramifications. It is also through the knowledges acquired through dreams from spirits, ancestors, and the deceased that jarlngungurr are able to perform healing, divination, shape-shifting, and time-travel. Dreams thereby help the Bardi anticipate future calamities, notably where respect for Country has been violated and must be remedied or redressed.

As the example above demonstrates, dreams and their authority in producing truths play an important role in enabling the transmission of cultural and spiritual knowledge across times and generations. In other contexts, dreams have played a seminal part in encouraging societal transformation, notably in the form of religious enculturation and spiritual self-reinvention. This is the case among the Asabano of highland Papua New Guinea, for whom dreams (aluma) have always acted as portals to the dead, forest beings, or place spirits, and as experiential evidence through which people describe, explain, and rationalise their religious beliefs (Lohmann 2000). When Baptist missionaries sought to convert them in the late 1970s, many Asabano continued to practice their customary religion. It was only following a series of prophetic dreams experienced by villagers, in which they encountered God, the Holy Spirit, Jesus, angels, apocalyptic deluges, and the fires of Hell, that Christian beliefs were truly absorbed and internalised. Christian figures that appear in villagers’ dreams to this day testify to these beings’ reality and power and remind people of the behaviours they must sustain in order to secure an afterlife in paradise, whereas traditional and familiar dream-entities like evil nature spirits and cannibal witches are now interpreted as minions of Satan. As such, while the ability of dreams to convey information has not changed for Asabano, the kinds of information being received, and associated dictates of moral conduct, have significantly transformed, with dreams playing an important—potentially even determinant—role in enhancing villagers’ receptivity to the precepts of introduced Christianity.

Dreams, as such, can be instrumental in validating, inspiring, and sustaining belief among members of religious communities. Their evocative valences can also be harnessed beyond the scope of those individuals who adhere to particular religious groups, as illustrated by Amira Mittermaier’s (2015) reflective account of dream-stories among Egyptian adherents to the mystic body of Islamic religious practice known as Sufism. During her fieldwork, Mittermaier was granted permission by her interlocutor, ‘Umar, to consult and select accounts from the Book of Visions, containing the records of dreams and waking visions of followers of Shaykh Qusi, a renowned inheritor and transmitter of the prophet Muhammad’s teachings. This permission, she later found out, itself stemmed from an order that had come to ‘Umar by way of a dream. However, while Mittermaier originally chose dream-visions for her research with the aim of achieving a representative sample from diverse sources and encompassing diverse themes, ‘Umar replaced these selections with a collection of accounts that, to Mittermaier’s initial disappointment, were all relatively similar in content. What drove ‘Umar’s choices was not the pursuit of neutrality or representationality, but rather the effectiveness of these particular dreams in achieving the key aims of Sufi dream-visions—namely, to communicate the shaykh’s aura, to create a sense of awe, and to buttress the shaykh’s spiritual authority. Just as anthropologists selectively deploy ethnographic examples to convince and draw in their readers, so too Sufis approach dream-stories as invitations to their audiences that enable them to communicate and connect with the Prophet, his descendants, and the dead. Dreams allow us to catch a glimpse of the inaccessible, invisible, and unknown, and to be moved both spiritually and imaginatively. And just as prophetic dreams in Sufi communities are at once highly valued and contested, so too decisions around which dreams to include and exclude in Mittermaier’s ethnographic account were never neutral, but shaped as much by anthropological considerations as by the evocative use of dreams as examples by Sufis themselves.

Conclusions

Dreams are universal as experiences yet specific in their contents, interpretations, and performances. As such, they constitute powerful resources for engaging with long-standing questions around the construction of, and relationship between, self and society, mind and body, and continuity and change, and the meaningful slippages that arise across the realms of the known and speculated, lived and narrated, practical and spiritual, and agentive and reflective. Dreams express cultural creativity, social conflict, potentialities for self-exploratory, self-transcendence or hazardous vulnerabilities. They alternately reflect, resolve, or reinforce individual and collective anxieties and desires, as people move in and across different worlds, knowledges, and relations.

Importantly, attending to dreams anthropologically challenges the notion of a single ‘reality’ and its correlative relationship to the ‘imagination’ as the ‘broader range of meanings that encompass a variety of spaces, modes of perception and conceptualizations of the real’ (Mittermaier 2011, 3). Instead, it invites us to think of dreams as a form of ‘emergent reality’ (Tedlock 1987b, 4)—or as ‘real in a different way’, as Vincent Crapanzano’s Moroccan informant, Tuhami, says when speaking about his nightly visitations by a she-demon (1980, 15). Dreams are multiply meaningful precisely in light of their inherent ambiguity and in-betweenness, or what Jeannette Mageo calls their ‘mimetic incompleteness’ (2004, 151). They also draw attention to the political, affective, and social force of the imagination as a culturally molded yet never entirely graspable or intelligible dimension of human existence (Stephen 1995; Stevenson 2014). And just as not all dreams bear the same hermeneutic weight or consensual meaning for those who experience them, so too it is critical to consider whose dream interpretations are foregrounded within anthropological accounts across insider-outsider and subjective-objective divides.

Since its inception, the anthropology of dreaming has continued to develop in new and exciting directions. It is no longer confined to particular ‘culture complexes’ or world-regions. Instead, comparative studies of dreams across Global North and South divides push against the romanticisation or essentialisation of non-Western dream cultures (Domhoff 1990). These studies identify recurring motifs in the dreams of American and Japanese citizens (Griffith, Miyagi, and Tago 1958), the role of conflict in the dreams of Bedouin, Irish, and Israeli children (Levine 1991), and the manifest content of dreams experienced by US-based college women of Anglo-American, Mexican-American, and African-American heritage (Kane 1994).^[5]

Alongside a burgeoning of multi-disciplinary approaches that combine anthropological methods and theories with cutting-edge findings in neuroscience and evolutionary biology, some scholars are practicing ‘studying up’ by examining how Western-trained psychotherapists understand their own dream experiences alongside their relationship to both their patients and their profession (Dombeck 1991). Other researchers practice ‘studying in’ by harnessing auto-ethnographic methods to consider how dream-related knowledge systems learned in the field come to bear new meanings in light of their own personal, physical, and psychological traumas back home (Richman 2000). The role of animals as participants in and producers of dreams (Hallowell 1960) has seen renewed attention in emerging multispecies approaches that consider, for instance, dogs’ dreams as expressions of more-than-human perspectival agency (Kohn 2007) or the haunting apparition in dreams of wrongfully killed cows as expressions of more-than-human retributive justice (Govindrajan 2022).

At the same time, dreams continue to pose certain challenges to the classical methods of anthropology. ‘Dream-narratives’ are always fragmentary and often socially or individually motivated accounts of ‘dream-experiences’ (Kirtsoglou 2010) that themselves cannot be empirically verified and lie beyond the reach of participant-observation. The personal nature of dreams, as well as their at-times spiritual, sacred, or supernatural dimensions, can make them a sensitive topic of discussion, often requiring a strong level of rapport between the researcher and her interlocutors. Taking dreams seriously as objects of analysis is also not devoid of risk for anthropologists themselves, whose professionalism and objectivity may consequently come under question—notably when it comes to writing and imparting their own dream experiences (George 1995, 17–8).

And yet, attending to dreams can also open meaningful spaces for conversations around the different yet interconnected worlds of researchers and their informants. Participating in dream-experiences and sharing dream-narratives can drive intersubjective dynamics of fieldwork, and create mutual trust, critical self-reflection, and openness to ambiguity.^[6]As a form of affective and discursive ‘involvement in the cosmology of the Other’ (Sprenger 2010, 61), delving into dreams—both one’s own and others’—can push back on the ‘anthropological taboo against going native’ (Ewing 1994, 574) and attendant assumptions around the nature of cultural belief versus empirical reality (Luhrmann 1989; Favret-Saada 1980). Rather than dismissing dreams as fictive constructs or ethnographic objects alone, it is perhaps in anthropologists’ willingness to become vulnerable to dreams’ intersubjective thrust that dreams’ agentive force as ‘wild possibilities’ (George 1995, 17) might relationally and imaginatively gain ground and grow.

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Note on contributor

Sophie Chao is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Chao is author of In the shadow of the palms: More-than-human becomings in West Papua (2022, Duke University Press) and co-editor of The promise of multispecies justice (2022, Duke University Press).

[1] On the significance of dreams and dreaming in Western history from Ancient Greece to modern times, see Pick and Roper (2004); Parman (1991). On the role of dreams in medieval world religions, including in Europe, early Asia, and Latin America, see Shulman and Stroumsa (1999); Bulkeley (2008).

[2] These studies found echo in later approaches that were concerned with identifying constant and recurring motifs underlying diverse myths across different cultural settings (e.g. Kuper 1979).

[3] For state-of-the-field syntheses of the anthropology of dreaming, see Laughlin (2011); Lohmann (2019); the edited volumes by Tedlock (1987a); Bulkeley (2001); Mageo (2003); Mageo and Sheriff (2021); and the special issues edited by Stewart (2004) and Heijnen and Edgar (2010). For region-specific anthologies of dreaming, see Lohmann (2003) on the West Pacific; Jȩdrej and Shaw (1992) on Africa; Bulkeley (1994) on the West; Price-Williams and Degarrod (1989) on South America.

[4] On the function of dreams as techniques for solving everyday practical matters, including in the contexts of hunting, curing, craftsmanship, and artistic production, see Brightman 2002; Rushforth 1992.

[5] On anthropologies of dreaming in the Global North, see Hollan 2005; Newsom 2021; Heijnen 2010; Sheriff 2017.

[6] On dreams as an intersubjective research method in the field, see Chao 2023; Lambek 2018.

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Mental Health

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 15:25:29 +0000

"Be happy and live". Photo taken in 2021 by photographer and mental health activist Damilare Adeyemi.

