Power has been defined in a great variety of ways by anthropologists, ranging from physical domination to symbolic empowerment. Of course, for there to be talk of power at all, anthropologists must be speaking of distinctions: either between an individual and a group, as in the power legitimized through acknowledged, often redistributive, leadership; or one group and another group, as in colonial domination; or between humans and their environmental energy sources, as in the power of a collectivity to organize and maintain itself. Social and political anthropologists have theorized about forms of social organization in non-state and state societies which legitimize the power of specific lineages, classes, or individuals to make decisions pertaining to others’ lives and the organization of social and material resources. Conflict theorists have studied factionalism and how claims to power are asserted and contested. Resistance theorists have studied more closely the ways in which those who seek to dominate others through the use of language, ritual and force, are resisted by those seeking self-determination or, in turn, domination also. A study of power implies not only a study of social distinctions but also of the inequalities implied in those distinctions — whether one is following Marx in thinking about the extraction of surplus labour or more recent theorists of the inequalities embedded in racial and gender distinctions. Power has been thought of by anthropologists as human influence and agency, and even as — reflecting various worldviews — situated outside humanity (see, for example, the cross-cultural notions of power described in Fogelson and Adams 1977). Attention to power goes in tandem with attention to powerlessness, although not all theories of power are binary.
While most anthropological analyses of power have investigated social stratification and hierarchy, some have looked at forms of social organization which assure that power is not individually concentrated, as in the industrial collectives or collectives not organized within state societies. Just as Marx was preoccupied with the question of how labourers came to give up their labour power, anthropologists have studied historically, and prehistorically, the question of how individuals might have come to dominate groups and how one group might have come to dominate another. Archaeological theorizing of inequality has been accompanied with methodological innovations in studying relational power over time (McGuire and Payn-ter 1991). Social theorists Max Weber and "Emile Durkheim influenced anthropological conceptualization of bureaucratic power in state societies and the perpetuation of institutional authority. Anthropological studies of social movements and state-making, and of national policy, have furthered conceptualization of institutional power and the rituals of its replication. Legal anthropologists, too, have studied cross-culturally the different systems through which power is legitimized, enforced and contested.
Anthropologists undertaking studies of institutional power must engage the debates formulated within sociology about structure and agency. C. Wright Mills (1956) argued influen-tially that social stratification and hierarchy are forcefully maintained by the ‘power elite’, those who, between themselves, mobilize the power to transcend ‘ordinary’ social environments and make decisions that pertain to the lives of people they will never meet, in nations they might never visit. This kind of structural analysis can be seen, for example, in anthropological studies of the itinerant power of transnational corporations. Class analysis has been used by anthropologists to study inequality in many social contexts, not all of them industrialized (see, again, McGuire and Paynter 1991). Anthropologists have also argued that class analysis has its limits, especially in contexts where exploitation is multidirectional, and have been drawn to reformulations of historical materialism, as in Giddens’s theory of structuration — in which ‘power is regarded as generated in and through the reproduction of structures of domination’ (Giddens 1981: 4), across time and space, whether those structures of domination rely on the allocation of material resources (as emphasized by Marx) or on, for example, information and surveillance.
The power relations, between nations and between individuals, organized through colonialism have been the most important influence, in several ways, on conceptualizing power within anthropology. While colonial political structures gave rise to early anthropological studies of the distribution of power through political systems, they also stimulated a variety of intriguing critiques, led most notably in anthropology by Asad (1973) and those in his collection, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Writers outside anthropology greatly influenced the way many anthropologists have conceptualized power and powerlessness, whether between colonizers and colonized or within societies as similar power relations, racialized, have been enacted. Colonial and neocolonial relations between nations became a useful trope for anthropologists seeking to critique institutional power and the discipline of anthropology’s epistemological role in perpetuating institutionalized power relations. Colonial critiques made more obvious, for example, the ways in which ‘observers’ assigned themselves the power to summarize others’ experience (and that power was reinforced through institutional resources and legitimacy), and the ‘observed,’ as encapsulated in those analyses anyway, were without the power to define themselves or assert autonomy in many other ways. A ‘reinvented’ or ‘decolonized’ anthropology was envisioned as work done by anthropologists with diverse ethnic, class, and political identities on not only traditional topics, but also, as Nader put it (in Hymes 1969), ‘studying up’: to really learn how those who held institutional power did so, and to use that knowledge to address — rather than simply document — social inequalities.
