“Where there is power, there is resistance” (Foucault). Does this remain a valuable source of insight into power relations in specific ethnographic contexts?
Power dynamics structure all relations. Or so we seem to keep being reminded. The media, academia, literature, cinema all seem to have power as their focus. Or if not at the forefront, it is assumed that students, readers, viewers, would understand the central subject matter as enmeshed in power relations that need not no reminder insofar as they are made aware of them daily. Yet, what happens in an environment where power as an all-pervasive reality is confronted with a multiplicity of identities, subjectivities, whose biases shape their understanding of the world? Is power, regardless of its context, always analysed, criticised, rejected? Is resistance inherent to its nature?
This essay will assess whether Foucault’s idea that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’ remains a valuable source of insight into power relations in specific ethnographic contexts. It will first look at how for Foucault’s claim to be valuable to ethnography, a move away from the theoretical must be undertaken. It will then focus on how the deconstruction of binaries is fundamental to understanding power relations. Lastly, it will consider new ways in which resistance can be conceptualised and made sense of.
Power controls so much as it enables control. Our categories of thought put power on a pedestal; almost all can be seen through its lens. We can intuit where power is and where it lacks. Thus, most of our concerns are anchored around it; news headlines speak of the fight against racism, inequality, the struggle for climate change or political power, law cases, asylum seekers, lottery winners. Academia attempts to explain power relations, conceptualise them, compare them. But to theorise is to generalise, to simplify, and consequently, to lose the complexity of the power relations. To theorise is also to choose to put a spotlight on ‘important’ or ‘real’ power, postponing consideration of other forms of power. As an indirect result, this focusing on ‘real’ issues of power hinders subsequent analysis of resistance. While studies of resistance permeate academia, these subconscious ideals of power inform our biases and shape our theories about what we think resistance does and does not look like. Hence, a fundamental tension emerges between the objectivity of theory and the subjectivity of lived realities. Foucault’s claim that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’ loses value when perceived through biases engrained in theoretical thought. For the claim to offer insight, one must be detached from rigid conceptions of power and resistance to allow oneself to see the subtle complexities and varieties power and resistance can take in specific ethnographic contexts. The focus must be on the reality offered, subjectively through informants, rather than the reality one wants to see. Yet, the reality offered in regard to resistance or power structures must be supplemented by an understanding of all beyond ‘power’ and ‘resistance’ so as not to construct their analysis solely in binary.
This next section will focus on the ways in which power and resistance transcend their binary and must be understood as engaged in a complex relationship of reactivity, dependence and interdependence. To think of resistance as solely reactive to power and instances of domination is to perpetuate the power. Gledhill (2000) notes that ‘an exclusive emphasis on the transforming power of Western colonial domination can be another way of denying Europe’s ‘others’ a role in history’. To only concentrate on the power the colonisers possess is to deny the inherent power indigenous resistance had in shaping the development of colonial societies. He goes on to highlight how the fact that attention is focused on the power rather than the resistance ‘illuminates facets of power relations’ often overlooked simply because they are not ‘dramatic confrontations’ worthy of the attention of historians or journalists. James Scott (1989) echoes this by highlighting the state centric tendency followed by historians documenting class struggle; with the events claiming attention being the ones to which ‘the state, the ruling class and the intelligentsia accord most attention’. Here, Foucault’s statement becomes most interesting once inversed, because although it is readily admitted that known forms of power incite resistance, less focus is conferred to the inverse claim: where there is resistance, there is power. Yet, as Foucault (1982) advocates himself, inversion enables resistance to be used as a ‘chemical catalyst so as to bring light to power relations, locate their position, find out their points of application and the methods used’. This stance, taken on by Abu-Lughod, deconstructs fantasies of resistance, deromanticizes it. For instance, she uses the example of a ‘deceptively frivolous issue: lingerie’ and the attitudes of the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouins towards it. She argues that young women, in resisting older women and their opinions on buying ‘frilly nylon negligees’ and moisturising cremes, are at once resisting and inscribing themselves in narratives of power. On the one hand, they are going against older, traditional norms of Bedouins women by buying such products; on the other, they still resist marriage like their grandmothers before them. Yet, their resistance differs from that of their grandmothers: they aren’t against the idea of arranged marriage, they resist certain matches. Ideally, they wish to find a husband that is rich, educated and willing to buy them what they desire, hence the need to subscribe to an ideal of beauty their grandmothers did not. Resistance here underscore how the well-being and standard of living of women now ‘depend enormously on the favour of husbands in a world where everything costs money … and where women have almost no independent access to it’; male powers are, quite literally, enriched, as they now importantly ‘include the power to buy things and to punish and reward women through giving them.’ As such, finding out how people resist, in ways that might not correspond to our expectations of ‘Resistance’, shows that these taken for granted resistances, of whatever form, signal ‘sights of struggle’ (Abu-Lughod 1990).
