Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory

• INTRODUCTION •

NICHOLAS B. DIRKS, GEOFF ELEY, AND SHERRY B. ORTNER

THIS READER is part of a more general effort to explore the varieties of relations among the phenomena of culture, power, and history. Perhaps the best way to explain our objectives is to elaborate on the current thinking concerning these three terms and the contexts of their interpenetration.

Culture. The notion of culture has recently been undergoing some of the most radical rethinking since the early 1960s. Within anthropology, where culture was in effect the key symbol of the field, the concept has come under challenge precisely because of new understandings regarding power and history. Thus, for example, one of the core dimensions of the concept of culture has been the notion that culture is shared by all members of a given society. But as anthropologists have begun to study more complex societies, in which divisions of class, race, and ethnicity are fundamentally constitutive, it has become clear that if we speak of culture as shared, we must now always ask By whom? and In what ways? and Under what conditions?

This shift has been manifested in several very visible ways. At the level of theory, the concept of culture is being expanded by Foucauldian notions of discourse, and Gramscian notions of hegemony (on the latter point, the works of Raymond Williams have been particularly influential). Both concepts emphasize the degree to which culture is grounded in unequal relations and is differentially related to people and groups in different social positions. Connected to this point, at the level of empirical work, there has been an explosion of studies, both contemporary and historical, on the cultural worlds of different classes, ethnic groups, racial groups, and so on and the ways in which these cultural worlds interact.

Another core aspect of the concept of culture has been the notion of culture's extraordinary durability. The cultures of traditional societies were thought to have changed extraordinarily slowly, if at all. The virtual absence of historical investigation in anthropology, until recently, has meant that cultural systems have, indeed, appeared timeless, at least until ruptured by culture contact. But as anthropologists have begun to adopt, at least partially, a historical perspective, the durability of culture has dissolved. In many cases, timeless traditions turn out to have been invented, and not very long ago at that (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). In other cases, long-term cultural configurations have, indeed, been very stable (e.g., Bloch 1986; Geertz 1980; Ortner 1989), but we now realize that this is a peculiar state of affairs, requiring very sharp questioning and investigation.

Finally, a central aspect of the concept of culture has been the claim of relative coherence and internal consistency—a system of symbols, a structure of relations. But an intriguing line of discussion in contemporary critical theory has now posed a major alternative view: culture as multiple discourses, occasionally coming together in large systemic configuration, but more often coexisting within dynamic fields of interaction and conflict.

Perhaps the main point about the current situation is that the anthropologists no longer own culture. At least some of the critique and transformation of the culture concept derives from its use in creative, and not simply derivative, ways in other fields—in history, philosophy, sociology, and literary criticism, to name only the most obvious cases. The field of cultural studies, which established itself with astonishing effectiveness in the last decade, draws on literary criticism, social history, sociology, and anthropology to fashion what has become a distinct perspective on the culture of power, the culture of resistance, and the politics of cultural production and manipulation. (See Johnson 1987; Brantlinger 1990; Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler 1992.) Which brings us to the second term for discussion:

Power. Just as the concept of culture is undergoing fragmentation, expansion, and reconstruction, so are issues of power, domination, and authority. And here, too, the questioning extends across a wide variety of fields.

One of the lasting goods of the intellectual radicalism of the 1960s—which was also the founding moment of contemporary social history—has been an expanded and more sophisticated understanding of the role and nature of the political in social life. This involves a radically deinstitutionalized understanding of the political process, in which questions of conformity and opposition, of the potentials for stability and cohesion in the social order, and of the strength or fragility of the dominant value system, are all displaced from the conventional institutional arena for studying them (that is, the state and public organizations in the narrower sense) onto a variety of settings previously regarded as nonpolitical, including the workplace, the street, the deviant or criminal subculture, the recreational domain, and, above all, the family and the home. If the personal is political (the specifically feminist contribution to this shift of understanding), then so, too, is the wider sphere of everyday transactions.

Thus if one direction of social history, perhaps the predominant one, has been to depoliticize the social into a discrete and manageable object for study, another has been to invest it precisely with political meanings. Politics was inscribed in the texture of the everyday. The effects of these shifts on the concept of power have been multiple.

There is first of all the sense that all the relations of everyday life bear a certain stamp of power. As Foucault in particular has made us see (see esp. Foucault 1978, 1980), people acting as men and women, parents and children, teachers and students, doctors and patients, priests and penitents, can no longer be regarded simply as performing functionally defined roles. Rather, these terms define relations in which the parties, whatever else they may do, are constantly negotiating questions of power, authority, and the control of the definitions of reality.

Second, there is the sense that everyday life and culture, in which people implicitly conform to or accept their situation, should not always be contrasted with dramatic social movements, in which people question and challenge the status quo. Instead, while organized social movements remain enormously important in understanding large-scale transformations, much can be learned by attending to everyday forms of resistance as well (see Scott 1985, 1990; Lüdtke 1993).

But this, in turn, opens the question of the relationship between popular culture—in which people strive to define their identities, their boundaries, their self-respect, their space against the established order—and more well-defined social movements that claim to represent the people. Such movements often themselves become removed from everyday experience, their members coming to see popular behavior as something to be educated, improved, disciplined. At the same time, the people on whose behalf such movements claim to speak often find the language and the mechanics of these movements remote and alienating. The complex and problematic relations between social movements and disorderly popular culture, involving distinctions of class and gender, ethnicity and race, roughness and respectability, are becoming central to the contemporary problematic.

Finally, the move in social history away from state politics, and toward a focus on the small people, has often gone too far by dropping the state out of the picture. The redefinition of politics in another domain of discussion has also applied to concepts of the state; this, too, needs to be recaptured. At present much creative effort is needed to synthesize an understanding of local movements and class culture, on the one hand, and large-scale state dynamics, on the other.

