CULTURE, ECONOMY, POWER: ANTHROPOLOGY AS CRITIQUE, ANTHROPOLOGY AS PRACTICE by Winnie Lem and Belinda Leach

In “Culture, Economy, Power: Anthropology as Critique, Anthropology as Practice”, Winnie Lem and Belinda Leach humbly achieve their stated purpose of “generating a critical body of knowledge, directed ultimately at contributing toward political programs of change” (1) by creating a forum conducive to sharing ideas about the political economy of the modern world that are both critical and interrogative. During my presentation of this book in a seminar in ethnography, I posed a question to the discussants: “How is it that Lem and Leach can claim to be applied anthropologists, trying to contribute towards political programs of change?” I had been a bit skeptical of the applied dimensions of Lem and Leach’s efforts throughout my reading of the book, but several of the responses transformed my perceptions of the role of political-economic theory (and theory in general) and critical analysis in applied anthropology. According to the seminar participants the goals of such efforts are to create a body of literature that can influence policy and predict reactions; a compendium of knowledge that delves into the depths of the social and political interactions that happen in modern, globalized economies. In Leide Porcu’s review of Lem and Leach’s volume, she observes the authors’ commitment to understanding the dialectic between theory and practice and articulates the authors’ demonstration that “anthropology should be involved in an expansion of critical knowledge, taking into consideration history and change, processes of globalization, the dynamics of neoliberalism, and the maintenance and transformation of old and new forms of capitalist exploitation, articulating global forces while paying attention to situated practices and heterogeneity” (Porcu 968).
In the following, I will survey the three different sections of the book and examine the core arguments of each, dissecting specific contributions that were poignant within the book and representative of its core theoretical aspirations. I will make an effort to engage with what appear to be the theoretical “engines” of each section - the political economy of anthropology in “Nations and Knowledge,” hegemony and political anthropology in “States and Subjects,” and globalization and historical materialism in “Hegemonies and Histories.” In fact, these various sections of the book are cross-cut by all of these (and more) theoretical orientations, with the most prominent theoretical orientations belonging to historical materialism, political economy, and political anthropology. I will integrate other review’s and perceptions of the book, including contributions made during the seminar in which I presented the book. I will also look at the methodologies employed by the contributors and the methodologies that could logically emerge from such theoretical departures. Throughout the analysis, I will evaluate (my interpretations) of the effectiveness of the arguments and the reactions and sympathies they invoked during my subjective engagement.

Nations and Knowledge

In the first part of the book, the myriad authors explore the fashions in which anthropologists engage in contemporary political economies. It examines the ways that anthropologists are molded by historical metamorphoses in capitalism as intellectuals who are engaged in systems of knowledge production. The intellectual production of knowledge is politically charged and shaped, directed, monitored, and (negatively and positively) sanctioned. An example of this in contemporary American anthropology would be the influence of the creation of military-government jobs for anthropologists in Iraq and Afghanistan and its effect on the integrity, character, and ethical consistnecy of the discipline. This section of the book navigates through the production of contextualized anthropological discourses in Canadian, Spanish, Mexican, United Statesian, and British anthropology. Theoretically, it touches upon issues of knowledge and power, including the influence of political economy in the production of concepts, disciplinary directions, and more localized intellectual conclusions. Methodologically, it deconstructs the ways in which various national anthropological traditions interact with society, culture, economy, and history. It is based primarily on scholarly research that avoids methodologies involving participant observation.
According to Dunk, Canada lacks a unified national character and is characterized by its bicentrism. In the absence of a strong national culture, “Canada’s unique cultural identity, or lack of cultural identity, is rooted in Canada’s long and regional variegated integration into global capitalism” (26). What distinguishes Canadian anthropology from anthropological literatures and traditions produced in other nation-states is the extent to which it relies - even depends - on practitioners who were trained elsewhere, most especially in the United States. According to Dunk, Canadian academicians in cultural studies and anthropology haven’t followed suit with other countries’ anthropological traditions in reading their own culture as “exemplifying global developments to their national contexts” (29). This difference is then starkly contrasted when Lem and Leach navigate us toward William Roseberry’s “Political Economy in the United States.”
Roseberry’s analysis of the changing relationships between anthropological-intellectuality and activism (social and political) in the United Sates is a highly captivating chapter that sheds a brilliant and refreshing light on the discipline of anthropology in the United States. Roseberry examines the contours of the discipline, looking at how it insulates itself and how it reaches outside of itself to imbue and direct political and social currents. Unlike the anthropological institutions of nations like Canada, the United States has an active and sui generis anthropological tradition that is home-grown (i.e., not imported from abroad). Because of this, anthropological traditions have pulsated with the rhythms of our domestic and international history. It is an anthropology that has boxed with the political system, penetrated and influenced social policy, and taken stands against racism and illegal war. Yet it is also an anthropology partially fueled by the interests of those who invest in it, an intellectual tradition that is molded by political and economic currents, and sometimes a mundane profession that is highly (and rightfully) concerned about catering to its adherents’ socio-economic positions. In fact, buildings even burned on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara in the defense of an activist-anthropologist who was fired from the staff there. Anthropology as critique, anthropology as praxis.
According to reviewer Dorothy L. Hodgson, this section of the book is the “most interesting and innovative” (Hodgson 2004, 768) and does a novel job of locating anthropology and anthropologists “in the context of shifting national histories, politics, and priorities” (Hodgson 2004, 768). The chapter is indeed very insightful, and cuts to the core of the inner workings of various national anthropological traditions and their relationships to political economy and global anthropological trends. It does a fine job of locating anthropology and its fluctuations within the pulsating dialectic between anthropology and history - historical materialism goes a long way in tracing the story of anthropology.

