Article

Cultivating Autonomy
Power, Resistance and the French
Alterglobalization Movement
Gwyn Williams
Abstract This article explores the resistance of alterglobalization activists on the
Larzac plateau in southern France to various forms of power. As part of a technique of resistance activists cultivate themselves as autonomous political
subjects and organize a movement considered to be an autonomous counterpower. In addition to being a political goal, autonomy is problematically tangled
up in many aspects of their lives and is of frequent concern in their efforts to
resist. Autonomy also constitutes a theoretical problem in anthropological
discussions of power and resistance. An autonomous space of resistance is often
assumed by social movement theorists or denied by those who argue that power
and resistance are inseparable. I argue in this article that autonomy, understood
as something socially relative rather than absolute, is produced in the process of
resisting via particular practices through which power and resistance come to
oppose one another.
Keywords antiglobalization alterglobalization autonomy France
hegemony Larzac power resistance social movements

The concepts of power and resistance have become ubiquitous in social

anthropology, even acquiring what Michael Brown has described as a
certain theoretical hegemony (1996: 729). Since Foucault, they have
been seen to permeate all social relations and anthropologists have been
increasingly concerned with their manifestations not just in explicit political struggle but in everyday life. This article is concerned with the relationship between power and resistance as understood and lived by political
activists. I shall draw on fieldwork1 I carried out in 20023 on activists
in southern France who were continually organizing what they called
resistance to forms of power. As part of the alterglobalization movement
(le mouvement altermondialiste), they fight for a form of globalization that is
alternative to the neoliberal variety they currently see being imposed by
the World Trade Organization (WTO) and by multinational corporations.2
I will explore the way they attempt to resist by cultivating themselves as
autonomous political subjects and organizing a movement considered to
be an autonomous counter-power. These forms of autonomy, I shall
argue, are produced in the process of resisting through particular social
practices which themselves help to create an opposition between power
and resistance.
Vol 28(1) 6386 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X07086558]
Copyright 2008 SAGE Publications (London, Los Angeles,
New Delhi and Singapore) www.sagepublications.com

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

64
Critique of Anthropology 28(1)

Autonomy has also been central to anthropological debates over power

and resistance. It constitutes something of a theoretical problem. A
common assumption, as I shall discuss, seems to be that a certain autonomy
from power is a prerequisite of resistance. Autonomy makes resistance
possible. Others have suggested, however, that resistance and power are
inseparable and have challenged the link between autonomy and resistance. Autonomy, here, becomes either something of a romantic illusion,
dissolving away altogether, or it becomes the product of power and part of
a technique of domination. Foucault is the key influence on those who take
such a position. He argued that modern forms of power produce
autonomous individuals who internalize discipline and govern themselves
(1977 [1975]). More recently some writers have linked autonomy to the
rise of neoliberal globalization and governmentality (Rose, 1999). Sian
Lazar writes that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Bolivia
extend the power of government in their attempts (though not entirely
successful) to create . . . empowered individual, entrepreneurial, active
citizens who will take responsibility for their own . . . welfare, and who are
prepared for the market rather than the state to provide for them (2004a:
302). Barbara Cruikshank, in her discussion of self-help activists, argues
along similar lines. The technologies of citizenship they adopt, while
aimed at making individuals politically active and capable of selfgovernment, are actually modes of constituting and regulating citizens.
Their goal may be to create some form of autonomy and empowerment
self-help, self-sufficiency, or self-esteem but technologies of citizenship
are in fact strategies for governing the very subjects whose problems they
seek to redress (1999: 12; see also Trouillot, 2001).
For others autonomy is a central aspect of liberation rather than domination. Alain Touraine (2001), in a book on politics and globalization,
argues that moving beyond neoliberalism depends on the action of
autonomous social actors and social movements, while the struggle for
autonomy, June Nash suggests, is what unites diverse social movements in
the neoliberal age (2005: 22). Hardt and Negri also link the possibility of
liberation from the forces of Empire to the potential of the multitude for
autonomy. The multitude that multiple social subject whose difference
[unlike that of the people] cannot be reduced to sameness (2005: 99)
is capable, they write, of forming society autonomously; this, we will see,
is central to its democratic possibilities (2005: xviixviii). The activists I
shall discuss similarly invoke autonomy in their attempts to resist neoliberal
capitalism. Like previous generations of activists, particularly anarchists and
those who took part in the mass protests of May 68, it is something they
value, to which they aspire and which they try to enact (see Graeber, 2004:
2ff.; Pratt, 2003: 645; Ross, 2002; Touraine, 1968).
How is it, then, that autonomy can be seen as so central to processes
of both domination and resistance? How best may we understand the
notion of autonomy and in what sense is it theoretically useful? In the

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

65
Williams: Cultivating Autonomy

course of this article I shall offer an ethnographic critique of autonomy,

with the hope that the ethnographic understanding I develop might shed
some light on theoretical debates. Very briefly, my goal is to show that
autonomy must be understood in relative and not absolute terms, and as a
social and historical phenomenon in which struggle is vital.

