What are the ways in which people exert power? First would be sheer force. A says, “Give me your money or I’ll shoot you

What are the ways in which people exert power? First would be sheer force. A says, “Give me your money or I’ll shoot you

Culture and Power

Culture and Power

Power—having it, getting it, and keeping it—is a primordial human desire. In its pursuit, people actively deploy cultural resources. More basic still, culture defines the arena in which the struggle for power takes place, who are the combatants, what is at issue and for whom, what should be accepted and what should be resisted, and what are the consequences of compliance or rebellion. Given the high stakes in power relationships at any level, a consideration of culture and power bring together many of the conceptions and processes we have seen previously.
This chapter investigates the way in which culture shapes power. It begins with a consideration of what power actually is and why powerful actors and institutions need cultural resources and schemas in the first place. It then considers power at different levels of human interactions, from the micro level of the couple or family all the way to the national and global levels. Finally it zeroes in on politics, the institutionalization of power, by looking at the role of culture in elections, spectacles, and cognitive and emotional responses—from patriotic sentiments to revolution—toward political regimes.
Power: What Is It, Who Has It, and Why Do People Submit to It?
Power is the ability to get one’s own way. Whether the “one” is an individual, a group, a category, or a nation, when we say one has power, we mean that he can do what he wants and get what he desires, regardless of whether other people agree or disagree. For example, most people are able to cross a room to get a glass of water—they have the power to do so—but a bedridden person in a nursing home cannot. He lacks the capacity to satisfy this simple desire, and some other person must assist. If a country has power vis-à-vis another country, it can go in and take the resources, and the second country will be helpless to prevent it.
Let’s call one unit, anything from an individual to a country, A and a second unit B. Then we can express a series of questions formally: What role, if any, does culture play in the ability of A to dominate B? What role, if any, does culture play in the ability of B to resist being dominated by A? Now let’s introduce a third unit, C, and ask, What role, if any, does culture play in C’s interpretation of and response to what has taken place between A and B?
We may address these questions starting with the social scientific definition of culture set out in the first chapter. Recall Clifford Geertz’s (1973:89) definition of culture: “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.” From this definition it follows that people’s culturally instilled knowledge and attitudes would prompt them to accept certain power arrangements and reject others.
Power is when A can get B to do something that B would not do otherwise. For example, A says to B, “Give me your money” or “Plow my fields” or “Have sex with me.” If B does it, A has some sort of power over B. And C, the witness, may regard this exercise of power as legitimate or as an abuse.
What are the ways in which people exert power? First would be sheer force. A says, “Give me your money or I’ll shoot you,” A whips B if B doesn’t plow the field, A rapes B because A is physically strong enough to overcome B’s resistance, or A physically restrains B. The observer C would usually interpret this as an abuse unless (1) it were in the context of play (i.e., sports or a contest with clearly specified rules), or (2) the powerful A has the authority to keep order through force, as with the police and justice system or with parents who might use force to make a child stop doing something dangerous. Designating something as “play” (boxing vs. a street fight) or as a permissible use of force (parents may spank their children, but unrelated adults may not) is a case of drawing cultural boundaries.
A second kind of power comes through exchange. Here A buys B’s compliance. A gives B something in return for B’s money or buys B’s sexual favors or pays wages for work done. In a market economy C would probably see this as legitimate, although such questions might be raised as, Why does A have more money? or Why is B forced to sell the goods or labor?
Neither force nor exchange necessarily requires cultural support. Indeed conquest and colonialism show us that A can extract compliance from B by force or exchange even if there is virtually no common cultural ground. But both force and exchange are costly for A in that they require energy (e.g., using physical force) or resources (e.g., buying something). This is where culture comes in. In some situations B submits to A’s wishes because the “historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols” makes B think and feel (“knowledge about and attitudes toward”) that A’s demand is legitimate and/or that complying with A’s demand is desirable and proper. And C, the witness, may share in this cultural interpretation or may recoil from it.
How would this cultural support for the exercise of power come about? As we have seen, culture provides models of and for behavior. It defines what is legitimate, proper, and normal. It sets out a moral code. And it shapes our common sense, our all-but-unconscious understanding of how things are and should be.
Legitimacy, morality, and common sense might illuminate the power relationship between professors and students, for example. Say a professor demands that a student give her his jacket. Most students would feel that, according to the institutional rules and norms of college, it is legitimate that professors ask students to write papers but illegitimate that they ask for students’ property. However, in some instances the moral code might say otherwise, as in the case of traditional Japanese respect and obedience toward teachers or of the Christian instruction that if someone asks for your cloak, you give it to him and more. And common sense might suggest that the demand is appropriate to the situation—for example, that the teacher needs the jacket to put over another student who has fainted.
So culture influences behavior, in this case B’s compliance with A’s demands, through defining what is legitimate, setting out a moral code guiding behavior, and shaping the common sense through which we interpret situations.
Next, we have a series of questions about the relationship between culture and the social world. How binding is culture? How does it work? Do the operations of culture—legitimacy, moral codes, and common sense—systematically advantage one group or type of person over another, or are they neutral?
On the question of how binding culture is, a question that is particularly important when we are thinking about the cultural legitimation of power, we may identify two extreme positions. The first is free agency: People, individually or collectively, are free agents in control of their own destiny. Culture provides resources for resistance as well as for domination, and people can draw on these resources to pursue their ends. The second is cultural “dopes”: People are programmed by their culture to such an extent that they fail to recognize their own interests. Harold Garfinkel (1967) used the term dopes in his critique of functionalism, but the same image applies to strong hegemony theories, which similarly regard people as having limited freedom or even awareness. Some theories are politically neutral, and others follow Marx’s assumption that the “ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class” and that these ideas rule by shaping knowledge and attitudes. Now we have already seen that people both create and are directed by meanings. Neither extreme—complete freedom or robotic control—is persuasive. We need to take a closer look at how culture actually works to produce or challenge power.
Power in Face-to-Face Interactions
Power exists in any group that involves two or more people. If the woman in a dating couple always decides what the couple will do, she holds the power in the relationship. If certain popular or simply aggressive teenagers can lead their friends into risky behavior, they are powerful within the group. Sometimes such power is legitimated by rules, as when the professor has the power to ask students to write papers, and sometimes the power is legitimated through the force of personality. And sometimes, although there are no explicit rules, certain categories of people have more power.
There may be no rhyme or reason to why people accord power to certain categories of people. Tall people, for example, have an advantage that does not seem related to any historical causes.

Of 43 American presidents, only five have been more than a smidgeon below average height, and the last of those was Benjamin Harrison, elected in 1888. (Another three, most recently Jimmy Carter, were just a hair below average.) Most presidents have been several inches above the norm for their times, with the five tallest being Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, and Franklin Roosevelt. (Landsburg 2002; for similar benefits of height to earnings, see Judge and Cable 2004)
But some categorical power and powerlessness has deep historical roots. Consider ethnicity, for example: Disadvantaged minorities—Dalits (untouchables) in India, Roma (gypsies) in Eastern Europe—lack power, and they may be socially discriminated against long after legal discrimination has ended.
Gender in face-to-face interactions seems to exert an independent effect. A considerable body of research on how conversations work, for example, suggests that women talk less than men and are more likely to be interrupted. Theory explains this is because gender shapes performance expectations; group members do not expect women to make as important a contribution as men, so women hold less power in the conversation. At the same time the internal development of the conversation itself may be more important than gender in determining who can change the topic. Early participants accumulate more power to direct the conversation than those who hold back at the beginning. In this sense the group develops its own micro-culture of power (Okamoto and Smith-Lovin 2001). Either can be seen as an issue of legitimacy: The group regards men and/or early participants as having a legitimate right to initiate topics or cut other people off—in other words, to get their own way in the discussion.
Although we usually assume that even small groups must have a strong leader to work, egalitarian cultures may be even more effective. Some political movements have internal cultures that encourage sharing power, working toward consensus, and bottom-up decision making. Francesca Polletta (2002) has shown that social movements from the 1950s and 1960s advocated and practiced such “participatory democracy.” Instead of this diffusion of power producing paralysis or anarchy, she found that such micro-cultures enabled civil rights and antiwar groups to strengthen their solidarity even as they nimbly adjusted to local circumstances.

