Introduction Laura Nader In societies undergoing rapid change there is a flow of power linking ideas, institutions, and human agency, a situation in which power is double-edged, simultaneously centered and decentered. The study of controlling processes in such power contexts presents a formidable challenge for scholars to connect the complexities of individual experiences without losing sight of the multilayered connections. Perforce, various research strategies in studying control as the means to power involve combinations of historical, ethnographic, and critical approaches. In 1997 "Controlling Processes: Tracing the Dynamic Components of Power" was published in Current Anthropology as the Sidney W. Mintz Lecture for 1995, along with ten commentaries and a reply from me as author. This paper presents a framework, both methodological and theoretical, for elucidating the dynamics of power by understanding how ideas about culture are interwoven with notions of control. I indicate how control is redistributed in the professions-in law, by coercive harmony, moving people to view harmony rather than justice as desirable; in medicine, by an ideology of choice inducing women to undergo body-altering surgery under the illusion of free choice; in museology, recontextualizing science work and by so doing demystifying an idealized version of science. These examples illustrate what has become normalized, the intention to document not only how cultures are invented but how invented cultures work to shift standards of value or taste, and how they move through multiple sites, discourses, and practices. In particular, these accounts show how control through naturalization works to control "First World" citizens. Social scientists are increasingly writing about the twentieth century as an age of ideologies among them fascism, Marxism, and corporate capitalism now in the context of globalization. And anthropologists in particular are struggling for an understanding of the means by which ideologies, as distinct from the non-instrumental idea of culture, create forms of subordination and conformity. Indeed, even in the ree examples in my 1997 paper, one cannot help but notice the interaction between harmony, choice, and science. The beauty of a controlling processes approach to power, which has roots in the theories of Gramsci, Foucault, Bourdieu, and others, is that it allows us to look at old questions in new and provocative ways that point to the potential of reconfiguring the mundane or "normal" in a way that is not bereft of human agency. For example, the redefinition of previously normal moods and behaviors as medical disorders is a case in point, one that goes far beyond the widespread uses of Prozac and Ritalin. As I noted in 1997, the final colonization is the colonization of the mind and not surprisingly anthropologists themselves are not immune to such processes, a challenge for us all. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers The present volume is the third in a series of KAS volumes on controlling processes research principally carried out by students at the University of California, Berkeley. The first two volumes were published in 1994 and 1996 covering a variety of sites and consisting mainly of ethnographic material. The 1994 volume included papers on the social practice of AIDS education, the privatization of justice, the moral economy of gambling, silicone breast implants in America, and the staging of female adolescent identity. The 1996 volume ranged even further afield including: the new industrial relations, the storage plans for nuclear wastes on Native American lands, the science and anti-science debates at the Smithsonian Institution, dormitories at UC Berkeley, and historicizing social science models of agency. This work consists of understanding how power works through control in contemporary societies. In all these papers the search was for better understandings of the principles of control, not all control, but particularly public control which operates coercively through interpenetrating institutions, and which operates in a manner that is sometimes covert or at least unknown to individuals or communities. The present 2002 volume builds upon the earlier two in scope and depth using documentary materials in addition to ethnographic data. The papers in this volume offer a diversity of sites and orientations: the national security state and Native American lands; the links connecting neoclassical economic theory, biological determinism, and the subordination of women; the construction of the corporation as a legal person, and the media's role in presenting the Gulf War as virtual violence. These papers are followed by the work of a scholar from comparative literature in which the author examines colonial mechanisms of control by manipulating what constitutes knowledge and belief and the resistances to reworking of such manipulations. In the final paper an anthropologist examines the inevitability syndrome as it operates in the U.S. House of Representatives, our media, and our workplaces. From the outset it is clear that, in these papers, researchers are attempting to understand how control works, realizing of course, that it works unevenly and thus is not total. Margaret Hiesinger developed her interests as a student in high school traveling and working in Indian communities in the southwestern part of the United States. Those experiences led her to focus attention on uranium mining and milling which is of serious concern to the Navaho people. Through interviews and observations, she is able to