Mikkel Kenni Bruun

King's College London

Initially published 4 Apr 2023

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

Abstract:

When we talk about mental health, we could seem to be talking about some self-evident reality. However, the very notion of mental health can be seen to both assume and require a specific vision of human interiority. The so-called ‘sciences of the soul’—or the ‘psy' disciplines—were particularly formative in defining this perceived interior selfhood through various scientific and therapeutic practices of inspection and introspection, through new constitutions, articulations, and regulations of what it means to be human. Mental health could be seen to be fundamental to our collective and individual ability as humans to think, feel, relate, interact with each other, sustain ourselves, and enjoy life. This entry explores some key theoretical and ethnographic interests, and their alignments and tensions, through which different anthropologies of mental health have taken shape. For example, social studies of mental health have been shaped by various engagements of ‘culture’ as a form of both contextualisation and critique. More recently, scholars have examined the political, ethical, and therapeutic processes by which people come to constitute themselves and others—for instance, through everyday practices of self-care or clinical diagnosis and treatment—as particular subjects of mental health. Anthropologists have described how people’s experiences of mental health and its associated afflictions are constituted relationally, in different ways, and with different social consequences around the world. The entry ends with a brief discussion of some current topics in anthropological studies of mental health, from the proliferation of mental disorders and the prevalence of neurobiological understandings of human distress to the increasing digitalisation of mental health. As these and other efforts imply, mental health is becoming a prominent field of enquiry in contemporary anthropology and one with renewed ethnographic salience for everyone involved.

Introduction: Situating mental health

The concept of mental health has drawn together a range of ideas and practices that have come to define, and intervene on, what it means to be human. In contemporary English-speaking societies, it is a concept which is often used to express a concern for human well-being in psychological terms. However, what counts as ‘mental health’ is a question of varied social significance as we move historically and ethnographically across time and space. Increasingly, mental health figures as a universal feature in conceptualising humans, and, conversely, mental ill-health is understood to affect humans globally, with an estimate of 970 million (or 1 in 8) people around the world considered to be living with a ‘mental disorder’.^{^[1]}

Some anthropologists have argued that mental illness is recognised in every culture, even if the ways in which people experience, treat, and make sense of psychological distress might differ considerably (see e.g. Luhrmann and Marrow 2016). Others have been sceptical of the very language of ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’, particularly where it has been deployed to pathologise or criminalise incongruent desires and bodies, as in the case of homosexuality for instance (Foucault [1961] 1988a), and to uphold systems of colonialism and racialisation (Fanon 1963). At the same time, the concept of mental health construed as a shared human condition of what it means to be psychologically well has been deemed important and needed; indeed, mental health has in recent decades come to be regarded as a ‘human right’ by the World Health Organisation (WHO).^{^[2]} Increasingly across different social worlds, from local healing practices and national health systems to everyday affairs of care and kinship, global health discourses, and beyond, mental health has emerged as something that ‘everyone has’. It is something that, for better or worse, warrants attention and action.

This entry provides a brief exploration of some theoretical and ethnographic interests that have been particularly instructive in anthropological studies of mental health. Before turning to anthropology, however, the entry suggests a way of situating mental health. This can only be done in very general terms here. One important point is that, despite its contemporary ubiquity and salience, mental health is a relatively recent concept that emerged in particular historical (and historiographical) circumstances, shaped by new psychological practices and institutions, through which new constitutions, articulations, and regulations of a ‘healthy mind’ were effected. Modern psychology now generally considers people to have something called mental health located in the putatively subjective interiority of the individual person, a human interiority which has become aligned with particular notions of ‘the mind’ or ‘the brain’ (Martin 2021; Rose and Abi-Rached 2013).

The concept of mental health reveals a complex historiography of social transformations over the past two hundred years, from the era of the asylums to the psychiatric hospitals and mental health services with which we are familiar today (Foucault [1961] 1988a; Unsworth 1993; Shorter 2007). It is a concept shaped particularly by two world wars and the emergence of welfare states with the monitoring of publics and populations (Fraser 1984; Busfield 1998; Marks 2017). Importantly, ideas of mental illness have also emerged in contexts of colonisation and decolonisation (Reyes-Foster 2018; Calabrese 2013; see also Fanon 1963). The historical precursor to the concept of mental health has been traced back to the efforts of the ‘mental hygiene movement’ that took shape in Europe and America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Bertolote 2008; Novella and Campos 2017). The idea of ‘mental hygiene’ gained traction in the second half of the nineteenth century and is often credited to the work of William Sweetser (1797–1875), who defined it as the science of preserving a healthy mind (Sweetser 1850). The mental hygiene movement sought to establish public health measures and interventions in the prevention and treatment of mental disorders. In the aftermath of the Second World War, however, the term ‘mental health’ gradually replaced the language of mental hygiene because the latter had become increasingly associated with Nazi eugenics.

When we move to present-day contexts of the cognitive sciences, mental health figures as a wide-ranging field of research, with several scientific and clinical definitions currently in circulation. The WHO offers the following:

Mental health is a state of well-being in which an individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.^{^[3]}

The WHO states further that ‘mental health is more than just the absence of mental disorders’. Conversely, according to this definition, mental ill-health implies that a person lies at a ‘negative’ end of a health continuum. For instance, mental health professionals might speak of ‘caseness’, of being ‘a clinical case’ (see e.g. Susko 1994), which means that a person who reports distress considered as pathologically significant is deemed to be suffering from mental ill-health. We see here that the very conception of mental health hinges on one of the key problems in psychiatry, namely the epistemic resolution of the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological’—including that distinction itself (Canguilhem [1966] 1989; Foucault [1963] 1973). The various ‘psy’ sciences (Rose 1985) that emerged over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries established themselves by claiming their ability to deal with a range of mental and behavioural phenomena deemed dysfunctional or abnormal. The concept of mental health was thus historically constructed around notions of pathology and the differentiation between normal and non-normal conduct.

Anthropological trajectories

Contemporary worlds of mental health can be seen to constitute a multitude of sciences, technologies, and professions, as well as involve a wide range of therapeutics and care practices within and beyond clinical settings. In the following sections, we are going to look at some key anthropological trajectories in relation to what has been collectively termed the ‘psy disciplines’, that is, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychology. Anthropologists have increasingly come to treat mental health as an ethnographic topic of central rather than tangential interest. This entry suggests that we might think of different anthropologies of mental health, some of which have developed within specific subfields of social and cultural anthropology, such as medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, and cross-cultural or transcultural psychiatry. Since the early twentieth century, anthropologists have developed diverse ways of studying issues that we might, for the moment, summarise as concerning ‘mental health’. However, this term—and other related terms such as ‘well-being’—came generally much later in anthropology.^{^[4]}

Anthropological research on mental health has often focused on traversing or reconciling the disciplinary fields of anthropology and psychiatry. One key aim was to render anthropological knowledge applicable to clinical problems. To some, this meant accounting for ‘culture’ in psychiatry, particularly in terms of ‘cultural difference’ in the perception and experience of illness, and in the classification, diagnosis, and treatment of people (Kleinman 1980; Littlewood and Lipsedge 1997). Within anthropology, it is largely medical anthropologists who have been at the forefront of dealing with these issues in the context of psychiatry—a discipline that has tended to dominate anthropological studies of mental health both ethnographically and analytically (see, e.g., Sapir 1932; Opler 1959; Westermeyer 1976; Kleinman 1988; Luhrmann 2000; Littlewood 2002; Brodwin 2013; Jenkins 2018; Pinto 2020).

Ethnographic fieldwork encourages us to take seriously the experiential realities of those we study. Anthropologists might not always find it appropriate, therefore, to assume a particular definition of mental health but tend instead to be more interested in how the people they study are establishing and enacting their own definitions and self-defining worlds: for example, how people might understand, use, resist, and live ‘mental health’, and the consequences. As such, rather than taking mental health for granted as pre-given or self-evident, we can think of it as something that emerges relationally. This entry suggests that mental health comes to figure in multiple ethnographic senses: as a presumed universal feature of the human mind; a sense of self; a psychological state that can be intervened upon and taken care of; a measure for populations, groups, or individuals; an object of therapeutic enquiry; a matter of concern for those classified as patients; and so on. We could talk here of different 'definitional realities' of mental health that constitute its meaning (see Ardener 1982; Hastrup 1995; McDonald 2020). For instance, clinical evaluations of mental health are inevitably dependent on the conceptual definitions offered of that reality. Analytically, this means that ‘mental health’ does not figure as an a priori phenomenon anterior to its relations and articulations, but as a category in action. Some social scientists might want to talk here about the ontological multiplicity of mental health; for example, how it is enacted and coordinated as a matter of concern—similar to the ‘doing’ of disease in medical practice (Mol 2002).

The ‘social’ and the ‘psy’

The question of mental health has been shaped by various attempts to either separate or reconcile the social and the psychological. Such attempts were particularly influenced by anthropological studies of the so-called ‘primitive mind’, the 'personality of culture', and the nature of human cognition. Anthropology addressed mental health as an object of study, in an important sense, via the scientific ambitions of the early psy disciplines, notably late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century psychoanalysis and experimental psychology. Yet mental health was often only implicitly dealt with, eclipsed by prevailing ambitions at the time to ascertain a universal human psychology—‘the generalised mind’—inspired in part by the German experimental psychologist William Wundt’s (1832–1920) ‘introspective’ methods, as well as by subsequent anthropological investigations into what was then seen as the ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ mind (Martin 2021, 26–51; see also Rieber 1980; Mandler 2011). Influenced by Darwinian evolutionism and its underbelly of Victorian scientific racism, a widespread theory of human psychology claimed that so-called ‘primitive’ people lacked higher mental functions while they surpassed ‘civilised’ people in physical performance, because more energy was seen to remain devoted to their physicality as opposed to their mentality (Martin 2021, 37). This theory was put to test, and eventually challenged, by the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (Haddon 1901; Herle and Rouse 1998; Sullivan 2012), which also sought more generally to investigate psychological ‘introspection’, namely the inspection of one’s own internal mental processes. The expedition was influential in shaping both modern anthropology, and in bringing together psychology and anthropology with a common interest in what we might now want to see as an early version of mental health research.