The sheer diversity of input into tactical choice that participatory democracy makes possible has enabled activists to outpace their opponents in generating novel tactics. In the Southern civil rights movement, organizers used participatory democracy to school local residents in the practice of politics.… Far from opposed to leadership, they aimed to create political leaders—and to create the mechanisms that would keep leaders accountable to their constituents. (2)
On the other hand, some groups skirt political conversation altogether in the interests of peace as they pursue other, non-political goals (Eliasoph 1998). Although this type of consensus through not talking about contentious issues may allow the group to function, such a non-confrontational local culture discourages reflection on the power relationships within the group itself. Becker’s (1999) study of the local cultures in American church congregations suggests something along this line. Some churches were “families,” and like families, their conflicts were passionate and personal. One church’s conflict over reporting procedures became “a matter of trust and caring, not accounting practices” (93). These churches were subject to upheavals and either dramatic change or the highly visible reassertion of power, which often rested in the hands of the pastor as patriarch. Other churches were emotionally cooler “houses of worship,” where offices and committees held the power and made the decisions. In these, conflicts were rare, and issues seldom unsettled the bureaucratic arrangements whereby power rested in duly elected officials. An appropriate exercise of pastoral power in the church as family would be an improper procedural violation in the house of worship.
Identity Politics
We have seen some of the mechanisms whereby culture serves the interests of power, including making something legitimate, moral, or common sense. One of the critical and most common ways this process takes place is in the construction of a group’s past and its implications for future action. History, in particular a group’s or a nation’s collective memory, makes some actions seem legitimate, moral, or common sense but not others. Yet history is a cultural construct, subject to individual and institutional manipulation, revision, and selective emphasis and forgetting.
We begin with the social basis of cognition and its consequences. As we saw in Chapter 4, Eviatar Zerubavel (1997), who looks at the structuring of time and other forms of collective cognition, argues that in between cognitive universalism of neuroscience and the cognitive individualism of romantic ideology and psychoanalysis lies the social mind. This defines the field of cognitive sociology, which requires a comparative approach to cognition that would “highlight our cognitive diversity as members of different thought communities” (11). Zerubavel urges us to examine the cognitive division of labor within a society, as well as the differences among societies. He draws attention to the social influences on perception (what people notice), attention and concern (what people care about), classification (how people categorize things, meanings, memories—what to remember, what to forget, how to feel about it), and time (how people place things in the past or future). For example, many African Americans regard slavery as a relatively recent “cultural trauma” having pressing contemporary meaning, while many white Americans see it as a long past institution having little current relevance (Eyerman 2002). Such group differences in the salience of past events are true at the level of nations as well; old wounds are commemorated by some and conveniently forgotten by others.
While we may say that the shared understanding of the past and future shapes our “worlds” in a phenomenological sense, such “worlds” do not necessarily lead to specific behavioral outcomes, nor do they necessarily influence other people’s worlds. Culture gains power only when it combines with resources. Ideologies about gender, for example, only work in combination with resource advantages. If a society believes that girls are not as good at math as boys are (ideology), the girls may prove this to be wrong if equal opportunities in the classroom (resource); if the boys are channeled into science classes, however, the ideology will combine with the educational resources to result in a self-fulfilling prophesy: more boys will succeed in science (Charles and Bradley 2009). Here Sewell’s (1992) theory of structure, mentioned in Chapter 2, will help. Recall Sewell’s discussion of cultural schemas, the general presuppositions underlying more explicit rules that can be transferred and applied to new situations. Schemas were only part of structure, however. The other half consists of resources, both human and material. Sewell puts resources and schemas together in his definition of social structure, which is “composed simultaneously of schemas, which are virtual, and of resources, which are actual.” Schemas are the effects of resources, and resources are the effects of schemas.
It is easy to see where power comes into such a conception. The powerful control more resources than the less powerful. We usually think of this at the level of nations or large groups, but it can operate at the small group level as well. When a family watches television together, the person holding the remote has the power; in the British working-class family, that person is usually the father (Morley 1986). Power gets legitimated through schemas; if there is an underlying schema that says that men are more decisive than women, this schema will structure new situations in which men get to make the decisions, often accumulating resources by doing so, and thus will reproduce male power.
But what about change? Wouldn’t any given structure of power just reproduce itself: Dad always gets the remote, Mom is always seen as not very capable outside the home sphere, and on and on forever? It is certainly the case that power structures tend to reproduce themselves. Educational systems, as Pierre Bourdieu and many others have pointed out, tend to take children who already have social advantages and pile on more advantages, putting them in more powerful positions when they become adults (Bourdieu 1984; Gaztambide-Fernandez 2009; Lareau 2003). Yet things obviously do change, and to account for this, Sewell modifies Bourdieu’s (1984) idea of the habitus, those underlying transposable dispositions that reproduce structure even in improvised action in totally new contexts. Although the habitus is basic to his conception of schemas, Sewell stresses that we need a less rigid conception, a more “multiple, contingent, and fractured conception of society—and of structure” (16). With multiple structures, various schemas that may conflict, and unpredictable resource shifts, change happens. Mom enters the labor force, accumulating new resources and new domestic power. Or second-wave feminism changes the schemas about men’s and women’s capacities to make decisions. And next thing you know, Mom is holding the remote—or will be until technological change, another unpredictable factor, makes the remote itself obsolete.
Powerful schemas include those of gender and race, as in the above examples, but one that may be less obvious is that of collective memory. Groups differ sharply in what they remember and how they feel about it—Zerubavel’s “social mind” at work—and when a memory acquires resources, it becomes history. We saw this in Chapter 4 in Binder’s (2001) study of local school conflicts where proponents of Afrocentricism or creationism struggled to control curricular decisions that could institutionalize their version of history. The former found support from a widely shared memory of discrimination against African Americans, where there was no general collective memory of discrimination against evangelicals. At an international level, the ongoing conflict between Japanese and Chinese interpretation of the events of the 1930s and World War II is an example of a clash of collective memories institutionalized in textbooks, museums, and commemoration.
More generally we can say that history is a documented account of the past, institutionally supported (e.g., in books and through education). History is complex, with levels of detail; it must be taught and may not be known by all members of the group. Collective memory, on the other hand, is known by definition, for it is an account of the past shared by a group. Often such memories are perpetuated orally, informally, and sometimes secretly if the memory goes against the history as promoted by the dominant group. History and collective memory may or may not coincide. Commemorations, monuments, and museums are typical ways states try to make them coincide. Documentaries, eyewitness accounts, stories, rumors, and photos are typical ways people resist.
A recent example comes from the tenth anniversary of the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, at which time the different ways the Bosnian Muslims and Serbians commemorated the event were in sharp conflict. In 1995 during the Bosnian War in former Yugoslavia, Bosnian Serb forces advanced on Srebrenica as part of the “ethnic cleansing” campaign. Thousands of Bosnian Muslims fled their homes and sought help from the small contingent of Dutch UN peacekeepers, for the UN had designated Srebrenica as a “safe area.” But Serb forces attacked, killing the men and boys, while the peacekeepers stood by helplessly. About 8,000 men and boys died in Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II.
In the summer of 2005 tens of thousands of people held ceremonies marking the tenth anniversary of the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. Grieving relatives buried more than 600 newly identified dead, after prayers and words of support from international and local officials. Serbian officials led by President Tadic paid respects for the first time. Muslim prayers echoed through the valley of the memorial site at Potocari, the site of the slaughter, as women in white headscarves wept beside the remains of their loved ones. The green coffins were then passed from hand to hand through the crowd to the freshly dug gravesites, as announcers called out one by one the names of the 610 dead. Each family buried its own dead, by hand or using shovels and buckets.
Serbia’s parliament, on the other hand, observed a minute of silence for all victims of violence in and around Srebrenica and of the previous week’s London subway bombing by Islamists. It failed to make specific reference to the Srebrenica massacre. Even the parliament’s diluted commemoration was boycotted by the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party. Here we have a striking contrast, with the Muslims trying to concentrate the focus on the massacre, limiting the attention in terms of time and space, and the Serbs trying to broaden it, referring to other atrocities (London bombings, times when Bosnian Muslims killed Serbs) or, in the case of the Nationalist Party and many Serbs (according to news accounts based on interviews), ignoring and denying it altogether.
The collective memory of the Bosnian Muslims differs from that of the Serbs. The many books and historical accounts written by outsiders, for example, Dutch peacekeepers, U.N. records, generally supports the Bosnian Muslim version, but that is irrelevant to the Serbs. This matters, of course, because past grievances justify—make legitimate, make moral, make common sense—future actions.
Historian David Lowenthal (1985) describes how collective memory and history intertwine, pointing out that for many people the past has become fragile and elusive, something cherished as “heritage” to be “preserved.” We know the past—and shape our schemas about it—through memory, history, and relics but also through imagination. With such aids, memory organizes consciousness, transforming welter of actual experience into desirable or meaningful events, and these become institutionalized as history. “Just as memory validates personal identity, history perpetuates collective self-awareness” (213). The past can be changed in many ways (e.g., through museum exhibits, artifacts, textbooks, or reenactments). Sometimes it is cleaned up. Typically this happens when myths of national origins conveniently lose sight of the atrocities that took place at the country’s founding. Lowenthal discusses a more amusing example of how hyperrealistic reenactments at Nova Scotia’s Louisbourg fortress had to be prettied up when too many tourists were disconcerted by the bored soldiers and “syphilitic whores” taking tickets.
Who has the power to reshape the past? While oral accounts associated with collective memory have the capacity to change the past, as in Goody and Watt’s (1963) account of the revised tribal history discussed in the previous chapter, those with control over institutions that can fix “history” have the most power. In the United States, museums and history textbooks for over a century presented a progressive view of history, but in the late twentieth century they replaced this with a relativistic one that gives more weight to the costs (for Native Americans, African slaves, and immigrant laborers) of nation building. Even relativism has its costs, as when critics charge that the Smithsonian’s monumental Museum of the American Indian homogenizes Native American experiences, making all Indians seem alike.
The Aesthetics of Power
Identities are the key to political thought and action. If cultural creators can frame their message so it resonates with a frame that the audience already possesses, they are more likely to persuade that audience to “buy” the message. Political propaganda operates this way quite overtly. Barry Schwartz (1996) has shown how Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, working to mobilize support for American involvement in World War II, keyed its pro-war message to the Lincoln frame from the past. Counting on the collective memory that honored Abraham Lincoln’s resolve in the face of war, the administration legitimated American military action by fitting it to the public’s “horizon of expectations” that included the sacred place that Lincoln held. This succeeded in orienting Americans toward the necessity and nobility of going to war.
Political framing is hard to accomplish. Debate over whether or not the Darfur conflict should be called genocide is an example where using the past (holocaust) to frame the present (the Janjaweed’s slaughter of Darfur villagers) is hotly contested. Some want to use the genocide to organize the political response to Darfur, focusing attention and ascribing meaning. But there are various historical discourses at play—not just genocide but memories of Western interference, African tribalism, and Muslim grievances—and so far there has been no agreed-upon frame.
Power holders as well as seekers of power work to legitimate their chosen frames through rituals and symbols. We saw earlier that this is in part a matter of efficiency: It is cheaper to organize a parade that whips up enthusiasm for the regime than it is to operate a police state. But how do such aesthetic claims about power actually work?
Paul DiMaggio (1997) has looked at the interaction between cognition and social life. He notes that under everyday circumstances, people organize information via automatic cognition, using “culturally available schemata—knowledge structures that represent objects of events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics, relationships, and entailments under conditions of incomplete information” (269). But sometimes there is the need to employ deliberative cognition, which is slow, deliberate, reflexive, and critical. One can think of this in Zerubavel’s terms as the social mind on autopilot versus the social mind aware of itself.
DiMaggio sees culture operating through the interaction of three forms: information, distributed unevenly through a population; schematic representations that shape the way we perceive, interpret, remember, and feel about the information we encounter; and culture as external symbol systems. Culture is not any one of the three but the interaction among them. For example, think of the schemas of the Bosnian Muslims versus those of the Serbs. Such schemas become activated by external cues, as in Srebrenica anniversary commemoration. Enacting their different schemas through institutional venues (e.g., the Serbian parliament, the international media), the two groups offered jarringly different interpretations of the recent past, and these interpretations then were available as information that could confirm or challenge future understanding of that past.
While power gets embodied in parliamentary speeches and commemorative rituals, it also impresses itself on human bodies. Susan Bordo (1993) has taken as her cultural object the female body as cultural image and biological organism. Everyone is aware of the fashion industry’s and the media’s celebration of an unnatural thinness, and this is often linked to the rise of eating disorders like anorexia among both celebrities and the population at large. Bordo maintains that contrary to the medical establishment’s view of such eating disorders as pathological, in fact the anorexics’ attitudes toward eating is not some “bizarre” cognitive disorder but an accurate representation of, and appropriate response to, cultural messages about desirable weight. Starvation constitutes a reasonable plan of action whereby the anorexic as creator produces a body as cultural object that reflects the ideal embedded in the receivers’ horizon of expectations. The plan makes cultural sense, in other words, even though it may prove fatal. In Bordo’s contrarian account, it is not the anorexic who is sick; it is the culture itself with its objectification and commodification of women’s bodies. Beauty both confers and is defined by power, and the anorexic is just trying to grab some power back.
Probably the most familiar form of power through aesthetics is at the national level—parades, holidays, spectacular celebrations—but even nationalism can be enacted on and through bodily aesthetics. Falesca-Zamponi (1997) describes how, during the Fascist period, Mussolini demanded that Italians greet one another with a Roman salute (stiff arm, right hand perpendicular) rather than a handshake, which according to the regime signified bourgeois decadence. Mussolini said the salute was “more hygienic, more aesthetic and shorter.” The salute was mandatory in schools and when subordinates greeted superiors, but it was also used between equals, for it became a sign of loyalty and fit a regime that promoted itself as dynamic and efficient. Since it showed “decisive spirit, firmness, seriousness, and acknowledgment and acceptance of the regime’s hierarchical structure,” therefore proof of fascist character, the theory was that practicing the salute itself could actually change character. Today on the other side of the globe Korea—the mass games of the North, the March 1 parades linking patriotism and Protestantism of the South—offers vivid examples of the corporal expression of nationalism (Kane and Park 2009; Myers 2010;).
People tend to distinguish between states and nations with respect to the culture/power relationship along the following lines: States deploy culture to legitimate themselves and their power over citizens, and they often meet resistance. Nations, on the other hand, are primordial, based on pre-existing cultures; they too deploy culture, but it meets no resistance. Ever since Benedict Anderson’s ([1983] 1991) “imagined community” thesis discussed in the previous chapter, however, which itself built on earlier work on “the invention of tradition,” sociologists have been aware that nations are not “natural” but constructed. States make their claims to legitimacy on the basis of this myth of a nation, a myth elaborated in cultural symbols.
The Baltic nation of Latvia, under Soviet control until 1991, exemplifies the political potency of national culture. Diana Eglitis (2002) locates the founding national myth in the Bearslayer epic about a heroic defender of his nation’s freedom. The epic features love of nature, ambivalence of Christianity, mistrust of cities, centrality of song, and suspicion of foreigners. Latvia’s “singing revolution” (1986–1991) voiced antipathy toward Soviets and the desire for return to “normality,” the nation’s “natural” state that preceded the Soviet takeover. In other words, the goal was a return to the Bearslayer nation. The revolution began on June 14, 1987, when a massive demonstration took place at the Freedom Monument in downtown Riga. The Freedom Monument, created by Kârlis Zâle in 1935, features a Liberty Statue—a woman with three stars symbolizing regional parts of Latvia—and allegorical and historical carvings, including one of the Bearslayer in action. The monument came to symbolize the anti-Soviet resistance of the late 1980s and today is a shrine to national independence, decorated with flowers each day by the city’s residents. The Latvian nation-state is a political entity founded on epic poetry, sculpture, and floral tributes.
Even statues and salutes have trouble molding a nation in the face of sharp group divisions. Multicultural societies prove especially challenging. Nation builders can use schemas, resources, and aesthetics to support a number of approaches:

