How Are Culture and Power Related?

Describe the ways that power is embedded in the culture concept.

As you have just read, anthropologists for many years focused primarily on culture as a system of ideas. But more recent scholarship has pushed anthropology to consider the deep interconnections between culture and power in more sophisticated ways (Foucault 1977; Gramsci 1971; Wolf 1982), and the chapters of this book take this challenge seriously.

Power is often described as the ability or potential to bring about change through action or influence, either one’s own or that of a group or institution. This may include the ability to influence through force or the threat of force. Power is embedded in many kinds of social relations, from interpersonal relations, to institutions, to structural frameworks of whole societies. In effect, power is everywhere, and individuals participate in systems of power in complex ways. Throughout this book, we will work to unmask the dynamics of power that are central to all aspects of culture, including race and racism, ethnicity and nationalism, gender, human sexuality, economics, and family.

Anthropologist Eric Wolf (1923–1999) urged anthropologists to see power as an aspect of all human relationships. Consider the relationships in your own life: teacher/student, parent/child, employer/employee, landlord/tenant, lender/borrower, boyfriend/girlfriend. Wolf (1990, 1999) argued that all such human relationships have a power dynamic. Though cultures are often assumed to be composed of groups of similar people who uniformly share norms and values, in reality people in any given culture are usually diverse, and their relationships are complicated.

Power in a culture reflects stratification—uneven distribution of resources and privileges among the culture’s members—that often persists over generations. Some people are drawn into the center of the culture. Others are ignored, marginalized, or even annihilated. Power may be stratified along lines of gender, racial or ethnic group, class, age, family, religion, sexuality, or legal status. These structures of power organize relationships among people and create a framework through which access to cultural resources is distributed. As a result, some people are able to participate more fully in the culture than others. This balance of power is not fixed; it fluctuates. By examining how the resources, privileges, and opportunities of a culture are shared unevenly and unequally, we can begin to use culture as a conceptual guide to power and its workings.

Power and Cultural Institutions

One key to understanding the relationship between culture and power is to recognize that a culture is more than just a set of ideas or patterns of behavior shared among a collection of individuals. A culture also includes the powerful institutions that these people create to promote and maintain their core values. Ethnographic research must consider a wide range of institutions that play central roles in the enculturation process. For example, schools teach a shared history, language, patterns of social interaction, notions of health, and scientific ideas of what exists in the world and how the world works. Religious institutions promote moral and ethical codes of behavior. The media convey images of what is considered normal and valued. Other prominent cultural institutions that reflect and shape norms and values include the family, medicine, government, courts, police, and the military.

A woman in a crowd wearing a hijab and a headband that reads, “Fraternite.” — A young Muslim woman with two French flags pulled over her head covering marches in Paris against a French ban on religious symbols, including headscarves, in public schools.

These cultural institutions are also locations where people can debate and contest cultural norms and values. In 2003, an intense debate erupted in France about Muslim girls wearing headscarves to public schools. Although few girls actually wore headscarves, the controversy took on particular intensity in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and terrorist incidents in Europe. For many non-Muslim people in France, the wearing of head coverings represented a grave danger to French society, particularly its commitment to equality for women, its history of ethnic assimilation, and its tradition of the separation of church and state. Passage of a law banning the headscarf from public schools was intended as a signal (to people both inside and outside France) of the country’s commitment to these principles. But many Muslim girls believed that wearing the headscarf also expressed a commitment to French values—the country’s commitment to religious freedom and liberty.

Despite legal challenges, strikes by students, and street demonstrations in opposition to the law, in 2004 the French government banned any clothing in public schools that indicates particular religious beliefs. Although the language of the law was broadly stated to include all religions, everyone understood that Muslim girls’ headscarves were the target. France’s public schools had become the venue for debating, contesting, and enforcing key French cultural norms and values (Bowen 2006). As we will see, cultural institutions such as schools are not only places where norms are enforced but also places where powerful ideas of what is normal and natural are shaped. Do you see parallels to current U.S. debates about mask mandates and mask wearing in public schools?

Hegemony

The Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) described two aspects of power. Material power, the first component, includes political, economic, or military power. It exerts itself through coercion or brute force. The second aspect of power involves the ability to create consent and agreement within a population, a condition that Gramsci (1971) called hegemony.

Gramsci recognized the tremendous power of culture—particularly the cultural institutions of media, schools, and religion—to shape what people think is normal, natural, and possible and thereby directly influence the scope of human action and interaction. Cultures, which develop slowly over time, include a shared belief system of what is right, what is wrong, and what is normal and appropriate. In this hegemony of ideas, some thoughts and actions become unthinkable, and group members develop a set of “beliefs” about what is normal and appropriate that come to be seen as natural “truths.” The French sociologist Michel Foucault (1926–1984), in Discipline and Punish (1977), described this hegemonic aspect of power as the ability to make people discipline their own behavior so that they believe and act in certain “normal” ways, often against their own interests, even without a tangible threat of punishment for misbehavior.

