Turning power inside out: Reflections on resistance from the (anthropological) field

Drawing from recent anthropological critiques of the notion of resistance, this paper argues that the concept is often sanitized and overextended in educational analysis. More nuanced and useful approaches to the idea of resistance in cultural contexts must take into account the ways in which cultural views of self inform the practices of power/resistance. On the one hand, certain individualist ideologies of self implicitly privilege views of agency that make resistance "inevitable"; yet there exist alternative views of self that give primacy to intimacy and self-other identification, as well as to domains of the inner self that subvert external appearances and operations of resistance. This paper argues that culturally shaped discourses on self and person ought to be more central to critical inquiry into themes of power and resistance.