Further, inverting Foucault’s statement can be valuable in relation to ethnography insofar as it hints at the complex nature of dependence and interdependence of power and resistance. That it can be said that resistance depends on the presence of power but also that power can be recognised through resistance, insofar as power is sometimes acknowledged because there is a site of struggle flagged by the presence of resistance, shows that they are mutually dependent on each other. Instead of just standing in binary opposition to one another, power and resistance take from one another, they invert, transform, make sense of. Resistance uses the language of power to be heard. O’ Brien, Kevin and Li (2006) contend that the border between power and resistance is sometimes not as clear cut as it would seem. They state that ‘contentious politics is not always a story of neatly divided antagonists, with representatives of the state or dominant classes posed on one side and members of the popular classes on the other’, rather in some cases ‘resistance depends on the discontented locating and exploiting divisions within the state’. To reduce resistance and/or power to this binary, to theoretical ideas about what they are and are not, obscures how people ‘go about warding of appropriation and political control’. Their example of Rightful resisters shows how some resisters do not subscribe to the view that ‘the state and its laws are typically inaccessible, arbitrary and alien’ (Scott 1989), but instead believe that there are ways to exploit symbolic and material capital made available by the modern state. One such occurrence could be when, through the employment of authorised symbols, resisters pose ‘inconvenient’ rhetorical questions such as ‘if you don’t listen to the Centre, then we won’t listen to you… Why do you always oppose the Centre? Why do you always oppose us? Are you cadres of the communist party?’, they infuse their resistance in reason and only lay out respectable demands, all the while highlighting their growing ‘rights consciousness and a claim to equal status before the law’. Moreover, this process goes both ways, insofar as given that rightful resisters accept Party rule, go along with many unwelcome measures such as birth control or legal taxation, cede the high ground to official values and only shape their challenges from ‘materials available by the structure of domination’, they appeal to elites who ‘recognise that their claims are consistent with established principles’. This type of resistance thus can be seen as a product of ‘state building and of opportunities created by the spread of participatory ideologies and patterns of rule rooted in notions of equality, rights, and rule of law’.
However, this raises the issue of the double constraint imposed on resistance. Resistance must resist power, but it cannot do so on its own terms. Roseberry (1994) posits that the ‘forms and languages of protest must adopt the forms and languages of domination in order to be registered or heard’. Thus, structures of domination come to constrain ‘the ways in which the dominated and the oppressed can resist their condition’ (Gledhill 2000). Scott (1989) in his work on everyday forms of resistance stresses this when arguing that the dismissal of poaching as a form of resistance, in favour of more revolutionary acts, is to overlook the ‘vital role of power relations in constraining forms of resistance open to subordinate groups’. It is not always the aim of resistance that changes but instead the effectiveness of domination, reducing ‘open, organised, radical activity’ to ‘petty resistance’ thereafter. Similarly, Ortner (1995) argues that power and resistance make sense in relation to one another, not as fixed binaries but as an ever changing, complex dynamic. Resistance can be seen as ambivalent and ambiguous because of the intricate webs of articulations and disarticulations existing between dominant and dominated. In other words, ‘the politics of external domination and the politics within a subordinated group may link up with, as well as repel, one another; the cultures of dominant groups and of subalterns may speak to, even while speaking against, one another’. Hence, dominant language can accommodate or constrain resistance and the form it might take, resulting in a complex interdependency. But perhaps of note here, beyond the language of power is the power of language and shared meaning. Indeed, symbols, acts and language of resistance, must be understood contextually, as belonging to a complex of shared meanings that give sense to the power as well as make sense of the resistance. As Foucault states, building on his statement that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’, he adds that ‘yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (Foucault 1978). Aretxaga touches on this in his work on the Dirty Protest by reminding us that resistance forms in a certain way and not others because of power dynamics, thus conferring to it social and political consequences in a ‘shared universe of meaning’. History, subjectivity, power narratives, psychological integrity all play part in shaping resistance; resistance does not simply stem in opposition to immediate domination, rather it mobilises a shared past, symbols and meanings, infused with particular subjectivities.
