Symbolic Power in Cultural Contexts

In this course we will explore the concepts of culture and power -what are they? Who "has" them? How are they used and manipulated? Using two ethnographies and several scholarly articles and book chapters, we will attempt to gain an anthropological understanding of the relationships between culture and power, focusing on economic power, physical/violent power, genocide, and grassroots or "people" power. We will define and then examine anthropological perspectives on resistance, domination, the global economy, nationalism, ethnicity, identity, and agency. What do these terms mean, and how are they used by different groups to meet particular -and changing -needs? This course fulfills the core curriculum requirement for "contemporary societies."

We propose to edit a series of books which explore the varieties of relations between the phenomena of "culture," "power," and "history." Perhaps the best way in which to explain the objectives of the series would be to elaborate on the current thinking concerning these three terms, and the modes in which they interpentrate.

"Polish Sociological Review", 2007

From Znaniecki's point of view, and alluding to present-day conclusions about the so-called reflexivity of modernity, one would have to say that it is a problematic reflexivity, as long as knowledge about the principles of cultural becoming will be minimal. Znaniecki did not deny the justification of sociological studies that start out from naturalist premises. However, he rightly believed that the dependence of cultural order on natural is not only shrinking, but the reverse is in fact happening - there is an increasing influence of cultural order on natural order, and the rising complexity of cultural phenomena renders the naturalist approach scientifically less productive. The development of sociology as a cultural science led, according to Znaniecki, to displaying the possibility of a world-society as a society founded on culture, while the development of cultural sciences would be an expression of global responsibility for the world-culture society.

“Culture and power: some concluding remarks”, in P.Briant & M.Chauveau (edd.), Organisation des pouvoirs et contacts culturels dans les pays de l’empire achéménide (Paris, 2010), 415-428.

Our theme has been "the organisation of powers and cultural contacts in the lands of the Achaemenid Empire"-two distinct concepts, but ones that join inasmuch as (a) the business of organising power may or must involve the personal interaction of individuals of diff erent cultural background, (b) the visible markers of power come with cultural characteristics attached, and (c) all conquerors (or at least all long-distance conquerors) require some negotiation with the fact of their own cultural diff erence from those they have conquered.

Theory, Culture & Society, 2007

W HAT IS the problem to which hegemony is the answer? It is that of power -not about what it is, but rather about its general operation from the point of view of political strategy, legitimation and intellectual leadership, and from the standpoint of organized opposition to prevailing relations of power . Underlying the question of hegemony, therefore, is another set of questions concerning, on the one hand, the government of conduct and the problem of the correlations of security, territory and population in the context of the mobile and conjunctural production and reproduction of unequal relations of power , and, on the other hand, concerning the anticipation of a time to come in which such inequalities will have been abolished or altered. Differently imagined futures are at stake here; they bring to the surface principles outside political interest in the narrow sense, for they implicate the ethical and ontological principles inscribed in the foundation of the political, say, about notions of the human that underlie fundamental rights and the idea of the common good. They thus refer to a transcendent or metaphysical dimension, for example inscribed in a religion -which is the conventional though still prevalent route -or circumscribing claims for an immanent, unrepresentable but generative force that would underlie the imagination of political order of one kind or another. Thus, in the background to the question concerning power, besides issues relating to political or economic interests, one encounters a dimension of the virtual that harbours being as potentiality, whether animated by a will, or desire or élan vital, or indeed a transcendent spirit. In what follows I shall construct a genealogy of power by reference to cultural theory, paying attention to what has been at stake in the shifts in the effectivity of the concept of hegemony for cultural theory from the 1960s, alongside shifts

2010

Abstract 1. Five studies indicate that conceptualizations of power are important elements of culture and serve culturally relevant goals. These studies provide converging evidence that cultures nurture different views of what is desirable and meaningful to do with power.

American Ethnologist, 2002

"Cultural politics" as it is being used in this growing list of publications refers to the processes through which relations of power are asserted, accepted, contested, or subverted by means of ideas, values, symbols, and daily practices. Power is the ability to make somebody do something, and relations of power include domination, oppression, discipline, struggle, resistance, rebellion, co-option, subversion, and sedition. In an overview of the field, Jordon and Weedon tell us that those who study cultural politics are concerned with the ways in which culture is used to legitimate the "social relations of inequality" and to contribute to "the struggle to transform them" (1995: 5).