  • Suppress multiculturalism through removal, ethnic cleansing, or denial. Examples include pre-1995 Bosnia, the Darfur region of the Sudan, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Such suppression is typically a tactic of authoritarian regimes but may also be a choice made by separatist movements themselves, as in the Kurdish independence movement or the back-to-Africa movements of the early-twentieth-century United States.
  • Deny multiculturalism. Such a denial characterized the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when assimilation and a melting pot were the shared assumptions. Japan to this day largely ignores its ethnic minorities and their problems. France and the Netherlands are similarly seen as denying the fundamental differences represented by their Muslim minorities under an illusion that time will transform them into simply being French or Dutch.
  • Marginalize or create a separate space for minority cultures. This has been the policy toward Native Americans in Canada and the United States, Aboriginals in Australia, and the Sami in Norway and Finland. Marginalized groups are often excluded from the nation’s political discourse and/or forcefully assimilated, as in the case of China’s policy toward Tibetans.
  • Admit the existence of multiculturalism but create an overarching, pan-cultural identity. This was the policy of the Soviet Union. It was also the policy of Nigeria in 1970s, where the intractable differences among 250 different tribes were papered over by the cosmopolitan image of the “New Nigerian.” More recently, New Nigerian has given way to a tenuous balance among the competing ethnic and religious interests.
  • Celebrate multiculturalism as part of their national identity. This has become the United States’ policy, though imperfectly and not without struggle, of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Many expect it to become European policy as well, though it is meeting strong resistance in Europe.