ANTHROPOLOGISTS ENGAGE THE WORLD

William UryNegotiating Anthropologically

Anthropologist William Ury specializes as a mediator and negotiation advisor in conflicts from workplace disputes to labor strikes to ethnic wars in the Middle East, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union. More recently, he has been involved in helping to end a civil war in Indonesia and to prevent one in Venezuela. An author of numerous books, including Getting to Yes (Fisher, Ury, and Patton 2012) and The Power of a Positive No (Ury 2007), Ury co-founded Harvard University’s Program on Negotiation and is currently a Distinguished Fellow of the Harvard Negotiation Project.

In his work on conflict resolution, Ury sees a deep connection between anthropology and mediation and negotiation: “At the heart of anthropology is the ability to put yourself in the shoes of someone whose culture on the surface seems quite different from your own. That is the essential competence of mediation as well. Mediators need the ability to put themselves in the shoes of both parties, or all parties, to try to understand how they see the world and what their interests and needs are. We need to try to understand ‘the other’ from within their frame of reference, and then try to understand the rules of the game as they see them.”

Central to Ury’s conflict resolution strategy is the concept of the “third side.” Although many conflicts involve two opposing sides, Ury works to resolve conflicts by mobilizing the surrounding community—the third side—around the conflict. The third side plays a constructive role in the negotiations by reminding the arguing parties what is really at stake, thus helping to restore a sense of perspective to an often emotionally charged situation.

“Yes, we’re capable of violence. We’re also capable of cooperating and resolving our differences. Each of us has the ability to exert peer pressure and use the power of community to prevent conflicts, to resolve conflicts that arise, and to contain those conflicts that might escalate.

People in business casual attire sit around a table having a discussion. — Anthropologist William Ury

“That to me is the essential challenge today in this world: How do we mobilize a third side powerful enough to become a container for the conflicts that exist in today’s world? How do we transform those conflicts from destructive forms such as violence to constructive forms such as cooperation? But the third side is not new. It is actually an articulation of patterns that humans have developed over our evolutionary trajectory to survive, function, and thrive—patterns that our cultures have forgotten or moved away from. We’re having to rediscover the third side. That’s what’s interesting. We’re having to reinvent what is actually our most ancient of human heritages for dealing with conflict. The challenge before us is to translate the third side into forms that work in today’s system.

“I’ve had the privilege over the last thirty-five years of having a front-seat view of a revolution taking place around the planet—a revolution in the way that human beings make decisions. I think of it as the negotiation revolution. A generation or two ago, the principal method for making decisions in most areas in life was pretty much top-down. The people on the top of the pyramid gave the orders, and the people on the bottom followed them. But there’s been a process, a trend, that goes back several centuries in some cases, but is most evident in the past thirty years, toward a flattening of those pyramids of power into organizational forms that resemble networks. As this happens, decision-making changes gradually from vertical to horizontal, from top-down orders to joint problem-solving. Today, in order to get something done, we are more and more reliant on people over whom we exercise no direct control. This is increasingly true in politics in democracies, in work, and at home. So, effectively, what we’re doing is negotiating all the time—restoring negotiation as one of the preeminent forms of making decisions. And because there’s often no clear authority that enforces what to do, it means we need to turn to the third side, with the use of mediation and community councils, for example, to help resolve issues that can’t be resolved by both sides alone.

“Amazingly, this heritage comes from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Hunting and gathering was the dominant form of human subsistence for 99 percent of our history. Today this way of life is disappearing from the face of the planet. I find it fascinating that we are experiencing at just this time a phenomenon I like to think of as ‘the great recurrence.’ There’s a way in which many of the older patterns and organizational forms, particularly of cooperation, are reemerging in a new way. Acknowledging the huge difference in conditions today, there are some striking similarities between the world we are now entering and the world that our hunter-gatherer ancestors faced. Today you see humans roaming around the globe again, increasingly nomadic, and also being dependent upon resources that aren’t concentrated as land and crops are. Today our principal resource appears to be information, which is also scattered and requires a lot of cooperation to produce. The basic organizational form that increasingly seems to work in today’s information society is more horizontal and less hierarchical. In this time of horizontal relationships, we need to reinvent the third side, which is our oldest human heritage for transforming conflict.”

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The ability to understand others and to negotiate in this diverse world depends crucially on the basic competencies that you learn in anthropology.

In thinking about the significance of anthropology, Ury offers this insight: “In a macro sense, right now we are living in an era in which, for the first time in the human story, thanks to the communications revolution, thanks to the internet, thanks to other processes of globalization, all the human tribes on the planet are in touch with each other. Thousands of language groups—call them tribes if you like—are all in touch. Future anthropologists may look back one day and call it the era of the ‘human family reunion.’ Like many family reunions, this one is not all peace and light. There are a lot of injustices and resentments. So the question is: How are we going to get along? How are we going to understand each other? Anthropology is a key discipline to understand what’s going on at this macro level.

