Unmasking the Structures of Power

1. Unmasking the
Structures of
Power
Lead discussant:
Nasif T. Macaslang, MA
LS 321
Dr. Grace S. Rafal

2. Power It is a totalising force used by state and dominant classes to
repress citizens who may have alternative viewpoints.
(Gramsci, 1988)
 It is a relation in which the actions of some people have an
effect on the actions of others. (Knights & Willmott, 1999)
 Power needs to be considered as an important concept in
the analysis of social stratification. Weber (1978)
 Power was defined in terms of prohibitions, as what prohibits
or prevents people from doing something. (Foucault, 1988)
 Power is concentrated at the macro or central levels and that
locals are powerless. Kothari (2001)
 Power is an important aspect of interpersonal relationships,
and a person can be influential in one situation, but not in
another. (Goodyear-Smith & Buetow, 2001)

3. Weber (1976) wrote:
“The ability to make others do what
one wants -- often against their
wills -- is a core element in power”

4. Power is a neutral concept and is not
inherently good or evil, but all powers can
be misused. (Pappas, 1990)

5. • Negative concept when it is used by
the powerful to control or oppress
the less powerful.
• Positive Concept in sense that it
empowers people to perform
specific functions.
The concept of power has been used in
both positive and negative manner
(Laverack, 2009)

6. 1. Power-from-within
2. Power-over
3. Power-with and
4. Powerlessness

7. • Refers to some inner sense
of self-knowledge, self-
discipline and self-esteem
and a means of gaining
control over ones’ life.
(Laverack (2009)

8. • It refers to the social
relationships in which one party
is made to do what another
party wishes them to, despite
their resistance and even if it
may not be in their best
interests. (Laverack, 2009)

9. • Describes a situation in which
“power-over” is used carefully
and deliberately to increase
other people’s power, rather
than to dominate or exploit
them.

10. • Powerlessness is the
absence of power whether
imagined or real (Laverack,
2009).

11. According to Lukes (1974), power
has three dimensions.
• First, power is exercised to secure a decision in
situations where there is some observable conflict or
disagreement.
• Second, power is exercised to keep issues on or off the
decision-making agenda, so that conflicts or
disagreements are precluded and therefore
unobservable.
• Third, institutional power is used to define reality, and
consequently, people accept and thereby reproduce
the power-invented definition of reality, even when
this is against their "real" interests

12. WHAT IS
RACE AND
RACISM?

13. RACE
 Denotes the belief that humans can be
grouped according to visible
characteristics such as skin color or hair
type, personality, cultural traits, or all of
these. (Brian Alleyne, 2006)
 Social and cultural anthropologists early
in the twentieth century insisted that
‘race’ was a social and not a natural
category (Montagu 1998[1964]).

14. Contemporary theories of race and
racism fall into four main areas:
1.Race relations
2.Marxist and neo-Marxist
approaches
3.Social constructionist
perspective
4.Related body of work
broadly influenced by

15. Race relations
perspectives It is the longest established of
these, especially in the English-
speaking world, where it
emerged in the 1950s.
It understands racial conflict as
resulting from clash between
groups with different cultures
and histories (understood as
races).

16. Marxist and neo-Marxist
perspectives
 begin with a structural
analysis of political
economy and the history
of racial domination under
European colonialism.
They see ‘race’ and class
as closely interlinked.

17. Social Constructionist Perspectives
 have been informed by class analysis as well
as feminism, but the principle influences have
been those of participant fieldwork and
ethnography, and more recently, structuralism
and post-structuralism.
 In this perspective ‘race’ and ‘racism’ are
examined in terms of subjectivity, identity and
representation.

18. Related body of work influenced by
feminist thought
 Since the 1970s a vibrant body of
work has grown up out of a critique
by Black feminist of the gender
blindness of much early work on
‘race’, as well as the ‘race’ blindness
of much pioneering feminist theory
and politics (Collin 1990).

19. Racism
• Commonly defined as “prejudice+power”
• It is a prejudice or discrimination against
someone based on his/her race.
• It can be manifested through beliefs,
policies, attitudes, and actions.
• It can be marked by color, ethnicity,
language, culture and or religion.