contrast how local people view the impact of uranium with the way scientific researchers determine health risks-the first view is broad gauged and the second is narrow in scope. The residents know little of radiation levels, but they experience multiple forms of radiation damage. The theme of "expert" and "non- expert" knowledge and their relative voice helps illuminate how environmental racism and nuclear colonialism co-occur. In the end individual compensation contributes little to the Navaho community, because the compensation is arrived at by means of a legally constructed, "scientific" paradigm. Added to Hiesinger's analysis is the No. 87 2 The House that Uranium Built consideration of self-blame. The Navaho believe that they are reaping blow back for disturbing the Natural Order of Mother Earth by mining uranium. The essay that follows by Leah Nutting also struggles with how scientific paradigms are used in the repackaging of ideology to explain inequality. Both biological determinism and noeclassical economic models in tandem "frame gender inequality as being independent from cultural forces and therefor beyond the realm of normative debate." Gender inequalities are thereby decontextualized. Nutting examines the underlying assumptions of these two models noting how they parallel and reinforce each other in a "contemporary hybrid scientific-economic formula for inequality." As she points out, sociobiology explains why men and women are innately different, and economic models explain why male traits are more valuable in the market. Finally, Nutting considers alternate paradigms and/or counter hegemonies arguing that good science can prevail over bad science. In Michael Zara's paper, the story is about how the corporation came to be a legal "person" with the legal rights of human beings. His research further explains how the fictitious person-the corporation-came to be legally considered a psychological person as well. He traces the evolution of this legal-political concept from the 1807 Supreme Court case Bank of the United States v. Deveaux, through several other cases over two hundred years that incrementally increased the economic and political rights of the corporation. The cumulative drift is antithetical to Sir Henry Maine's historical evolutionism. Zara spotlights how the private-and business- oriented individualism of American industrialism gets legitimated through law, which over time threatens to displace the natural individual in favor of fictitious corporate persons. In the paper on pharmaceutical sales practices, Michael Oldani explores the worldngs of double loyalty. Pharmaceuticals contribute through research for the good of manlind. At the same time they contribute to a bottom line mentality for shareholders through aggressive promotion of their products. Sales people are caught in a double bind between profit and health care. As a true participant observer, that is as a former salesperson, Oldani was apparently also caught in this sales dilemma. As it turns out, it was not a necessary dilemma, but a manufactured one, resulting from ideological moorings created in opposition to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Sometimes such corporate tactics erupt in scandals, followed by a cracking down within the industry on "spinselling." He describes the sales indoctrination, the sales process itself, as well as rituals of the trickster salesperson being caught. In the end, he labels his subject "the culture of cheating" in the context of "the culture of 1 The boldness with which corporations are still pushing for rights of personhood is illustrated in a recent bid by corporations in Vancouver, British Columbia for the right to vote in municipal elections. The Aurora Institute in Vancouver, an non-profit group, not only opposed the initiative, but is leading the movement to remove corporate person-hood. Hiesinger 3 Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers winning." He concludes by pointing to the gap in the literature on the "rep and the doctor," while at the same time pointing out how pharmaceutical corporations (and he as a salesperson) use the authority of science and knowledge of anthropology to "spinsell." Kathleen Wilutz's essay is about the media and the Persian Gulf War. Her work is based on survey materials on how the war was presented as a virtual event. She posits that having learned from public protests during the Vietnam era, the media repeatedly presented sanitized images of the Gulf War without death or destruction. These antiseptic presentations allowed for the continued bombing of Iraq after the declaration of the cease-fire, without media coverage. And the censorship plan worked-dissent disappeared and war without protest was the way the Gulf War was billed in the media. What protesters there were got depicted as negative or dangerous as compared to other Americans. Stories were systematically paired-Iraq was dangerous to its opposite, that is, the American way of life. The media portrayed "expert" testimony as "strategic ritual," increasing its credibility and authority. Unique to this war was the absence of reports detailing human destruction or even counts of the dead. The Iraqis were portrayed as destroyers of civilian populations while Americans employed advanced technologies (e.g., "smart bombs) that avoid unnecessary destruction. The stage was set for primetime media events. Names of operations resembled video war games. Following the war, the sanctions allowed for a new type of aggressive war-the economic embargoes. The silence continued, and the author