Power and the Self

by Edited by Jeannette Marie Mageo

• ISBN13: 9780521808392
• ISBN10: 0521808391
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-02-25
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Power and the Self deals with an important but neglected topic: the ways in which power is experienced by individuals, both as agents and as objects of the exercise of power. Each contributor presents a series of case studies drawn from a variety of cultural contexts, including the analysis of the appeal of Japanese superhero toys for American children; the conditions that lead to dehumanising treatment of patients in an American nursing home; the experiences of a Turkish immigrant woman in the Netherlands; a contribution relating theories about the capacity to commit genocidal violence to 'everyday forms of violence', and other cases from New Guinea and Samoa. The introduction provides a readable historical review and synthesis of the theoretical ideas that provide the context for the work presented in the book.

Author Biography

Jeannette Marie Mageo is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University. She has lived in the Pacific, where she has carried out extensive fieldwork, and she writes about self, power, transvestism, spirit possession, moral discourse, and body symbolism

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
List of contributors	viii
Foreword	ix
Gananath Obeyesekere
Introduction: theorizing power and the self	1	(28)
Jeannette Marie Mageo
Bruce M. Knauft
Part I Power differentials in the US
The genocidal continuum: peace-time crimes	29	(19)
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Intimate powers, public selves: Bakhtin's space of authoring	48	(23)
William S. Lachicotte
Part II Transnational psychologies
Playing with power: morphing toys and transforming heroes in kids' mass culture	71	(22)
Anne Allison
Consciousness of the state and the experience of self: the runaway daughter of a Turkish guest worker	93	(24)
Katherine Pratt Ewing
Part III Colonial encounters: power/history/self
Spirit, self, and power: the making of colonial experience in Papua New Guinea	117	(24)
Douglas Dalton
Self models and sexual agency	141	(36)
Jeannette Marie Mageo
Part IV Reading power against the grain
Eager subjects, reluctant powers: the irrelevance of ideology in a secret New Guinea male cult	177	(17)
Harriet Whitehead
Feminist emotions	194	(22)
Catherine Lutz
Index	216