"Resisting Resistance": Historicizing Contemporary
Models of Agency

Robyn Kliger

They do not know it, but they are doing it.

-Karl Marx, Das Kapital

[I]n contrast to a certain hagiographic and rhetorical stylization, the
harsher the oppression, the more widespread among the oppressed is the
willingness, with all its infinite nuances and motivations, to collaborate.

-Primo Levi (1986:137)
Introduction

Analytic models within the academy reveal a relatively recent concern with
microstrategies of resistance. The current intellectual zeitgeist is one in which notions of
individual "strategies" (Bourdieu 1977) and "tactics of resistance within everyday practice"
(de Certeau 1984) are valorized in the literature. According to Michel Foucault, "[w]here
Soviet socialist power was in question, its opponents called it totalitarianism; power in
Western capitalism was denounced by the Marxists as class domination. But the task, of
analyzing the mechanics of power could only begin after 1968, on the basis of daily struggles
at grass roots level, among those whose fight was located in the fine meshes of the web of
power" (1972:116). I am suggesting, in Foucauldian terms, the emergence of an epistemic
shift: one in which the post-colonial subject, as an identity constructed by Western social
scientific discourse, is far more empowered than the subject of colonialist times. This "other"
of postmodern times is vibrant with agency and the will to resist. Today, the truth of the
subject is told through a narrative of microstrategic resistance, as part of a larger post-colonial
discourse which attempts to recuperate the savage of colonialist times, in order to repent for
our previous sin: the denial of consciousness in the "savage other."

As historian Susanna Barrows (1981) has shown, French "men of letters" threatened
by the resurgence of strikes, riots and demonstrations in the 1880's, and 1890's, channeled
much of their uneasiness into a purportedly objective study of crowds. In analyzing the crowd,
these intellectuals constructed new, dramatic and revealing metaphors of fear: crowds, they
argued were primitive creatures, alcoholics, victims of hypnosis, and hysterical females.
Although these theorists claimed to have discovered a scientific paradigm for crowd behavior,
their work shows that their writings are best understood as reflections of bourgeois anxiety at
the end of the century. Similarly, it may be profitable to view the preponderance of
microstrategic resistance models-at the end of the twentieth century-as reflections of
intellectual anxiety.

Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers

Recall the E. E. Evans-Pritchard's famous monograph of the Nuer (1940), assigned to
most graduate students. Recall as well, the representation of the native, according to Evans-
Pritchards' depiction: "[a]fter a few weeks of associating solely with Nuer, one displays, if the
pun be allowed, the most evident symptoms of Nuer-osis." With respect to the accuracy of
these representations, Evans-Pritchard himself readily acknowledges: "[i]n case it can be said
that I have only described the facts in relation to a theory of them and as examples of it, and
have subordinated description to analysis, I reply that this was my intention. It is difficult to
know how far one is justified in pressing an abstraction" (1940:261).

My argument is that the contemporary fetishism of microstrategies of resistance is, in
part, an attempt to return dignity to the "post-colonial other." One of the postmodern projects
is to re-write the other with agency, in order to recuperate him/her from previous social
scientific abuses. Hence, one finds works such as Weapons of the Weak (Scott 1985), in which
a high level of agency is imputed to even the smallest acts; i.e., the Malaysian peasant who
steals the chicken is doing much more than "acting out" anger in a psychological sense, but
rather, in Scott's rendition, this "post-colonial other" is vibrant with consciousness and
resistance against the landowner (1985:59).

In the closing chapter of his book, Scott proclaims: "[i]f revolution were a rare event
before..., it now seems all but foreclosed. All the more reason to see in the tenacity of self-
preservation-in ridicule, truculence, irony, in petty acts of non-compliance, in foot dragging,
in dissimulation, in resistant mutuality...a spirit and a practice that prevents the worst and
promises something better" (1985:350). It is with this sentiment in mind that Scott develops
his argument, making small acts of self-preservation gargantuan acts of symbolic resistance.
This paper argues that, in fact, these actions are most probably viewed "as an aspect of
revolutionary praxis or precursors to it"-(see Scott's discussion on how these small acts can
inadvertently lead to large scale revolution, such as the Russian revolution, 1985:293)-
precisely in order to compensate for the fact that they are not inherently inchoate, symbolic
forms of revolution. It is a matter of interpretation, and this interpretation is historically biased.
It is my sense that the disillusionment and despair over the absence of a proletarian uprising is,
in part, responsible for the contemporary and utopian politicization of everyday acts.

