The Emory Department of Anthropology has significant interest in the relationship between power, practice, and representation. How subjective orientations and power relations mutually inform each other through concrete practices, and how these processes are represented both by people themselves and in scholarly understanding, is centrally important to contemporary anthropology and in ethnography in particular. These dynamics engage with the critical understanding of how representations serve as loci of power, authority, and meaning in different contexts, including how self-definition and modes of complicity or resistance operate with respect to structures and social constructions of authority or authenticity. In Emory’s anthropology program, these issues are engaged in a wide variety of cultural contexts, scales of analysis, and topical areas, including:
the relation of state, government, or international institutional authority and intervention to local or personal self-definition, agency, or resistance
the practice, power, and representation of gender and sexuality
the contested articulation of power relations with cultural and subjective orientations in projects or schemes of development, rehabilitation, or recovery
the use of language, performatives, and aesthetics to express or critique relations of power, domination, or subordination
how different axes of difference that are associated with inequality or disempowerment
-- class, caste, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, age and so on – articulate with each other in institutional, practical, ideological, and cultural terms.
how the representation of power and the subjective or cultural orientations of others informs and is itself informed by academic and scholarly practice