One thing a nation cannot do with multiculturalism is ignore it. The Netherlands offers a cautionary example here. For decades the Dutch welcomed immigrants but paid little attention to their cultural worlds, assuming that the Netherlands’ easygoing, tolerant, rational way of life would absorb the newcomers and shape their values along European lines. For some immigrants it worked that way, but others were appalled by what they regarded as the licentiousness and godlessness of Dutch life. When Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born feminist critical of Islam’s treatment of women, and Theo van Gogh, an avant-garde filmmaker, made a provocative film relating the abuse of women to the Qur’an, a radical Islamist named Mohammed Bouyeri responded in November 2004 by stabbing van Gogh to death (Buruma 2006). Bouyeri, born in Amsterdam and holding both Moroccan and Dutch passports, might seem an exemplar of the cosmopolitan, global citizen, but instead he epitomizes those fundamentalists who reject modernity in favor of a narrow and intolerant worldview. He pinned a note to van Gogh’s body excoriating the West, Jews, feminists, and secularized Muslims. Immigrant leaders and Dutch officials, while decrying the murder itself, became increasingly engaged in wrestling with the complexities of a multicultural society. A statue, erected in 2007 at the site of the murder, that honors free speech is one symbolic response. More significant is the widespread recognition that while different cultures need not produce perpetual conflict, their co-presence has real consequences—witness the struggle over the “Ground Zero mosque” in New York—that cannot be dismissed in some complacent fantasy of the Enlightenment.
Political Acts as Cultural Objects
Culture’s role in political life goes well beyond spectacles of power and group membership. Elected and unelected office holders use aesthetic means to shore up their claims to legitimacy. Rituals seem especially pertinent to the assurance of orderly transitions, continuity despite change, as when European countries proclaim at the accession of a new monarch with “The King is dead. Long live the King.” Barack Obama’s 2008 Election Night rally in Chicago’s Grant Park—the media coverage, the giant high-definition screens, the stage, the flags, the victory speech, and the crowd itself both making history and witnessing itself witnessing history—is a recent case of the ritualized aesthetics of power.
Americans are familiar with the symbols that attend a president: The band plays “Hail to the Chief,” everyone stands when the president enters the room, and important speeches are delivered against a carefully studied background of flags, portraits of Lincoln, and other sacred symbols of the American polity. Candidates for office and their advisors ponder how to dress, what photo opportunities to arrange, and how to project both leadership and the common touch required in a democracy. Impressions matter, and the specter of Richard Nixon visibly sweating during his debate with John Kennedy in 1960 haunts candidates, as the media zoom in. At the inauguration of the president, Washington witnesses a round of balls—there were nine official inaugural balls in 2005—with the president making an appearance to dance briefly at each. Through the media, the whole world is indeed watching, and the rituals do not just ornament the political transition but in some respects actually make it happen.
In Britain the queen opens Parliament each autumn in an elaborate performance that seems straight out of a fairy tale. First is the ceremonial search of the cellars of Westminster Palace, reenacting the danger posed by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Next a member of the House of Commons is taken hostage at Buckingham Palace to guarantee the sovereign’s safe return. The queen travels to Westminster in a horse-drawn coach, where she puts on the Robes and Crown of State. She delivers the Speech from the Throne (written not by her, of course, but by the Cabinet) outlining the government’s agenda for the coming session. Finally she withdraws, having ensured by this ritual that the business of government can commence.
It might seem from such panoply of tradition that when it comes to impression management, more is always better, but this is not the case. Not only does the substance of impression management differ from place to place—black tie and cowboy boots versus the Crown of State—but the style does as well. Jean-Pascal Daloz (2003) has studied displays of ostentation by political elites in various countries. Ostentation in politics is “a sharp contrast with regard to the common lot … expressed through the appropriation of the rarest goods but also through the ceremonial, and the most refined manners” (38–39). Ostentation can legitimate power in some contexts but not others (in terms of the cultural diamond, it all depends on the receivers’ expectations). Daloz shows that in Nigeria, the leaders’ extravagant show of wealth in expensive cars, luxurious dress, and bevies of retainers reassures the clients in a patronage system that the Big Man continues to be in a position to provide for them. At the opposite extreme are the Scandinavian countries, where ostentation is rejected. There, politicians work hard to maintain the profile of being very ordinary and somewhat boring. France falls in between, with leaders wavering between exhibiting aristocratic refinement and the common touch.
Of course, such political rituals often don’t succeed. When the electorate perceives politicians to be working too hard on their images, it is distinctly unimpressed. If not altogether cynical, voters are sophisticated in the marketing and media manipulation—spin—done by political candidates, thus making it harder than ever to impress them. New technologies help, so in the early twenty-first century political websites and blogs were fertile arenas for managing impressions and garnering support (Howard Dean’s candidacy in 2004 was initially an Internet phenomenon), but such novelty is hard to maintain. Even rituals with some tradition behind them can lose their ability to legitimate power.
This may be a function of the limited capacity of ritual itself in today’s complex and media-saturated world. Jeffrey Alexander (2004) has defined rituals as “episodes of repeated and simplified cultural communication in which the direct partners to a social interaction, and those observing it, share a mutual belief in the descriptive and prescriptive validity of the communication’s symbolic contents and accept the authenticity of one another’s intentions” (527). An effective ritual “energizes the participants and attaches them to each other” (527). This surely captures what every political leader would like to achieve. Formal rituals as such are less central in complex, rationalized societies, but social performances—like those of political leaders—have the same structures and goals (to legitimate power, to make a transition from one social state to another). Such performances and rituals fail when they seem artificial and inauthentic. As always, much depends on the perceptions of those in the position of receiving the cultural object. This is why every four years Americans watch their presidential candidates go through their performances in early primary states—shaking hands in New Hampshire, touring hog farms and ethanol plants in Iowa—but are more amused than persuaded by these mandatory performances.
The slightly silly spectacle of a suit-and-tie candidate making the rounds of hog farms and maple sugar houses is not just an American political quirk. French candidates get photographed on horseback; Japanese politicians protect inefficient rice farmers through tariffs; Nigerian presidents visit chicken farms. “In the South Korean National Assembly, rural voters are ‘overrepresented’ by a margin of three to one. This disproportionate influence of farm voters has led to high tariffs on food imports, forcing Korean consumers to pay some of the world’s highest prices for beef, fruits, and vegetables” (Stokes 2007). Around the ever-more-urban world, the farm is a meaningful cultural object that bespeaks the native soil and homely virtues at the root of national pride. The cultural object is universal, but the particularities—hog farms, rice farms, chicken farms—fit the social world in which the politician is operating. Or at least that is the producer’s (the political advisor’s, the media specialist’s, the party leader’s) intention. The recipients (the voters, the onlookers, the media), however, may find the object meaningless, or they may attach a more cynical meaning to it, viewing the image of man-looking-thoughtfully-at-cow not as a signifier of the candidate’s rural sympathies but as one more obligatory photo-op as he trolls for votes.
Cultures Without Centers
National myths and politicians’ efforts to embody them are fighting against the tide of a de-centered world. At the dawn of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats made the double prediction that bears repeating: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.” Now, at the dawn of a new century, we realize he was half right. Cultural centers did not hold. We have gone from a bipolar to a polycentric world, from a world of cultural hierarchies to a world of multiple and parallel meaning systems, from a world where specialists controlled access to information to a world where “the best that has been thought and known,” and the worst too, is accessible to anyone who goes online.
Cultural purity is gone from the face of the earth; it was probably always a myth, but now few even pretend to believe in it. We are all hybrids now (Ang 2001; Bhabha 1994). Even the popular image of multiculturalism as a mosaic, a salad bowl in which different cultures mix but keep their integrity, is misleading (Hannerz 1993). Cultures are more like soups, flavored with many ingredients, some unidentifiable.
At the same time, however, things did not fall apart. Human beings continue to ward off chaos through cultural objects; the embrace of chaos tends to be a temporary and highly stylized posture of youth, like the jackets embroidered with “Live fast, die young.” People continue to produce and perpetuate their cultures through interaction and socialization. Our original cultural definitions still work. People may exist in multiple communities through multiple networks, but along these networks they still share meanings with one another. Communities, whether relational or spatial, still collectively represent themselves through patterns of meanings embodied in symbols, meanings that shape attitudes and actions.
In a de-centered world, understanding the connections among cultures and societies may require a handful of cultural diamonds, but the familiar questions still apply. To understand any cultural phenomenon, from the traditional to the postmodern, one needs to ask: What are the characteristics of this specific cultural object? What does it mean, and for whom? Who are its creators? Who are its receivers, and how do they interpret it? From what social world does it come, and into what social world is it sent? One can ask these questions about an MTV video or an idea sent through the Internet just as one can ask them about a Chinese poem or a Nigerian masquerade. Their answers will continue to be revealing about the relevant social world. And those people who can come up with the answers will be those best equipped to navigate in this still new century.
QUESTIONS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION

  1. Think of the micro-politics, the power struggles and attempts to get one’s own way, of a very small group: a dating couple. In the case of a conflict, how does each person use culture to support his or her own position? Develop an example of how the conflict might play out.
  2. What makes the various forms of reconstructing the past work politically, and what makes them fail? Consider how a contemporary leader or candidate refers to some historical figure or past event to justify a line of action. Is this move successful? Why or why not?
  3. How does your own country, or a country with which you are familiar, deploy culture to create nationalism? What succeeds and what fails? Why are some attempts to do this more successful than others? Is this form of nation building ultimately divisive and destructive, or is it a necessary part of building a collective identity?
  4. Can a visual spectacle like a parade or convention have any impact on political life today? What about a website? If you were running for office, what type of political aesthetics would you invest in, and why?

RECOMMENDED FOR FURTHER READING

Howard, Phil. 2006. New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Howard gives a partly appalling, partly amusing account of the impact of the Internet and ICTs on American political life during the first presidential election in which it played a major role. He also portrays the inside-the-beltway geek culture that produces the techno-politics.
Ikegami, Eiko. 2006. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. In this rich cultural history by a sociologist, Ikegami locates the aesthetic foundation of Japanese collective identity and political practices.
Straughn, Jeremy Brooke. 2005. “Taking the State at Its Word”: The Arts of Consentful Contention in the German Democratic Republic. American Journal of Sociology 110:1598–1650. Straughn shows how even in a repressive political context, the powerless can fight back by seeming to take the ideals of the powerful with utmost seriousness, thereby justifying their resistance.