This last part will briefly outline ways in which resistance and its relation to power might be understood once it is divested of theoretical baggage and binary biases. To say that resistance is hegemonic is to generalise the narrative and take away from an understanding of the subtle nuance and complexities of each act of resistance. Specific ethnographic contexts have specific power relations and specific types of resistance stemming from them as well as particular subjectivities. Aretxaga notes that The Dirty Protest was ‘simultaneously a sign of rejection and an instrument of power, but one that constituted also the symbolic articulation of dangerous feelings that could not be expressed in other forms without risking madness or serious physical injury’. In that sense, the smearing of faeces over the walls constituted not so much the instrument of a mimetic violence but rather ‘the crystallisation of a conflict between the desire of mimetic violence against prison officers and the need for restraint to preserve some physical and psychological integrity’. As such, as an act of resistance, it entailed a deep personal involvement which proved to be a tremendously painful process for the prisoners, both psychologically and physically. But this resistance was not only linked to personal subjectivities but also to a collective subjectivity, one going beyond the individual, enabling others to make sense of the resistance according to shared understandings. In the case of the Dirty Protest, the historically founded scars of colonialism could be seen as a larger discourse within which the relation between the prisoners and guards was embedded, this relation thus being mediated by a ‘relation of social inequality larger and historically more significant than that in the existing prison universe’. Thus, resistance can be seen as always enmeshed in ambiguous and complex contexts, of which the Foucauldian binary, if taken literally, is reductive. Indeed, to abstract all but the politics of resistance through the analysis of the relationship between the dominant and the subordinate, devalues the analysis or understanding that can be brought to the ethnographic material. It is to obscure not only that resistance can have different aims and that power manifests in different forms, but also to fail to acknowledge their evolving and changing character. For Foucault’s idea of ‘where there is power, there is resistance’ to be a valuable insight to understanding power relations in specific ethnographic contexts, it is necessary to break away from the hegemony of power and that of resistance; both evolve, change, and respond to one another over time. As Ortner states, resistance is plagued with internal division and to omit that from analysis is a powerful move in itself (and brings into question the power intrinsic to ethnographies and biases invested in them). She claims that there is ‘never a single, unitary, subordinate, if only in the simple sense that subaltern groups are internally divided by age, gender, status and other forms of difference and that occupants of differing subject positions will have different, even opposed, but still legitimate, perspectives on the situation’ (Ortner 1995). Both the personal and collective subjectivities thus impact acts of resistance; ‘individual acts of resistance, as well as large scale resistance movements, are often themselves conflicted, internally contradictory, and affectively ambivalent ... due to internal political complexities.’
To conclude, insofar as ‘power’ and ‘resistance’ as such heavily theorised concepts, any use of these notions to understand power relations in specific contexts will be limited if there is no active deconstruction of biases surrounding resistance and power. To expect certain forms of power or certain manifestations of resistance to be salient in specific contexts is to create an illusory form of them and to make ethnographies a political, and even moral, tool.
Bibliography
Abu-Lughod, L. 1990. ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women’, American Ethnologist, 17:1, pp.41-55.
Brown, M.F. (1996) ‘On Resisting Resistance’, American Anthropologist 98(4): 729–49.
Gledhill, J. 2000. “The political anthropology of colonialism: a study of domination and resistance.” In Power and its disguises: Anthropological perspectives on politics. London: Pluto Press. pp. 67-91.
Ortner, S. 1995. ‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37 (1): 173-193.
Scott, James 1989. Everyday forms of resistance. The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 4.
O'Brien, Kevin J.and Lianjiang Li. 2006. Rightful Resistance in Rural China. Cambridge University Press.
Aretxaga, B. 1995. Dirty protest: symbolic overdetermination and gender in Northern Ireland ethnic violence. Ethos 23, 123-148.