In the academy today, we are theorizing the "other's" psychological responses to the
dominant in a radically different manner than did Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud,
and Evans-Pritchard. Today we are imputing consciousness and resistance where once none
was assigned. The goal of this paper is to show an analytic shift in our thinking about
resistance and to next attempt an analysis to account for this epistemic shift. In order to
articulate how these representations of the "other" are "complex refractions of the twenty-first
century intellectual culture," and, in order "to fathom the layers of meaning embedded in their
rhetoric" (Barrows 1981 :viii), this paper briefly discusses changes in the focus of North
American social scientific theory, analyzing resistance models according to Frantz Fanon,
Marx and Freud; and secondly, problematizes models of resistance within medical
anthropological discourse. The final section of this paper ties these theories into a brief
discussion of postmodernity and post-colonial guilt.

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Theorizing the Other: How The Other is Used by the Social Theorist

The creatureliness is the terror.

-Kierkegaard (1957:217)

According to Lila Abu-Lughod (1991:313), "[t]erms like voices, subversion,
dissidence, counter-discourse and counter-hegemony, as well as resistance, circulate through
such widely diverse enterprises as French feminist theories (e.g., Kristeva 1981) and social
scientific studies of specific subordinate groups, e.g., slaves in the American South and the
Caribbean, Southeast Asian peasants, and subaltern groups in colonial India...as well as among
various groups of women in this country and elsewhere." Abu-Lughod goes on to argue:

the popularity of resistance studies provokes a number of interesting
questions...Unlike the grand studies of peasant insurgency and revolution of
the 1960's and early 1970's (e.g., Scott 1976; Wolf 1969) what one finds
now is a concern with unlikely forms of resistance, subversions rather than
large-scale collective insurrections, and small or local resistances not tied to
the overthrow of systems or even to ideologies of emancipation. Scholars
seem to be trying to rescue and to restore to our respect such previously
devalued or ignored forms of resistance. (ibid.)

Abu-Lughod then remarks, that in some of her own work, and in the work of other theorists,
"there is perhaps a tendency to romanticize resistance, to read all forms of resistance as signs
of the ineffectiveness of systems of power and of the resilience and creativity of the human
spirit in its refusal to be dominated" (1991:314). This is quite a different version of human
resistance than one reads in Marx (whose views are discussed in a later section).

Edward Bruner (1986), in a fascinating paper, argues that:

In the 1930's and 1940's, the dominant story constructed about Native
American culture change saw the present as disorganization, the past as
glorious, and the future as assimilation. Now however, we have a new
narrative: the present is viewed as a resistance movement, the past as
exploitation, and the future as ethnic resurgence. The theoretical concepts
associated with the outmoded story, such as acculturation and assimilation,
are used less frequently and another set of terms has become prominent:
exploitation, oppression, colonialism, resistance, liberation, independence,
nationalism, tribalism, identity, tradition, and ethnicity.... The ethnographic
problematic is now one of documenting resistance and telling how tradition
and ethnicity are maintained. (1986:140)

This renewed-or simply, new?-interest in resistance as the micropolitics of everyday life can
be seen in a few different epistemic orientations. For example, some researchers have chosen
to focus upon how the ritualization of everyday life serves to maintain the social structure"
(see Goffman 1967). Additionally, since 1974 there has been a burgeoning interest within
anthropology in the study of women and microstrategies of resistance (Lamphere 1975).
Initially, feminist theorists focused upon questions of universal sexual asymmetry and the
universal oppression of women (see Lamphere and Rosaldo 1974). The second wave,

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according to Lamphere, turned away from questions of universality to focus on individual
women and their strategies of resistance.

At a certain point in social science development we begin to locate in the literature a
politics of individual agency, micropower and individual strategies of resistance (e.g.,
Bourdieu 1977; de Certeau 1984; Foucault 1976; Thompson 1978). Historian Aletta Biersack
(1989:9 1) corroborates this point:

Within Western Marxism, there is a tradition that seeks to supplant
mechanistic base-superstructure models with models in which the human
subject becomes the "ever-resurgent" subject of his or her own history (see
E.P. Thompson's The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, (1978). Railing
against the structural Marxism of Althusser and using a less idiosyncratic
language than that of Bourdieu or Sahlins, Thompson insists on the historical
subject's ability to "'make" him or herself... Making, because it is an active
process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning, as much to action
as to structure...Thompson's agenda thus aligns itself with that of Sahlins
and Bourdieu.

In general, this "return to the actor" (Touraine 1988) can be identified as an epistemological
shift which emphasizes human agency over structural determinism, micropractices over
macropractices. This is most evident when reviewing work such as Durkheim's sociology and
Radcliffe-Brown's structural functionalism: "[t]he social phenomena we observe in any human
society are not the immediate result of the nature of individual human beings, but the result of
the social structure by which they are united" (Radcliffe-Brown 1949:191). Functionalism,
with its metaphors of organic equilibrium and human physiology, as well as Kroeber's notion
of the superorganic, depicted society as a superorganic entity, capable of functioning without
the individual actors intentionality or agency.