However, the relationship between anthropology and psychology as exemplified by the Cambridge Expedition did not end in a happy marriage. On the contrary, in Britain and elsewhere, the social and cultural were in many ways further delineated in contradistinction to the psychological. During the early twentieth century, new disciplinary identities emerged as practitioners marked out social science (including anthropology) distinct from psychology and natural science. For example, the British anthropologist Edmund Leach treated psychology as a discipline against which social scientists are ranged. He asserted that ‘[the anthropologist] will be well advised to leave psychological matters to psychologists and stick firmly to the public sociological facets of the case’ (1958, 148). This was a disciplinary division of labour according to which the world was also divided into a presumed separation of the public and private, the collective and individual, the external and internal. One of the pioneers of British social anthropology, Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) effected his own disciplinary boundary-making by way of critically engaging with psychoanalysis. In Sex and repression in savage society (1927), Malinowski famously examined the Freudian ‘Oedipus complex’ in the context of Trobriand kin relations and child development, which led him to dismiss any notion of Oedipal universality claimed by psychoanalysts of the day. While Malinowski remained a critic of psychoanalysis and its ‘exorbitant claims’ throughout his career, he also contended that its ‘open treatment of sex […] is of the greatest value to science’ (Malinowski 1927, vii–viii). Although Malinowski and Leach, and, before them, Émile Durkheim ([1912] 2008), had long moved the ‘social’ away from the ‘psy’, the question of human interiority—for some the seat of cognition, emotion, and subjectivity, complete with an individuated mind or consciousness (indeed, what many today might think of as pertaining to mental health)—never completely disappeared from anthropology.

Influenced by the work of Franz Boas (1858–1942), another famous anthropological pioneer, developments in American cultural anthropology during the first half of the twentieth century offered a rather different engagement of psychological theories. The most prominent development came from the ‘culture and personality’ movement during the 1920s and 30s instigated by the work of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead (all former students of Boas) and which subsequently fed into the American-bred field of psychological anthropology (Ingham 1996; LeVine 2010; see also Mead 1928; Sapir 1932; Benedict 1934). Applying their own critical reading of Freudian psychoanalysis, they argued that human behaviour is ‘culturally patterned’, just like speech is patterned by a particular language. The cultural patterns of childhood experience were thus considered to be the cause of adult personality characteristics, which in turn gave rise to culture-specific patterns of mental health and forms of psychopathology. The aim was for some to develop a generalised cultural description of mental health through ethnographic research on individual personalities and, by extension, the personality of cultures. For other anthropologists, however, such an ambition simply confirmed what they had previously suspected, that a psychologised version of anthropology was susceptible to reductionism and overgeneralisation (LeVine 2001).

It was only much later with the ‘cognitive revolution’ of the 1970s, that ‘psy’ gradually came to occupy another conceptual space among anthropologists as they began to move from the mythic and symbolic universe of structuralism (owed to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and those who read him, see e.g. 1963) to the laboratory of cognitive science. New evolutionary theories equipped anthropologists with novel rethinkings of ‘cognition’ (e.g. Bateson 1972) that shaped the emerging subfield of cognitive anthropology (Blount 2011). Importantly, some anthropologists challenged what to them appeared to be their discipline’s ignorance of a properly scientific study of human mental life. Cognitive anthropology sought to put an end to the Durkheimian separation of the social from the psy that had informed so much of anthropology. However, mental health was still largely a taken-for-granted object in cognitive anthropology, which has tended instead to examine the transmission of cultural representations, Theory of Mind (ToM), innate modularity, and cognate ideas (see Whitehouse 2001; Bloch 2012; Irvine 2018). In all such endeavours, and in those that have come after, the concept of culture looms large.

Culture and mental health

Anthropological studies of mental health in the second half of the twentieth century have been driven by efforts to account for ‘culture’ and ‘cultural differences’ that came out of interdisciplinary borderlands between psychiatry and anthropology, sometimes referred to as ‘cross-cultural’ and ‘transcultural’ studies (cf. Opler 1959; Westermeyer 1976). Culture was also taken up as a language of anthropological critique. For example, the psychiatrist-cum-anthropologist Roland Littlewood has argued that the concept of culture remains ambiguous for psychiatry as it has tended to perceive it as secondary to a biomedical reality. He argued that psychopathology is inherently ‘local’, and that the discipline of psychiatry has its own tacit ‘culture’ (Littlewood 1996). Earlier work had already introduced the idea of ‘the cultural construction of clinical reality’ and encouraged ‘a clinical social science capable of translating concepts from cultural anthropology into clinical language for practical application’ (Kleinman, Eisenberg and Goods 1978, 140). Its authors urged a distinction between ‘disease’ and ‘illness’, as well as the concept of ‘explanatory models’ that sought to include and elicit the ‘patient’s experience’ of disease and treatment: how do people understand and live with mental illness? How is disease perceived in cultural terms? What or who caused it, and how? This work seemed in many ways novel and important, but it still took for granted many of the old dichotomies of medicine. For instance, Kleinman and his colleagues presented a scenario of doctors with scientific ‘knowledge’ and patients with culturally determined ‘beliefs’; with ‘disease’ (medical reality) on the one hand, and ‘illness’ (cultural experience) on the other.

The disease versus illness distinction has informed much research in the intersecting fields of anthropology and psychiatry, as well as beyond: it is now a common component of clinical education programmes where it features as a way of reinserting ‘the cultural context’ where such is deemed lacking or to acknowledge ‘the patient perspective’. Yet this conceptual binary can also imply a problematic separation of the physical versus the mental whereby the former is seen as underlying (biological) causation and the latter as mere (cultural) representation. This has tended to presuppose that neurobiology—as a seemingly culture-free reality—is the ontological foundation of mental health upon which perceptions and experiences of it are culturally or socially constructed. We can trace many contemporary versions of this type of social and cultural constructionism in anthropologies of mental health and related fields.^{^[5]}

The earlier work of Kleinman (1980; 1988) along with the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1970s (e.g. Szasz 1974) nevertheless had a significant impact in confronting psychiatry with ‘culture’, although their reasons for doing so differed greatly: anthropologists generally sought to improve psychiatry rather than dismantle it. Even so, anthropologists now seemed equipped to take apart the cultural preconceptions built into psychiatric diagnoses and treatments in a manner that exposed psychiatric conceptions of mental disorder as inherently ethnocentric, revealing underpinning cultural biases and assumptions (Littlewood and Lipsedge 1997). Anthropologies of mental health and illness have since been routinely embedded in constructs of ‘cultural difference’ or ‘different cultures’ (e.g. Littlewood and Dein 2000; Luhrmann et al. 2015; Onchev 2019). The language of culture has also been considered a worthwhile mode of contextualisation in a field of research that still tends to be dominated by biological determinism (e.g. Sargent and Larchanché 2009). Some anthropologists have found it compelling to talk of ‘the culture’ of the mental health clinic (Luhrmann 2000, 119–57); of differences in professional and therapeutic cultures, with diagnosis, treatment, and patients recontextualised. More recently, new interdisciplinary engagements between anthropology and psychology have described how different cultures ‘invite’ people to relate to their mind in particular ways, which in turn affects the kinds of mental experiences people have and how they make sense of them (Luhrmann 2020; Weisman et al. 2021). Understanding mental health here means grasping shifting cultural models of mind.

Historically, anthropologists have thus been largely responsible for introducing the concept of culture to the study of mental health (cf. Mead 1953; Opler 1959; Westermeyer 1976), although it did not always bring about the anthropological insights that occasioned it. For example, ‘cultural competency’ now regularly features as an important educational component of many mental health training programmes and services (e.g. Carpenter-Song, Schwallie and Longhofer 2007). But cultural competency efforts, despite their best intentions, can appear to treat culture simply as a variable to be accounted for. Different differences—what might be seen as pertaining to nationality, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality—are often brought together under a single denominator of the ‘cultural’, thereby eliding a range of experiences altogether.^{^[6]}

The concept of culture has in many ways effected its own problems. Introducing ‘culture’ in studies of mental health, as suggested above, meant introducing ‘context’ and then ‘meaning’. Yet, in these instances, culture is easily reified in ways that some anthropologists might find rather problematic (Strathern 1995; Fox and King 2002; McDonald 2012). For example, speaking about different cultures of mental health might imply an unhelpful normativity that requires further anthropological validation, and evoking culture as a mode of contextualisation and critique does not always differ significantly from people’s own self-understanding. Whitney Duncan (2017) explores this latter point in her ethnography of psychoeducation (psicoeducación) in Oaxaca, Mexico. Working with psychologists and patients in and around a psychiatric hospital, she describes how mental health practitioners come to understand culture as a barrier to mental healthcare. They strive to further ‘psy-globalisation’—the transnational flow of ideologies and practices around mental health. Practitioners see themselves as involved in a global and modernising movement to promote mental health but express frustration about how difficult this project is in Oaxaca, where ‘local culture’ prevents their efforts (Duncan 2017, 37). Mental health practice thus emerges as a project of what she terms ‘psychological modernisation’, a movement that is defined against its own perception of local culture (consisting of ‘traditional medicine’, ‘beliefs’, and ‘magical thinking’). It considers local culture to be incommensurable with global notions of mental health and a source of resistance to mental healthcare and its de-stigmatisation. Not only does psychoeducation in Oaxaca provide a means of self-understanding among professionals and patients alike in the context of modernity, Duncan argues, but it also actively seeks to produce the psychological conditions for modernity.

From governmentality to self-cultivation

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) has arguably been one of the most influential scholars in social studies of mental health and illness. It was the earlier body of his work on the history of madness and the birth of the clinic (Foucault [1961] 1988a; [1963] 1973) which initially inspired critical examinations of the psy disciplines—speaking of a ‘great confinement’ of the mad into asylums and new scientific ambitions that effected the authority of a ‘medical gaze’ (e.g. Hacking 1998; Rose 1989; Danziger 1998). These accounts have traced how, over the course of the twentieth century, psychological knowledge regimes have effected new forms of self-governance—what Foucault called ‘governmentality’—and political relations. The insight that whole populations and ‘life itself’ have become problematised as objects of management and regulation gave rise to the terms ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’ (Foucault et al. 1991; Rose 2006).^{^[7]} In the formation of (neo)liberal democracy, Nikolas Rose (1996) has shown that diverse psychological knowledge practices require that we ‘invent our selves’ or constitute ourselves as if we were selves. The crux of the arguments that run through much of this and related Foucauldian scholarship is the contention that, in the name of expertise and well-being, the psy disciplines—their institutions, professions, technologies, and interventions—conceal and instil specific moral and political ideologies that shape the ways we come to know, relate to, and act upon ourselves and others. Constituted through discourses of individual autonomy, people are rendered responsible for their mental health—for instance, in everyday articulations and requirements ‘to take care of yourself’—in the name of their own freedom.