Thus power is moving around the social space. No longer an exclusive property of repressive apparatuses, it has invaded our sense of the smallest and most intimate of human relations as well as of the largest; it belongs to the weak as well as to the strong; and it is constituted precisely within the relations between official and unofficial agents of social control and cultural production. At the same time, there is a major recognition of the degree to which power itself is a cultural construct. The modes of expression of physical force and violence are culturally shaped, while force and violence in turn become cultural symbols, as powerful in their nonexecution as in their doing. And, of course, force in turn is only a tiny part of power, so that much of the problematic of power today is a problematic of knowledge making, universe construction, and the social production of feeling and of reality.

History. One of the most obvious changes in the field of anthropology in recent years is the extent to which the field has been moving in a historical direction. Only slightly less obviously, history has become increasingly anthropological. On both sides, some extremely interesting and important work has come out of these shifts, yet we may now recognize that the love affair between the two fields has been relatively uncritical. On the side of anthropology, the category of history was for a long time captured by the so-called political economy school (see Ortner, this volume). On the history side, there was a sense that being anthropological meant studying the more symbolic bits of life—rituals, festivals, folklore—or alternatively simply doing the ethnography of the past. On neither side was there a really serious assault on the question of whether history itself was inherently cultural, and culture, inherently historical.

We have already indicated the ways in which the concept of culture is being historicized. The recognition of the invented nature of many traditions, the recognition of cultural constancy and durability as a problem rather than a natural state of affairs, the centrality of the notion of the constructed nature of culture in general—all of these points are elements of a growing recognition that a historical anthropology is not just a narrativized anthropology, not just a matter of giving the present some sort of ancestral pedigree. Rather, there is a kind of dislodging of a whole series of assumptions about what culture is and how it works.

But if culture is being historicized, history is being—there is really no verb here—anthropologized? culturized? in much more profound ways than in earlier efforts. For one thing, there is a developing view that history itself has variable cultural form—that the shape of events, the pace of time, the notion of change and duration, the very question of what an event is—all of these things are not simply objective realities, but are themselves products of cultural assumptions. Moreover, there is a growing tendency to move culture out of the realm of the exotic custom, the festival, the ritual, and the like and into the center of the historical problematic, or, rather, to recognize that the rituals and festivals are sites in which larger and more dynamic fields of discourse, larger and more powerful hegemonies, are being constituted, contested, and transformed.

But here the point links up with issues of power. For the point is not simply that some generic form of historian is getting interested in culture, and some generic form of anthropologist is getting interested in history, although that is certainly true to some extent. Rather there is a very specific convergence here, and power, in the broad range of senses discussed earlier, is the point on which that convergence is taking place. Culture as emergent from relations of power and domination, culture as a form of power and domination, culture as a medium in which power is both constituted and resisted: it is around this set of issues that certain anthropologists and certain historians (as well as fellow travelers in sociology, philosophy, literary criticism, and other fields) are beginning to work out an exciting body of thought.

MORE POWER

If two of the three key terms in our series refer as much to disciplinary cores—history and anthropology—as to a constellation of theoretical preoccupations, the third term, power, is both more specific and more pervasive. And if our understanding of power derives from no single theoretical position, it is nevertheless linked in important ways with the writings and influence of Michel Foucault (1977a, 1977b, 1978, 1980, 1988). With all of our inevitable caveats and idiosyncratic readings, we still acknowledge the importance of Foucault's insistent and penetrating scrutiny of the field of power relations, especially in modern historical contexts. Two selections from Foucault appear in this volume, and it will be well to describe at the outset what we understand as Foucault's distinctive contribution.

Power is neither some universal drive lodged in individuals nor some elementary force transcending society and history. If historical actors sometimes embody what appears to be a Nietzschean will to power, it is equally true that any historical actor will also embody a wide range of other feelings and desires, including desires precisely antithetical to power—for love, for tenderness, for communion—although nowadays such terms can hardly be spoken with innocence, but on the contrary are also always partially implicated in power themselves. Insofar as the social world is ordered as an endlessly shifting field of inequalities, even these desires can only form themselves against a backdrop, and within the interstices, of this field, and necessarily bear its stamp. By extension, no examination of social relations or historical processes can be engaged without a relentless suspicion about power's displacements and effects.

Although Foucault is typically labeled a poststructuralist (a term that usually conceals more than it suggests), we follow Peter Dews's genealogy in placing him in the second, more political, wave of poststructuralism, in which attention begins to shift from language as all-embracing medium to the determinations which bear upon language; discourse starts to be seen as patterned and disrupted by non-discursive forces(Dews 1988, 110). Dews argues that this shift was related to the events of May 1968 and entailed a recognition that "[w]hat sustains or rebels against a given social structure cannot be simply an effect of that structure itself. Social systems are both imposed by force from above—they embody relations of power—and are adhered to or rejected from below—they are invested or disinvested with desire"(Dews 1988, 110–11).

Foucault, then, takes power in all its various guises as his chief concern, but he upends the usual procedures for studying it. Whereas many would assume that power is only another term for the political, and more specifically that power is exercised chiefly by the state, Foucault seems to look everywhere else but the state. Whereas power is usually seen in opposition to freedom, particularly when opposed to its legitimated complementary term, authority, Foucault views freedom as a necessary precondition for modern forms of power. Freedom cannot abolish power; rather, it redefines power's terrain. Whereas resistance is normally seen as opposed to power, power here depends upon the possibility of resistance, and power is a field of relations from which even the purest of revolutionary struggles cannot be exempt.

However, as Foucault's own writing makes clear, the usual objections to his work—that it suggests an unbearably totalizing sense of power and affords no hope for oppositional politics—do not usually take into account the strategic character of his analysis. Indeed, Foucault's reading of power, and of discourses more generally, is always strategic, tactical, polemical, situated. Thus Foucault has examined hospitals, prisons, asylums, the truth regimes of philology and humanism, the discourses of sexuality, and what he calls government in a broad sense: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick (1982, 221). In subjecting to his critical scrutiny the institutions of the modern era otherwise regarded as rational and liberating, Foucault has both perfected his analytic of power and demonstrated its historicity: the success of modern forms of domination has resided in the dispersal of power from the state to a wide variety of agencies with reasonable claims to autonomy. This is not to say that Foucault ignores the state, only perhaps that he appreciates how misleading its obviousness can be. Indeed, Foucault reads the sinuous and subtle operations of power back into the state, which since the eighteenth century has attained an unprecedented capacity, both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power (1982, 213).