“Then at a micro level, because the classroom is becoming more and more multicultural, students are going to see evidence of the human family reunion right there in the classroom. How do you understand ‘the other’? How do you understand other cultures, other ways of seeing the world? This ability to understand the other is actually critical to success at work, whether you work in the nonprofit sector, in business, or in government. It’s the essential perspective you need to be able to negotiate for what you want and need, because you’re likely going to be dealing with people who come from very different backgrounds. The ability to understand others and to negotiate in this diverse world depends crucially on the basic competencies that you learn in anthropology.”

This hegemony of expectations shapes our daily life choices without our awareness, delineating in our imaginations what is possible, permissible, right, and wrong. We consent and self-discipline without obvious external enforcement. On a small scale, we buckle our seatbelts without physical coercion. We stop at red traffic lights even in the absence of oncoming cars, police, or surveillance cameras. By April 15 each year, we pay our taxes of our own volition—grumbling perhaps—but without a tax collector coming to the door. On a more complex level, hegemonic concepts of race, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality constrain our choices of who we love and marry.

Earlier in this chapter, we discussed anti-miscegenation laws in the history of the United States. These laws drew upon cultural beliefs in “natural” biological differences among races and the seemingly unnatural, deviant practice of intermarriage. Despite the elimination of these formal laws, a certain hegemony of thought remains: Many in U.S. culture still see interracial marriage as unthinkable and undoable. As evidence, consider U.S. intermarriage rates. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2016), there were 5,818,000 interracial married couples in 2016, only 10.2 percent percent of all marriages in the United States.

Clearly, although U.S. culture has very few formal rules about whom one can marry, cultural norms combined with long-term geographic and institutional patterns of segregation still powerfully inform and enforce our behavior. As this example shows, views against interracial marriage do not require legal sanction to remain dominant, hegemonic norms.

Human Agency

Although hegemony can be very powerful, it does not completely dominate people’s thinking. Individuals and groups have the power to contest cultural norms, values, mental maps of reality, symbols, institutions, and structures of power—a potential known as agency. Cultural beliefs and practices are not timeless; they change and can be changed. Cultures are not biologically determined; they are created over time by particular groups of people. By examining human agency, we see how culture serves as a realm in which battles over power take place—where people debate, negotiate, contest, and enforce what is considered normal, what people can say, do, and even think.

Although a culture’s dominant group may have greater access to power, resources, rights, or privileges, the systems of power such groups create are never absolute, and their dominance is never complete. Individuals and groups with less power or no power may contest the dominant power relationships and structures, whether through political, economic, religious, or military means. At times, these forms of resistance are visible, public, and well organized, including negotiations, protests, strikes, or rebellions. At other times, the resistance may be more subtle, discreet, and diffuse.

A group of protesters look up and wave Egyptian flags.; Two people in hats sit in the back of a large work truck next to a field of small plants. — Resistance to unfair conditions takes many forms. (*Left*) Egyptian protestors in Tahrir Square, Cairo, demonstrate against their government. (*Right*) Malaysian farmers conduct a slowdown to protest working conditions.

For example, James Scott’s book Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985) identifies strategies that people in very weak positions use to express their agency and to resist the dominant group. Scott focuses on a village in northwestern Malaysia that underwent rapid economic transformation as a result of technological changes in the local rice-growing process. The introduction of large-scale irrigation, double cropping, and harvesting machines made harvests more plentiful but threw many landless farmers out of work. The changes benefited the village elite (mostly Chinese) and hurt the poor (mostly Malay). In light of these stark inequalities, Scott asks why poor farmers who are the majority do not revolt and overturn the social and economic order that has made them poor and kept them poor. Scott suggests that the poor farmers understand the potential risks of resistance and the dangerous consequences for themselves and their families that could result from a conflict with the rich and powerful minority. So, they often avoid obvious, public displays of resistance and choose subtler, nonconfrontational forms of resistance, including foot-dragging, slowdowns, theft, sabotage, trickery, arson, and false compliance with regulations.

Map 2.2 is titled Malaysia and focuses on Southeast Asia. — MAP 2.2

**Malaysia**

Some scholars question whether these are really forms of resistance because they are not aimed at, and do not necessarily achieve, change. But Scott argues that not all resistance is revolutionary and that, over time, many acts of everyday resistance can bring change. Through these processes of contestation, norms, values, mental maps of reality, symbols, organizations, and institutions that appear to be timeless and accepted are actually undergoing constant change and renegotiation as people express their human agency even in the face of overwhelming displays of power.

power: The ability or potential to bring about change through action or influence.
stratification: The uneven distribution of resources and privileges among members of a group or culture.
hegemony: The ability of a dominant group to create consent and agreement within a population without the use or threat of force.
agency: The potential power of individuals and groups to contest cultural norms, values, mental maps of reality, symbols, institutions, and structures of power.

How Are Culture and Power Related?

Power and Cultural Institutions

Hegemony

Human Agency

Glossary