Department of Anthropology

Ideas about culture are interwoven with notions of control and the dynamics of power. To show how controlling processes work to construct and institutionalize culture, I examine three ethnographic examples of different types of control--1) moving people to see harmony rather than justice as desirable, 2) inducing women to undergo body-altering surgery under the illusion of free choice, and 3) dismissing the context of scientific by emphasizing an idealized version of science. The Sydney W. Mintz lecture for 1995