Durkheim argued that "the determining cause of a social fact should be sought among
the social facts preceding it and not among the states of the individual consciousness" (1938:
25). Durkheim stated that "a social fact is to be recognized by the power of external coercion
which it exercises or is capable of exercising over individuals and the presence of this power
may be recognized by the resistance offered against every individual effort that tends to violate
it." The rules of the social guide human behavior and hold society together, through either
mechanical ("primitive") or organic (complex) solidarity.

From this vantage point we can begin to construct varying versions of how cultural
power is exercised and therefore resistance stimulated. Based on these earlier models, control
and power moves from the social to the individual, with the individual carrying out and
reproducing the imperative of the social order. In these models, both resistance and
mechanisms for change-if they exist at all-become a challenge to ferret out; in part because
these earlier theorists were interested to answer the question of what holds societies together;
and in part because earlier social theorists thought of change in macrostructural terms, as a
relatively slow process or as a rare event, not an everyday individual practice: "[s]tructural
forms may change with revolution and military conquests" (Radcliffe-Brown 1949:193),
certainly not with microlevel acts. The shift today is toward viewing social structure as a

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dialectical process created extemporaneously and dynamically vis-a-vis human interaction. In
this vision of society, power is manifold and productive.

Marx, Freud, and Fanon

New narratives open up new spaces of discourse that arise precisely from
the gaps and silences of the previous era.

-Foucault (1973:207)

My purpose in invoking Marx and Freud is to suggest that what we can learn from
their theories how the truth of the subject is told in historically specific terms, and in so doing,
makes clear the hegemony of certain paradigms in particular historical moments. Briefly,
Marx discussed resistance in terms of macroscale revolution and spoke of man's oppression in
terms of ideology:

Everything appears reversed in competition. The final pattern of economic
relations as seen on the surface, in their real existence and consequently in
the conceptions by which the bearers and agents of these relations seek to
understand them, is very much different from, and indeed quite the reverse
of their inner but concealed essential pattem and the conception
corresponding to it. (1990: 111)

For Marx, ideology is what serves to obfuscate, to hide the real social conditions. In effect, for
Marx, as long as human beings are unable to resolve the contradictions that inhere in practice,
they will project them into ideology, into consciousness; this then serves to mask the real
conditions of their lives. This perpetuates a vicious cycle in which ideological distortion hides
the real conditions, thereby perpetuating the same cycles of domination.

As controversial as Freud is, his models of the "psychic apparatus" are a brilliant
attempt to discuss individual actors' responses to, and reactions against, power and
domination. Freud saw false consciousness as pervasive, as a lived reality, which the
"psychical apparatus" perpetuated (1949:1). The superego, according to Freud, is what keeps
our deep libidinal instincts in check, repressing them in order that we may live the lie that is
everyday social life. Terry Eagleton (1991:176) comments:

Freud's writings are faithful to the central contention of the tradition we are
examining-that the mind itself is constituted by a chronic distortion or
alienation and that ideology is thus its natural habitat.... In this sense, we
might say that Freud's theory of ideology is of an Althusserian cast.... It is
from Freud himself, via the detour of Lacan, that Althusser derives his
notion of ideology as lived relations which exist largely at the level of the
unconscious and involve an inescapable structure of misrecognition.

What Freud points to as the fundamental mechanisms of the psychical life
are the structural devices of ideology: projection, displacement, sublimation,
repression, idealization, rationalization, disavowal: all of these are at work in
the text of ideology, as much as in dream or fantasy; and this is one of the

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richest legacies Freud has bequeathed to the critique of ideological
consciousness. (1 991:185)

Eagleton goes on to argue that the late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw human
existence as "ideological to the core" (1991:185) and, that while Marx understood political
practice to be a palliative to oppressive ideology, Freud understood psychoanalysis to be a
palliative for psychic oppression. In fact, Freud defined psychoanalysis as the "staging of
practical relations of human subjects" (1949:113). Both revolutionary practice and the scene of
psychoanalysis involves the painful reconstruction of a new identity. For both Marx and
Freud, theory comes down to an altered practical self-understanding. Yet, for both theorists,
practice and ideology are experienced as ontologically divided, such that once ideology unifies
itself with practice, it becomes transformed through the consciousness practice necessarily
evinces in the actor. This conscious awareness of ideology, culminating in revolutionary
practice, must precede resistance; resistant praxis cannot be ontologically prior to ideological
illumination.

Thus, from both Marxian and Freudian perspectives authentic subjectivity is
contingent upon transforming the ideological-the unseen or repressed-in one's life; whether it
be psychic false consciousness or social false consciousness. In both models, human agency is
thwarted by what it does not know to exist consciously: we are unable to resist openly in these
paradigms because we are unaware of the conditions of our own oppression; to become agents
of social and psychic change, we must first become conscious of the role of ideology in our
lives. Again, according to Terry Eagleton (1991:75):

[M]y image in the mirror is in some sense me, and at the same time a
'second best' phenomenon. Why Marx and Engels want to relegate
consciousness to this second-hand status is clear enough; for if what we
think we are doing is actually constitutive of what we are doing, if our false
conceptions are internal to our practice, what room does this leave for false
consciousness? Is it enough to ask George Bush what he thinks he is doing
to arrive at a satisfactory account of his role within advanced capitalism?

