More Power to You, or Should it be Less?

Abstract

If anthropology is in need of a lesson against reductionism, it would appear that no longer is it in need of one against reification, for this is more often the log ical flaw that contemporary anthropologists strive hardest and most con sciously to avoid. Yet for all the merits of the critique against reification, it has its downside: it renders us less sensitive to the dangers of reductionism. Quite frequently today the charge of reification is leveled against what was once the discipline's core concept, the concept of culture, which we are told is overly deterministic, excessively totalizing, and insufficiently sensitive to issues of multivocality and hermeneutic multiplicity. Cultural theorists are accused of investing the concept with too much causal weight and of sheltering it from the tides of history and contingency. Mere museum curators rather than observers of the dynamic human condition, cultural theorists are said to place 'cultures' under bell jars and then to claim that culture determines everything. In order to avoid overly reified notions of culture, recent theorists have shifted the discussion and taken up the analysis of power. In rejecting cultural analysis, the latter claim that no society has ever possessed a systematically agreed upon vision of itself and its normative structures. Anyone who asserts the contrary has probably been talking to the wrong informants, informants who have a political stake in conveying a single view of their collectivity and its norms, beliefs, and values. To replace this alleged mono-vocalic view of cul ture, concepts such as agency, struggle, and heterogeneity have taken the baton, becoming the dominant tropes of present day anthropological discourse. Nevertheless, if agency and struggle imply that people are mostly out for them selves and rarely agree, these same champions of heterogeneity assume that there is one thing that is universal among individuals and societies everywhere, and that this is the will to and the propensity to maximize it. If it was once overlooked, power today has become anthropology's most important human motivation and the one to which all others become rapidly reduced. In place of a reification, then, we have managed to substitute a reduction and in place of Kroeber (1963) and White (1959), we appeal to Foucault (1979).