Foucault Meets South New Guinea: Knowledge, Power, Sexuality

Abstract

Foucault's move to critique and historicize knowledge-as-power has been highly influential in cultural anthropology. So, too, his assessment that power and resistance entail one another; that master plans of resistance reinstate the epistemic premises they seem to oppose; and that the envelope of the unthought and the unsaid is best expanded at the epistemic, political, and sexual margins. Like the influence of French predecessors such as Durkheim and Levi-Strauss in earlier eras, Foucault's impact in American anthropology of the 1990s is diffuse enough to be almost taken for granted. That some of the more recent turns in postcultural anthropology have backgrounded an explicit sense of their intellectual history increases the tacitness of this influence. Foucault's work leaves a large question of application: How are analyses geared for a critique of Western knowledge-power to be applied in third- and fourth-world contexts, in postcolonial and postindustrial circumstances, and across the global range of cultural and epistemic variation? The dominant trend in anthropology has probably been to invoke Foucault as a dependable and general-purpose critic of Western epistemic hegemony. For instance, Foucault informs anthropological critiques of colonial or neocolonial knowledge-as-power and our own complicity as social