From both Marx and Freud's perspectives then, analytic models which normalize and
popularize prosaic acts of everyday resistance are highly problematic, precisely because
everyday, individual acts of resistance imply an awareness of oppression that neither theorist is
terribly optimistic about. The possibility of the masses being spontaneously freed from the
social and psychological grip of ideology, and hence, of being aware of one's own oppression
to the point where one is capable of acts of everyday resistance appears remote; hence, the
clarion call for the establishment of an intellectual vanguard or enlightened psychotherapist to
stimulate resistance! Recall that Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, feel the
urgency and necessity of making the proletariat into a conscious class, so that they can
organize against the conditions of their exploitation. However, the proletarian have not yet
formed a class, do not yet have class consciousness, and as such, they are, by and large, unable
to politically act upon the conditions of their oppression.

Recall the theories of Radcliffe-Brown, Durkheim and Kroeber, in which the
individual actor appears culturally and structurally insignificant. These actors do not
"naturally" and normatively exhibit the agency synonymous with resistant action (unlike

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contemporary analytic scenarios, in which human actors everywhere are capable of the will to
resist). I would argue, that in some senses, the emphasis upon, and romanticization of
resistance, is a direct backlash to years of social scientific theory in which the actor is lost,
understood to be blinded by false consciousness or mechanisms of repression.

Frantz Fanon: Psychological Theories and the Absence of individual Resistance

Fanon was a Black psychiatrist who toiled to articulate the psychology of oppression
among the colonized. He was greatly distressed over the suffering of his own people, and
sought to explain, in detail, the psychological processes by which the oppressed become
debased, devalued, and finally, by "submitting to oppression invariably condemn themselves
to psychological, social and historical death" (1968:127). According to one author, "Fanon
boldly analyzed violence in its structural, institutional and personal dimensions" (Bulhan
1985: 138).

In Algeria, Fanon directly observed the horrors of war, as well as the anomie that
takes place as the oppressed begin to take control back. In the first chapter of his book,
Wretched of The Earth (1968), Fanon elaborated the dynamics of violence and of human
suffering in situations of oppression. His main concern was to articulate a psychology of
oppression that would lend insight into the complicity offered by the colonized, while
simultaneously avoiding a blame-the-victim posture. He wrote:

In prolonged oppression, the oppressed group willy-nilly intemalizes the
oppressor without. They adopt his guidelines and prohibitions, they
assimilate his image and his social behaviors, they become agents of their
own oppression. The oppressor without becomes an introppressor-an
oppressor within. Because of this internalization and its attendant but
repressed rage, the oppressed may act out, on each other, the very violence
imposed on them. They become auto-opressors, as they engage in self-
destructive behavior injurious to themselves...the oppressed acquire a victim
complex and hence view almost all actions and communications as further
assaults and indications off their victim status. (1968:126)

At this point, we find ourselves a long way theoretically from an analytic model that assigns
motives of resistance to everyday acts. It is a broad leap from Fanon to James Scott. Fanon is
theoretically and morally beholden to these people; he has suffered with them and he is one of
"them." His primary conundrum is to explicate both the reality and mechanisms of complicity
(i.e., how do the colonized internalize their colonizers and how to explain false
consciousness):

The colonizer resides not only without, but also within. There is no
occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the
other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are
contested, disfigured, in the hope of final destruction. Under this condition,
the individual's breathing is an observed, and occupied breathing. It is a
combat breathing. (1968:65)

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The colonized man will manifest this aggressiveness which has been
deposited in his bones against his own people. This is the period when the
niggers beat each other up, and police and magistrates do not know which
way to turn when faced with astonishing waves of crime. (1968:52)

One has only to delve into the literature to find researchers who made similar psychological
discoveries of self-destruction and complicity under situations of extreme oppression (e.g.,
Bettleheim 1960; Levi 1986) Bruno Bettleheim, who developed the popular psychological
construct known as "identification with the aggressor" (1960), was also a concentration camp
survivor who wrote about how concentration camp victims identified with the Nazi guards
psychologically, in order to gain the strength to survive. In fact, according to Bettleheim's
research, concentration camp victims, were more likely to help their enemies, rather than resist
them, in order to gain even an iota of human kindness or sympathy. Bettleheim noted how
Nazi prisoners emulated the Gestapo by dressing like them and behaving like them out of a
kind of perverse admiration for their power.