The triumph of modern power, however, provides us with only a partial sense of the problems of understanding its workings and is never to be construed as sufficient reason for total despair. Power exists for Foucault not as some essential thing or elementary force, but, rather, as a relation. If power is therefore everywhere, this is not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere (Foucault 1978, 93). Foucault continues, [W]here there is power, there is resistance. But even as his discussion of the necessary relation of power to resistance makes clear the immanent cracks in all forms of discursive domination, we also discover that resistance itself cannot be placed outside of power, that there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary (ibid, 95), no place in which the spirit of resistance may be kept wholly pure and safe. Instead, Foucault sees a plurality of resistances, which play the multiple roles of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations (ibid.).

Foucault's complex understanding of power therefore invites analyses of the multiple ways in which power is deployed, engaging the myriad points of resistance present everywhere in the power network (ibid.). For Foucault, power is not simply juridical. Rather than exercising the negative function of limitation or repression, of just saying no, power is productive and inciting. Power cannot somehow be stripped away from social relations or discursive forms to expose the essence at the core, and the utopian prospect of eliding the relations of power in the politics of resistance can only be illusory. But far from thereby neutralizing the importance of power, Foucault instead demonstrates the complexity of its ubiquity, and compels us to assert that without it, neither history nor culture can be understood.

For the purposes of this reader, we echo Foucault's advocacy of a new economy of power relations (1982, 210) and see it as leading in a number of different, contestatory directions. For example, Foucault's writings on how this economy works in asylums, clinics, and prisons are taken up explicitly in Tony Bennett's paper, The Exhibitionary Complex (this volume), this time in terms of the institutional history of museums and exhibitions. Although Bennett begins his article with explicit acknowledgement of Foucault's method, he also seeks to qualify the terms Foucault proposes for investigating the development of power/knowledge relations during the formation of the modern period. Whereas Foucault's classic institutional mechanisms of subjection involve confinement, Bennett's examples are of exhibition, display, and spectacle. Surely the carceral system is only one aspect of the individualizing and normalizing technologies of power. Museums and exhibitions, Bennett argues, "sought to allow the people, and en masse rather than individually, to know rather than be known, to become the subjects rather than the objects of knowledge" to be impressed by the capacity of the state to arrange things and bodies, not least society itself, for public display.

Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish (1977a) that the modern prison was part of the development of a society based not on spectacle but on surveillance. The panopticon was seen from the outside simply as a sign of disciplinary power, but on the inside was a labyrinth for the disciplinary gaze, where subjects are always seen by invisible but all-invasive eyes. The great exhibitions of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, were designed so that everyone could see. One of the major objects that could be seen, of course, was society itself, an abstraction made material, an object less of discipline than of regulation. Bourgeois national culture was both celebrated and constituted by the civic instruction involved in assembling large crowds for peaceful and uplifting purposes. The rowdiness of the public fair and carnival gave way to the moral and cultural regulation of the museum.

It is interesting to compare this approach to nineteenth-century bourgeois culture with existing historical literatures, most of which have yet to register the impact of Foucauldian perspectives and are generally formed around sets of particularized national-historiographical preoccupations. In British social history, for instance, one such focus has been on religion, philanthropy, moral improvement, and the bases of associational life; in Germany attention has focused on the supposed difficulties of grounding liberal ideals of citizenship in the emergent structures of bourgeois economic power. In the massive outpouring of publications revisiting the social and cultural history of the nineteenth-century German bourgeoisie since the mid-1980s, there is no evidence of the possibilities suggested by Bennett's appropriation of Foucault or the more general literature on museums and exhibitions on which he draws (see Kocka and Mitchell 1992; Blackbourn 1991; on Britain, see Wolff and Seed [1988]). A different, but cognate, line of enquiry also stems from Jürgen Habermas's concept of the public sphere, although the persisting nervousness of Habermas before the kind of cultural analysis represented in this reader tends to position such inquiry in a somewhat different intellectual space, as, indeed, does the more vehement resistance of Habermas to a Foucauldian notion of power (see Habermas [1962] 1989; Calhoun 1992; Eley, this volume; for an extremely stimulating exploration of possible connections, see Scobey [1992]).

In the exhibitionary complex, the state not only displayed its superior power, it also linked its national past to the evolutionary chain. Anthropology and prehistory were given entertainment value, and civilizational genealogies were carefully constructed, with the self-congratulatory rhetoric of progress as the principal narrative conceit. The Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 Paris Exhibition, was both a highly visible triumph of French technology and a means by which all of Paris was converted to spectacle. Nevertheless, Bennett (this volume) reminds us that state and society did not live by exhibition alone; the doors of the Museum stay open only because the doors of the prison are closed: Where instruction and rhetoric failed, punishment began.

