Although this collection of nine essays is primarily
written by Cultural Anthropologists and for Cultural Anthropologists, there is
a little something for everyone in it. This is due to the good care that Mageo
has taken to ensure that the reader is presented with a fair selection of the
wide-range of topics that a cultural anthropologist interested in power and
the self might concern herself with.

The book is
divided into four more or less equal parts: Power Differentials in the US,
Transnational Psychologies, Colonial Encounters, and Reading
power against the grain. Each part contains two essays occupying different
territories of the same field. These essays are all prefaced by brief
introductions (by Jeannette Mageo & Bruce Knauft) relating their themes to
current anthropological investigation, though perhaps more helpful to the
general reader will be the summaries included in Mageo and Knauft’s passionate
introduction to the book and its topic. The other main purpose of this
introduction is to relate the essays to the aims of the book as a whole:

 Power and the Self is part of a larger
effort in contemporary psychological anthropology to craft new theories by
coupling local cognitive structures with broader conceptualizations of
motivation, affect, and identity via the operation of epistemic and symbolic
power…these chapters trace the experiential journeys through which people
achieve embodied, emotive, and strategic forms of agency within fields of
social and epistemic power. (p. 8)

But the essays in this volume, we are told, are linked by more than
mere subject matter:

They illustrate that forms of agency are intimately
bound up with our capacity to innovate upon if not to reimagine existing
schemata; these innovations and reimaginings are integral to the activity of
self-making. (p. 8)

Happily, the truth or falsehood of this theory doesn’t interfere with
the main aim of the book, which is to show how power in all its multifarious
forms – cultural, economic, epistemic, historical, institutional, legal,
linguistic, political, psychological, physical, racial, scientific, social etc
– will often affect the identity of people by limiting the potential for free
agency in numerous ways. Indeed, it isn’t even clear whether the theory in
question is meant to lead us to, or arrive from an
enriched understanding of these relations between power and agency.

What the
volume does make clear, however, is that these relations are more pervasive
than we might want to think. Here all the contributors – bar none – provide us
with an overwhelming array of research (field or otherwise,) that manifests
itself in the various figures, narratives, interviews and facts (more often
than not personal) that make up what I take to be the book’s most vital
contribution to the field.

In her essay Peace-time
Crimes Nancy Scheper-Hughes consciously follows Hannah Arendt’s footsteps
in demonstrating how Americans consent to everyday violence (even against their
own loved-ones) by tolerating institutionalised forms of social in the forms of
prisons, insane asylums, public hospitals and retirement homes which treat
people belonging to certain classes as dispensables. How is this behaviour, she
asks, any different to, say, the treatment of ‘street urchins’ in Brazil? More
importantly, this kind of social critique must end in self-critique: in
what sense can we still view ourselves as autonomous human subjects if we allow
ourselves to be rendered powerless by such institutions? Shifting the focus to
the very people who occupy these wards, William S. Lachicotte’s Intimate
powers, public selves draws on Michail Bakhtin’s work on ‘the space of
authoring’ to help show how psychiatric discourse developed to control
patients can actually be used by them for their own ends; by borrowing the
authority of medicine to answer other people’s claims against them, they
fashion themselves as ‘borderlines’ thus enabling themselves to hang on to
aspects of their own agency without letting go of the mitigation provided by
the legitimate disabilities of illness.

Anne
Allison’s Playing with power looks into how morphing action-figures can
transform children into would-be consumers who fetishize battle, aggression,
perfection and male, white ‘superiority’. Katherine Pratt Ewing presents us
with a different kind of transformation. Her Consciousness of the state and
the experience of self tells the story of a 23 year old Turkish immigrant
who runs away from her husband. Having initially compartmentalized her life
unhappily between her immigrant world and the Dutch world (at disjunctive times
and places), she eventually learns to redefine herself into adopting a
transnational identity which allows her to live a personally fulfilling life,
thus authoring her own identity by recreating the world(s) in which she lived.

Douglas
Dalton’s Spirit, self, and Power examines the making of colonial
experience in Papua New Guinea. Dalton claims that the colonial undermining of
precolonial discourse produced two divergent forms of linguistic disorders
causing Rawa men to get caught in the contradictions generated by them. The argument is that this complicates their
sense of self, giving rise to conflicting emotions, and turning them into
agents that are simultaneously both assertive and dependent. Similarly,
Jeannette Marie Mageo’s Self Models and sexual agency points to the
historical collision of Samoan culture with two other radically different
cultures (namely Victorian mission culture and 20^th century American
culture) to illustrate the ‘postcolonial recreation of Samoan women’s
traditional modes of discourse and agency’.

In Eager
subjects, reluctant powers, Harriet Whitehead makes a good case for the
irrelevance of ideology in a secret New Guinea male cult, arguing that this
misperception arises from the mistaken Western assumption that power is
universally desired. Finally Catherine Lutz’s piece on Feminist emotion appeals
to 20^th century feminist discourse on emotion in with the aim of
questioning how the language of emotions has been used to suppress
self-awareness.

It is
impossible to have a ready opinion on all these matters, besides which, any
serious attempt to give a proper assessment of each essay would be require a
separate review. What can be noted, however, is that all in all, the facts tend
to be more captivating than the theories…especially to readers who are
relatively new to the field. This is an area where the stories speak for
themselves, and do so best when they are left, if not alone, then in the
company of modest suggestions as to what conclusions one might suitably draw
from them. If there is fault with any trait that the volume possesses as a
whole, it is that the language is dense, technical, and often undefined, with
constant appeal to the authority of continental philosophers such as Bourdieu,
Deleuze and Foucault.

 

© 2003 Constantine Sandis

 

Constantine Sandis is currently completing his Ph.D.
on The things we do and why we do them at the University of Reading. He
also teaches in the Philosophy Department there, as well as at Campbell Harris,
London.

Categories: Philosophical