Hinkle and Wolff (1956) documented this same phenomenon among Russian
prisoners of war. They did extensive research into communist "ideological remoulding
institutes," claiming that:

all indoctrination programs have much in common. When a man's [sic]
relations with his environment is disrupted, man is strongly beset with
motivations to adjust, at all costs. The subject is faced with pressure upon
pressure, and discomfort upon discomfort, and none of his/her attempts to
deal with the situation leads to an amelioration of pain, an individual reaches
the point psychologically that he or she 'learns helplessness.' (1956:11)

In other words, the oppressed often learn to capitulate in situations of oppression, in order to
survive. In the models of these psychological theorists, resistance is a distant luxury. So, where
does the motivation to resist come from, in such situations of oppression? Until we can
account for the motivational rationale and will to resist, social scientific theories of resistance
will continually fail to convince others of pervasive resistance, either in consciousness or
action.

In a recent article, Mahoney and Yngvesson (1991:44) argue:

That subordinates have resisted relations of domination is clear.
Explanations of such resistance are unsatisfying however, because they
emphasize the force of political economy and dominant cultural discourses
and shy away from theorizing about the way relationships of power (whether
based upon class, gender or legal entitlement) are constructed
psychologically and reproduced through everyday practice. Without an
account of how subjects experience these relationships of power, we cannot
explain what impels them to resist domination and to make change.

According to Fanon, it was the search for security in conditions of oppression, the quest for
personal harmony in circumstances of social violence, or the wish for private success at the
cost of betraying collective aspirations that drove "the oppressed [to] submit for fear of
physical death, but because they submit, they die" (1968:127). In Fanon's rendition of

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oppression, there is very little motivation to resist; in fact, the psychological motivation to
survive engenders capitulation, not resistance.

How do we reconcile these psychological arguments with our contemporary
anthropological focus upon resistance? Mahoney and Ygnvesson (1991:40) offer the following
reconciliation:

While acknowledging the importance of anthropological theory that
emphasizes the production of selves and meanings at the intersection of
overlapping structures of power, we suggest that an explanation of resistance
requires a theory of the subject as not being simply produced in relations of
power but as making meanings in her relationships with others.... [I]t is in
this dialogue that the disjunctures and conjunctures of culture are reshaped
into the subjective forms of desire, empowering subjects who are not only
complicit but capable of as well of resisting relations of domination.

It is necessary that anthropologists give greater thought to the internal psychological states of
their informants, and seek to incorporate the insights of psychological and psychoanalytic
research in order to furnish a more nuanced understanding of "intrapsychic" understandings of
resistance. While it has been this author's experience that symbolic analysis is pennitted
within the academic anthropological discourse as it pertains to cultural meaning systems, it is
disallowed when symbolic analysis is attempted to explicate the individual "intrapsychic"
realm. Greater rapprochement between anthropological insights into culture and psychological
insights into intra-individual experiences of reality are called for, particularly with respect to
contemporary theories of resistance.

Exaggerating The Symbolic

...[A]t no other time in the history of anthropology has interest in the
symbolic character of cultural phenomena been more clearly pronounced
than during the last two decades.... So fundamental, in fact, has the concern
with symbolic meaning become that it now underlies whole conceptions of
culture.

-Basso and Selby (1976:1-2)

The current focus upon the more overt, visible and collectible aspects of cultural
phenomena-a focus encouraged by Geertz's insistence that culture is a public phenomenon-is
problematic. Much of peoples' experience is not articulated in overt forms, (i.e., overt acts of
resistance); nor, as Rosaldo reminds us, is quantity of expression a reliable indicator of depth
of meaning (1989).

In his book, Despair Viewed Under the Aspects of Finitude/Infinitude, Soren
Kierkegaard wrote that man fails in life when he refuses to face up to the existential truth of
his situation-the truth that he is an inner symbolic self, which signifies a certain freedom, and
that he is bound by a finite body, which limits that freedom. The attempt to ignore either
aspect of man's situation, to repress possibility or to deny necessity, means that man will live a
lie. For Kierkegaard, too much possibility is the attempt by the person to overvalue the power

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of the symbolic self. It reflects the attempt to exaggerate one half of the human dualism at the
expense of the other (See Kierkegaard 1957; Becker 1964).

This is my concern with the emphasis upon, and at times, fetishization of resistance:
ultimately, it is an overexaggeration of the symbolic specifically with respect to interpretations
of the body (plentiful within the medical anthropological literature). Stallybrass and White
write:

Fetishism or repression is equally likely to occur in attempts to 'think' the
body. The body cannot be thought separately from the social formation,
symbolic topography and the constitution of the subject. The body is neither
a purely natural given, nor is it merely a textual metaphor.... To this extent.
the critique of the carnival ...is valid for the body. It has been a major aspect
of our project to reveal how intimately these realms are interconnected in the
definition of status and subject identity. Celebratory invocations of the body,
like celebratory invocations of carnival, emerge out of similar mechanisms
of symbolic reterritorialization. (1986:192)

Like Stallybrass and White, much anthropological research views the body as a symbol, a
culturally specific and socially affected physical reality (Comaroff 1985; Douglas 1966;
Turner 1985). In Natural Symbols, Mary Douglas states that "natural expression is culturally
determined.... There can be no way of considering the body that does not involve at the same
time a social dimension" (1966:65). Because the term resistance in medical anthropological
literature raises questions about how the human body is used symbolically to communicate
states of being, it renders necessary a discussion of how the body is experienced and
understood cross-culturally. In other words, it requires that we ask about the relationship
between subjectivity and physical embodiment.