Anthropologists of mental health have also drawn from Foucault’s work on ‘subjectification’ (assujettissement) in examining the different modes and processes by which human beings are made into subjects. Subjectification refers not only to a mode of having power and control exercised over oneself (‘political subjection’) but also to modes of acting upon oneself and others that constitute one as a particular kind of subject (Foucault 1997). When applying this analytical lens to mental health, it can elucidate, for instance, the effects of people subjected to practices of diagnosis and treatment by which they are classified as distinct clinical cases (e.g. ‘a patient with anxiety disorder’), at the same time as they are required to take up particular subject positions (see Hacking 1985, on ‘making up people’). Consider as example the construction of ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD). Based on Vietnam War veterans’ reports of war-related trauma, PTSD was officially accepted in 1980 as a universal disorder, when it was included in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-III). This followed a political struggle by psychiatric workers on behalf of the large number of veterans who were seen to suffer from the psychological effects of traumatic memory (Young 1995). Contrary to the depiction of the disorder in psychiatric classification practices, PTSD may thus not be timeless, nor does it possess an intrinsic unity:

Rather, it is glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, treated, and represented and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments that mobilised these efforts and resources’ (1995, 5).

Young shows how clinicians in the US applied the diagnostic criteria to include people that they felt ought to be seen as mentally ill and shows the way patients in turn began to present themselves in such a way as to fit into the diagnostic categories of PTSD.

Moreover, some scholars have argued that psychiatry’s capacity to define the ‘mentally ill’ has been achieved partly through the making and remaking of the DSM (American Psychiatric Association 2013)^{^[8]} and through historical processes of institutional colonialism, market capitalism, and a medicalisation of human suffering (see e.g. Healy 1997; Kirk and Kutchins 1997; Borch-Jacobsen 2012; J. Davies 2021). This literature targets modern psychiatry and pharmaceutical industries in particular, and has echoes of earlier critiques that came out of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 70s (e.g. Fanon 1963; Szasz 1974). This was a movement influenced by Foucault’s genealogy of madness, which appeared to expose psychiatry in many ways as a structural oppressor. Foucault’s scholarship thus had a significant impact on intellectual anti-psychiatry critics, many of whom held academic positions in psychiatry, although he often distanced himself from the direction in which they took his work.

Since the 1980s and 90s, then, social scientists have been ready to contextualise and deconstruct mental health within an analytical frame of ‘politics’. Neoliberalism—with its associated ideals of autonomy and individual responsibility (Ganti 2014)—has often been evoked as one such political frame within which to locate and critique mental health. Social scientists have pointed to the impact of neoliberal attitudes on social and economic stressors such as unemployment in relation to the rapid increase in ‘mental health problems’. Neoliberalism especially shapes depression and the growing ‘happiness’ industry (W. Davies 2015). At the same time, even putatively ‘neoliberal’ mental health initiatives might be seen to move beyond political agendas and logics with unexpected consequences. For example, some anthropologists argue that the self-governing practices of individuals required to ‘work on’ their mental health—and any process of subjectification this might entail—are not always sustaining any straightforward or self-explanatory neoliberalism (Cook 2016; Bell and Green 2016). It has also been common in social science studies of mental healthcare for ‘politics’ (neoliberalism or capitalism, for instance) to be seen and cited as a domain that gets in the way. By the same token, one common way of criticising care has thus been to situate it in the service of politics.

T.M. Luhrmann’s (2000) ethnography of American psychiatrists can be read as an objection to the kind of critical studies of the psy disciplines discussed above. Luhrmann refrained from situating her study of American psychiatry in terms of Foucauldian governmentality, deeming such social science perspectives a naive romanticism that does little justice to the suffering subjects:

Foucault did presume that madness had always existed, but he romanticised it in a way that, despite all his insights, did a terrible disservice to its pain. […] Madness is real, and it is an act of moral cowardice to treat it as a romantic freedom. (2000, 11–2).

Instead, Luhrmann identified two competing paradigms in psychiatry: the psychotherapeutic model (informed by psychoanalysis and psychotherapy) and the biomedical model (informed by neuroscience and pharmacology). Her ethnography provides a remarkable account of the epistemological conflicts between ‘talk therapy’ and ‘drug therapy’, and the medico-moral consequences of losing the former to the latter.

More recently, it is Foucault’s later writings on ethics and care (see e.g. [1978] 1988b; 1997) that have inspired anthropological perspectives on mental health. People who undergo mental healthcare, for example, can be understood as participating in active processes of self-cultivation through an ethical practice of ‘reflective thought’ (Laidlaw 2018). Here, one’s mental health is constituted as an object of reflection in order to change it, or one's relation to it. Practitioners of ‘mindfulness-based cognitive therapy’ develop a particular ‘distanced perspective’ as they are learning to cultivate a detached relation to thoughts and feelings: ‘I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts’ (Cook 2015, 223–9). This seeming capacity for introspection, to take one’s ‘self’ as an object of inspection and reflection, is at once assumed and required in psychological therapies as practised in the UK and elsewhere (Bruun 2023). In the face of the promise of postsocialist democracy, the work of post-Soviet Russia’s psychotherapists can be understood as an ethical practice of freedom, but one that ultimately hinges on ‘an ongoing struggle between different assumptions about freedom […] that plays out through precarious care’ (Matza 2018, 241). The freedoms sought in post-Soviet Russia are less individualised and based instead on collective forms of ‘self-work’. Psychotherapists seek to cultivate mental health for themselves and their clients but are caught between psychology’s ambiguous care for the lives of two distinct groups of people—those who accumulated wealth and those who did not—following the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no easy way out of biopolitics here, but the logics of psychotherapeutic care also enable new ethical orientations, new modes of caring for self and others.

Foucauldian notions of both governmentality and self-cultivation have encouraged anthropologists and mental health practitioners alike: not only have they provided important conceptual frameworks within which anthropologists might contextualise and critique psychological realities, but they have also informed mental health practitioners’ own critical assessments of their professional worlds.

Psyches, minds, bodies, and brains

Within the historiographical context of the sciences, mental health emerged in mutual distinction and self-definition: physiology dealt with ‘the body’; psychology with ‘the mind’ or ‘psyche’. The so-called ‘sciences of the soul’ were particularly formative in defining a perceived human interiority through different practices of inspection and introspection (Coon 1993; Danziger 1998; Vidal 2011). The modern disciplines of the clinic thus helped divide the human into the mental and the physical, the psychological and the physiological. We have largely inherited this and other dichotomies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where also ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ emerged in contradistinction (Daston and Galison 2007). New psycho-technologies and scientific methods of introspection helped constitute ‘the human mind’ as an object of both scientific observation and intervention (Rieber 1980; Green 2010; Martin 2021). Reified as empirical objects, ‘the mind’ and ‘the body’ established in turn universalising ideals about ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ health, including their demarcation and distinct disciplinary subdivisions and specialisms.

With the rise of neuroscience in the twenty-first century, some feel that mental health has finally been anchored in the physical reality of the brain (Rose and Abi-Rached 2013). Consequently, a biologically orientated psychiatry now tends to see the distressed mind as a result of a biologically dysfunctional brain. Focusing on the persuasive power of brain images as experienced by people suffering from mental ill-health, Joseph Dumit’s (2003) ethnography shows how neuronal connectivities and chemistries, such as neurotransmitters, come to be seen as the aetiology of distress. Through encounters with neuroscientific causation models where brain images (such as PET scans) play a key role, people come to understand themselves as having chemical imbalances in their brain that cause mental illness such as depression. Neuroscientific facts cast the afflicted person as a dysfunctional brain by which they acquire a sense that they are their brain. The persuasive idea here is that ‘the mind is what the brain does’. But this understanding of mental health, in which the person experiences distress because of their brain, also comes to sit in tension with people’s sense of an agentive self and a capacity for self-determination: ‘is it me or my brain?’ (Dumit 2003).

Neurobiological theories that envisage the brain as a chemical laboratory of mental health have, for a long time now, equipped mental healthcare systems with scientific rationales for the use of psychopharmaceuticals in the treatment and management of people who experience distress (Petryna, Lakoff and Kleinman 2006; Jenkins 2010; Oldani 2014). Biomedical models of mental health can thus appear to locate responsibility and agency elsewhere, namely in the biochemical constitution of brains. Conversely, anthropologists have also described how psychotherapists have tended to locate moral responsibility on the part of the afflicted person (Kirsner 1998; J. Davies 2009). Littlewood (2002) has construed this tension as ‘naturalistic’ versus ‘personalistic’ explanations of mental ill-health. For the biomedically-trained psychiatrist, however, mental illness was no longer anyone’s fault: people were instead suffering from discrete ‘disorders’ that could be detected neurologically and treated with drugs (Luhrmann 2012). By the 1980s, neuro- and cognitive scientists were throwing out the psyche and Freud had become a footnote in psychology textbooks as psychoanalytic theories and methods were largely discredited. Psychological scientists have since strived hard to situate mental health research in the scientific principles and measures of ‘real science’ on an equal footing with biomedicine, contending that their discipline could otherwise be lost to ‘pseudoscience’ (cf. Lilienfeld, Lynn and Lohr 2004).

Notions of the biochemical and genetic brain remain instructive in contemporary understandings of mental ill-health and its treatments (Rose and Abi-Rached 2013). It is partly through the persuasive notion of a universal human physiology that the concept of mental health has acquired its own universality. But it has also brought with it a biological understanding of minds and maladies. For some anthropologists, this entails a problematic reductionism which has caused a ‘psychiatric drug epidemic’ by way of pathologising human distress (J. Davies 2017). Over the past forty years, numbers of mental disorders have grown exponentially in the publications of international diagnostic manuals, resulting in a proliferation of psychopathologies and market-driven pharmaceutical treatments (Petryna, Lakoff and Kleinman 2006). In an age of psychopharmacology, the ‘pharmaceutical self’ (Jenkins 2010) continues to shape experiences of mental health with vast social, ethical, and economic effects.