States and Subjects

“States and Subjects,” the second part of the book, examines the ways in which hierarchies of power and forms of state domination such as hegemony function in the formation of subjectivities in ethnographic contexts that vary over time and space. The section seeks to illustrate how the flux of history and political upheavals work in molding and detailing narratives and subjectivities. For example, Scheper-Hughes’ chapter on remorse and the formation of subjectivities in post-apartheid South Africa from Biehl et al’s collection “Subjectivities: Ethnographic Interpretations” (2007) would have fit in nicely in this section. As the reader, we are dropped into a specific social-historical context and asked to empathize with the subjectivities of those who are adapting, transforming, and negotiating with broader social and historical storm fronts. Theoretically, the chapter examines hegemony a la Gramsci and statehood as they play out in narratives and representations of history. It also employs a form of deep ethnography that looks at histories and stories as texts to be examined, unpacked, and implicated. The major methodology employed in this section involves the analysis of narratives and the extrapolated dialectic between communities, nations, and globalized economies.
Dipankar Gupta’s “Sentiment and Structure: Nation and State” negotiates with issues of nationality, identity, and statehood. The author shows that there is a positive correlation between the establishment of a nation-state and the demands for ethnic groups abroad who represent the nation-state. For example, while Native Americans have not been able to claim a sovereign nation-state to energize their demands, modern Jews have. The knowledge of an independent homeland directly linked to global identities is empowering and highly correlated with an optimal social-economic status. Her essay is a compelling analysis of of the key challenges confronting an anthropology of citizenship and the nation-state (Hodgson 2004). Essays such as Striffler’s “Communists Communists Everywhere!” on the other hand, are case studies that illustrate how these issues play out. Striffler’s essay discusses how a group of workers in Ecuador invaded a United Fruit Company banana plantation because crops were failing, jobs were becoming scarce, and livelihoods were in jeopardy. As a result of the conflict, the Ecuadorian government employed draconian measures - including a large-scale military intervention and purge - to weed out “communist influences” in the community that were almost purely imagined. “The arrival of the military did not simply lead to the destruction of popular organizations.. it made it virtually impossible to talk about the invasion in an intelligent and open manner.. Tengeulenos had to say the invasion was communist, even if all of them did not believe it” (118). Thus, what is being analyzed here is memory transformation under the pressure of hegemonic state discourses. The author’s unit of analysis, however, is not the historical evidence for “communist infiltration” into the community, but rather the local narratives that sought to reinforce the claims of the Ecuadorian government. Despite the fact that they were perfectly aware that there were not direct communist influences in their invasion of the plantation, they had to subtly integrate such discourses into their narrative to be able to justify the horrors that were endured. State hegemony infiltrated local narratives and helped mold local identities. Statehood and citizenship were reinforced in a form of self-deprecating blame - a discourse that sought to justify historical purges.
“States and subjects” thus looks at subjectivity within power relationships and how people respond to such tensions and the types of relationships that are the result of these interactions. The formation of national identities and historical narratives is thus contingent not only on the relationship between a community and a state, but also upon the relationship between a community, a state, and the global political economy. Narratives are not simple texts that reveal, on their surface, the subtlety of communities. Rather, they are complex discourses that have deep stratigraphic layers of meaning that must be teased apart. Sometimes narratives can conceal much more than they reveal, as is the case in Striffler’s “Communists Communists Everywhere!” Other times, such as in a post-Bush America, the social memory of the erosion of civil liberties and the truncating of core beliefs have energized a social response to an all-but-subtle right-wing state hegemony.

