The trajectory ofmy argument has been to address conceptual approaches that provide an increasingly expansive understanding ofthe extent to which, and the ways in which, broader segments of the community are viewed as political actors. I look now at what can be described broadly (though not always helpfully) as poststructural approaches to politics, represented most significantly in classical scholarship by the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. Suggestive of the overlap and trajectory of the different conceptual approaches described here, Bourdieu’s and Foucault’s own positions evolved from an intellectual affinity with Marxism and structuralism in their earlier work to an increasing emphasis on how groups and subgroups are engaged in practices that are structured by, and in turn alter, particular historical discourses.
Bourdieu
In many ways, the intersection of classical interests and Bourdieu’s work should come as no surprise (on Bourdieu and the classics, see Hammer 2006). Bourdieu’s early fieldwork in Kabylia, for example, supplemented a growing interest by classicists in using comparative anthropological data to shed light on the operation of ancient societies. ‘‘The Berber house’’ took as its starting point a description of the arrangement of social space: the house. These arrangements, as Bourdieu suggested, could not be explained completely by ‘‘technical imperatives or functional requirements’’ (1970: 153). Rather, employing a structural approach, one could identify in the household a whole series of symbolically mediated ‘‘homologous oppositions’’: dark and light, nature and culture, animal and human, raw and cooked, and lower and higher, all of which are organized around the complementary opposition of female and male (1970: 157). Like much of structural analysis, these oppositions become political as they are seen as the organizing principles for the society (Bour-dieu 1970: 157; also Detienne 1977; Segal 1986; Loraux 1986, 1993; and Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988).
The attention to the organization of space was of interest to classicists because it provided a way to interpret the structures of social spaces from the scant archaeological record (see Gould 1980: 47-8; I. Morris 1999, 2000: 280-6). The problem is, as Morris himself would recognize, that it becomes nearly impossible to untangle whether the structural system of binary oppositions was an artifact of the archaeological record or an artifact of the anthropologist’s imagination (Morris 1999: 11). Bourdieu would later revise his structuralism by seeing the categories and boundaries of social and political interaction, including those of Kabyle society, as ambiguous and fluid, subject to manipulation, negotiation, interpretation, and innovation (Bourdieu 1977: 10; see also 1990 and revised interpretations by D. Cohen 1989: 9; Foxhall 1989: 22-4).
One of the most innovative aspects of Bourdieu’s work is his attempt to show how the political order - a field in which agents struggle to assert their vision of how to perceive and express the social world (1991a: 172) - is transferred to and inscribed in our inner expressions and outward conduct. That is, politics is not just about a struggle between groups; that struggle is translated into bodily dispositions, or a ‘‘bodily hexis’’ that is a repository of a ‘‘durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking’’ (1990: 69-70). Read into the ancient world, Bourdieu’s notion of bodily hexis provided a powerful conceptual tool for interpreting the body as the site in which gender and power relations are enacted: how broader social and political structures not only produce the interests, motivations, and practices of individuals and groups, but also how these dispositions may be modified as they confront and are adapted to new situations and experiences (Gleason 1995; Stewart 1997; Steiner 1998; Gunderson 1998, 2000).
Bourdieu’s approach allowed not just for an understanding of how the political is inscribed in the body but also, in turn, for a way to interpret the operation of differential relations of power in a society without reducing the determinants of these relations to economic class. Bourdieu extended considerably the insights into the activity of gift exchange, developed most influentially by Marcel Mauss, to understand a variety of social interactions (Bourdieu 1977: 183-6). Social relationships are determined (or at least substantially influenced) by the distribution of different forms of what Bourdieu referred to as ‘‘capital’’: economic capital (material resources), social capital (relationships with key people), cultural capital (possession of culturally valued items, such as knowledge), and symbolic capital (such as prestige) (1991b: 230; 1977: 171-97). Bourdieu offered a way, as well, to interpret hidden strategies of domination. This hiddenness, which Bourdieu refers to as ‘‘symbolic violence,’’ occurs as ‘‘misrecognized’’ domination (1977: 192): an acceptance of the legitimacy of differential relations that are maintained through the accumulation of different forms of capital and inscribed in our bodily habits and mental perceptions (or what Bourdieu refers to as ‘‘habitus’’).
Bourdieu’s approach, as applied to the ancient world, allowed for a sophisticated way of interpreting the political without reducing it to either objective forces or subjective intentions. Price, for example, uses Bourdieu’s model of gift exchange to understand the establishment of the Roman imperial cult in Greece (Price 1984). Habinek focuses on how the ‘‘symbolic capital of literature augments the common property of the Roman elites,’’ functioning both to preserve them against autocracy and exclude others from access to elite privilege (Habinek 1998: 66; also Leach 2003). And perhaps most ambitiously, Kurke sees herself as doing for the archaic Greek world what Bourdieu did in Distinction:, offer a richly textured exploration of the ‘‘material symbols that identify and reproduce different class fractions’’ (Kurke 1999: xi; also D. Cohen 1991 on moral structures; Griffith 1995 on Athens; Alden 2000 on Homer).