Another exemplary piece on a similar subject, Donna Haraway's paper, Teddy Bear Patriarchy (this volume), demonstrates what we can learn from the process of collecting and displaying the objects of nature in one particular exhibitionary complex, the American Museum of Natural History. Haraway shows how the hyperreal myths of the natural were appropriated by, and ordered for, a decidedly gendered bourgeois cultural form; focusing on the life/lives of the heroic taxidermist Carl Akeley, she tells a tale of the commerce of power/knowledge in white and male supremist monopoly capitalism. Haraway follows Akeley from his first triumph, when he successfully stuffed P. T. Barnum's dead elephant, to his final apotheosis in an African jungle, where he died from tropical fever during the last of a series of brave adventures to rescue life from death and champion the causes of conservation and nature education. Along the way, Akeley gunned down myriad gorillas and elephants to present nature in the New York museum in dioramic scenes that would convey it in its truthful essence. Through taxidermy, which was art in the service of science, he conjured perfect images of natural power and beauty, noble beasts frozen forever in that moment they recognized the presence of the dangerous Other: humanity. As with Bennett's exhibitionary complex, the stress is on order, perfection, mastery, permanence. But here the violence of the museum is both celebrated and denied, the death of the displayed objects both a sign of general decadence and the transformative means for the conquest of death. Haraway tells us how the texts of the dioramas, like the texts that narrate the lives of Akeley and his wives, patrons, and African assistants, were always multivocal, always subtexts for other texts, which bring out the distortions, lies, and conceits of a dominant but frightened upper-class male world. These themes were part of the psychology of turn-of-the-century U.S. capitalism, and they became entwined in the development of eugenics, the movement to preserve hereditary stock, to assure racial purity, to prevent race suicide.

Although Haraway's emphasis on the relations between power and knowledge, and her reading of the displacements and dispersals of the institutional complex of the museum, display a range of Foucauldian insights, she is also fascinated with the multiplication of historical narratives within institutional histories in ways that move us some distance from any Foucauldian text, though in a slightly different direction from the one urged by Bennett. Haraway employs a feminist perspective to demonstrate the gendered nature of power in ways that remind us of the general challenge of feminist theory to conventional social analysis. She rescues some of the hidden voices in her story—the secretary, Dorothy Greene, who was the actual author of Akeley's texts, the first wife, Delia, whose prowess in hunting, and in nursing her often weakened husband, is buried in archives and countertexts, the African assistant, Bill, whose provisional individuality was always constructed against the silence of his coded service and loyalty. Power never totally suppresses resistance, nor ever fully destroys the multiple subjects who resist.

Bennett extends the provenance of Foucault's text, convincing us that the process of individuation (the production of the subject) is necessarily coupled with the constitution of society (the object), that the institutional mechanisms of confinement are complemented by those of exhibition. But Bennett does not fully engage the difficulties that Haraways's account permits us to see. We might now ask about the costs of linking the constitution of the subject with the subjection of the individual. What happens when questions of agency, and of the individual's relation to power, the state, or society are asked in relation to a Foucauldian enterprise? In order to get some perspective on this question, it will be useful to step back and situate Foucault historically, among a broad range of responses to midcentury social theory.

THE SUBJECT OF PRACTICE

Although at one level Foucault has given us a crucial point of leverage out of midcentury social theory, tranforming both culture and history with a radically novel and pervasive sense of power, at another level his work requires a certain historical perspective itself. Here, Foucault's (poststructuralist) influence must be set beside at least one other major strand of social and cultural theorizing which, rather than stressing the determination of power through history, places human agency and social practice at the very center of the problematic. Theories emphasizing practice can be traced to a number of sources (Marx, of course, but also Weber, Gramsci, and Sartre), most of which predate structuralism and continue alongside of and beyond it, insistently raising the problem of the historical actor.

As discussed in Sherry Ortner's paper, Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties (this volume), the 1950s and 1960s saw the near-total hegemony of social theories in which the analytic emphasis was on the ordering of the forms—institutional, ideational, psychological—within which social actors are situated (the image of enclosure and the passive voice here are both intentional). Parsonian systems theory in the United States and Lévi-Straussian structuralism in France defined the boundaries of this theoretical territory. Although Parsons claimed that the point of understanding systems was ultimately to understand the bases of social action, somehow the examination of any actual instances of social action was never quite reached, being endlessly deferred as the theory of systems was refined. Lévi-Strauss on the other hand had no interest in even nodding to the actor. As the debates with Sartre made clear, the whole point of his framework was quite intentionally to get away from a philosophical tradition in which the actor (or consciousness, or will, or intention, or subject) had been endowed with far too much ontological and historical force and freedom (Lévi-Strauss 1966).

Most poststructuralists in France, including Foucault, sustained and indeed expanded the structuralist bias against theorizing the subject, particularly in the form of an agent with will and intentionality. While dropping certain aspects of Lévi-Strauss's hyperrationality, they did not drop this core tenet of the structuralist agenda, and thus should be considered late- or ultra-structuralist, rather than post- , as more or less any French thinker who became popular after Lévi-Strauss tends to be. Insofar as a subject was recognized or postulated within this framework at all, it was a radically decentered subject, often drawing from the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan. The subject had no internal coherence, and was granted neither the originary grounds of autonomous existence nor the epistemic means for self-knowledge; instead, the subject was seen as dispersed in (multiple) texts, discursive formations, fragmentary readings, and signifying practices, endless constructing and dislodging the conceit of the self.

The papers in the present collection have been selected in part to constitute a response to this position. They do so in two rather different ways. On the one hand, there is general agreement that the bourgeois agent and psyche are not the eternal subject; on the other hand, there is a clear refusal to argue that the acting subject has no ontological reality whatsoever. Thus we try to highlight efforts to understand the ways in which the subject is culturally and historically constructed in different times and places, as a being with a particular kind of affective organization, particular kinds of knowing and understanding, particular modes of gender and sexual ordering, and so forth. At the same time we seek to highlight efforts to understand the ways in which culturally and historically constituted subjects become agents in the active sense—how their actions and modes of being in the world always sustain and sometimes transform the very structures that made them.

Constituting the Subject

We must begin by confronting the ambiguity in almost all the available terms for the actor, that is, we must confront the fact that all these terms have both an active and a passive implication. Both the notion of the agent and the notion of the subject imply a person who is an active initiator of action. According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary, all of the primary meanings of agent are highly active: One who exerts power or produces an effect; [of things] efficient cause; a natural force acting on matter . . . ; one who does the actual work. The active implications of subject are less prominent, but are thrown into relief when the term is contrasted with object. In these contexts, both agents and subjects are authors of their actions and their projects. But agent, of course, also means representative; travel agents or shipping agents act on behalf of their clients, not on their own initiative. Similarly, as Foucault in particular has emphasized, one of the meanings of subject is precisely a person under the dominion of an authority of some sort; a king's subjects are in a relationship of obedience to him, and laboratory subjects may do only what they are told to do by the researcher. And there are further terms, all of which carry their own nuances of activity and passivity: person, self, actor, individual, consciousness. Given that there is no perfectly unambiguous vocabulary for the phenomenon in question, we will simply shift about between the terms undogmatically and clarify our intentions as we go.