claims that the absence of a formal declaration of war by the United States Congress allows escape from legal redress. The following paper illustrates the use that can be made of controlling processes by specialists in comparative literature-a mode of verification for anthropology. Underscoring the difficulties of separating subject and investigator, Shaden Tageldin questions the facile dichotomizations of colonizer/colonized and dominant/subordinate as mechanisms of control in the colonial process, and while doing so, interrogates technology "as a force that realized imperial designs." The notion in the colonized world that the West lacks a true civilized spirit impedes wholesale acceptance of imperial designs, she tells us. The "other" is not mute, and the idea that the colonized can only passively accept these designs feeds into the notion that the West has knowledge while the "others" only practice belief. To pursue her questions, Tageldin explores the sources of European power in the case of Egypt at the turn of the nineteenth century after Napoleon's occupation. Muhammd Ali sent the first delegation of Egyptians to France under the direction of Rafic Al- Tahtawi, a twenty-five-year-old scholar, who was a student of Al-cattar and a broad and divergent thinker of his day. Al-Tahtawi remained in Paris from 1826 to 1831 and published his study of European life in 1834-a detailed ethnography of early nineteenth-century France. In this work, he opposes an Arab/Islamic unity of reason and belief to French "secular" reason. He posits skepticism about French claims to 4 No. 87 The House that Uranium Built truth, all the while warning of the potential force of persuasion and penetration through the power of ideas of European cultural imperialism. In the final paper, Peter Shorett focuses on the irreversibility of "the inevitability syndrome" and shows how "inevitability thinking" works in practice in three contexts: (1) in United States House of Representatives hearings on the World Trade Organization (WTO), (2) in the media presentations of neoliberal globalization as a natural and inevitable process, and (3) as a manipulative device for managing workforces. Such inevitability exercises result in a "strategic form of misrecognition," a prelude to passivity, acquiescence, and helplessness because there appear to be no other options. In addition, he describes the most extraordinary use of sociology, more specifically the knowledge of group processes, in Rosebeth Kanter's work indicating that such applied sociology might well be a violation of social science codes of ethics, written or unwritten. In summary, these essays discover how control works and with what consequences: self-blame serves to let industry and medical experts off the hook while reducing efforts at resistance; slow corporate take-over case by case for over a century has meant the corporation as a person has become normalized; ideologies that work in tandem have a lock-in effect; the culture of cheating is paired with the culture of winning, both mind-bending techniques that threaten public health; the "notion that the West lacks a true civilizational spirit" impedes wholesale acceptance of things European while the colonizers believe they have knowledge while others only practice belief; inevitability thinking is part of a heritage of progressional and progressivistic philosophies in the West that silences critical thought while dispensing "Western" thought globally. The methods used in the study of controlling processes are: first, the practice of exoticizing the dance between the dominant players, the complicit parties and those making counter-hegemonic moves; second, the highlighting of complexity, thereby revealing simplification as a standard rhetorical tool of mind colonization and normalization. Progressional hegemonies may be undergoing decentralization. If Foucault is right in his fundamental assertion that knowledge is power and that power is decentralized and a fluid force that permeates all aspects of social life, then as Gramsci points out, we are all complicit in our own domination. That very realization of complicity, of course, is the key move towards liberation. At this point one theoretical point of departure might be a reevaluation of the concepts of agency, choice, volition, will, and various related notions. Many of these concepts are subject matter in allied fields of cognitive science and psychology for example, and not-so-regarded disciplines such as physics, philosophy, or mathematics. For example, Daniel Wegner's new book The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002) is the result of many years of research on memory and thought suppression and on the relation between thought and action. In his work Wegner suggests that the illusion of Hiesinger 5 6 Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers No. 87 will or agency may be useful to us as a species, but the social aspects of agency in the research is not broadly contextualized. With all the problems that an anthropologist might see in his work and in its interpretation the unanswered questions remain an interesting challenge-if people do not control their lives the way they think they do, what does control them, and to what degree is the illusion of conscious will a Eurocentric idea? My motive in raising the issue of agency in this brief introduction is to provoke future ethnographers to take seriously the question of complicity and agency in relation to empowerment. Works Cited: Wegner, Daniel. M. 2002 The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.