CONTRO:LLING
.   I.S E L E C T
SELECTED~I ,
PROCESSES
ESSAYS
1 994-2005
GUEST EDITOR:
LAURA NADER
KROEBER ANTHROPOLOGICAL
SOCIETY PAPERS
No. 92/93, 2005
KROEBER ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY PAPERS
No. 92/93, 2005
INTRODUCTION
LAURA NADER
COERCIVE HARMONY
LAURA NADER
SILICONE BREAST IMPLANTS IN AMERICA
LINDA COCO
SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET
MARIANNE MCCUNE
BRAVE NEW WORKPLACE
ROBERTO GONZALEZ
NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE MONITORED
RETRIEVABLE STORAGE PLAN FOR NUCLEAR WASTES
C. JAY O-U
DORMITORIES AT UC BERKELEY
CLARENCE TING
THE EVOLUTION OF CORPORATE LEGAL STANDING
IN THE U.S. AND INTERNATIONAL LAW
MICHAEL ZARA
TALES FROM THE "SCRIPT"
MICHAEL OLDANI
THE DESTRUCTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED
KATHLEEN WILUSZ
DOGMAS OF INEVITABILITY
PETER SHORETT
The Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, Number 92,93
? 2005 Kroeber Anthropological Society:
Editorial Committee:
James Battle        Marcus Moore
Nathaniel Dumas     Amelia Moore
Marc Goodwin        Adelaide Papazoglou
Andrew Hao          Alysoun Quinby
Daniel Husman       Beatriz Reyes-Cortes
Larisa Kurtovic     Marian Swanzy-Parker
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Editors-in-Chief: Nathaniel Dumas, Marc Goodwin, and Daniel
Husman
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Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers
No. 92, 93 2005
Controlling Processes: Selected Essays 1994-2005
Guest Editor: Laura Nader
Contents:
Preface
Laura Nader ..................................................................1
Introduction
Laura Nader .................................................................  2
Coercive Harmony: Political Economy of Legal Models
Laura Nader .................................................................  7
Silicone Breast Implants in America: A Choice of the "Official Breast?"
Linda Coco .................................................................  23
Skeletons in the Closet: The Staging of Female Adolescent Identity
Marianne McCune .................................................................  58
Brave New Workplace: Cooperation, Control, and the New Industrial Relations
Roberto J. Gonzalez .................................................................  107
Native Americans and the Monitored Retrievable Storage Plan for Nuclear Wastes:
Late Capitalism, Negotiation, and Control
C. Jay Ou .................................................................  128
Dormitories at UC Berkeley
Clarence Ting .................................................................  197
The Evolution of Corporate Legal Standing in U.S. and International Law: One View
of the Doctrine of "Corporate Personality"
Michael Zara .................................................................  230
Tales from The "Script": An Insider/Outside View Of Pharmaceutical Sales Practices
Michael J. Oldani ..........................................................  286
The Destruction Will Not Be Televised: Media Representations of Destruction in the
Persian Gulf War and Sanctions against Iraq
Kathleen Wilusz ................................................................ 316
Dogmas of Inevitability: Tracking Symbolic Power in the Global Marketplace
Peter Shorett ..........................................................  335
Preface
Laura Nader, University of California, Berkeley
In 1994 the Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers published the first set of
Essays on Controlling Processes. In the introduction to that first issue I described the
concept of controlling processes as dealing with processes of control that emphasize
the importance of ideas and beliefs as dynamic components of power, a concept that
encompasses knowledge of how central dogmas are made and how they work. The
essays in the 1996 and 2002 volumes speak to many of the same issues focusing on
power as means-principally the manner in which individuals and groups are
influenced and persuaded to participate in their own domination.
As the papers in this selected volume show, the domains of influence and
persuasion are often multi-sited. They are found in the law, in the workplace, in
university dormitories, in museums, on Native American reservations, and are
generally ubiquitous. Because of the interpenetrating qualities of hegemonic
controlling processes, the concept of resistance has been recognized as important,
requiring an ever more careful and critical eye to understand when resistance is
resistance and how it matters.
There are some pragmatic insights in this selected collection of papers: culture
easily impacts on a fragile or vulnerable mind, and hegemonic influence often limits
our imagination. Furthermore, the importance of ideas as dynamic components of
power often emanates from their appearance in clusters or interlocking systems.
Institutions of entrenched power and privilege are supremely aware of the power of
complex cultural codes. The essays in this volume speak to the processes of
entrenchment.
Introduction
Laura Nader, University of California, Berkeley
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. 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
three 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
Introduction
the colonization of the mind and not surprisingly anthropologists themselves are not
immune to such processes, a challenge for us all.
The present volume is a selection from 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 waste 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, offering 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; the
media's role in presenting the Gulf War as virtual violence; internal colonial
mechanisms of control over what constitutes knowledge and belief and the resistances
to such manipulations; and finally, an examination of 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. The theme of "expert" and "non-expert" knowledge and their relative voice
helps illuminate how environmental racism and nuclear colonialism co-occur.
Another deals 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 therefore beyond the realm of normative debate." Gender
inequalities are thereby decontextualized.
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
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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 ethnographic study of pharmaceutical sales practices, Michael Oldani
explores the workings of double loyalty. Pharmaceuticals contribute through research
for the good of mankind. 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 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."
In Nader's piece on "Coercive Harmony," the use of the harmony law model
is used as a technique of pacification. Nader traces the harmony law model from its
use by Spanish colonizers in Mexico to its use in the United States and then as a tool
of modern imperialism. Linda Coco's paper "Silicon Breast Implants in America: A
Choice of the 'Official Breast?"' brings us full cycle.  She writes about the
internalized imperative that -hakes most women feel that "they are making the
decision for breast implants on their own and for themselves." As she explains,
however, this choice often can be distilled to economic survival. She concludes that
women in America in fact do not choose implantation because the women she
interviewed were neither freely situated nor critically informed. Linda Coco probes
the mechanisms of power, asking to what end has flat-chestedness for women become
a disease and why do millions of women accept such medical diagnosis as
authoritative to the point of risking their- lives through invasive surgery in order to
achieve "perfect" standardized breast dimensions.
Marianne McCune questions how it has come to be that the revolt against
parental authority by adolescent girls delivers such youngsters into the hands of
unseen authorities with such efficiency. The essay on "Brace New Workplace"
compares the techniques of the new industrial relations with those of thought reform
programs. Roberto Gonzalez uses as material experience in work, teams and quality
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Introduction
circles in a General Motors automotive assembly plant. He asks: "Are quality circles
coercive, and if so, how-that is, through what mechanisms are workers coerced?" C.
Jay Ou's paper on the political economy of nuclear waste storage projects in the
United States focuses on negotiations between the federal government, Native
American tribes, and the nuclear industry in searching for potential sites for nuclear
waste disposal. Exploring the new radioactive colonialism highlights the problematic
nature of industrial interests on Indian land of which the Nahavo case is probably the
most well-documented. Tribal sovereignty and economic development of cultural
capital are at issue.
Kathleen Wilusz'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.
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 last essays discover how control works and with what
consequences: slow corporate take-over case-by-case for over a century has meant the
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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; 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 re-evaluation 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
will or agency may be useful to us as a species, but the social aspects of agency in his
research are 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.
Notes
' 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, a non-profit group, not only
opposed the initiative, but is leading the movement to remove corporate person-hood.
References Cited
Wegner, Daniel. M.
2002 The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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