Power, NowJohn D. Kelly Abstract Basic questions about power now arise. Critical scholarship renders two predicaments: postcoloniality (David Scott: "it is no longer so clear what 'overcoming' Western power actually means' (1999: 14)") and postmodernity (Michel Foucault: "the past century . . . we found ourselves . . . surely facing too much power" (Foucault 1997: 43). And there are new things in the world: the Internet, war on terrorism. Where should research go? What can it do? Concerning postcoloniality, we can and should reconceive the nation-state as an artifact of decolonization and US planning after World War II. Answering Scott's question, Martha Kaplan and I argue for disaggregating "the West" and focusing on American power now. Concerning knowledge and power more broadly, anthropology can make a better contribution to Science and Technology Studies: comparative inquiry into creation of new forms of power. My research here focuses on the engineering, in early historic India, of the Sanskrit language and its system of genres, the software of monastic universities. I take up Bruno Latour's challenge to Foucault's "Erewhon" vision of power, but seek a comparative perspective better than either modern scientific exceptionalism or Latour's forced symmetries. |