Social Anthropology

This paper examines the potential contribution of the work of Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) to anthropological theories of agency, resistance and subjectivity. It argues that de Certeau's work shares with contemporary anthropological theory a legacy of the counter‐Enlightenment that combines a profound pessimism about modern society with an emphasis on the redemptive possibility of populism, expressivism and pluralism. Whilst in anthropology these developed into a complex theorisation of agency, resistance and subjectivity as embedded in socio‐cultural context, de Certeau appears to systematically avoid a coherent Rather, he offers a of agency, resistance and subjectivity that sees resistance through ‘tactics’ as the manifestation of an enduring counter‐modern human spirit, and as inherently morally good. The paper closes with a caution against anthropologists adopting a similar ‘theological’ stance towards resistance.

This article analyses how otherness and a politics of affect emerge from the presence of a new Latino migration to Rome, Italy. Looking at processes around Catholic evangelisation and plural migrant itineraries, the paper argues that different and contradictory forces such as narratives of centrality and periphery are mirrored in the presence and history of the Sacred Heart. Exploring and counterposing de Certeau's ideas on migrations and mystics, and the urban as a space of enunciation, I suggest that we should explore a modality of ethnography that combines and mirrors revelatory and analytical apprehensions of the world.

edited by Benson, Rodney, and Erik Neveu

Women's economic empowerment has come to play an increasingly prominent role in the policies of mainstream development agencies. This article draws on fieldwork amongst small‐scale traders in southwestern Nigeria to suggest that the capacity of traders to exercise ‘choice’ is more complex than development narratives suggest. Deploying de Certeau's (1984) distinction between strategies and tactics, the article argues that making clear‐cut, choices is dependent on having the power to realise them: power that many women in this as in other settings, including those with considerable buying and spending power, are not in a position to fully exercise. Women's struggles for success and survival in this context, the article argues, are waged in domains where their positions as agents are relational, situational, and above all, provisional. As members of families, associations and hearth‐holds, their abilities to make active, purposive, choices are constantly reconfigured in relation to these others. ‘Empowerment’ may be defined by mainstream development agencies as a destination, but looking more closely at the experiences of poor women in this setting reveals journeys along pathways that may be pitted with obstacles, in which chance and contingency may play as much of a part as deliberate choice, and for which tactics are needed for survival as well as success. A central argument in this article, then, is for the need to factor contingency into representations of women's working lives in development discourse, which in turn calls for an approach that can accommodate the mediation of agency and the tensions between autonomy and connectedness that course through women's lives.

The historian and theorist Michel de Certeau offers a challenge and a promise to all those involved in the practice of ‘writing culture’. Part of the promise that his work contains is for a true interdisciplinarity that is fashioned out of a much more integrated approach to culture; but it is also a promise that suggests an approach to culture that is much more responsive to the particularity and peculiarity of culture (an ‘interdiscipline’ that would refashion itself in its response to its object). The challenge that de Certeau offers is one fundamental to anyone writing culture now: how to write of reality, truth, actuality, in the face of the massive epistemological scepticism generated by poststructuralism.