Hegemonies and Histories

In “Hegemonies and Histories,” Lem and Leach seem to be suggesting that capitalism and modernization (manifestations of materialism) transform local cultures, subjectivities, and political struggles. This section, however, seems much more oddly placed and relatively incomplete when compared to the others in the book. In fact, Hodgson states it quite accurately when she says some of these articles “read like the mechanistic, deterministic analyses that characterized much of neo-Marxist anthropology, masking more nuanced understandings of social relations and social change” (Hodgson 2004, 769). Where some of the other contributors’ provided relevant theoretical orientations or novel and intertwined ethnographic investigations in previous sections, this section feels like “what’s left over.” Hodgson also states that the historical materialism approaches in this section represent a theoretical trend that “minimizes the variable and contested roles of meaning, symbols, representations, and cultural knowledge and practices as sites of power and catalysts for change” (Hodgson 2004, 768). These comments seem to underscore the feeling that these ideas could have been explored under the rubrics provided in the first two sections of the book, and that the efforts of the authors’ reveal much less developed and nuanced ethnographic and theoretical approaches. Theoretically, this section is again engaged in analyses of hegemony and historical materialism - we are again plunged into discourses and narratives concerning epochal historical and economic transformations. Methodologically, it employs a mixture of ethnographic participant observation and interviews and relies on extrapolations from archival research.
Labrecque discusses how maquiladoras and women’s increased access to markets in the Yucatan did not result in women’s increased access to social, economic, or political power. Far from the expectations of neoliberalism’s claims to empowerment through free global markets, Labrecque demonstrates how access to the labor market via maquiladoras had overwhelmingly negative impacts on the self-determination and autonomy of women, and even the Mexican state, in the Yucatan. “The Mexican state is no longer in a position to exercise this kind of power over women as a social category; international institutions have taken over that position” (174). Thus, in this social-historical inquiry we are provided we a rich example of the give-and-take of the dialectic between global capitalism and local contexts. Where neoliberalism was campaigned as being a liberating opportunity for women (i.e., taking women out of the domestic sphere and putting them to work in factories and markets) it actually became a tool for patriarchs and capitalists to exploit the vulnerabilities in maquiladoras. Similarly, in “Acquiescence and Quiescence: Gender and Politics in Rural Languedoc,” Winnie Lem demonstrates how the introduction of capitalism and modernization to the wine industry in rural France has transformed local culture, subjectivities, and political struggles. In the process of modernizing the wine industry, these modernistic, capitalist forces have served to disempower women and erode their previously prestigious roles in Languedoc’s wine industry.
These chapters discuss global flows and transmigrations, the neocolonial role of multinational corporations in local communities, and the effects of globalism on identity, community, and statehood. Smith states that “transnationalism, the mobility of people and the global flows of capital, have made membership in a physical locale a far less powerful factor in people’s sense of collective identity than before” (251). The chapter he writes to cap off the section (but more adequately the book) calls for a more multi-sited ethnography that analyzes the importance of transnational populations whose relationship to places are more complex and problematic. We are asked to dive into the dialectic of historical materialism and look at the roles of workers, managers, bankers, and even anthropologists in these exchanges. From the wine fields of rural france, to the banks of New York City, to the lecture halls of Ivy League schools, this book humbly explores the contours of culture, economy, and power in anthropological practice and theory.







Biehl, Joāo, Byron Good and Arthur Kleinman (2007). Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hodgson, Dorothy L. (2004). Review of “Culture, Economy, Power” in American Anthropologist Vol. 106(4): 768-769.

Lem, Winnie and Belinda Leach (2002). Culture, Economy, Power: Anthropology as Critique, Anthropology as Praxis. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Porcu, Leide (2004). Review of “Culture, Economy, Power” in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Vol. 27.4: 967-969.