The Medium of Foucault in Anthropology

Dominic Boyer The Medium of Foucault in Anthropology Foucault's pervasiveness is largely unparalleled in anthropology, almost to the point that, like oxygen, one takes his ethereal yet nourishing presence in everyday disdplinary life almost for granted. This is not to say that he is everywhere affirmed and celebrated; rather, that "Foucaulf and an allied terminology induding "biopower," "governmentality," "power/ knowledge" and so on, areconstantpoints ofcommunicativedeparture and of reference, dtational orienters, and andiors, if you will, in the everyday discursive networks of anthropological knowledge-making. Some view Foucaulfs expansive currency in anthropological discourse as a sign of hope and renewal, others as a sign of despair and decline. I am more interested in Foucaulfs discursive status as symptom and sodai fact; Foucaulfs currency is an index of changes affecting the social organization of knowledge-making within the diverse professional intellectual networks and institutions we practitioners identify as "anthropology." Foucaulfs pervasiveness signifies (to me) the attractiveness of his flexible analytics and evocative narratives for a particular kind of artisanal and subspedalized professional intellectual community like contemporary anthropology as it seeks to make sense of itself in a postindustrial ecology of knowledge-making that is increasingly encountered as systemic, mediated, and estranging. The "mediating" quality of Foucault has to do with the way the specific character ofhis writing speaks to a specific sodological situation and allows thesituated artisanal intellectuals1 (like us) to cognize ourselves as agentive subjects through the mediation of his narratives. Orbiting Planet Foucault2 If one wants to get a sense of general theoretical currency in a disdpline, ifs not a bad exerdse to listen to whidi dtations job candidates carefully intercalate into their presentations. As most of us know from having experienced the ritual, the job presentation is a difficult speech situation in which one is expected to demonstrate, in its anthropological variant, both a richly woven fabric of immediate ethnographic knowledge and familiarity and facility with a wide range of theoretical dialects. Of course, the candidate also knows intuitively (if s/he has been appropriately professionalized in graduate school) that there is an economy of citationality at work in evaluation situations. One needs to perform competently not just any theory but the right theory, both for the project and for the audience. My point is that the job presentation is, if correctly prepared, a speech context that cultivates a highly neurotic relationship to theory, a context in which the expected sodai valuation of theory becomes a condition of its articulation. Interestingly, in my listening to job talks at Cornell over the past two years, only one of about a dozen candidates didn't mention Foucault. 266 the minnesota review At times the references were somewhat superficial, at other times more lengthy critical or affirmative engagements. No other theorist, and certainly no other self-identifying "anthropologist," received such common citation. When it came time to speak ofissues of the scale of "discourse," "power," or "knowledge," Foucault was predictably invoked to triangulate these problems , to serve as the point of departure for the candidate's own gymnastics of positioning. After his talk, I mentioned informally to the one candidate who did not cite Foucault that he distinguished himself by not having mentioned Foucault at all. He calculated my intention for a moment and then replied, looking somewhat worried, "But I did mention discourse." Theories do all sorts of things; they do what we commonly construe them as doing—that is, they provide paradigms of analysis, key interpretive categories, analogical tools, and sources of inspiration for the formation of expert knowledge about the research object under consideration. But theoretical dialects also fulfill other kinds of communicative tasks: like "trade languages," they allow specialists in different academic disciplines with highly variable commitments, horizons, and connotational dispositions to muddle through communication to one another. In anthropology, the presence of such trade languages is particularly vital as the discipline has aggressively subspedalized both geographically and thematically over the course of the twentieth century. Without transspedalized registers of "theory," I think there would be very little metapragmatic recognition of disdplinary "wholeness." In the 1960s and 1970s the dominant theoretical dialects that gave practitioners a sense of common investment and identity were still largely drawn from...