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The cognitive machinery of power: Reflections on Valeri's The Forest of Taboos
Author(s) -
Lansing J. Stephen
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.2003.30.3.372
Subject(s) - taboo , subject (documents) , capitalism , fetishism , power (physics) , sociology , michel foucault , hegemony , governmentality , philosophy , epistemology , anthropology , politics , law , political science , physics , quantum mechanics , library science , computer science
As Judith Butler has emphasized, for Michel Foucault power is both external to the subject and the very venue of the subject, intrinsic to the formation of the self. Valerio Valeri's studies of the Huaulu, an egalitarian society of forest dwellers on a remote Indonesian island, help to disentangle these two aspects of power. Foucault often cautioned that his analysis of the history of European systems of thought made no claims to universality, but scholars working in the Foucauldian tradition have seldom ventured outside Europe. Valeri's analysis of Huaulu taboo clarifies and contextualizes Foucault's insights into the formative nature of power and offers new insights into the cognitive foundations of consumer capitalism, [cosmologies of capitalism, repressive regimes, taboo, potlatch, subject formation, consumer society, Frankfurt School, commodity fetishism]