Agency: The Relation Between Meaning, Power, and Knowledge
Author(s)
Gledhill, John
Abstract
Professional anthropologists conspicuously disagree about the kind of practical engagement we should have with multiculturalist and indigenous rights politics. Disagreement is not simply about whether academics should act as advocates for the specific interests of their research subjects but about the desirability of this type of politics in itself. Although the latter is often presented as a matter of academic conscience, where, for example, strategic essentialisms prove more politically effective than our preferred scholarly accounts, other actors inevitably see it as political. That the professional ‘we’ often excludes anthropologists not based in North America or Western Europe further complicates the issues. The author argues that retreat to the study to compose analyses that ‘speak truth to power’ is quite ineffectual in a world in which forces we wish to denounce have themselves become skilled players of multiculturalist politics. For all its difficulties, more active engagement in the messy realities of concrete situations is the only way forward. That entails the rejection of some of the intellectual trends that have dominated the discipline in the past two decades and the kind of re-evaluation of our professional role that has to date been sidestepped in efforts to contain ethical and political controversy.