8
Culture and Power

Power—having it, getting it, and keeping it—is a primordial human desire. In its pursuit, people actively deploy cultural resources. More basic still, culture defines the arena in which the struggle for power takes place, who are the combatants, what is at issue and for whom, what should be accepted and what should be resisted, and what are the consequences of compliance or rebellion. Given the high stakes in power relationships at any level, a consideration of culture and power bring together many of the conceptions and processes we have seen previously.
This chapter investigates the way in which culture shapes power. It begins with a consideration of what power actually is and why powerful actors and institutions need cultural resources and schemas in the first place. It then considers power at different levels of human interactions, from the micro level of the couple or family all the way to the national and global levels. Finally it zeroes in on politics, the institutionalization of power, by looking at the role of culture in elections, spectacles, and cognitive and emotional responses—from patriotic sentiments to revolution—toward political regimes.
Power: What Is It, Who Has It, and Why Do People Submit to It?
Power is the ability to get one’s own way. Whether the “one” is an individual, a group, a category, or a nation, when we say one has power, we mean that he can do what he wants and get what he desires, regardless of whether other people agree or disagree. For example, most people are able to cross a room to get a glass of water—they have the power to do so—but a bedridden person in a nursing home cannot. He lacks the capacity to satisfy this simple desire, and some other person must assist. If a country has power vis-à-vis another country, it can go in and take the resources, and the second country will be helpless to prevent it.
Let’s call one unit, anything from an individual to a country, A and a second unit B. Then we can express a series of questions formally: What role, if any, does culture play in the ability of A to dominate B? What role, if any, does culture play in the ability of B to resist being dominated by A? Now let’s introduce a third unit, C, and ask, What role, if any, does culture play in C’s interpretation of and response to what has taken place between A and B?
We may address these questions starting with the social scientific definition of culture set out in the first chapter. Recall Clifford Geertz’s (1973:89) definition of culture: “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.” From this definition it follows that people’s culturally instilled knowledge and attitudes would prompt them to accept certain power arrangements and reject others.
Power is when A can get B to do something that B would not do otherwise. For example, A says to B, “Give me your money” or “Plow my fields” or “Have sex with me.” If B does it, A has some sort of power over B. And C, the witness, may regard this exercise of power as legitimate or as an abuse.
What are the ways in which people exert power? First would be sheer force. A says, “Give me your money or I’ll shoot you,” A whips B if B doesn’t plow the field, A rapes B because A is physically strong enough to overcome B’s resistance, or A physically restrains B. The observer C would usually interpret this as an abuse unless (1) it were in the context of play (i.e., sports or a contest with clearly specified rules), or (2) the powerful A has the authority to keep order through force, as with the police and justice system or with parents who might use force to make a child stop doing something dangerous. Designating something as “play” (boxing vs. a street fight) or as a permissible use of force (parents may spank their children, but unrelated adults may not) is a case of drawing cultural boundaries.
A second kind of power comes through exchange. Here A buys B’s compliance. A gives B something in return for B’s money or buys B’s sexual favors or pays wages for work done. In a market economy C would probably see this as legitimate, although such questions might be raised as, Why does A have more money? or Why is B forced to sell the goods or labor?
Neither force nor exchange necessarily requires cultural support. Indeed conquest and colonialism show us that A can extract compliance from B by force or exchange even if there is virtually no common cultural ground. But both force and exchange are costly for A in that they require energy (e.g., using physical force) or resources (e.g., buying something). This is where culture comes in. In some situations B submits to A’s wishes because the “historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols” makes B think and feel (“knowledge about and attitudes toward”) that A’s demand is legitimate and/or that complying with A’s demand is desirable and proper. And C, the witness, may share in this cultural interpretation or may recoil from it.
How would this cultural support for the exercise of power come about? As we have seen, culture provides models of and for behavior. It defines what is legitimate, proper, and normal. It sets out a moral code. And it shapes our common sense, our all-but-unconscious understanding of how things are and should be.
Legitimacy, morality, and common sense might illuminate the power relationship between professors and students, for example. Say a professor demands that a student give her his jacket. Most students would feel that, according to the institutional rules and norms of college, it is legitimate that professors ask students to write papers but illegitimate that they ask for students’ property. However, in some instances the moral code might say otherwise, as in the case of traditional Japanese respect and obedience toward teachers or of the Christian instruction that if someone asks for your cloak, you give it to him and more. And common sense might suggest that the demand is appropriate to the situation—for example, that the teacher needs the jacket to put over another student who has fainted.
So culture influences behavior, in this case B’s compliance with A’s demands, through defining what is legitimate, setting out a moral code guiding behavior, and shaping the common sense through which we interpret situations.
Next, we have a series of questions about the relationship between culture and the social world. How binding is culture? How does it work? Do the operations of culture—legitimacy, moral codes, and common sense—systematically advantage one group or type of person over another, or are they neutral?
On the question of how binding culture is, a question that is particularly important when we are thinking about the cultural legitimation of power, we may identify two extreme positions. The first is free agency: People, individually or collectively, are free agents in control of their own destiny. Culture provides resources for resistance as well as for domination, and people can draw on these resources to pursue their ends. The second is cultural “dopes”: People are programmed by their culture to such an extent that they fail to recognize their own interests. Harold Garfinkel (1967) used the term dopes in his critique of functionalism, but the same image applies to strong hegemony theories, which similarly regard people as having limited freedom or even awareness. Some theories are politically neutral, and others follow Marx’s assumption that the “ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class” and that these ideas rule by shaping knowledge and attitudes. Now we have already seen that people both create and are directed by meanings. Neither extreme—complete freedom or robotic control—is persuasive. We need to take a closer look at how culture actually works to produce or challenge power.
Power in Face-to-Face Interactions
Power exists in any group that involves two or more people. If the woman in a dating couple always decides what the couple will do, she holds the power in the relationship. If certain popular or simply aggressive teenagers can lead their friends into risky behavior, they are powerful within the group. Sometimes such power is legitimated by rules, as when the professor has the power to ask students to write papers, and sometimes the power is legitimated through the force of personality. And sometimes, although there are no explicit rules, certain categories of people have more power.
There may be no rhyme or reason to why people accord power to certain categories of people. Tall people, for example, have an advantage that does not seem related to any historical causes.

Of 43 American presidents, only five have been more than a smidgeon below average height, and the last of those was Benjamin Harrison, elected in 1888. (Another three, most recently Jimmy Carter, were just a hair below average.) Most presidents have been several inches above the norm for their times, with the five tallest being Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, and Franklin Roosevelt. (Landsburg 2002; for similar benefits of height to earnings, see Judge and Cable 2004)
But some categorical power and powerlessness has deep historical roots. Consider ethnicity, for example: Disadvantaged minorities—Dalits (untouchables) in India, Roma (gypsies) in Eastern Europe—lack power, and they may be socially discriminated against long after legal discrimination has ended.
Gender in face-to-face interactions seems to exert an independent effect. A considerable body of research on how conversations work, for example, suggests that women talk less than men and are more likely to be interrupted. Theory explains this is because gender shapes performance expectations; group members do not expect women to make as important a contribution as men, so women hold less power in the conversation. At the same time the internal development of the conversation itself may be more important than gender in determining who can change the topic. Early participants accumulate more power to direct the conversation than those who hold back at the beginning. In this sense the group develops its own micro-culture of power (Okamoto and Smith-Lovin 2001). Either can be seen as an issue of legitimacy: The group regards men and/or early participants as having a legitimate right to initiate topics or cut other people off—in other words, to get their own way in the discussion.
Although we usually assume that even small groups must have a strong leader to work, egalitarian cultures may be even more effective. Some political movements have internal cultures that encourage sharing power, working toward consensus, and bottom-up decision making. Francesca Polletta (2002) has shown that social movements from the 1950s and 1960s advocated and practiced such “participatory democracy.” Instead of this diffusion of power producing paralysis or anarchy, she found that such micro-cultures enabled civil rights and antiwar groups to strengthen their solidarity even as they nimbly adjusted to local circumstances.