In order to establish the authenticity of acts of resistance, then, we must first articulate
the contingent relationship between modes of bodily resistance, culture and individual
subjectivity. As historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg powerfully establishes in her work,
Disorderly Conduct (1985), resistance is inherently identity-specific; Smith-Rosenberg makes
a similar argument with respect to resistance and revitalization movements. She states that
during the first half of the nineteenth century, the Second Great Awakening's violent
upheavals and, theological and liturgical disputes transformed American Protestantism-and
temporarily the religious experience of women. New sects emerged, and women were their
most zealous adherents (ibid.: 129). Yet Smith-Rosenberg warns that we must be careful how
we interpret this data:

Silenced in Christian churches since the days of Paul, women now seized
sacred space.... Wild bodily behavior and physical disorder frequently
characterized women's religious enthusiasm... Their religious experiences
fell within the category of what anthropologists have defined as religious
anti-ritualism.... At the same time that women's religious responses span
class distinctions, their diverse and changing nature within class (not all
bourgeois or marginal women espouse anti-ritualism, some who do soon
renounce it) defeats any effort to generalize from similarities across class to
the existence of women as a monolithic social or cultural group.... Much

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new research must be done before we can unreservedly assert that anti-
ritualism voices the experience of structural movement or marginality. It is
especially necessary if we are to understand the complexity and
changeablility of anti-ritualism as a symbolic or metaphoric language, for I
will argue, anti-ritualism conveyed differing meanings depending upon the
social group.... Rooted in different experiences, women's and men's anti-
ritualism constituted two quite distinct metaphoric languages. (1985:136-7)

She goes on to argue that this same conversion experience did not necessarily indicate
resistance for many male religious rebels because they were not undergoing upheaval in
gender relations at that time (1985:138). My point here is simply this: we need to exercise
extreme caution in our imposition of resistance models cross-culturally, intraculturally, and
transculturally, as Rosenberg has shown us, particularly when we speak about the body: "[t]he
state, the body, society, sex, the soul, the economy are not stable objects, they are discourses"
(Foucault 1972:137).

"Resistance" and Medical Anthropology

Contemporary analysis has tended either to fetishize or repress the
savage.... This fetishism is equally likely to occur in attempts to 'think' the
body.

-Stallybrass and White (1986:192)

How does culture affect the way an individual uses the body to express pain, stress
and sickness? Pierre Bourdieu emphasized the way in which not only the emotions, but the use
of the body as well, is culturally constructed. Bourdieu documents the use of mimetic
representations, in which implicit analogies are made between parts of the human body, daily
life, the social structure, and the cosmology of a given culture. These relationships are
incorporated into culture through the socialization process, and understood to be natural,'
inevitable and unquestionable-a situation Bourdieu termed "doxa" (1977:82). If we accept this
theory, we must acknowledge that what is resistance within one cultural context may be
nothing of the sort in another. The ways in which people may resist-indeed, the very notion of
resistance itself-is historically and culturally specific. Therefore, in order to fully understand
the possibilities for resistance, one must exfoliate layers of enculturation-the familial, societal,
cultural, economic, and historical contexts from which a particular body emanates.

At this point, I would like to assess the place of resistance within medical
anthropological paradigms, in which bodily praxis is viewed as a form of resistance in contrast
to psychiatric/biomedical interpretations. I do this in order to once again suggest an
epistemological/theoretical transition, as exemplified by models in which the body is marked
as resistant.

Somatization models articulate that the body and its illnesses are forms of resistance.
Power and repression are decoupled; in this instance, power produces resistance in somatic
forms. In some medical anthropological paradigms for example, the body is a trope, a key
symbol, the terrain and site upon which theories of resistance are practiced/enacted (e.g.,
Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1986, 1987, 1991). Theoretical fiames are imposed upon the body.

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It is a hermeneutic clash, however, for biomedical and key psychiatric paradigms view the
body as unconscious; its collapse into illness is the inevitable succumbing to power. In the
biomedical model, sickness is not equal to resistance (see, for example, the psychiatric
handbook for professionals: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III revised, under
Somatoform Disorders).

Theorists have argued that resistance-body praxis-(i.e., somatization), is a
"lang,uage" of the body. Yet the polemic between the biomedical and critical anthropological
community remains: is the body resisting through somatic processes or is that too symbolic,
too romantic a depiction of the sickness experience? In what follows, I focus upon the
somatization debate as a key trope for contemporary notions of resistance and the body.