Perhaps the most extreme position on the constitution of the subject is staked out by Foucault, who fully equates the constitution of subjects with subjection in the dominative sense. As he says at the beginning of his essay The Subject and Power, My objective . . . has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects . . . three modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects(1982, 208). He goes on to say that he is interested in exploring not so much institutions of power, but forms of power, and specifically that form of power that "categorizes the individual, marks him [sic] by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others must recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects"(1982, 212).

Most of the authors in this volume do not take as uncompromising a position on the subjection of the subject as did Foucault. Nonetheless, even for authors committed to recognizing much greater scope for transformative practice, there is now a strong Foucauldian tendency to recognize that the identities culturally made available to us are often deforming and debilitating, at once constituting and limiting, providing people with a narrow sense of possibility, keeping them in their places. Through his concept of habitus, Pierre Bourdieu develops this point extensively, arguing that the parameters of personal identity—especially of one's place within a system of social differences and inequalities—are structured into the objective environment (Bourdieu 1977; see esp. ch. 4, reprinted in this volume). The organization of space (in houses, in villages and cities) and time (the rhythms of work, leisure, holidays) embody the assumptions of gender, age, and social hierarchy upon which a particular way of life is built. As the actor grows up, and lives everyday life within these spatial and temporal forms, s/he comes to embody those assumptions, literally and figuratively. The effect is one of near-total naturalization of the social order, the forging of homologies between personal identity and social classification.

Bourdieu's discussion of the inculcation of doxa, of the sense that the limits of one's subjective desires are more or less isomorphic with the limits of objective possibility, is a discussion of the formation not of any particular form of subjectivity but of the limits of subjectivity itself. We will return to Bourdieu shortly, to inquire how he combines this strong sense of the constructed and limited subject with a theory of practice that professes a commitment to open-endedness and change.

Recent discussions of postmodernism, represented in this volume by Dick Hebdige's paper, After the Masses, are important in this context for suggesting ways in which postmodern subjects are culturally and historically constructed in relation to a particular contemporary historical moment, usually described as the culture of late or postindustrial capitalism. By extension, they question certain forms of poststructuralism for celebrating and transcendentalizing this decentered and fragmented subject. As Jameson (1984) and Hebdige (this volume) argue, the death of the subject so central to poststructuralist theory is in fact merely the theoretical reflection and reification of a particular kind of subject, constructed under the regime of postmodernism. In this characterization, postmodern culture, including contemporary theory, is centrally founded on a denial of a variety of depth models—in persons (for example, in the notion of an inner self), in history (in the notion that the past is recoverable in some real sense), and in a variety of other contexts (for example, in buildings, which seem to consist only of external surfaces). Moreover, insofar as contemporary culture is increasingly organized in terms of surfaces, and of the interplay between surfaces (for example, in the contemporary emphasis on pastiche), it will tend to constitute subjects who are as depthless as postmodern society. In Jameson's terms, there is a waning of affect and a replacement of specific feelings with a kind of general euphoria. The dominant form of cultural pathology shifts from alienation (so central in modernist discourse) to fragmentation. But, again, both Jameson and Hebdige argue that the postmodern subject is not the eternal form of the ontological subject (as some poststructuralists would have it), but itself a specific historical form, constituted under the conditions of late capitalism.

Central to such discussions is the point that a theoretical position constructed around a depthless subject with no sense of history cannot generate a coherent political actor, one who formulates a comprehensive social critique and an agenda for change. This point is also taken up by Linda Alcoff, in considering the implications of poststructuralism for feminist theory and practice in her paper, Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism (this volume). More than perhaps anywhere else, it is in feminist theory that the problem of rescuing the subject from both poststructuralist dissolution and Foucauldian overconstructionism, has been—and is being—confronted. The attraction between feminist theory and poststructuralist theory (particularly in its early, Derridean and Lacanian forms) may have seemed strange to many observers precisely because of the dissolution of the subject, and because of the apparent impossibility of constructing an active politics within a subject-denying framework. However, the attractions of poststructuralism for British and American feminists were very similar to those for the French philosophers: they allowed an escape from the essentialized subject, in this case, from the figure of the essential woman (nurturant, relational, nonviolent, and so on), either by denying the ontological reality of the subject entirely (the early poststructuralist move) or by moving into a strong constructionist position. But once again, Alcoff points out, the problem of the acting subject immediately rears its head: And here is precisely the dilemma for feminists: How can we ground a feminist politics that deconstructs the female subject? Nominalism [Alcoff's term for both kinds of poststructuralist move] threatens to wipe out feminism itself. Alcoff goes on to review a number of recent feminist perspectives—and to propose one of her own—that retain the benefits of poststructuralist thought and yet allow for the ways in which women have been and can continue to be the authors of their histories and politics.

Imagining Practice

In the final section of Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties (this volume), Sherry Ortner makes a case for the necessary centrality of social practice in understanding both the persistent structurations of culture, power, and history, and their historical transformations. Ortner traces the oscillations in anthropological theory between objectivist and subjectivist, materialist and idealist perspectives. In addition, she traces the shift from a notion of practice seen as apolitical action and interaction to a notion of practice as always embedded in relations of power and inequality. Drawing on work by Sahlins (1981), Giddens (1979), and Bourdieu (1977), Ortner argues that the newer sense of practice both responds to the political naiveté of bourgeois social theory and allows for a conception of a social and historical process that holds together, rather than polarizes, structure and agency, material and cultural life: The modern versions of practice theory . . . appear unique in accepting all three sides of the [theoretical] triangle: that society is a system, that the system is powerfully constraining, and yet that the system can be made and unmade through human action and interaction.