Anthropology encourages us to treat the division of health into the ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ as a matter of ethnographic interest. It is, in other words, worthy of study to anthropologists that some people conceptualise health in terms of ‘mind’ and ‘body’, and that these divisions in turn mark out different realities deemed ‘psychological’ and ‘physiological’. More recently, the ‘biopsychosocial’ model, invented by the American psychiatrist George L. Engel (1977), has been an attempt to bring together different disciplines (biology, psychology, social science) alongside their associated realities (body, mind, society). Rather than treating these as separate phenomena, this model claims to further a more holistic and scientifically rigorous understanding of humans as biopsychosocial beings. In the context of mental healthcare, such an understanding has in turn encouraged a perspective on treatment in which it is no longer sufficient for interventions to consider only biological or psychological factors. Instead, treatment must include ‘the social’ in the sense of environment, context, and culture (see e.g. Álvarez, Pagani and Meucci 2012; Gask 2018). According to this model, mental health is not only a case of a biological body (a case of ‘brain chemistry’, for instance) existing anterior to its psyche, social relations, or environment, but of a whole body-mind-subject—biologically, psychologically, and socially constituted—in a particular cultural world. However, the anthropologist might wonder at the separations and connections that are sought here. We might ask, for example, if the tripartite differentiation put forward in the ‘biopsychosocial’ is still suggestive of a problem rather than offering a novel reconciliation.

The proliferation of mental health

Following the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, an upsurge in mental ill-health around the world and its associated medical, social, and economic impacts, including an exacerbation of existing health inequalities, have been widely reported on in scientific journals (e.g. Moreno et al. 2020; Wu et al. 2021). The Covid-19 pandemic has reinvigorated mental health as a matter of concern, from local and national levels of concern—pertaining to ‘individuals’ and ‘populations’—onto a cosmopolitan scale as part of ‘global mental health’ efforts. Mental health perceived as a global phenomenon, which might require equally global intervention, seems now a well-established reality that has received further experiential confirmation by reports of a worldwide mental health crisis of depression and anxiety disorders caused by the pandemic (e.g. Santomauro et al. 2021). Anthropological investigations of mental healthcare in times of ‘crisis’ seem therefore both pertinent and needed (see e.g. Wright 2022).

An important trajectory of anthropological research in the field of mental health has focused on the production of neuroscientific facts (Cohn 2008, 2010; Dumit 2004), the effects of pharmaceuticals (Dumit 2012; Jenkins 2010; Petryna, Lakoff and Kleinman 2006), and the construction of ‘disorders’, such as bipolar disorder (Martin 2007), autism, depression (Kitanaka 2012), and schizophrenia (Luhrmann and Marrow 2016). Furthermore, the expansion of ‘evidence-based psychological therapies’, especially cognitive behavioural therapy and mindfulness, and a proliferation of mental health initiatives and psy professions around the world have been a recent focus of ethnography by which new accountabilities, healing modalities, and configurations of care and politics have been examined (Brenman 2021; Bruun 2023; Cook and Cassaniti 2022; Duncan 2018; Huang 2018; Long 2018; Matza 2018; Pickersgill 2019b; Vogel 2017; Vorhölter 2021; Zhang 2020). These studies deal diversely with issues of precarity and access to mental healthcare, the transformation of therapeutic practices within and beyond their particular cultural or clinical environments, and the social and ethical consequences of particular scientific, economic, and political framings of mental health.

Another recent direction of research explores the digitalisation of mental health. The proliferation of digital monitoring technologies and AI-assisted interfaces—such as computerised therapeutics, online clinical platforms, smartphone apps, and wearable self-tracking devices—has constituted new fields of digitised mental healthcare (see e.g. Birk and Samuel 2020; Brandt and Stark 2018; Fullagar et al. 2017; Minozzo 2022; Pickersgill 2019a; Trnka 2022). Self-monitoring of ‘mental well-being’ is now part of many people’s daily health regimen as everyday activities of eating, sleeping, work, and recreation have become digitalised objects of observation shaped by ambitions to ‘encode wellness’ and promote personalised forms of health surveillance (Cearns forthcoming; Bruun forthcoming). This move towards ‘digital psy’ presents us with ‘disparate subjects, practices, places and temporalities of sensing, predicting, diagnosing, or treating mental health’ (Bemme, Brenman and Semel 2020). New therapeutic socialities and relationalities have unfolded.

Conclusion

The anthropology of mental health has come a long way. This entry has shown how ‘mental health’ can figure both as an analytical category in anthropology and an object of ethnography. Ethnographies of mental health can help us grasp not only the structural features of healthcare systems but also the modalities of healing and care in and beyond the clinic (e.g. Meyers 2013; Patton 2010), the medical and moral complexity of psychological distress (e.g. Luhrmann 2000; Zhang 2020), and the experiential realities that take shape around these issues. Where issues of authority and mental illness come together, anthropologists have demonstrated how people might resist, reinvent, or transform the therapeutic worlds in which they live (e.g. Brodwin 2013; Calabrese 2013; Myers 2015). Ethnography also teaches us that people’s experiences of mental health are situated in their own and others’ classifications and understandings of it (Bruun and Hutten forthcoming). Mental health thus entails particular kinds of theories that people have about themselves and others and the world in which they live. Anthropology can help us better understand why and how people experience mental distress but also what well-being and happiness might mean and look like.

Mental health might be seen to have acquired a hard-won universality. While some find this universality compelling and needed, others are critical of the ubiquity of mental health as an organising concept with the capacity to both normalise and pathologise. Kleinman, among others, contends that the expansion of the category of mental health ‘seems to simultaneously trivialize the most serious medical conditions and to medicalize social problems’ (2012, 118). He suggests that ‘fifty years from now this category will have been abandoned’ (Kleinman 2012, 118). Meanwhile, the realities of people’s experiences of mental health are unlikely to go away any time soon. In many parts of the world, mental health is now something that ‘everyone has’. To have mental health everywhere brings home its ethnographic salience.

Note

The writing of this article was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Programme for research and innovation (project no. 947867).

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Note on contributor

Mikkel Kenni Bruun is a Research Associate at King’s College London, where he currently works on the ERC SAMCOM project (https://samcom.uk). He also teaches anthropology at Cambridge University and is co-editing a volume on the anthropology of psychology. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Dr Mikkel Kenni Bruun, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. kenni.bruun@kcl.ac.uk

[1] World Health Organization. 2022. “Mental disorders.” June 8. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-disorders. Accessed 1 October 2022.

[2] World Health Organization. 2022. “Mental health.” June 17. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health-strengthening-our-response. Accessed 1 October 2022.

[3] World Health Organization. “Health and well-being.” https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/major-themes/health-and-well-being.

[4] Some early anthropological work that sought to study mental health explicitly is collected in the volume Culture and mental health, edited by Marvin Opler (1959). Many of its contributors were also professional psychiatrists.

[5] For a critique of cognitivist and cultural models in anthropology and psychology, see Toren 2012.

[6] A related issue concerns ‘structural competency’ efforts in the training of healthcare practitioners (Hansen and Metzl 2019). The ‘structural’ refers here to an analytical shift away from the level of the individual to examine institutional structures (clinical, educational, judicial, etc.) that underlie social determinants of health problems and access to care.

[7] It is important to note that Foucault was dealing mostly with the historiography of the ‘western’ subject. There are other histories and formations, of course. Recent anthropological writing on the relationship between the emergence of the psy sciences and colonialism has considered how we might think about presenting this history (Reyes-Foster 2018; see also Fanon 1963, on the ‘psycho-affective’ effects of colonisation). I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this work.

[8] The DSM is currently in its fifth edition (DSM-5), published in 2013. It replaced the DSM-IV which appeared in 1994. For a critical review of the DSM-5, see Hacking (2013).

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Magic

Felix Stein — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 11:03:55 +0000

Matteo Benussi

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Initially published 25 Oct 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19magic

Abstract:

Attempts to define and describe magic must reckon with this concept’s slipperiness, as magic is often understood against what supposedly it is not: typically, ‘proper’ religion and ‘rational’ science, even though both religion and science are objects just as elusive. Despite its ambiguous status and the prejudices attached to it, or maybe precisely for these reasons, magic has long enthralled scholars in the human sciences, and anthropology in particular. After first exploring the genealogy of magic as a concept, this entry will examine the manifold ways in which occult knowledges and practices play a role in the life of many societies. It will touch on the role of vernacular magic in experiences of crisis, and dwell on how anthropology has found a way to appreciate the ‘truth’ of magic. It then explores magic as a ‘craft’ – a set of techniques through which practitioners creatively shape their relationships with the world and their own selves. Emphasis will be given to magic’s documented potential to activate the imagination. The case of ceremonial magic and its revival will allow the reader to appreciate the modernity of magic. The entry concludes with a reflection on the recurrent attributes of magic – often identified as a particularly experimental, do-it-yourself, and manipulation-based form of spiritual action – and its compatibility with a post-secular age that has not renounced enchantment.

Defining magic

Magic is one of the most puzzling phenomena studied by social scientists, which has inspired and challenged generations of observers. Is magic irrational, maybe even delusional, the product of minds that cannot think straight? Despite widespread prejudice, most specialists nowadays think this is not the case. Historical and ethnographic research has revealed that many reasonable, lucid, and intellectually sophisticated people, including great philosophers and artists of the past, dabbled in magic (Yates 1964; Saunders 2010; Jütte 2015). One may wonder: perhaps such people, despite their discernment, were ignorant of modern science – is magic ‘primitive’ or ‘barbarous’, then? This too is unlikely. Categories like ‘primitivism’ and ‘barbarity’ would not get us very far in exploring magic, not only because anthropologists consider such evolutionist concepts inherently misleading and derogatory, but also because all types of societies, including ones characterised by highly complex technology, organizations, and scientific knowledge, appear to have room for magic. Understanding magic, then, requires that we be prepared to shed or at least bracket ingrained prejudices. But how do we define magic, to begin with?