The Somatization Debate: Is the Body "Resisting" or Collapsing?

Somatization is a form of body praxis which has been interpreted by leading medical
anthropologists to be a form of resistance (Dunk 1989; Low 1989; Martin 1989; Nichter 1980;
Racy 1980; Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987, 1991). The process of somatization is difficult to
discuss for two reasons: first, because the meaning of the term is debated between the fields of
biomedicine and medical anthropology; and second, because within the subdiscipline of
medical anthropology there are different interpretations of its meaning. One rather traditional
definition of somatization seen frequently within the medical anthropological literature is:
"[t]he expression of physical complaints in the absence of defined organic pathology, and the
amplification of symptoms resulting from established physical pathology" (Kleinman 1982:
12). In this definition, Kleinman, a biomedical physician whose work, The Social Origins of
Distress and Disease, stimulated much discussion about the somatization process, cautions that
somatization must be interpreted as a "particular cognitive-behavioral type whose adaptive or
maladaptive consequences involve assessment of social, cultural and personal variables"
(1986:60). This last statement is a reference to the biomedical model, which considers the use
of the body to manifest distress as indicative of psychopathology, or of emotional dysfunction.
The term somatization is, in fact, used in biomedicine, particularly in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to indicate psychopathology.

Kleinman (1986:434) discusses the way in which somatic expression changes
according to cultural setting and historical context:

Somatization appears to have had an even higher prevalence rate in the West
prior to the emergence of an increasingly psychological idiom of distress in
the Victorian middle class. This psychologizing process has been related to
the cultural transformation shaped by modernism...That is to say, affect as
currently conceived and even experienced among the middle class in the
West is shaped as "deep" psychological experience and rationalized into
discreetly labeled emotions that were once regarded and felt as principally
bodily experiences. As bodily experience, "feeling" was expressed and
interpreted more subtly, indirectly, globally and above all, somatically.

The experience of somatization, then, is historically unique. According to this argument,
somatic experience has drastically changed in the West; and consequently, one would suspect

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this would be true for the phenomenology of somatization itself (is somatization still an
expression of resistance in a culture where somatic expression is the dominant mode of
expression?). Traditional Chinese medicine, for example, gives utmost importance to somatic
expression (Kleinman 1986), while in the industrialized Western countries, psychologization
has become the predominant mode through which one is socialized to express distress.

Within contemporary biomedical praxis, somatic manifestations of psychic distress
are interpreted as "secondary" (Kleinman 1982), despite the fact that anthropologists have
revealed that, worldwide, the appearance of somatic complaints is the most common
manifestation of "psychobiological affect" (Ots 1990). According to the physician-researcher
Thomas Ots: "It is most common in third world countries; next, in Europe, and third, in North
America. In Europe it is more common in less industrialized countries" (Ots 1990:24). Ots,
like Kleinman, argues that somatization-or, the "language" of the body-is directly shaped by a
person's historical/cultural context. If contemporary studies about the somatization process
suggest that the body is employed cross culturally as a vehicle for experiencing, interpreting,
and communicating about emotional and social issues (see Kleinman 1986; Martin 1989;
Nichter 1981; Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987), and, that "somatic idioms of distress indicate
that the body feels and expresses social problems" (Kleinman 1986: 194), are somatic idioms
of distress still to be interpreted as a transculturally constant form of resistance?

I find this proposition suspect given that somatization appears to be a dominant, not a
counter-dominant form of expression. If somatization is so prevalent, this renders somatization
hegemonic. And, if this is the case, why are structural changes so rare, given that most people
resist?

Postmodernity and Resistance

I defined postmodernity as incredulity toward metanarratives.... Where, after
the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?

-Lyotard (1990:167)

Foucault considers the attempt to locate historically the strands of practice and
discourse dealing with the subject, knowledge, and power to be the genealogy of the modern
subject. According to Foucault, what is distinctive about Westem culture is that we have given
so much importance to the problem of the subject in our social, political, economic, legal,
philosophical, and scientific traditions (1980). In a far more humble endeavor, I suggest that
part of the distinctiveness about "postmodern" Western intellectual thought is its emphasis
upon microstategies of resistance. As one author proclaims:

There is a growing awareness that other cultures, non-European, non-
Western cultures, must be met by means other than conquest and
domination, as Paul Ricouer put it more than twenty years ago, and that the
erotic and aesthetic fascination with 'the Orient' and 'the primitive'-so
prominent in Westem culture, including modernism-is deeply problematic.
This awareness will have to translate into a type of intellectual work
different from that of the modernist intellectual who typically spoke with
confidence of being able to speak for others.... It is easy to see that a

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postmodernist culture emerging from these political, social, and cultural
constellations will have to be a postmodemism of resistance.... Resistance
will always have to be specific and contingent upon the cultural field within
which it operates. (Huyssen 1984:113)

During this "epoch of colonial guilt" (Ong 1992, seminar lecture) perhaps the intellectual
tendency to impute meaning-that is, to render meaningful the practice of everyday life vis-a'-
vis the construct of resistance-is a way for social theorists to rectify the sins of colonialist
paradigms.

