Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-22dnz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T07:56:22.842Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

CULTURE, PSYCHE AND STATE POWER

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2014

ANDREW ZIMMERMAN
ANDREW ZIMMERMAN*
Affiliation:
Department of History, George Washington University E-mail: azimmer@gwu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The discipline of anthropology has perhaps always been especially close to the exercise of state power, but, in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century, the nature of both anthropology and state power changed dramatically. This was a period when many anthropologists distanced themselves from earlier evolutionist accounts that traced a generalized human development from “primitive” to “civilized.” This evolutionist anthropology, as many scholars have shown, reflected and justified a range of imperialist practices by presenting European conquest as bringing progress to societies existing in a noncontemporary present. Two of the most important variants of post-evolutionist anthropology are the cultural relativism associated with Franz Boas (1858–1942) and the sociological universalism associated with Emile Durkheim (1858–1917). The state power that evolutionist anthropology had once supported also changed radically over the same period. The forms of domination exercised by the global North over the global South gradually shifted from direct colonial rule to the combination of military intervention and economic control that characterizes the postcolonial period. Anthropology, Talal Asad has written, is “rooted in an unequal power encounter between the West and Third World . . . an encounter in which colonialism is merely one historical moment.” Internally, the social welfare state continued its remarkable growth but also, in the 1960s and 1970s, faced challenges from those who rejected the patriarchy and heteronormativity that it often presupposed and reinforced. The two books under review reveal how new types of anthropology in the United States and France came to serve these new forms of state power in the twentieth century. In both cases anthropology adapted to these new political conditions by incorporating psychoanalysis to posit an especially strong bond between individual and culture that produced what one contemporary called an “oversocialized conception of man.”

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , August 2015 , pp. 485 - 496
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See, for example, Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983)Google Scholar.

2 Asad, Talal, “Introduction,” in Asad, Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter (New York, 1973), 9–19, 16Google Scholar.

3 Wrong, Dennis H., “The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology,” American Sociological Review, 26/2 (1961), 183–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wrong criticizes Parsonian sociology here, which underwent a similar development in this period. On psychoanalytic anthropology and state power see also Fassin, Didier, “Les politiques de l’ethnopsychiatrie: La psyché africaine, des colonies africaines aux banlieues parisiennes,” L’ Homme, 153 (2000), 231–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Anderson, Warwick, Jenson, Deborah, and Keller, Richard C., eds., Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Durham, NC, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 On Parsons as Durkheimian see Pope, Whitney, Cohen, Jere, and Hazelrigg, Lawrence E., “On the Divergence of Weber and Durkheim: A Critique of Parsons’ Convergence Thesis,” American Sociological Review, 40 (1975), 417–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 For one obvious example see Boas, Franz, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York, 1921)Google Scholar.

6 Love, Eric T., Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004)Google Scholar.

7 See, for example, Brown, Wendy, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ, 2006)Google Scholar.

8 Gary, Brett, The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

9 Lacan, Jacques, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York, 1991), 38–9Google Scholar.

10 Rubin, Gayle, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Reiter, Rayna Rapp, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York, 1975), 157–210Google Scholar.

11 Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990)Google Scholar.

12 Copjec, Joan, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA, 1994)Google Scholar; Scott, Joan W., The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham, NC, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Freeman, Derek, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Cambridge, MA, 1983)Google Scholar.

14 Leonardo, Micaela Di, Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (Women in Culture and Society series) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Walton, Jean, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference (Durham, NC, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mandler (284–5) similarly rejects the discussion in Klein, Christina, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley, CA, 2003)Google Scholar. Also relevant, although perhaps too recent to have been available to Mandler, is Meyerowitz, Joanne, “‘How Common Culture Shapes the Separate Lives’: Sexuality, Race, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Constructionist Thought,” Journal of American History, 96 (2010), 1057–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Mandler, Peter, “Deconstructing ‘Cold War Anthropology,’” in Isaac, Joel and Bell, Duncan, eds., Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War (New York, 2012), 245–66Google Scholar.

16 Foucault, Michel, “Psychoanalysis and Ethnology,” in Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1970), 373–86, 387Google Scholar. Robcis (170) offers a different reading of this part of Order of Things.