Foucault
In many ways, Foucault’s work followed the same trajectory as Bourdieu’s. In his earlier writings, Foucault emphasized the role of structures, or what he referred to as discursive practices, in constituting individuals as subjects. Discourses could be best understood as regimes of truth, organized around networks of power and institutional arrangements, that defined both the values by which we try to live and the practices that help us live that way.
In his later work, Foucault turned toward identifying what he described as a specifically modern, scientific discourse of sexuality that allowed (and still allows) society to exercise increasing scrutiny and control over the desires of the subject. Foucault’s interest in the genealogy of this modern discourse of sexuality pushed him back further and further into the ancient world where he identified a much different discourse organized around the care of the self. Foucault’s work has served as an impetus (both as embrace and critique) for many explorations of the social and historical construction of sexuality and gender in the ancient world. The political significance of these analyses lies in the ways that sexuality and gender emerge as sites in which relations of power are both inscribed and contested.
In classical Greece, as Foucault suggests, the care of the self emphasized self-mastery and was organized around, and used to reinforce, the differential power relationships of active citizen and passive noncitizen. A slightly different story is told of Rome. With the disintegration of the city-state and the traditional relationship between ‘‘one’s status, one’s functions, one’s activities, and one’s obligations,’’ the emphasis of the care of the self turned toward defining a ‘‘principle of a relation to self that will make it possible to set the forms and conditions in which political action, participation in the offices of power, the exercise of a function, will be possible or not possible, acceptable or necessary’’ (Foucault 1990b: 85-6). Extending Foucault’s argument, Skinner suggests that we might understand Roman sexuality as serving as ‘‘an ordered semantic system for articulating social anxieties’’ about maintaining authority and honor in an imperial society with increasing constraints (M. Skinner 1997: 5).
Foucault has drawn considerable scholarly fire for his ambitious interpretation of the ancient world. Feminists have criticized Foucault’s project because it tended to discount (or outright ignore) the active role and experiences of women in their own sexuality (Richlin 1991; 1992: xiv-xvii; 1998; Foxhall 1998) or of groups outside the narrow elite that Foucault identifies (Edwards 1993: 56-7). In fact, as Richlin reminds us, the notion of the body as constituted by the organizing principles of political life had a long feminist pedigree that preceded Foucault (Richlin 1991: 174; also 1992; Rabinowitz and Richlin 1993). Others have criticized Foucault for failing to recognize the degree of difference and conflict in beliefs and values that may lie within a particular historical period (P. Miller 1998). And significant criticism has come from those responding to his claim that the ancient mode of ‘‘subjectivation’’ (or way of making oneself an ethical being) involved a set of practices that treated and transformed the self as a work of art (Foucault 1990a: 29; 1988). Critics charge Foucault with slipping into a fundamental (and for some, a dangerous) error by making aesthetics itself, and not living according to a universal, rational, and natural order, as the end of self-fashioning. Absent the goal of living in truth (or with the realization that living in truth is living in a constructed discourse of truth), self-fashioning for the sake of self-fashioning is seen as taking on a certain modern feel - a form of‘‘dandyism,’’ in Hadot’s oft-quoted words (1992: 230).
Although one can find much with which to quarrel in the historical sweep of Foucault’s generalizations, his work broadens considerably the complex interplay between structures of power and the ways we become ethical and political subjects. As Foucault notes, the ‘‘practices’’ by which a ‘‘subject constitutes itself’’ are ‘‘not something invented by the individual himself. They are models that he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group’’ (Foucault 1997: 291). This certainly has importance for the historical constitution of sexualities, but it also may provide a framework for exploring the ways in which individuals locate themselves in, and reinterpret, their political context. Edwards, for example, notes how Seneca’s Epistles can be understood as exercises in self-scrutiny and self-transformation in which the ‘‘activities of Roman public life - law-courts, games, elections’’ were used as ‘‘metaphors and images for articulating relationships within the self’’ (Edwards 1997: 36). And one can approach Foucault’s care of the self as a form of ‘‘looking’’ or a ‘‘conversion of the gaze’’ in which individuals become the makers of themselves as monuments, the outlines of the self (and what the self stands for) brought into relief so that, as Seneca writes, we may live ‘‘in plain sight of all men’’ (Foucault 2005: 10, 217; Sen. Ep. 83.1, trans. Gummere 1996; Hammer 2008).
World History