20. Racism
It is a global hierarchy of superiority and
inferiority along the line of human that have
been politically, culturally, and economically
produced and reproduced for centuries by the
institutions of the “capitalist/patriarchal
western-centric/Christian-centric
modern/colonial world system.
(Grosfoguel, 2011)

21. Forms of
Racism1.Individual or
internalized
2.Interpersonal
3.Institutional
4. Structural

22.  It exists within individuals.
It is when one holds negative
ideas about his/her own
culture, even if unknowingly.
Examples:
Xenophobic feelings
one’s internalized sense of
oppression

26.  It refers to the ways in
which the joint
operation of
institutions (i.e., inter-
institutional
arrangements and
interactions) produce
racialized outcomes,
even in the absence of
racist intent.
 Indicators of structural
racism include power
inequalities, unequal
access to opportunities,
and differing policy
outcomes by race.
 It is cumulative,
pervasive, and durable.

28. 1.Racial naturalism
2.Racial Eliminativism
3.Racial Constructivism

29. • Race is a legitimate biological category.
Four Claims:
1. Race is inherited. It has genetic basis.
2. Race is marked by certain bodily
characteristics
3. There are five or six races, clustering
our continents.
4. Races are natural kinds.

30. • Race are large groups of humans that share
stable properties; these properties arise
due to genetic differences.
• BiDil is a drug approved for use among
Africa-American heart failure patients. It
appears that African-Americans have lower
levels of nitric oxide in the blood, and BiDil
is more effective among people with lower
levels of nitric oxide.

31. • Race is not a legitimate
biological category. Hence,
there are no races, period. We
should do away with the
concept of race.

32. • Race is not a biological phenomenon; however, races still exist
as a result of social practices and classifications.
• Society places people into racial categories. Due to social
discrimination, people in different categories will experience
differences in resources access, opportunities, well-being, etc.
• Furthermore, racial classification still affects one’s self-identity
and leads to the creation of minorities.
• Compare to socioeconomic class. This is not determined
biologically, but it is still real, and still has significant
consequences.
• There is no absolute racial classification; it depends on the
time and place. (E.g. the US once adopted the “One drop
rule”); Jews and the Irish are now considered white, but once
were not, etc.

33. 1. There are no clear boundaries
between populations. Human
variation is clinal. Therefore, any
attempt to draw lines between races
will be arbitrary.
OBJECTION: the fact that there is no
clear line between categories doesn’t
entail that there are no categories.

34. 1. Multiregional
model/hypothesis
2. “Out of Africa”
model/hypothesis

35. 3. Human evolution has
evolved extensive gene flow
between populations. Alleles
that emerge in one population
don’t stay localized in that
population.video

36. WHAT IS
ETHNICITY?

37. Ethnicity
Ethnicity, as defined in the
public domain, is "the cultural
characteristics that connect a
particular group or groups of people
to each other"

38. Twenty-first-century anthropologists,
however, are likely to complicate simple
notions of ethnicity, or they might refuse
to accept a general definition of the
concept without first demanding accounts
of the particular formation of an ethnic
identity in a unique place and time.

39. A central story of ethnicity in
anthropology is its labored
disentanglement from now
discredited biological and
evolutionary notions of “race”, ideas
that continues to contribute to the
general public's
conceptualization of the
"ethnic" as a physically
distinct type of person.

40. In the mid-nineteenth century the
terms ethnic and racial first came into
common use, employed by preand post-
Darwinian scientists, and later
anthropologists, to construct human racial
and cultural taxonomies.

41. Throughout the nineteenth
and into the twentieth century,
race, was the dominant concept
for the scientific, social, and
political classification of human
groups in the Western world.

42. Anthropologists assumed
that all Europeans, Asians,
Africans, and Native Americans
were naturally distinct from each
other—even on the level of the
species—through differentiation
over time (monogeny) or through
natural, created difference
(polygeny).

43. According to Waters (1990)
“People commonly associate
ethnicity with distinctions based on
national origin, language, religion,
food, and other cultural markers,
and link race to distinctions drawn
from physical appearance, such as
skin color, hair texture, eye shape
and so on.”

44. ETHNICITY AND ETHNIC GROUPS
An ‘ethnic group’ has been defined as
a group that regards itself or is regarded by
others as a distinct community by virtue of
certain characteristics that will help to
distinguish the group from the surrounding
community.

45. Ethnicity has been described as
residing in:
• the belief by members of a social group that they
are culturally distinctive and different to
outsiders;
• their willingness to find symbolic markers of that
difference (food habits, religion, forms of dress,
language) and to emphasise their significance;
and
• their willingness to organise relationships with
outsiders so that a kind of ‘group boundary’ is
preserved and reproduced