In reflecting on the influence of Bourdieu on this formulation, we must realize again that theory is written and produced in contexts that change dramatically when theory starts traveling, and much of the theory discussed in Ortner's essay had been on the road for a long time. When Bourdieu articulated his theory of practice, he was writing against a Lévi-Straussian structuralism that assumed certain objective mental structures in human beings, and that also assumed a methodology devoted to discovering those structures objectified in such symbolic/discursive productions as myths and rituals. Where Durkheim had argued that mental and symbolic representations reflected social structure, Lévi-Strauss turned Durkheim on his head. Bourdieu, in turn, was attempting to turn Durkheim back again (but with a political twist absent in both Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss), arguing that the structures to be found in cultural forms were transformed, misrecognizable form[s] of the real divisions of the social order.

From this vantage point, Bourdieu had two principal objectives: to show how these real divisions become masked through the process of naturalization, and to chart this process as it seeped into people's heads, bodies, selves. The realization of both objectives is to be found in practice. Thus the enterprise of practice theory, in Bourdieu's hands, is largely a matter of decoding the public cultural forms within which people live their lives—the patterns and rhythms of work, eating, sleeping, leisure, sociability, patterns and rhythms that already encode the divisions, distinctions, and inequalities of the society as a whole. And the aim is to get as close as possible (both ethnographically and imaginatively) to the practical ways in which, in enacting these forms, the subject/agent comes to embody them, assume them, take them so utterly for granted that it goes without saying because it comes without saying.

In Marxism and Literature (1977, excerpted in this volume) Raymond Williams works within the context of British literary studies and Marxist politics, and seems at one level to be concerned with very different kinds of issues. However, like Bourdieu, Williams is concerned with the degree to which the social and cultural process as a whole, which he interprets with his classic reading of Gramsci's theory of hegemony, shapes identities and, in his famous phrase structures of feeling, so as to produce the naturalization of the arbitrary to which Bourdieu attends so centrally. But Williams is more directly concerned than Bourdieu with the question of resistance and social transformation, and thus attends more directly to the question of how hegemony (similar to but critically different from doxas and discourses) can be at once so powerfully defining and shaping of identities and worldviews, and at the same time limited or open enough that the actor is never wholly subjected. Williams comes up with a variety of solutions, sometimes emphasizing the historical complexity of social formations, such that there are always residual and emergent arenas of practice that do not articulate fully with the current regimes of the ordinary; sometimes emphasizing the synchronic social complexity of a given social entity, such that (say) different classes will necessarily have at least partially different sets of practices and views of the world; and sometimes emphasizing the openness and inexhaustiblity of creative cultural forms, which demand interpretive flexibility and imaginativeness on the part of the actor. Recognizing the finite but significant openness of many works of art, as signifying forms making possible but also requiring persistent and variable signifying responses helps us see the ways in which, and the degrees to which, the cultural process must not be assumed to be merely adaptive, extensive, and incorporative.

Calls to practice have taken diverse forms in different national contexts as well as in different disciplinary formats. Another important variant is the so-called Alltagsgeschichte (everyday life) school of social history developed among German social historians. Exponents of this view, such as Hans Medick and Alf Lüdtke, examine the resources and resourcefulness of ordinary people in the conduct of their everyday lives, and find their values and experiences not easily assimilable to the conventional narratives of political history and social development (Lüdtke 1993, Eley 1989). At one level, this represents the now-familiar social historian's move, which carries analysis beneath or behind the actions of formal institutions, such as government or parties, to the structuring context of society itself. But in fact, such work is far more than this, and registers precisely the influences expounded in this introduction—above all, a turning to anthropology and a sophisticated conception of culture and power relations—so that the microcontexts of everyday analysis are less the superior realities that some populist social histories would like them to be, than the necessary ground to which the big and abstract questions of domination and subordination, power and resistance have to be chased. In other words, it is in daily experience, in the settings of ordinary desire and the trials of making it through, that the given power relations are contested or secured, in an always-incomplete process of negotiation, which is rarely unambiguously lost or won.

If power is the term that transforms both culture and history in ways that move beyond their midcentury forms, practice—in the extended sense suggested here—in turn grounds both culture and power in history. In its strongest claims, practice theory is nothing less than a theory of history (thick history?), a theory of how social beings, with their diverse motives and their diverse intentions, make and transform the world in which they live (Ortner 1989, 193). Practice takes many forms, from the little routines of everyday life, which continually establish and naturalize the boundaries of the subject's aspirations; to the micropractices of relations of power and knowledge, as for example between therapist and patient, which reestablish the normalcy or deviancy and very forms of certain desires; to the practices of resistance, both daily and in large-scale social movements, which denaturalize and transform the boundaries of exploitation, oppression, and prejudice in custom and law.

RESISTANCE

If the call to practice is an attempt at one level to repeal the normative character of social scientific assumption, it carries its own freight of problems. Practice may contest the overdeterminations of theories of power, but Bourdieu and Foucault often appear as two giants chipping away at two sides of the same theoretical coin; while Foucault uncovers the operation of power in institutional discourses and disciplinary practices, Bourdieu shows us how power inscribes its logics and scripts into the everyday lives and categories of subjects, who carry the full weight of their etymological ambivalence. It is perhaps small wonder that resistance to some of the implications of these theoretical projects, even when this resistance takes these analyses of power and practice as the point of departure, has taken the form of seeking out resistance itself.

