Uncoiling the Serpent: Towards an Anthropology of Control Society (original) (raw)

2022, University of Edinburgh, School of Social and Political Science

Since the early 1980s, Foucauldian conceptions of power have largely dominated the field of political anthropology. Although this theoretical scope has been analytically effective, its continued applicability in the highly dynamic, global context of digitized neoliberal capitalism has been called into question. To address this concern, I will argue for a shift in attention to Gilles Deleuze's notion of "control society" as a more appropriate framework for an anthropological dissection of power relations within the present context of neoliberalism. This suggested turn toward a Deleuzian paradigm has been previously proposed across several disciplines, including studies of globalized capitalism, surveillance, the internet, data, algorithms, and more. However, despite Deleuze's considerable impact on anthropology, relatively little direct overlap exists between theories of control society and contemporary ethnography. I aim to bridge this gap between anthropology and interdisciplinary theories of control society, examining how ethnographic research corroborates, complicates, and challenges this paradigm, with the ultimate goal of mapping out potential fragments of an anthropology of control and resistance thereof.