Imagining Communities : Anthropological Reflections

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This is a revised version of my Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology Award Commemorative Lecture, delivered on June 1, 2008 at the 42^<nd> Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology, held at Kyoto University. The goal of this paper, while looking back at my own research, is to consider the processes of how people construct communities through imaginative and reflexive practice. Community is here not thought to be something that already exists, but to be something that is on-goingly created in practice, through the development of people's desires, imaginings or thought. First, while critically examining the practice theory of BOURDIEU, LAVE and WENGER and others, I note that communities are formed through diverse effects of power. Here, diverse effects of power includes not just the control of others from the outside, but also, as with ideology and discourse, the effects influencing people's modes of cognition and valuation, which lead them to accept a particular social order. The description of struggles or resistance against such effects of power was one of the major themes of late 20^<th> century ethnography, and in this the widespread use of agency as distinct from the modern Western notion of the subject became prominent. In the research that I have been involved with regarding spirit-medium cults or AIDS self-help groups in northern Thailand, I have focused on the processes of how patients and infected persons inside communities have re-created, through imaginative and reflexive practice, complex relations between self and other and of power. The wellspring of their action, rather than being that of rationalistic knowledge, is to be found in the hermeneutic knowledge concerning their own "life" embedded within their communities. On the other hand, however, in terms of the recent developments in social management, we must pay attention to the fact that it is the communality formed within communities as such that is becoming the target of or circuit in which the diverse power of NGO's, corporations and the state intervenes. In this regard, FOUCAULT'S notion of governmentality is useful in analyzing how power intervenes through such community frameworks and constructs flexible, self-disciplining subjects. The courses by which people in this way use imagination in the constructing of communities as new forms of communality overlap with the effects of governmental technologies in self-disciplining. It is, therefore, necessary for anthropology to approach such multi-layered processes.

Imagining Communities : Anthropological Reflections

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