The sheer diversity of input into tactical choice that participatory democracy makes possible has enabled activists to outpace their opponents in generating novel tactics. In the Southern civil rights movement, organizers used participatory democracy to school local residents in the practice of politics.… Far from opposed to leadership, they aimed to create political leaders—and to create the mechanisms that would keep leaders accountable to their constituents. (2)
On the other hand, some groups skirt political conversation altogether in the interests of peace as they pursue other, non-political goals (Eliasoph 1998). Although this type of consensus through not talking about contentious issues may allow the group to function, such a non-confrontational local culture discourages reflection on the power relationships within the group itself. Becker’s (1999) study of the local cultures in American church congregations suggests something along this line. Some churches were “families,” and like families, their conflicts were passionate and personal. One church’s conflict over reporting procedures became “a matter of trust and caring, not accounting practices” (93). These churches were subject to upheavals and either dramatic change or the highly visible reassertion of power, which often rested in the hands of the pastor as patriarch. Other churches were emotionally cooler “houses of worship,” where offices and committees held the power and made the decisions. In these, conflicts were rare, and issues seldom unsettled the bureaucratic arrangements whereby power rested in duly elected officials. An appropriate exercise of pastoral power in the church as family would be an improper procedural violation in the house of worship.
Identity Politics
We have seen some of the mechanisms whereby culture serves the interests of power, including making something legitimate, moral, or common sense. One of the critical and most common ways this process takes place is in the construction of a group’s past and its implications for future action. History, in particular a group’s or a nation’s collective memory, makes some actions seem legitimate, moral, or common sense but not others. Yet history is a cultural construct, subject to individual and institutional manipulation, revision, and selective emphasis and forgetting.
We begin with the social basis of cognition and its consequences. As we saw in Chapter 4, Eviatar Zerubavel (1997), who looks at the structuring of time and other forms of collective cognition, argues that in between cognitive universalism of neuroscience and the cognitive individualism of romantic ideology and psychoanalysis lies the social mind. This defines the field of cognitive sociology, which requires a comparative approach to cognition that would “highlight our cognitive diversity as members of different thought communities” (11). Zerubavel urges us to examine the cognitive division of labor within a society, as well as the differences among societies. He draws attention to the social influences on perception (what people notice), attention and concern (what people care about), classification (how people categorize things, meanings, memories—what to remember, what to forget, how to feel about it), and time (how people place things in the past or future). For example, many African Americans regard slavery as a relatively recent “cultural trauma” having pressing contemporary meaning, while many white Americans see it as a long past institution having little current relevance (Eyerman 2002). Such group differences in the salience of past events are true at the level of nations as well; old wounds are commemorated by some and conveniently forgotten by others.
While we may say that the shared understanding of the past and future shapes our “worlds” in a phenomenological sense, such “worlds” do not necessarily lead to specific behavioral outcomes, nor do they necessarily influence other people’s worlds. Culture gains power only when it combines with resources. Ideologies about gender, for example, only work in combination with resource advantages. If a society believes that girls are not as good at math as boys are (ideology), the girls may prove this to be wrong if equal opportunities in the classroom (resource); if the boys are channeled into science classes, however, the ideology will combine with the educational resources to result in a self-fulfilling prophesy: more boys will succeed in science (Charles and Bradley 2009). Here Sewell’s (1992) theory of structure, mentioned in Chapter 2, will help. Recall Sewell’s discussion of cultural schemas, the general presuppositions underlying more explicit rules that can be transferred and applied to new situations. Schemas were only part of structure, however. The other half consists of resources, both human and material. Sewell puts resources and schemas together in his definition of social structure, which is “composed simultaneously of schemas, which are virtual, and of resources, which are actual.” Schemas are the effects of resources, and resources are the effects of schemas.
It is easy to see where power comes into such a conception. The powerful control more resources than the less powerful. We usually think of this at the level of nations or large groups, but it can operate at the small group level as well. When a family watches television together, the person holding the remote has the power; in the British working-class family, that person is usually the father (Morley 1986). Power gets legitimated through schemas; if there is an underlying schema that says that men are more decisive than women, this schema will structure new situations in which men get to make the decisions, often accumulating resources by doing so, and thus will reproduce male power.
But what about change? Wouldn’t any given structure of power just reproduce itself: Dad always gets the remote, Mom is always seen as not very capable outside the home sphere, and on and on forever? It is certainly the case that power structures tend to reproduce themselves. Educational systems, as Pierre Bourdieu and many others have pointed out, tend to take children who already have social advantages and pile on more advantages, putting them in more powerful positions when they become adults (Bourdieu 1984; Gaztambide-Fernandez 2009; Lareau 2003). Yet things obviously do change, and to account for this, Sewell modifies Bourdieu’s (1984) idea of the habitus, those underlying transposable dispositions that reproduce structure even in improvised action in totally new contexts. Although the habitus is basic to his conception of schemas, Sewell stresses that we need a less rigid conception, a more “multiple, contingent, and fractured conception of society—and of structure” (16). With multiple structures, various schemas that may conflict, and unpredictable resource shifts, change happens. Mom enters the labor force, accumulating new resources and new domestic power. Or second-wave feminism changes the schemas about men’s and women’s capacities to make decisions. And next thing you know, Mom is holding the remote—or will be until technological change, another unpredictable factor, makes the remote itself obsolete.
Powerful schemas include those of gender and race, as in the above examples, but one that may be less obvious is that of collective memory. Groups differ sharply in what they remember and how they feel about it—Zerubavel’s “social mind” at work—and when a memory acquires resources, it becomes history. We saw this in Chapter 4 in Binder’s (2001) study of local school conflicts where proponents of Afrocentricism or creationism struggled to control curricular decisions that could institutionalize their version of history. The former found support from a widely shared memory of discrimination against African Americans, where there was no general collective memory of discrimination against evangelicals. At an international level, the ongoing conflict between Japanese and Chinese interpretation of the events of the 1930s and World War II is an example of a clash of collective memories institutionalized in textbooks, museums, and commemoration.
More generally we can say that history is a documented account of the past, institutionally supported (e.g., in books and through education). History is complex, with levels of detail; it must be taught and may not be known by all members of the group. Collective memory, on the other hand, is known by definition, for it is an account of the past shared by a group. Often such memories are perpetuated orally, informally, and sometimes secretly if the memory goes against the history as promoted by the dominant group. History and collective memory may or may not coincide. Commemorations, monuments, and museums are typical ways states try to make them coincide. Documentaries, eyewitness accounts, stories, rumors, and photos are typical ways people resist.
A recent example comes from the tenth anniversary of the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, at which time the different ways the Bosnian Muslims and Serbians commemorated the event were in sharp conflict. In 1995 during the Bosnian War in former Yugoslavia, Bosnian Serb forces advanced on Srebrenica as part of the “ethnic cleansing” campaign. Thousands of Bosnian Muslims fled their homes and sought help from the small contingent of Dutch UN peacekeepers, for the UN had designated Srebrenica as a “safe area.” But Serb forces attacked, killing the men and boys, while the peacekeepers stood by helplessly. About 8,000 men and boys died in Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II.
In the summer of 2005 tens of thousands of people held ceremonies marking the tenth anniversary of the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. Grieving relatives buried more than 600 newly identified dead, after prayers and words of support from international and local officials. Serbian officials led by President Tadic paid respects for the first time. Muslim prayers echoed through the valley of the memorial site at Potocari, the site of the slaughter, as women in white headscarves wept beside the remains of their loved ones. The green coffins were then passed from hand to hand through the crowd to the freshly dug gravesites, as announcers called out one by one the names of the 610 dead. Each family buried its own dead, by hand or using shovels and buckets.
Serbia’s parliament, on the other hand, observed a minute of silence for all victims of violence in and around Srebrenica and of the previous week’s London subway bombing by Islamists. It failed to make specific reference to the Srebrenica massacre. Even the parliament’s diluted commemoration was boycotted by the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party. Here we have a striking contrast, with the Muslims trying to concentrate the focus on the massacre, limiting the attention in terms of time and space, and the Serbs trying to broaden it, referring to other atrocities (London bombings, times when Bosnian Muslims killed Serbs) or, in the case of the Nationalist Party and many Serbs (according to news accounts based on interviews), ignoring and denying it altogether.
The collective memory of the Bosnian Muslims differs from that of the Serbs. The many books and historical accounts written by outsiders, for example, Dutch peacekeepers, U.N. records, generally supports the Bosnian Muslim version, but that is irrelevant to the Serbs. This matters, of course, because past grievances justify—make legitimate, make moral, make common sense—future actions.
Historian David Lowenthal (1985) describes how collective memory and history intertwine, pointing out that for many people the past has become fragile and elusive, something cherished as “heritage” to be “preserved.” We know the past—and shape our schemas about it—through memory, history, and relics but also through imagination. With such aids, memory organizes consciousness, transforming welter of actual experience into desirable or meaningful events, and these become institutionalized as history. “Just as memory validates personal identity, history perpetuates collective self-awareness” (213). The past can be changed in many ways (e.g., through museum exhibits, artifacts, textbooks, or reenactments). Sometimes it is cleaned up. Typically this happens when myths of national origins conveniently lose sight of the atrocities that took place at the country’s founding. Lowenthal discusses a more amusing example of how hyperrealistic reenactments at Nova Scotia’s Louisbourg fortress had to be prettied up when too many tourists were disconcerted by the bored soldiers and “syphilitic whores” taking tickets.
Who has the power to reshape the past? While oral accounts associated with collective memory have the capacity to change the past, as in Goody and Watt’s (1963) account of the revised tribal history discussed in the previous chapter, those with control over institutions that can fix “history” have the most power. In the United States, museums and history textbooks for over a century presented a progressive view of history, but in the late twentieth century they replaced this with a relativistic one that gives more weight to the costs (for Native Americans, African slaves, and immigrant laborers) of nation building. Even relativism has its costs, as when critics charge that the Smithsonian’s monumental Museum of the American Indian homogenizes Native American experiences, making all Indians seem alike.
The Aesthetics of Power
Identities are the key to political thought and action. If cultural creators can frame their message so it resonates with a frame that the audience already possesses, they are more likely to persuade that audience to “buy” the message. Political propaganda operates this way quite overtly. Barry Schwartz (1996) has shown how Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, working to mobilize support for American involvement in World War II, keyed its pro-war message to the Lincoln frame from the past. Counting on the collective memory that honored Abraham Lincoln’s resolve in the face of war, the administration legitimated American military action by fitting it to the public’s “horizon of expectations” that included the sacred place that Lincoln held. This succeeded in orienting Americans toward the necessity and nobility of going to war.
Political framing is hard to accomplish. Debate over whether or not the Darfur conflict should be called genocide is an example where using the past (holocaust) to frame the present (the Janjaweed’s slaughter of Darfur villagers) is hotly contested. Some want to use the genocide to organize the political response to Darfur, focusing attention and ascribing meaning. But there are various historical discourses at play—not just genocide but memories of Western interference, African tribalism, and Muslim grievances—and so far there has been no agreed-upon frame.
Power holders as well as seekers of power work to legitimate their chosen frames through rituals and symbols. We saw earlier that this is in part a matter of efficiency: It is cheaper to organize a parade that whips up enthusiasm for the regime than it is to operate a police state. But how do such aesthetic claims about power actually work?
Paul DiMaggio (1997) has looked at the interaction between cognition and social life. He notes that under everyday circumstances, people organize information via automatic cognition, using “culturally available schemata—knowledge structures that represent objects of events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics, relationships, and entailments under conditions of incomplete information” (269). But sometimes there is the need to employ deliberative cognition, which is slow, deliberate, reflexive, and critical. One can think of this in Zerubavel’s terms as the social mind on autopilot versus the social mind aware of itself.
DiMaggio sees culture operating through the interaction of three forms: information, distributed unevenly through a population; schematic representations that shape the way we perceive, interpret, remember, and feel about the information we encounter; and culture as external symbol systems. Culture is not any one of the three but the interaction among them. For example, think of the schemas of the Bosnian Muslims versus those of the Serbs. Such schemas become activated by external cues, as in Srebrenica anniversary commemoration. Enacting their different schemas through institutional venues (e.g., the Serbian parliament, the international media), the two groups offered jarringly different interpretations of the recent past, and these interpretations then were available as information that could confirm or challenge future understanding of that past.
While power gets embodied in parliamentary speeches and commemorative rituals, it also impresses itself on human bodies. Susan Bordo (1993) has taken as her cultural object the female body as cultural image and biological organism. Everyone is aware of the fashion industry’s and the media’s celebration of an unnatural thinness, and this is often linked to the rise of eating disorders like anorexia among both celebrities and the population at large. Bordo maintains that contrary to the medical establishment’s view of such eating disorders as pathological, in fact the anorexics’ attitudes toward eating is not some “bizarre” cognitive disorder but an accurate representation of, and appropriate response to, cultural messages about desirable weight. Starvation constitutes a reasonable plan of action whereby the anorexic as creator produces a body as cultural object that reflects the ideal embedded in the receivers’ horizon of expectations. The plan makes cultural sense, in other words, even though it may prove fatal. In Bordo’s contrarian account, it is not the anorexic who is sick; it is the culture itself with its objectification and commodification of women’s bodies. Beauty both confers and is defined by power, and the anorexic is just trying to grab some power back.
Probably the most familiar form of power through aesthetics is at the national level—parades, holidays, spectacular celebrations—but even nationalism can be enacted on and through bodily aesthetics. Falesca-Zamponi (1997) describes how, during the Fascist period, Mussolini demanded that Italians greet one another with a Roman salute (stiff arm, right hand perpendicular) rather than a handshake, which according to the regime signified bourgeois decadence. Mussolini said the salute was “more hygienic, more aesthetic and shorter.” The salute was mandatory in schools and when subordinates greeted superiors, but it was also used between equals, for it became a sign of loyalty and fit a regime that promoted itself as dynamic and efficient. Since it showed “decisive spirit, firmness, seriousness, and acknowledgment and acceptance of the regime’s hierarchical structure,” therefore proof of fascist character, the theory was that practicing the salute itself could actually change character. Today on the other side of the globe Korea—the mass games of the North, the March 1 parades linking patriotism and Protestantism of the South—offers vivid examples of the corporal expression of nationalism (Kane and Park 2009; Myers 2010;).
People tend to distinguish between states and nations with respect to the culture/power relationship along the following lines: States deploy culture to legitimate themselves and their power over citizens, and they often meet resistance. Nations, on the other hand, are primordial, based on pre-existing cultures; they too deploy culture, but it meets no resistance. Ever since Benedict Anderson’s ([1983] 1991) “imagined community” thesis discussed in the previous chapter, however, which itself built on earlier work on “the invention of tradition,” sociologists have been aware that nations are not “natural” but constructed. States make their claims to legitimacy on the basis of this myth of a nation, a myth elaborated in cultural symbols.
The Baltic nation of Latvia, under Soviet control until 1991, exemplifies the political potency of national culture. Diana Eglitis (2002) locates the founding national myth in the Bearslayer epic about a heroic defender of his nation’s freedom. The epic features love of nature, ambivalence of Christianity, mistrust of cities, centrality of song, and suspicion of foreigners. Latvia’s “singing revolution” (1986–1991) voiced antipathy toward Soviets and the desire for return to “normality,” the nation’s “natural” state that preceded the Soviet takeover. In other words, the goal was a return to the Bearslayer nation. The revolution began on June 14, 1987, when a massive demonstration took place at the Freedom Monument in downtown Riga. The Freedom Monument, created by Kârlis Zâle in 1935, features a Liberty Statue—a woman with three stars symbolizing regional parts of Latvia—and allegorical and historical carvings, including one of the Bearslayer in action. The monument came to symbolize the anti-Soviet resistance of the late 1980s and today is a shrine to national independence, decorated with flowers each day by the city’s residents. The Latvian nation-state is a political entity founded on epic poetry, sculpture, and floral tributes.
Even statues and salutes have trouble molding a nation in the face of sharp group divisions. Multicultural societies prove especially challenging. Nation builders can use schemas, resources, and aesthetics to support a number of approaches:

  • Suppress multiculturalism through removal, ethnic cleansing, or denial. Examples include pre-1995 Bosnia, the Darfur region of the Sudan, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Such suppression is typically a tactic of authoritarian regimes but may also be a choice made by separatist movements themselves, as in the Kurdish independence movement or the back-to-Africa movements of the early-twentieth-century United States.
  • Deny multiculturalism. Such a denial characterized the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when assimilation and a melting pot were the shared assumptions. Japan to this day largely ignores its ethnic minorities and their problems. France and the Netherlands are similarly seen as denying the fundamental differences represented by their Muslim minorities under an illusion that time will transform them into simply being French or Dutch.
  • Marginalize or create a separate space for minority cultures. This has been the policy toward Native Americans in Canada and the United States, Aboriginals in Australia, and the Sami in Norway and Finland. Marginalized groups are often excluded from the nation’s political discourse and/or forcefully assimilated, as in the case of China’s policy toward Tibetans.
  • Admit the existence of multiculturalism but create an overarching, pan-cultural identity. This was the policy of the Soviet Union. It was also the policy of Nigeria in 1970s, where the intractable differences among 250 different tribes were papered over by the cosmopolitan image of the “New Nigerian.” More recently, New Nigerian has given way to a tenuous balance among the competing ethnic and religious interests.
  • Celebrate multiculturalism as part of their national identity. This has become the United States’ policy, though imperfectly and not without struggle, of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Many expect it to become European policy as well, though it is meeting strong resistance in Europe.