The word ‘magic’ evokes a vast array of associations: from the solemn, white-bearded sage, endowed with mystical power in fairy tales and fantasy films, to sinister witches and sorcerers surrounded by grimoires, occult sigils, potions, and astrological charts; from ‘cunning folk’ healers, combining incantations and herbal remedies, to stage magicians asking us, with a wink, to let our senses be deceived. Yet explaining clearly what the many tropes associated with the concept of magic have in common is easier said than done. The concept has been used in association with divergent practices such as folk medicine, divination, palmistry, necromancy (communication with the dead), astrology, alchemy, spiritualism, occultism (the study of hidden or paranormal things), illusionism, neo-paganism (the worship of natural forces, often modelled after ancient religions), and New Age spirituality. To complicate things, the field of magic as the term is commonly understood – including amongst many of its practitioners – has come to incorporate elements that elsewhere would fall under the category of ‘religion’, such as Kabbalah (a Jewish mystical tradition) or Yoga (a set of spiritual doctrines emerged from within Indic Dharmic faiths). A plausible working definition of magic, loose enough to accommodate at least most of the nuances associated with it, may describe it as a set of activities and technologies intended to manipulate invisible or immaterial agencies and energies, not recognised by science, to an advantageous end. However, there are risks inherent in defining such elusive a subject as magic.

The word ‘magic’ has long evoked negative connotations, associated with the exotic religious customs of a threatening Other. The vocabulary and concept of magic have a distinctly Western genealogy: the word comes from the Greek mageia, which, in ancient Greece, was used to describe the priests (magav) of the arch-inimical Persian Empire (Graf 1995; Bremmer 1999). In this ancient sense, the word was associated with practices that were outlandish because they were foreign. Over time, however, and partly due to the influence of Christianity, the idea of magic became attached to spiritual or remedial practices that, while originating from within Western societies, were classified as eccentric, illegitimate, or dubious because of their external/marginal status vis-à-vis religious and scientific orthodoxy. In early modern Europe, arcane knowledge and practices were also associated with marginal groups like the Jews or peasants (Ginzburg 1991; Jütte 2015). Despite this shift in orientation, the concept of magic retained its association with notions of weirdness, mysteriousness, and unorthodoxy (Stratton 2013). When we use the category, therefore, we must be alert to both its potentially negative connotations and its shifting boundaries.

Another, related danger inherent in the vocabulary of magic is connected to its usability in non-Western contexts. For instance, let us take the Islamic notion of siḥr, usually translated as magic or sorcery. Siḥr partly resembles Christian understandings of magic as unorthodox dealings with the occult, and therefore illegitimate and sinful. However, alongside familiar items like goetia (commerce with demons) and astrology, siḥr also includes slander, malicious gossip, the ‘charismatic seduction of crowds’ (Knight 2016: 16), and other arts of deception which would not be considered ‘magic’ in most Western understandings. When it comes to magic, nuance risks easily getting lost in translation.

Furthermore, distinguishing between ‘unorthodox’ magical practices and ‘legitimate’ religious ones is particularly problematic in the case of religious traditions that are not based on highly codified doctrines and liturgies, and therefore do not encourage distinctions between prayer, incantation, or spell to the same extent as Christianity, in particular, as we shall see, in its Reformed versions. For instance, in certain Tibetan Buddhist contexts, religious specialists take part in propitiatory rituals to conjure or restore ‘fortune’ (Humphrey 2012) that in Western settings might easily be classified as magical spells and rituals.

Magic, science, religion… and anthropology

It is impossible to omit the role of anthropology itself in construing the idea of magic that was to become dominant in the modern era. In other words, we must consider that anthropology as an academic discipline has greatly contributed to establishing what counts as magic and what does not in today’s mainstream consciousness, including amongst many practitioners of magic.

The early-nineteenth-century rise of scientific interest in magic was both fuelled and conditioned by Europe’s encounter with hitherto unfamiliar spiritual traditions in the colonies. Nebulous concepts like ‘shamanism’ and ‘fetishism’ both enthralled and repelled European intellectuals, divided between an optimistic embrace of empirical science and technologic progress and a hard-to-kill Romantic fascination with all things mysterious and arcane (Pels 2003). Both the asymmetries of the colonial encounter, with Europe seeking to justify its exploitation of faraway peoples as a ‘civilising mission,’ and the intellectual establishment’s anxieties over the popularity of phenomena like occultism, thus conspired to turn magic into a veritable culture-war item. If colonialism ‘required’ the foil of native magic as a pretext for domination (Wiener 2003: 140), magic never stopped haunting the metropole itself through the mediation – or mediumship? – of homegrown Spiritualists and Theosophists, generating in turn the reaction of scientific-minded debunkers. The latter group encompassed novel professional figures as diverse as besuited stage illusionists, proponents of a disenchanted version of magic as pure entertainment and skill, and erudite scholars of ‘native trickery’: early anthropologists (Jones 2017).

Building on the reports of missionaries and explorers, Victorian-era anthropologists (of the mid- to late-nineteenth century) busied themselves with creating hierarchically organised taxonomies of social facts they had second-hand knowledge of, and that corresponded, in their view, to more or less well-defined ‘steps’ in an evolutionary ladder of human cultures. Influenced by the styles of reasoning of their time, these scholars classified magic, religion, and science in different categories, corresponding to progressive ‘stages’ of cultural complexity, with magic attached to ideas of archaism and childlike irrationality. From a magical stage, human groups would progress to a religious stage, followed by science supplanting religion at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy.

Where did the assumption underpinning nineteenth century academic conceptualizations of magic come from? Later scholars of magic (Tambiah 1990) have identified a mindset imbued with Protestant sensitivities, and the prestige of classical heritage and erudition, as crucial factors in shaping magic as an object of social-scientific study. Some of the most influential pioneers in the study of religious life had a Protestant background, in particular E.B. Tylor, who famously defined religion as ‘belief in Spiritual Beings’ (2008: 25). Scholars like Tylor, however, were reluctant to put religion – a respectable sphere of contemplation and worship – on the same footing as ‘base’ magic. It has been persuasively argued (Tambiah 1990: 12-5) that evolutionistic ideas of magic as distinct from and inferior to religion were likely fuelled by Protestantism’s deep dislike of occult practices and Biblical characterizations of magic as diabolical. This Protestant legacy contributed to the consolidation of a narrow idea of religion as a system of abstract beliefs (cf. Tylor’s definition), culminating in theology and metaphysics, as opposed to magic with its hands-on, result-oriented manipulation practices. A distinction between prayer (religious) and spell (magical) epitomised this opposition.

As far as the second source of influence – the Hellenic tradition – is concerned, Classical Greece grouped what we today call magic (understood as the occult manipulation of invisible forces) together with philosophy, the manipulation of concepts, and medicine, the manipulation of bodily substances. These activities were quite distinct from the sphere of religion understood as the worship of the Gods. While the first realm was characterised by an inquisitive, experimental attitude, the realm of divinity was not seen as an arena of human disputation. Stanley Tambiah (1990: 8-11) has argued that, given the prestige of Hellenic traditions in Western academia, a separation between magic and religion ended up influencing Victorian anthropologists such as James Frazer. In his pioneering research into magic, Frazer came to consider magic a failed attempt at science, as both systems were thought to share the idea that the universe is regulated by impersonal forces that can be intervened upon, harnessed, and manipulated. However, magic was understood to be based on incorrect ideas about these forces, as well as distorted and incomplete factual knowledge of the world (Jarvie & Agassi 1970).

Scholars in the turn-of-the-century French sociological tradition came up with yet different reasons to push magic to the margins of spiritual life. Émile Durkheim, one of the key figures of the early social science of religion, defined religion as a set of beliefs and practices concerning sacred things and shared by a moral community: a ‘Church’. He expressed the view that magic, while consisting of belief and rites like religion, though ‘less developed’, should be considered distinct from the latter because, being chiefly an individual endeavour, magic fails to generate proper ‘Churches’ (1995: 39-42). This notion too contributed to framing magic as something eccentric, peripheral, and somewhat lacking vis-à-vis religion, despite being tightly connected to it.

Later scholarship, based on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive time spent in the company of magic practitioners observing how magic is carried out in practice, became more interested in understanding magic rather than debunking it. Resulting approaches tended to call into question the notion that clear-cut divisions, let alone hierarchies, between magical, religious, and scientific worldviews can be objectively established. Furthermore, a consensus has emerged amongst anthropologists and religious studies specialists that deciding where religion (e.g. belief in spiritual beings), folk knowledge (e.g. non-biomedical healing systems), or ‘natural philosophy’ (e.g. astronomy) end and magic begins, has more to do with cultural boundary-making and social normativities than with any ‘objective’ reality. In innumerable historical and socio-cultural settings, drawing clear lines would be impossible. In Renaissance Europe, magic was performed by clergymen, scientists, and philosophers, while twentieth-century occultists, guided by a keen interest in scientific discoveries, moved in a grey area between science and magic producing ambiguous yet highly successful concepts such as ‘animal magnetism’, ‘mesmerism’, or ‘psychic energy’. In colonial Africa, sorcery was part and parcel of communities’ everyday religious and ritual life (Evans-Pritchard 1937). In 1980s Euro-America, witchcraft was rediscovered by tight communities of college-educated urbanites. These cases invite us to abandon the deeply ingrained stereotypes about magic as spiritually aberrant, irrational, and irredeemably ‘other’ that influenced early anthropology.

In spite of the fallacies of evolutionism outlined so far, the works of Victorian anthropologists remain relevant today. Some of their ideas are still compelling and they are frequently referenced by contemporary occultists themselves. One example of such lasting contributions is Frazer’s typological distinction between imitative magic, based on similarity, and contagious magic, based on contact. In the case of imitative magic, actions, objects, or enactments that resemble a given thing, person, or event, are understood to have an effect on the latter (e.g., enacting a hunt to secure abundant game); contagious magic, on the other hand involves using items once connected to the intended target of magical action (e.g., using someone’s clothes or nail pairings to cast a spell on them). This distinction has become a staple in magical studies and even within magical milieus. More broadly, early social scientists’ characterization of magic as a quintessentially pragmatic, experimental endeavour, an attempt to harness and manipulate occult forces – getting one’s hands dirty with the occult, so to speak – retains most of its validity today, even if we might not want to see this as absolutely incompatible with, or subordinate to, canonical religion or academic scientific thinking.