Much of the recently intensified interest in resistance is concerned with salvaging the subject in the wake of its erosion under poststructuralism. But in the contemporary debates, both meanings of the term subject remain at stake. If the cultural construction of the subject is always, at least in part, a form of subjection, then the theoretical exploration of the subject as an active agent must be concerned, at least in part, with the question of resisting or at least eluding that subjection. Again, the issues are highly complex. From a theoretical point of view we need a subject who is at once culturally and historically constructed, yet from a political perspective, we would wish this subject to be capable of acting in some sense autonomously, not simply in conformity to dominant cultural norms and rules, or within the patterns that power inscribes. But this autonomous actor may not be defined as acting from some hidden well of innate will or consciousness that has somehow escaped cultural shaping and ordering. In fact, such an actor is not only possible but normal, for the simple reason that neither culture itself nor the regimes of power that are imbricated in cultural logics and experiences can ever be wholly consistent or totally determining. Identities may be seen as (variably successful) attempts to create and maintain coherence out of inconsistent cultural stuff and inconsistent life experience, but every actor always carries around enough disparate and contradictory strands of knowledge and passion so as always to be in a potentially critical position. Thus the practices of everyday life may be seen as replete with petty rebellions and inchoate discontent (James Scott 1985, 1990; De Certeau 1984). Even if the subject cannot always be recuperated as a purposeful agent, neither can it any longer be seen as only the effect of subjection.

In Authority, (White) Power and the (Black) Critic; It's All Greek to Me (this volume), Henry Louis Gates, Jr., poses this question acutely within the domain of theory as such, a domain where battles for legitimacy, control, and voice have been bitterly fought in the 1980s, not just between rival theoretical schools but also between theorists and those who think theory per se is the problem. For the latter, theory itself is the language of power, intimidating and disabling its audience, positioning its users within privilege, and securing the status quo with its authority. Whether from the advocates of history from below or people's history, some feminists, African-American and other minority militants, or anticolonial activists, the poverty of theory has been a recurring complaint. As a leading literary theorist and critic, centrally positioned in one of the dominant culture's leading institutions, and yet at the same time a major African-American intellectual and therefore a key voice of Black culture, Gates speaks from the heart of this contradiction.

In his discussion, Gates moves candidly back and forth between the empowering possibilities of joining the given discourse of critical theory, with its legitimating aura and access to influence—speaking the white man's language—and the presently subversive, ultimately more powerful prospect of a distinctively Black theory itself—the constructive value of the Black vernacular, the language we use to speak to each other when no white people are around. The difficulties of embodying this claim—the difference between competing for access within an already constituted system and transforming the system itself—are familiar ones for subordinate or marginalized groups as they seek to contest the power of hegemonic formations, whether these are constituted within academic disciplines, particular institutional fields, or at the level of whole societies. But Gates formulates this constructive aspiration of resistance—its transformative and counterhegemonic opportunities as well as its negating and more purely self-protective functions—with characteristic acuity and eloquence.

The general discussion around the trope of resistance is further motivated by a reaction against totalizing formulations about power and domination. Concern about resistance seems both a way to find the cracks and fissures in the terrible proliferation of power itself (whether as repressive or terroristic domination or in the less discernible guises of late industrial technocratic capitalism) and to contest the hold that power has over us. Many recent theoretical discussions have assumed that we have a choice to make here, either for power or for resistance, a choice that is simultaneously theoretical and political. We prefer to emphasize that both Foucault, at least in his later writings, and Gramsci, certainly as interpreted by Williams, have contended that power and resistance go together, producing and reproducing each other. But once again, the demise of the standard antinomies of Western social theory leaves us groping for new formulations and different ways to think.

By now, there is a significant body of work in social history and anthropology, and to a lesser extent in sociology and political science, which explores, often movingly and with great imagination, the resilience and vitality of popular culture in the face of exploitation and repression, of crushing inequalities of access to resources and cultural goods, or simply of the snobbery and elitist disdain of their betters for what ordinary people are capable of achieving (Thompson 1963; Genovese 1974; Scott 1976, 1985; Willis 1977). There is now much greater sensitivity to the wide range of cultural forms and strategies through which even the most heavily dominated groups—slaves, serfs, impoverished first-generation workers, and so on—both maintain a distinct identity and express resistance, even under threat of retribution. Such cultural forms are what James Scott has called the weapons of the weak, involving everything from exaggerated deference to petty resistance, contests that are hidden or displaced into popular cultural forms, such as folktales and festivals, in which traditions of opposition and alternative visions of the world are kept alive (Stallybrass and White 1986). There is resistance, in other words, in places we would not expect and in forms we would not recognize.

Ranajit Guha, in his paper, The Prose of Counter-Insurgency (this volume), has written about those instances where colonial power exercised itself in part through its capacity to silence the historical record of the subaltern classes, representing spectacular forms of popular resistance as pathologies, problems of order, and/or symptoms of religious fanaticism or cultural anomie. In this essay, Guha reads against the grain of colonial discourse to recode (semiotically and politically) the Santal insurrection of 1855; he argues that the Santals used the resources of their own cultural religiosity to engage in a decidedly political contest against British domination.

Guha, an Indian historian responsible for organizing a collective of younger Indian historians under the banner of Subaltern Studies, takes many of his terms and cues from Gramsci. However, he begins his essay with the challenge that the texts of historical analysis are always the texts of the dominant or, in the case of modern Indian history, the colonial power, and that the voices of the subaltern are either silent or muted and transformed by the grammar of official discourse in these texts. Thus peasants are texted only in the colonial prose that contains, controls, and dismisses their subjectivity. This textualization is more than simply an abstract report: it is an expression of the colonial codes that provide the dominant structures for peasant life as well. As Guha notes, the peasant's subalternity was materialized by the structure of property, institutionalized by law, sanctified by religion, and made tolerable—and even desirable—by tradition. So far, Guha's reasoning seems consistent with a Foucauldian understanding of the power of discourse, in this case, the truth regime that was institutionalized in the invasive colonial presence in India.