One thing a nation cannot do with multiculturalism is ignore it. The Netherlands offers a cautionary example here. For decades the Dutch welcomed immigrants but paid little attention to their cultural worlds, assuming that the Netherlands’ easygoing, tolerant, rational way of life would absorb the newcomers and shape their values along European lines. For some immigrants it worked that way, but others were appalled by what they regarded as the licentiousness and godlessness of Dutch life. When Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born feminist critical of Islam’s treatment of women, and Theo van Gogh, an avant-garde filmmaker, made a provocative film relating the abuse of women to the Qur’an, a radical Islamist named Mohammed Bouyeri responded in November 2004 by stabbing van Gogh to death (Buruma 2006). Bouyeri, born in Amsterdam and holding both Moroccan and Dutch passports, might seem an exemplar of the cosmopolitan, global citizen, but instead he epitomizes those fundamentalists who reject modernity in favor of a narrow and intolerant worldview. He pinned a note to van Gogh’s body excoriating the West, Jews, feminists, and secularized Muslims. Immigrant leaders and Dutch officials, while decrying the murder itself, became increasingly engaged in wrestling with the complexities of a multicultural society. A statue, erected in 2007 at the site of the murder, that honors free speech is one symbolic response. More significant is the widespread recognition that while different cultures need not produce perpetual conflict, their co-presence has real consequences—witness the struggle over the “Ground Zero mosque” in New York—that cannot be dismissed in some complacent fantasy of the Enlightenment.
Political Acts as Cultural Objects
Culture’s role in political life goes well beyond spectacles of power and group membership. Elected and unelected office holders use aesthetic means to shore up their claims to legitimacy. Rituals seem especially pertinent to the assurance of orderly transitions, continuity despite change, as when European countries proclaim at the accession of a new monarch with “The King is dead. Long live the King.” Barack Obama’s 2008 Election Night rally in Chicago’s Grant Park—the media coverage, the giant high-definition screens, the stage, the flags, the victory speech, and the crowd itself both making history and witnessing itself witnessing history—is a recent case of the ritualized aesthetics of power.
Americans are familiar with the symbols that attend a president: The band plays “Hail to the Chief,” everyone stands when the president enters the room, and important speeches are delivered against a carefully studied background of flags, portraits of Lincoln, and other sacred symbols of the American polity. Candidates for office and their advisors ponder how to dress, what photo opportunities to arrange, and how to project both leadership and the common touch required in a democracy. Impressions matter, and the specter of Richard Nixon visibly sweating during his debate with John Kennedy in 1960 haunts candidates, as the media zoom in. At the inauguration of the president, Washington witnesses a round of balls—there were nine official inaugural balls in 2005—with the president making an appearance to dance briefly at each. Through the media, the whole world is indeed watching, and the rituals do not just ornament the political transition but in some respects actually make it happen.
In Britain the queen opens Parliament each autumn in an elaborate performance that seems straight out of a fairy tale. First is the ceremonial search of the cellars of Westminster Palace, reenacting the danger posed by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Next a member of the House of Commons is taken hostage at Buckingham Palace to guarantee the sovereign’s safe return. The queen travels to Westminster in a horse-drawn coach, where she puts on the Robes and Crown of State. She delivers the Speech from the Throne (written not by her, of course, but by the Cabinet) outlining the government’s agenda for the coming session. Finally she withdraws, having ensured by this ritual that the business of government can commence.
It might seem from such panoply of tradition that when it comes to impression management, more is always better, but this is not the case. Not only does the substance of impression management differ from place to place—black tie and cowboy boots versus the Crown of State—but the style does as well. Jean-Pascal Daloz (2003) has studied displays of ostentation by political elites in various countries. Ostentation in politics is “a sharp contrast with regard to the common lot … expressed through the appropriation of the rarest goods but also through the ceremonial, and the most refined manners” (38–39). Ostentation can legitimate power in some contexts but not others (in terms of the cultural diamond, it all depends on the receivers’ expectations). Daloz shows that in Nigeria, the leaders’ extravagant show of wealth in expensive cars, luxurious dress, and bevies of retainers reassures the clients in a patronage system that the Big Man continues to be in a position to provide for them. At the opposite extreme are the Scandinavian countries, where ostentation is rejected. There, politicians work hard to maintain the profile of being very ordinary and somewhat boring. France falls in between, with leaders wavering between exhibiting aristocratic refinement and the common touch.
Of course, such political rituals often don’t succeed. When the electorate perceives politicians to be working too hard on their images, it is distinctly unimpressed. If not altogether cynical, voters are sophisticated in the marketing and media manipulation—spin—done by political candidates, thus making it harder than ever to impress them. New technologies help, so in the early twenty-first century political websites and blogs were fertile arenas for managing impressions and garnering support (Howard Dean’s candidacy in 2004 was initially an Internet phenomenon), but such novelty is hard to maintain. Even rituals with some tradition behind them can lose their ability to legitimate power.
This may be a function of the limited capacity of ritual itself in today’s complex and media-saturated world. Jeffrey Alexander (2004) has defined rituals as “episodes of repeated and simplified cultural communication in which the direct partners to a social interaction, and those observing it, share a mutual belief in the descriptive and prescriptive validity of the communication’s symbolic contents and accept the authenticity of one another’s intentions” (527). An effective ritual “energizes the participants and attaches them to each other” (527). This surely captures what every political leader would like to achieve. Formal rituals as such are less central in complex, rationalized societies, but social performances—like those of political leaders—have the same structures and goals (to legitimate power, to make a transition from one social state to another). Such performances and rituals fail when they seem artificial and inauthentic. As always, much depends on the perceptions of those in the position of receiving the cultural object. This is why every four years Americans watch their presidential candidates go through their performances in early primary states—shaking hands in New Hampshire, touring hog farms and ethanol plants in Iowa—but are more amused than persuaded by these mandatory performances.
The slightly silly spectacle of a suit-and-tie candidate making the rounds of hog farms and maple sugar houses is not just an American political quirk. French candidates get photographed on horseback; Japanese politicians protect inefficient rice farmers through tariffs; Nigerian presidents visit chicken farms. “In the South Korean National Assembly, rural voters are ‘overrepresented’ by a margin of three to one. This disproportionate influence of farm voters has led to high tariffs on food imports, forcing Korean consumers to pay some of the world’s highest prices for beef, fruits, and vegetables” (Stokes 2007). Around the ever-more-urban world, the farm is a meaningful cultural object that bespeaks the native soil and homely virtues at the root of national pride. The cultural object is universal, but the particularities—hog farms, rice farms, chicken farms—fit the social world in which the politician is operating. Or at least that is the producer’s (the political advisor’s, the media specialist’s, the party leader’s) intention. The recipients (the voters, the onlookers, the media), however, may find the object meaningless, or they may attach a more cynical meaning to it, viewing the image of man-looking-thoughtfully-at-cow not as a signifier of the candidate’s rural sympathies but as one more obligatory photo-op as he trolls for votes.
Cultures Without Centers
National myths and politicians’ efforts to embody them are fighting against the tide of a de-centered world. At the dawn of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats made the double prediction that bears repeating: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.” Now, at the dawn of a new century, we realize he was half right. Cultural centers did not hold. We have gone from a bipolar to a polycentric world, from a world of cultural hierarchies to a world of multiple and parallel meaning systems, from a world where specialists controlled access to information to a world where “the best that has been thought and known,” and the worst too, is accessible to anyone who goes online.
Cultural purity is gone from the face of the earth; it was probably always a myth, but now few even pretend to believe in it. We are all hybrids now (Ang 2001; Bhabha 1994). Even the popular image of multiculturalism as a mosaic, a salad bowl in which different cultures mix but keep their integrity, is misleading (Hannerz 1993). Cultures are more like soups, flavored with many ingredients, some unidentifiable.
At the same time, however, things did not fall apart. Human beings continue to ward off chaos through cultural objects; the embrace of chaos tends to be a temporary and highly stylized posture of youth, like the jackets embroidered with “Live fast, die young.” People continue to produce and perpetuate their cultures through interaction and socialization. Our original cultural definitions still work. People may exist in multiple communities through multiple networks, but along these networks they still share meanings with one another. Communities, whether relational or spatial, still collectively represent themselves through patterns of meanings embodied in symbols, meanings that shape attitudes and actions.
In a de-centered world, understanding the connections among cultures and societies may require a handful of cultural diamonds, but the familiar questions still apply. To understand any cultural phenomenon, from the traditional to the postmodern, one needs to ask: What are the characteristics of this specific cultural object? What does it mean, and for whom? Who are its creators? Who are its receivers, and how do they interpret it? From what social world does it come, and into what social world is it sent? One can ask these questions about an MTV video or an idea sent through the Internet just as one can ask them about a Chinese poem or a Nigerian masquerade. Their answers will continue to be revealing about the relevant social world. And those people who can come up with the answers will be those best equipped to navigate in this still new century.
QUESTIONS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION

  1. Think of the micro-politics, the power struggles and attempts to get one’s own way, of a very small group: a dating couple. In the case of a conflict, how does each person use culture to support his or her own position? Develop an example of how the conflict might play out.
  2. What makes the various forms of reconstructing the past work politically, and what makes them fail? Consider how a contemporary leader or candidate refers to some historical figure or past event to justify a line of action. Is this move successful? Why or why not?
  3. How does your own country, or a country with which you are familiar, deploy culture to create nationalism? What succeeds and what fails? Why are some attempts to do this more successful than others? Is this form of nation building ultimately divisive and destructive, or is it a necessary part of building a collective identity?
  4. Can a visual spectacle like a parade or convention have any impact on political life today? What about a website? If you were running for office, what type of political aesthetics would you invest in, and why?

RECOMMENDED FOR FURTHER READING

Howard, Phil. 2006. New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Howard gives a partly appalling, partly amusing account of the impact of the Internet and ICTs on American political life during the first presidential election in which it played a major role. He also portrays the inside-the-beltway geek culture that produces the techno-politics.
Ikegami, Eiko. 2006. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. In this rich cultural history by a sociologist, Ikegami locates the aesthetic foundation of Japanese collective identity and political practices.
Straughn, Jeremy Brooke. 2005. “Taking the State at Its Word”: The Arts of Consentful Contention in the German Democratic Republic. American Journal of Sociology 110:1598–1650. Straughn shows how even in a repressive political context, the powerless can fight back by seeming to take the ideals of the powerful with utmost seriousness, thereby justifying their resistance.

And comment on this:
Introduction
Gathering personal, confidential information from an underserved population requires preparation from the stakeholders and selected committee members based on qualifications, connections, and investment in a positive outcome.  To ensure confidentiality, privacy, and accuracy the researcher must come prepared with a clear understanding of the problem and how changes will affect a housing subsidy that provides safe and affordable shelter.
Discussion
Face to face interviews is a qualitative method that helps both the tenant and the researcher to feel comfortable, ask questions, and be honest about each piece of the investigation into accurate financial disclosure.   Not only can the questionnaire be focused on accurate disclosure of financial information, the researcher can gather information from the environment, the apartment. If there are more things in the unit that cost money, questions can be expanded to include the history behind the purchase of those identified objects.
In the initial disclosure form, the researcher must explain why the interview is happening and what will come from the answers.  Questions can start with an approved list of what income is and what it means to have accurate disclosure. Eventually, the tenant should include anecdotal information that helps to fill in missing information.  The quantitative methods that can be used with a single housing authority population are interval sampling method (Soriano, 2013) to select many tenants who might not understand their obligation to disclose all financial information while not objectifying the entire population.  The alternative to applying the needs assessment to one housing authority is to approach an entire region combining several housing authorities’ and use the systematic sample method (Soriano, 2013) where groups of a target population can be studied systematically.
One drawback to using any sampling methods is the researcher and potential biases or limited knowledge of the target population.  Another limitation is the accuracy of the answers given by the tenants.  If the preparatory work to establish a trusting relationship was not done correctly, the answers given in any of the data collection efforts will be unreliable.  There is always the possibility that tenants who have agreed to participate in the early stages of the needs assessment now have changed their minds or have moved.
Conclusion
Safe shelter is identified as a critical piece of Maslow’s need hierarchy theory in the quest for self-actualization (Graham, & Balloun,1973).  During the investigative piece of the assessment, it is the researcher’s responsibility to be sensitive to the delicate nature of maintaining safe affordable shelter while gathering data that will help to solve the problem of non-disclosuremc.
References
Graham, W. K., & Balloun, J. (1973). An empirical test of Maslow’s need hierarchy theory. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 13(1), 97-108. 10.1177/002216787301300114
Soriano, F. I. (2013). Conducting needs assessments: A multidisciplinary approach (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. ISBN: 9781412965743.
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