Dealing with the negative: maleficium and modernity

If drawing clear boundaries and establishing hierarchies with respect to magic may be difficult, how does contemporary, fieldwork-based anthropology go about understanding it? Especially after anthropology’s methodological revolution in the 1920s that established ethnographic fieldwork as the paramount avenue to investigate social and cultural life, anthropologists have become particularly interested in understanding magic in and through practice – in other words, in figuring out what people do exactly, when they do magic.

Focusing on the uses and meanings of magic in concrete social settings has had the effect of showing us that magic, far from being something archaic, lies at the heart of global modernity. As people from Latin America, to central Africa, to Mongolia, to the US and Europe become engulfed in urbanization, capitalist markets, and dreams of social mobility, ideas about the occult gain currency. They reveal deep connections between personal experiences of distress and anxiety, historical transformations marked by dynamics that exceed the ordinary and the visible, and lasting yet flexible cultural models of the cosmos which include both visible and invisible forces (Geschiere 1997, Harding & Stewart 2003, Buyandelger 2007, Barkun 2013). Magic, thus, serves as a powerful resource through which people across the globe cope with their lives in a complex, unpredictable, and often intractable world.

Indeed, scholarship based on immersion in concrete socio-cultural settings has, from its inception, recognised magic as an existential resource people draw upon ‘to compensate for the uncertainties of chance and to forearm against bad luck’ and ‘create confidence, enhance hopes and anticipations’, as fieldwork pioneer Bronislaw Malinowski wrote describing vernacular propitiatory agricultural spells amongst Trobriand islanders (1935: 217, 246). Malinowski thereby suggested that magic becomes psychologically salient when humans are confronted with the problem of the unknown: a spell is a linguistic buffer against anxiety in the face of an ever-present threat of misfortune. Malinowski’s explanation of the psychological function of magic – as part of an explanatory approach called ‘functionalism’ – has spearheaded studies that focus on cognition, some of which will be discussed in the next section (Luhrmann 1989).

In a watershed study conducted in the 1930s, Edward Evans Evans-Pritchard investigated witchcraft and anti-witch vengeance magic among members of the Azande ethnic group of current day South Sudan. The concept of witchcraft, i.e. the capability to cause harm to others through mystical means either deliberately or unwittingly, was described by him as providing members of the Azande with ‘a natural philosophy by which the relationship between men and unfortunate events is explained’. In addition to offering practical means of dealing with misfortune, Azande witchcraft theory also pointed to a system of values regulating human conduct (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 18). Hostile or envious attitudes carried the risk of attracting ruinous witchcraft accusations. Furthermore, misdeeds could result in retaliatory magical attacks. Azande witchcraft theory thus inhibited socially disruptive behaviours, thereby strengthening the stability of what Evans-Pritchard saw as a social system. Interestingly, witchcraft accusations did not undermine social cohesion in this analysis. Instead, witchcraft could be seen to contribute to social stability.

The Azande, however, were perfectly aware of non-magical causal links. Witchcraft was not meant to explain all aspects of how a certain misfortune occurred. For example, when a building collapsed and killed somebody, any Azande could easily figure that its supporting structure had been weakened by termites. However, magic offered a framework to explain why something happened to a particular person and not someone else. Evans-Pritchard famously described this as the theory of the ‘second spear’. If a man is killed by an elephant, the elephant – the direct cause – is the first spear. Maleficium (causing evil through occult means) is the second spear. The elephant rammed into him, and not someone else, because he, not someone else, was bewitched.

This study revolutionised understandings of magic by framing it as a socially appropriate and culturally meaningful answer to the problem of a negative unknown, rather than a cognitively inadequate one. It emphasised that the Azande were not credulous, but people who prized inquisitiveness and rational thinking, and whose mental processes where not dissimilar from those of Evans-Pritchard’s fellow Europeans. Indeed, a major implication in Evans-Pritchard’s work is that it draws attention to the fact that all humans are likely to ask the question ‘why me?’ when visited by misfortune, with recourse to supernatural strategies. Azande witchcraft was not, after all, so exotic. This realization led to the emergence of sustained debates on the ‘rationality’ of magic that have been engaging anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers of various backgrounds and orientations (Winch 1970, Jarvie & Agassi 1970, Sperber 1982, Lewis 1994, Boyer 2002) ever since. These on-going debates have helped establish that multiple forms of rationality, apt to address complex moral, relational, and emotional problems alongside technical ones, are at play in all human societies. ‘Apparently irrational beliefs’ may appear much less outlandish once considered as parts – and expressions – of broader social and cultural logics.

In addition to recognising the social meaning of magic, anthropologists have also drawn attention to its therapeutic efficaciousness vis-à-vis experiences of the negative, especially illness and trauma (Lévi-Strauss 1974; Lindquist 2005; Favret-Saada 2015). Writing on folk magic in the deep rural south of Italy after World War II, Ernesto De Martino (2015) shed light on the experiences of anguish that characterised communities caught between impoverishment and rapid modernization – and especially the most vulnerable groups, labourers and women. He wrote, ‘[t]he root of … any form of magic, is the immense power of the negative throughout an individual’s lifetime, with its trail of traumas, checks, frustrations, and the corresponding restrictedness and fragility of the positive’ (2015: 87). In circumstances such as illness, exploitation, or uprooting, vulnerable individuals and communities faced a radical existential uncertainty that manifested itself in altered states of consciousness ranging from frenzy to catatonia, a condition called tarantism (literally a ‘tarantula’s bite’). De Martino investigated the vernacular magic-based emergency procedures, most prominently spells and ecstatic dances (Tarantella), activated in these cases. Folk magical techniques are, in De Martino’s view, procedures that facilitate recovery from crises, helping to overcome illness and existential dread. Magic enables people to makes sense of suffering, and offers a ‘first aid kit’ of materials, spells, exorcisms, and ritual specialists capable of reabsorbing the negative and thereby restoring a sufferer’s sense of self. De Martino mixes a phenomenological approach characterised by a focus on first-person experience, useful to grasp the intimate, personal dimension of magic, with a Marxian concern with the ‘structural’ dimension of the problem of suffering.

Related post-Marxist approaches have further illuminated magic’s relation with political-economic dynamics, such as the rapid development of capitalist markets disrupting pre-existing social arrangements and spreading anxieties across social bodies. Michael Taussig (1977), for example, has explored how in the 1960s, impoverished labourers in Latin American mines and sugar plantations employed the occult idiom of ‘the devil’ and the trope of the Faustian pact – the risk of losing one’s soul – to make sense of their work. These ideas were used to express intellectual and moral statements about the ‘hidden’ mechanisms of aggressive capitalism, such as uncompensated labour, the extraction of surplus value with the amassment of wealth into a few private hands, and commodity fetishism.

Indeed, devil talk turns out to be a surprisingly sophisticated tool through which unschooled peasants and miners could formulate theories and critical judgements about their political and economic reality of exploitation. Inspired by such studies, as well as Max Gluckmann’s notion of ‘magic of despair’, anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff have further contributed to our understanding of the political economy of magic and witchcraft though their notion of ‘occult economy’ (1999), i.e. imaginative and material practices connected to the use of magical means to achieve utilitarian ends. Phenomena such as witchcraft ‘epidemics’, urban lore on zombie labour, or occult-related conspiracy theories are, the Comaroffs submit, ‘symptoms’ of occult economies ‘waxing behind the civil surfaces’ of development. Cultural tropes such as the undead slave and the blood-sucking warlock become urgently salient when entire populations are drafted into regimented, mindless, and exhausting forms of labour or confronted with exploitative, seemingly invincible corporations. The term ‘occult economies’ thus indicates people’s ‘recourse to the occult in situations of rapid social transformation, under historical conditions that yield an ambiguous mix of possibility and powerlessness, of desire and despair, of mass joblessness and hunger amidst the accumulation, by some, of great amounts of new wealth’ (1999: 283): it is easy to see why although the Comaroff’s main focus is Africa, their approach has been applied to multiple contexts across the global South.

Working on the invisible: the magus craft

Despite the importance of studies that explore magic as a phenomenon straddling the personal, the cosmological, and the socio-historical, some scholars have argued that insisting on its negative aspects does not tell us the entire story. The occult is more than a symptom of suffering, turmoil, and distress. Indeed, a well-established scholarly tradition focuses on magic as an occult technology – a ‘craft’ – used to bring about desired change in both self and world. These approaches should not be seen as antithetical to the ones discussed above, and indeed the two aspects often coexist within the same instance, as the change being pursued with magical means may aim to restore balance and wholeness in the face of affliction or illness. Bearing in mind that distinguishing between ‘negative’- and ‘craft’-oriented approaches to the study of magic is to some extent an analytical artifice, this section will foreground examples of the creative and positive dimension of magic.

The case of ceremonial magic and especially Western esotericism is particularly helpful to appreciate magic’s ‘craft’. While all types of occult practices and knowledges are learned with varying degrees of mastery, Western ceremonial magic, being based on written bodies of tradition and often socialised through relatively organised communities, offers an ideal case study of magic as a set of techniques for the transformation of both the self and the world.

Many consider the Renaissance the golden era of European ceremonial magic. From the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries CE, polymaths and thinkers such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, Isabella Cortese, or John Dee devoted considerable energy to the investigation of both the visible and the invisible dimensions of the universe. These figures, at once proto-scientists, theologians, and explorers of the occult, played an important role in defining the field of ‘erudite’ Western magic, drawing on repertoires as different as astrology, Christian theology and ethics, Greek mystery religion and philosophy, and Jewish mysticism (Yates 1964, 2001; Culianu 1984; Jütte 2015). The Renaissance model of the cosmos featured an ethereal dimension, called pneuma, existing between the physical and the spiritual realms. All persons and things, although materially separate from each other, were understood to be invisibly interconnected at the ‘pneumatic’ level, clinging to each other in secret correspondences that escaped the base senses. Anthropologists working on magic have identified comparable models of reality in a vast number of societies. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl has classically defined this model ‘participatory’ (1999); more recently, Philippe Descola has proposed the notion of ‘analogism’ to describe models of the world in which all things are thought to be invisibly interlinked (2013).