However, Guha demonstrates his departure from Foucault and his specific debt to Gramsci in taking as his primary subject the recovery and interpretation of peasant resistance. In other words, power is acknowledged and analyzed, but less because of its totalizing importance than because it has become the foil for uncovering the suppressed subject position of the subaltern. Official texts are read to show the extraordinary complexity and resilience of peasant rebellion, the expression of rebellion through the systematic (if sometimes displaced) upending of colonial codes. Guha rescues the peasant in part by reading silences, in part by explaining the necessarily religious character of protest in an overdetermined, prepolitical colonial context. The terms of analysis are structuralist and oppositional; there is a clear implication, in spite of the subsequent alignment of the Subaltern school with Foucault by some of its authors, that radical history must champion resistance rather than power, even in contexts where power seems not only triumphant, but able to trivialize the gestures and idioms of any revolt from below.

The return of the repressed, however, raises a host of theoretical and empirical problems. In particular, when Guha attempts to restore the subject position of the subaltern in history, he must resort to characterizations of peasant tradition, culture, and religion that reverberate problematically with the views of colonial anthropology itself. Peasants are often homogenized (not least by all being gendered as he), reified, and romanticized. When questioning the European constitution of the universal subject, whether for any history celebrating resistance, or for non-Western histories where European subjects are imposed, it is clear that we constantly run the risk of reinventing all-too-familiar categories, the genealogical foundations that take us right back to the heart of modern darkness: colonial history and the patriarchal anthropologies of domination. Nonetheless, Guha and the Subaltern Studies collective stake out an important pole of the resistance problematic forcefully and eloquently, insisting on the necessity for recovering not only instances of resistance but also some of the irrepressible cultural forms from which resistance can grow.

In Ritual and Resistance: Subversion as a Social Fact (this volume), Nicholas Dirks reviews a range of arguments about the character of resistance and its relationship to both periodic and quotidian forms of cultural practice. The essay confronts us with ethnographic examples of disorder, disruption, and dissention in a set of key village rituals in southern India, and suggests that resistance as a conceptual preoccupation may be most useful as a way of undermining the assumptions of order that undergird most of our social science. It prompts us to look not just for hidden transcripts but for systematic and pervasive disorder. In arguing that order is, at least in part, an effect of power, he proposes that the search for disorder through resistance may provide access to more critical understandings of both order and power. The recognition of disorder also opens ways to confront the ambivalent relationship of discourse and event, in terms of cultures of power where the center never holds, in which the twin processes of containment and dispersal are always in conflict (though in culturally specific contexts and ways). Thus the road to resistance might take us further than we expected, into critical forms of reflection about the foundational assumptions underlying social scientific theories about social order, in this particular instance, anthropological concepts of ritual and culture (and resistance).

Nevertheless, even anthropological approaches to the study of cultural order/orders can demonstrate, as in Marshall Sahlins's paper, Cosmologies of Capitalism (this volume), that the culture concept need not be on the side of power. It may even provide the basis for articulating powerful resistance, in this case to the hegemonic spread of Western capitalism. Sahlins projects his insights about the cultural character of resistance onto the largest possible screen: the interactions of Europeans with Chinese, Hawaiians, and Kwakiutl in the course of European commercial expansion from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Here, the subjects in question are societies, peoples with their own traditions and their own histories, who accepted (though always selectively) the material goods the Europeans had to offer, but who resisted the frames of interpretation (which of course cast the Europeans as superior) that seemed to go with them. Resistance here was not so much a matter of articulating opposition as of reasserting existing cultural forms and of subordinating European goods to the fulfillment of traditional ends: [D]estiny is not history. Nor is it always tragedy. Anthropologists tell of some spectacular forms of indigenous cultural change turning into modes of political resistance—in the name of cultural persistence. Thus culture can provide instances of dramatic resistance to Western hegemony and power, at the same time that it provides the conceptual grounds for a critique of worlds that are taken as natural, in particular, the world that capitalism has given us.

THE QUESTION OF CULTURE

But if the anthropological concept of culture can be used to animate our understanding of resistance, it is also clear that culture is currently in the midst of a whirlwind of critical reflection, represented by a significant number of the articles included in this reader. As we stated at the beginning of this introduction, it is now commonplace to question whether and in what precise ways culture might be shared (or contested), durable (or constantly changing), coherent and consistent (or inchoate, contradictory, fragmented). Sahlins's own work has elsewhere demonstrated precisely how political, kinship, and gender divisions within Hawaiian society determined the kinds of responses that could be made to the disruptive presence of Captain Cook, whose life was (literally) appropriated to sustain a political cosmology that became threatened with extinction by Cook's arrival. The cultural terms of expanding Western capital transformed the death of a god into the pretext of conquest. And, through the same story, Sahlins has insisted on the destabilizing character of events for all notions of structure (see Sahlins 1981, 1985).

Clifford Geertz (1973, 1980, 1988), whose eloquent interpretations of anthropological culture have been uniquely influential, never had the same worries about structure as did Sahlins, grounding his own theory of culture in interpretive semiotics rather than structuralism. Geertz's definition of culture has always been predicated on the notion that culture has to do with meaning, with the way experience is construed rather than with some unmediated notion of experience itself, with the centrality of symbols for formulating and expressing meanings that are pervasive as well as shared. His characteristically American reading of Weber achieved its peculiar power in a succession of subtle readings of cockfights, market towns, wedding feasts, calendrical schemas, irrigation temples, and royal cremations, to mention only a few examples. For Geertz, culture became a semiotic code for reading virtually everything else (anything can be a cultural system), but he never confronted the issue of power.

Stephen Greenblatt has been among those insisting on the mutually invasive fields of the things we characterize when we say culture and power. His work, now seen as the origin of the new historicism in literary studies, is in some ways more anthropological than historical; his sense of cultural poetics owes more to Geertz than to anyone else. In The Circulation of Social Energy (this volume), the opening chapter of his book, Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt defines his enterprise as the study of the collective making of distinct cultural practices and inquiry into the relations among these practices, but his readings constantly traverse between the cultural categories at play, so to speak, on the Elizabethan stage and the interests—institutional, personal, financial, political—that cross the aesthetic boundaries between the theater and the world (see also Greenblatt 1980).

Greenblatt's importation of anthropological methods into the Arnoldian province of