The Anthropology of Power: Empowerment and Disempowerment in Changing Structures (Asa Monographs)

An edited collection which examines the theoretical issues surrounding power, and particularly empowerment, which uses ethnographic analysis as its basis. It takes material from the Middle East, Canada, Columbia, Australasia and various parts of Europe and Africa. It looks particularly at the extent to which traditionally disempowered groups gain influence in postcolonial or multicultural settings, and at how power relates to economic development, gender and environmentalism. "The Anthropology of Power presents case studies from a wide range of societies and discusses what is actually happening when people talk about 'empowering' others. The contributors question whether power is actually being transferred to the powerless, or whether this is a delusion." "This collection draws on ethnographic material from Europe, the Middle East, Australasia, Africa and the Americas, exploring how traditionally disempowered groups gain influence in postcolonial and multicultural settings, from civil war to new communication technologies, from religious imperialism to transnational mining investments. It surveys the relationships between empowerment and economic development, gender and environmentalism. The contributors confront post-Foucauldian theoretical issues on the nature, distribution and balance of power, and ask whether the rhetoric of 'empowerment' actually masks a lack of change in established power relations."--Jacket 'Empowerment', especially when divorced from consideration of what constitutes 'power', seems to be a sanitised buzz-word of the mid-1990s, yet as Wright (1994: 163) has noted, the word itself has been part of the discourse of debureaucratisation for some two or more decades.