Some of the most influential ethnography of the 1980s and 1990s was concerned with resistance to structures of inequality or oppression, whether these were based on differences of class, gender or ethnicity. As a topic, resistance was especially attractive to those anthropologists concerned to reconcile the 1970s influence of Marxism in anthropology, with the more culturally sensitive approaches of symbolic anthropology; it also appealed to feminist anthropologists.
Whereas most Marxist anthropology of the 1970s was influenced either by French structural Marxism, with its somewhat formal language of mode of production and social formation, or by world-systems theory, which left little apparent space for the culturally or ethnographically particular, ethnographies of resistance in the 1980s drew on different theoretical inspirations. Particularly important were the British cultural Marxists like Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (whose idea of hegemony and counter-hegemony itself achieved a kind of theoretical hegemony), the Indian historians of the Subaltern Studies group, and the French social theorists ^Michel Foucault and ^Pierre Bourdieu.
The combination of interpretive approaches, derived from symbolic anthropology, with historical and material concerns was a heady one. The work of the cultural Marxists opened up new areas for enquiry: inequality was not just a matter of economic relations and was not just to be found in the workplace. It was inscribed in all social relations and took culturally specific forms, and so resistance might also be found, often in elusive or disguised form, in unexpected areas of life. Important ethnographic analyses covered areas as different as women factory workers and labourers in rice fields, members of native churches in South Africa, Bedouin women and tin-miners in Bolivia. Ethnographers were able to connect ‘classic’ anthropological concerns like shamanism, ritual, and spirit possession to issues of power and resistance and thence to broader structures of inequality.
‘Resistance’ provided a broad rubric for innovative work which, above all, showed how local cultural resources could empower people confronted by global structures of inequality. Its chief drawbacks were the vagueness of what was taken to be ‘resistance’ – i.e. action which impeded or subverted unequal power relations, as apart from moments of relative autonomy when the apparently powerless could step aside from the realities of oppression – and consequently the considerable interpretive licence used by some ethnographers in reading resistance into acts and symbols which people themselves might describe in quite different terms (see Fox and Starn 1997). At its most extreme, this could lead into a kind of neo-functionalism in which all social and cultural phenomena might be reduced to the role they play in maintaining or subverting power relations.