Importantly, accessing the etheric dimension required sophisticated training of one’s imaginative and affective faculties. This involved rigorous spiritual discipline, encyclopaedic knowledge, articulated ceremonials, and the craft of handling matter according to its occult, etheric properties. In what is known as ‘desire magic’, for instance, Renaissance magicians would use their ability to discern and activate ethereal interconnections between objects, including persons, to influence the latter’s psychic life.

Intriguingly, this has originated the hypothesis that Renaissance magic is best understood not as a prefiguration of natural science, but rather of advertising, propaganda, and ‘mass psychology’ – the use of affective means to induce inter-psychic dynamics (Culianu 1984: 88). Indeed, the fact that there seems to be a strong family resemblance between ‘magic’, understood as the ability to generate and control interpersonal affective states, and mass publicity phenomena – from charismatic leadership to the attractiveness of brands – has long been recognised by anthropologists (Mazzarella 2017).

The advent of Protestantism likely drove ceremonial magic and its etheric intermediate dimension underground, ushering in an order of the universe premised upon a stark separation between the terrestrial and divine realms (Orsi 2002). However, the extent to which this transformation was successful is disputable: as we have seen in the previous section, modernity remains far from magic-free. Anthropological research (Luhrmann 1989, Lewis 1996) has revealed that ceremonial magic did not altogether disappear; rather, it withdrew to the counter-culture, where today it is actively pursued by new generations of practitioners. In contemporary Euro-America, occult circles of various types, such as Wiccan and neopagan covens, consciously attempt to revive Renaissance magic. Yet unlike their predecessors, latter-day Western occultists inhabit a post-Enlightenment, Cartesian mainstream anxious to exorcise the unruly spectre of magic (Pels 2003) or at least push it out of sight – either into the disreputable category of the ‘primitive’ or into the sanitised realm of ‘art’ (Mazzarella 2017).

Under these unfavourable conditions, anthropologists are interested in exploring how people who are socialised in a secular, non-magical, scientific cosmos, actively learn to ‘believe’ in magic. In other words, through which activities ordinary, scientifically literate Westerners reorganise their cognitive processes in order to ‘see’ the invisible workings of magic, in the mundane flux of everyday life. Anthropologists have described the transformative processes whereby magicians accustom themselves to finding magic persuasive as a work of cognitive cultivation. They have proposed concepts such as ‘interpretive drift’ (Luhrmann 1989) and ‘magical consciousness’ (Greenwood 2013; 2014) to characterise changes in magicians’ thinking styles.

Although magical forces are unpredictable, practitioners attempt to become alert to, and manipulate, them through disciplines requiring assiduous training, such as meditation, visualization, and dream interpretation. Ritual is equally important to ‘forge magical selves’ (Pike 1996). Consider the following example reported by Tanja Luhrmann: in the 1980s a London-based sorcerer performs a ceremony to propitiate fortune in finding accommodation (even then a notoriously tall order in the city’s housing market). A few days after the ritual, ‘no house is forthcoming, but a packet of advertising leaflets on house maintenance arrives in the post. This is reported with pride and self-mockery – the rite worked, but not quite with the intended results’ (Luhrmann 1989: 130). Recognising and attributing importance to hidden connections does not imply naiveté on the sorcerer’s part. Rather, doing magic entails a degree of irony, and a valorization of the imagination. Fantasy is not dismissed as mere ‘pretend’, but valorised as a ‘serious play’, a realm in which things and events are meaningful and wondrous. As Greenwood put it, while participating in magical consciousness, the question of belief in the ‘real’ existence of spiritual forces and beings frequently becomes ‘irrelevant’ (2014: 203).

What often counts for practitioners is that magic offers an avenue to positively engage with the world, while at the same time cultivating cognitive skills and imaginative or emotional resources that otherwise would remain inert. Owing to its ability to generate desirable affective states, William Mazzarella (2017) surmises, magic makes reality more enjoyable and pleasureful – even the mundane encounter with a packet of leaflets is experienced with delight – and this has positive repercussions on a sorcerer’s self. Ethnographic studies suggest that not only the goals, but also the methods of magic are considered invigorating by practitioners. When it comes to ritual, for instance, ceremonial magic allows ample scope for creativity compared to mainstream religious organizations: ceremonies change over time and magical milieus borrow from multiple traditions such as mythology, folklore, academic literature, and pop culture. Far from being seen as problematic, eclecticism in ritual is often proudly declared, an emphasis on creativity and bricolage understood as empowering (Magliocco 1996: 99; 2006).

While in this section we have focused on Western magic, it should be stressed that this form of ‘erudite’ occult craft is by no means the only one that underwent a revival in recent years. Consider, for example, the Book of Changes or I Ching – a classic Chinese divination text dealing with techniques of prognostication based on casting lots. Straddling philosophy, metaphysics, and soothsaying, I Ching has been described by some modern scholars as evidence that imperial-era Chinese literati were immersed in a ‘magical worldview’ (Chun 2014: 30). While, historically, divination has not been pushed underground or stigmatised to the same extent as Renaissance magic, I Ching was nonetheless harshly critiqued as superstitious during socialist-led modernization. Recently, however, I Ching divination made a comeback amongst middle-class urbanites, with some seeing it as having ethical value in view of its association with ‘traditional’ Chinese virtues. Others appreciate it for complementing scientific knowledge without being incompatible with a rational picture of the world (Matthews 2016, 2017). This example shows that in non-Western settings, too, occult disciplines may come to be cherished as helpful tools for ‘positive’ self-development and satisfying engagements with the world.

Despite the mainstream’s uneasiness with occult crafts such as ceremonial magic and divination, their stubborn refusal to simply vanish into thin air points not only to the inherent contradictions of modernity, but also to the value that practitioners attach to such crafts. Regardless of what individual scholars may think of the truth of magic, anthropology seeks to understand what makes it valuable in the eyes of its practitioners.

Re-enchantment and the future of magic

Mainstream ideas of magic and sorcery are linked to the stereotype of the broomstick-riding witch that crystallised during the Euro-American witch-hunts (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries). While witch trials are often described as ‘mediaeval’, it is now well established (Ginzburg 1991) that during the actual Middle Age, ecclesiastical authorities were dismissive of magical threats, as they were certain that only God had sovereignty over the unseen. It was only as Europe entered early modernity that wizards and sorceresses became a real problem and the witch-hunts started. Recent interpretations (Stephens 2002; Silverblatt 2004) suggest that the reasons for this lie in an attitude of scepticism and inquisitiveness as well as a novel bureaucratic rationality, which began to pervade early-modern European society. Institutions such as the Inquisition sought ways to methodically explore the supernatural and systematically inquire into an occult realm. The latter had already started receding from the consciousness of Western elites, and was increasingly associated with marginal populations such as women or racial minorities. Paradoxically, even though in retrospect the witch-hunt bloodsheds may strike us as irrational, they may have been driven by a dispassionate experimental and bureaucratic mindset, rather than impulsivity and credulity. The useful lesson that this historical case can offer us is that enchantment and disenchantment are often intertwined in unpredictable ways.

This is not any less true today. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, influential European intellectuals like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber appeared convinced that a worldwide increase in literacy, better living conditions, and growing acquaintance with modern science, would make people gradually forget their consolatory but false beliefs in spirits, gods, witches, and magical forces (Casanova 1994). On the other hand, it has been noted that occult-related themes often associated with these thinkers’ works – such as fetishism, the uncanny, or charisma – haunt and complicate simple visions of progress (Pels 2003; Morris 2017). And indeed, empirical observation of recent social phenomena – such as the aforementioned global boom of occult economies or the worldwide success of Wicca and neopaganism – show that the world may not be bound to become a disenchanted and secular place after all. Contemporary scholars even propose to understand the modern as being ‘re-enchanted’ (Partridge 2005). In such a re-enchanted world, many practitioners take ‘occulture’ – an eclectic milieu mixing esotericism, pop culture, and urban mysticism – to be perfectly compatible with logical thinking and a sensible outlook on life. They also treat magic as a valuable resource to address existential predicaments, foster resilience in the face of the negative, expand their cognitive resources, work on their spiritual selves, explore fantasy and creativity, and generally improve their relationship with the world.

Though scholars agree that late modernity has witnessed a resurgence of organised religions as well, magic, with its experimental, do-it-yourself character, appears particularly well-aligned with the post-secular spirituality of the twenty-first century. ‘Church’ religions remain powerful actors, but modernity has limited their hegemonic claims over the spiritual, enabling new opportunities for mystical, alternative, individualised spiritualities to blossom. From this point of view, Durkheim’s judgment of magic as a quintessentially personal spiritual endeavour was not so mistaken, and indeed late-modern spirituality has been defined by an influential commentator as ‘post-Durkheimian’ (Taylor 2002). Social research has shown, however, that magic is perfectly capable of fostering communities, even if it is as yet impossible to predict how, and whether new, ebullient magical milieus – like neopaganism or Wicca – will consolidate. In any case, scholars have argued that magical spirituality should not be considered any less genuine just because religionists do not ‘sit in pews’ nor ‘believe in systematic theologies’ (Partridge 2005: 2). What seems beyond doubt is that magic is not set to vanish into thin air anytime soon.

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Note on contributor

Matteo Benussi (PhD, Cantab.) is a social anthropologist specialising in the study of religion, ethics, and post-secularism. He has conducted research on vernacular spirituality and ritual in Ukraine as well as on Islamic piety movements in Central Eurasia/Russia, and has lectured on the anthropology of religion at the University of Cambridge. For his current research project on memory and morality amongst Russia’s Muslims, he divides his time between the Universities of Berkeley and Venice (Ca’ Foscari), and his fieldwork site in the Volga-Ural region of Russia.

Dr Matteo Benussi, Department of Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Dorsoduro 3484/D, Venice, Italy. matteo.benussi@unive.it

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