Hegemony, the concept of totalizing power (in which the state and/or a popular majority dominate, through every means, ‘civil society’) articulated by Gramsci (1971), provided anthropologists with a way to think about pervasive institutionalized power. The Subaltern Studies group (Guha and Spivak 1988), worked through a critical deconstruction of colonial historiography to recognize the powerful ways in which colonial subjects had been left without a voice in strategic discussions of their identity, resources, and future. Earlier, as anthropologists in the USA and in France rethought the political role of intellectuals in reaction to their nations’ protracted war in Vietnam, the concept of hegemony became a way to think about how the state did indeed have agency, through a militarized institutional apparatus, to repress – ideologically, socially and physically — those citizens who held contradictory views about state actions. That was also a time when, in anthropology, theories of resistance took their cue from political movements.
The social theorist who has most shaped anthropologists’ recent discussions of power is "Michel Foucault (1980), although not all those writings influenced by him reproduce Foucault’s views of power. In contrast to the binary views of power articulated by so many, whether cast in terms of gendered power relations focusing on patriarchy and those oppressed by it, or domination and resistance, Foucault saw power as being produced and reproduced through constant social interaction, from many different directions. He countered arguments about power as constituted through structural positions between individuals or social classes with arguments about power as being problematic, contested, and requiring constant, disciplined persuasion to convince those construed as powerless of their powerlessness and those construed as powerful of their powerfulness. Although he wrote about institutional sites as important for reproducing power relations, Foucault (1981: 93) described power as ‘not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society’. Influenced by Foucault’s analysis, Kondo (1990: 307) stated in her ethnography of the crafting of identity in Japan that power is ‘creative, coercive, and coextensive with meaning’. A view of power as not simply embedded in structural relations — maintained by force of one kind or another — but also as constituted through language and everyday practice (Bourdieu 1991) engendered many ethnographies exploring the specific, historicized ways in which power has been constructed and challenged in different social contexts (cf. Comaroff 1985). Foucault’s work has drawn anthropological attention to the relational aspects of power, with a concentration on the contexts of actions and interpretations, and away from structural control of resources by individuals with fairly static institutional authority. Some critics of Foucault think that attention has strayed, in the late 1980s and 1990s, too far from structural power; some feminist theorists, for example, have argued that Foucault and other writers of postmodern social criticism have — while meaning to eliminate ‘big stories’ — replaced binary structural models of power which have been useful for theorizing oppression (especially by those working to understand the social mechanism of their own disempowerment) with a less useful totalizing model of over-determination (e.g. power is everywhere, thus what social site does one go about working to transform?). They also argue that, once again, the ‘powerless’ have not been left space, or agency, in the discussion to articulate their own theories of power. (This, of course, has continued to happen despite the actions of any social theorist.)
The historical focus that Foucault brought to his discussion of the disciplining of bodies and minds through hospitals, prisons, courts, and schools, has had its effect in medical, legal and educational anthropology, or at least coincided with trends in these and other areas of anthropological study, as more anthropologists have turned from synchronic ethnographic studies to diachronic discussions of social institutions.
For example, Emily Martin’s comparative study of birthing practices (1987) demonstrates the institutional ways in which women are empowered or disempowered in relation to control of their own bodies and actions. Anthropologists have been informed, also, by researchers working in sociology and other disciplines on collective — or participatory — research strategies that challenge the epistemological leverage of an ‘expert’, whether the researcher or some other person asserting ‘legitimate authority’ in a social setting, and recentre the ‘subjects’ of study as those with the power to legitimize research design and documentation.
In addition to studies of power as evidenced in times and sites of war, where claims to power are forcefully clear, if contradictory, anthropological analyses have increasingly also been focused on the elusive power of transnational capital in determining social relations in various localities and on manifestations of symbolic power. Bourdieu (1991: 164) described symbolic power as ‘that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it’. Such a form of power can be studied in such diverse social arenas as the very public scripts of television advertising and the very private rituals of the Ku Klux Klan (Kertzer 1988). Thus, power and its social legitimacy and contestation continue to be puzzled through creatively in anthropological analyses.