Ultimately, this paper claims that today, the truth of the subject is constituted vis-ac-vis
empowerment theories; theories which intend to show that the truth of "the other" is one of
agency, consciousness and, ultimately, resistance. This then implies that it is us, the producers
of theory, who are resisting-or writing back and against-our own previous accounts and
theories of consciousness, or unconsciousness/false consciousness, as articulated by Marx,
Freud, Fanon and others. The refutation of Marxist notions of ideology and false-
consciousness is evident in much of the post-structuralist thought.

In a sense, and admittedly climbing out on a psychoanalytic limb, my argument is
that the more "they" begin to look like "us," the more agency, resistance and consciousness we
will impute to them. And since this is postmodemity-the globalization of the local and the
localization of the global, it is indeed a time, unlike Evans-Pritchard's and Malinowski's, in
which the noble savage is known, and even sends tribal elders dressed in native costume to
global events, such as the bio-diversity environmental conference, to represent their own
interest. The more theorists are forced to reconcile the images we have constructed of the
noble savage, with images of ourselves (because so many non-Western "others" in
contemporary society now hold positions of institutional authority), the more "we" will
humanize "them." Today, we are forced to reconcile our social theories with a living,
interactive reality: the "savage/peasant/other" who speaks back.

Marcus and Fischer discuss this phenomenon in their book Anthropology as Cultural
Critique (1986). In it they discuss the impact of postmodernity upon the anthropological
endeavor:

It is commonly thought that with advances in communications and
technology, the world is becoming a more homogeneous, integrated and
interdependent place, and with this process, the truly exotic, and the vision
of difference it held out, is disappearing. Our consciousness has become
more global and historical: to invoke another culture now is to locate it in a
time and space contemporaneous with our own, and thus to see it as part of
our world rather than as an alternative to ourselves, arising from a totally
alien origin. (1986:134)

My own sense is that this has significantly impacted the psychology behind our theories. I am
suggesting that social theorists are resolving the tensions evoked by the disappearance of the
exotic, and their subsequent reappearance as "part of our own world" (Marcus and Fischer
1986: 134), by re-writing the colonial others' psyche in terns that are empowering precisely
because they have become us. "New narratives do not arise from anthropological field

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Kliger     "Resisting Resistance": Historicizing Contemporary Models of Agency

research, as we sometimes tell our graduate students, but from history, from world
conditions.... Different narratives are foregrounded in the discourses of different historical
eras" (Bruner 1986:152).

Theoreticians are being increasingly forced into a greater awareness of the
subjectivity of their truth-claims; and, concomitantly, into an increased awareness of the ways
in which "our truth" reflects our own psychological processes (such as the need to appropriate
notions of revolution into postmodern academic rhetoric in order, ultimately, to deflect our
own anxieties about the failure of Marxism(s). Or to put it another way, some theoretical views
allow the members of the academy to feel justified in seeing themselves as part of a political
vanguard, (not merely as part of a privileged institution in which theory and practice are
separate and opposed endeavors).

Theoretical narratives create ways of seeing the world. Discourse and "reality" are
"codependent" entities, mutually creating one another. It has been the task of this paper to ask
why the academic zeitgeist has so emphasized potentials and mechanisms for individual
resistance. To what end and as a result of what influences? I hope that this brief foray into
alternative conceptions and perceptions has helped to clarify that, at the very least, our theories
are goaded on at every moment by a constellation of emotional, social, political and
intellectual pressures. The preponderance of theories of resistance did not generate itself (as a
lizard's tale does) through some self-perpetuating DNA type impetus. These theories stem
from the failure of certain metanarratives, Marxist especially, to make good on their promises.
Those of us who hold out hope for social changes are currently inspired to look toward
possibilities other than widespread revolution. And so, we turn toward other potential pockets
of resistance, such as individual microstrategies, to bolster our weary optimism. As
Wittgenstein aptly put it, "[a]ll that one knows could be otherwise. All that one sees could be
otherwise" and I suggest that today we are searching for the "otherwise" in microstrategies of
resistance.

Theoretical penchants do not arise in a vacuum; they are the result of specific
historical political tensions: "Narratives are not only structures of meaning but structures of
power as well.... The resistance narrative is a justification for claims of redress for past
exploitation" (Bruner 1986:144). It will serve us well in our future intellectual endeavors to
keep in mind the reasons for our newfound devotion to particular discourses, lest we tend to
see them as natural and therefore more truthful than other potential ways of seeing and
knowing otherwise. For "the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the
more complete will our 'concept' of the thing, our 'objectivity', be" (Nietzsche 1989:119).

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