The Larzac
For over 30 years the Larzac plateau in the south of France has been well
known for its political activism. The Larzac is a sheep farming area that
became famous in the 1970s after the government decided to extend the
military camp on the plateau, provoking a decade of protest on the part of
local peasant farmers threatened with expropriation (see Alland, 2001;
Martin, 1987; Vuarin, 2005). Over the course of the 1970s, the Larzac itself
became what people call a symbol of resistance. What made the Larzac
struggle remarkable is that the farmers often God-fearing, obedient and
conservative formed an alliance with thousands of liberated outsiders
hippies, students, Maoist revolutionaries, radicals from May 68 and ordinary
citizens who saw the struggle of the farmers for their land as part of a much
broader fight against state power, hierarchy, inequality and capitalism. A few
outsiders settled on the plateau, occupying farms the army had managed to
purchase and grazing sheep like their peasant neighbours. They considered
their activities to be both agricultural and political, a demonstration to the
warmongers of the life-sustaining capacity of the land. Many thousands of
others contributed funds, came to help the farmers in the summer, and
participated in an ongoing series of demonstrations, occupations, illegal
construction projects, marches, symbolic protests and mass gatherings, the
largest of which attracted 100,000 people to the plateau. The struggle was a
non-violent one. Although certain outsiders had sometimes violent revolutionary aims, the peasants consciously adopted non-violence as a political
strategy following the visit of a religious leader and Gandhian disciple called
Lanza del Vasto. Asserting their autonomy against the demands of outsiders,
they made non-violence a condition of participation in the struggle.
The struggle lasted ten long years until, finally, the farmers won when
newly elected Socialist President Franois Mitterrand cancelled the camp
extension in 1981. The struggle, however, generated a sort of culture of
protest in the area which continues to this day. Following their victory, the
peasants and the neorural residents of the Larzac decided to return the
solidarity and support received from outsiders during the struggle. They
turned their attention to political battles in the outside world, most notably
the Kanak independence movement in New Caledonia. Today, the
struggles of the Palestinians and the Kurds for self-determination are of
special interest to Larzac activists, as are the battles of people everywhere
against genetically modified crops and neoliberal globalization.

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

66
Critique of Anthropology 28(1)

Twenty years after the exemplary struggle of the 1970s, the Larzac was
thrust back into the national spotlight in the summer of 1999 when a group
of activists dismantled a McDonalds restaurant being built on the
outskirts of Millau, a town of 20,000 at the foot of the plateau, as part of
what they called a non-violent and symbolic protest.3 The action was led
by Jos Bov, Larzac activist and spokesperson of the Confdration
paysanne, the second largest farmers union in France. It was triggered by
the imposition of US import tariffs on a hundred or so European products,
among them Roquefort cheese, the mainstay of the local economy. The
tariffs were a retaliation for a European Union (EU) ruling condemned
by the WTO refusing the importation of hormone-treated meat from the
United States. The tariffs angered local farmers who sell ewes milk to the
Roquefort firms. But the dismantling was much more than a corporatist
protest against the United States by farmers concerned with their livelihoods. McDonalds came to symbolize everything that the activists involved,
many of whom were not farmers, consider wrong with globalization: standardization and the effacement of local diversity; commercialization and
the commodification of the world; the privileging of the private over the
public good; the liberalization of the global economy being driven by the
WTO. Against such neoliberal forces, activists assert that the world is not
a commodity, a phrase popularized in the title of one of Bovs books,
Le Monde nest pas une marchandise,4 and which has become the catch-cry of
the movement.
Extensive media coverage of the McDonalds affair made Bov into a
household name and one of the most celebrated political figures in France.
It helped to cement the Confdration paysanne at the forefront of the
movement and it reinforced the Larzacs reputation as a symbol of resistance. The McDonalds dismantling was seen by the activists I knew as the
beginning of a new era of protest, the event that gave the social movement
a new lease of life and which encouraged activists across the country to say
no to the WTO and the neoliberal economic reforms it promotes. For
many, the WTO is the greatest single cause of the worlds injustice and its
wrongs, and is the power they are concerned to resist. In 2003, Larzac-Millau
activists, with the assistance of activist groups in Paris and elsewhere, organized an enormous gathering on the plateau against the WTO. The gathering, known as Larzac 2003, was held over three days in August and attracted
an estimated 300,000 people to a series of concerts and political forums.
Participation in Larzac 2003 was diverse. In addition to the highly visible
presence of the Confdration paysanne and Attac, one of the major alterglobalization organizations in the country, the gathering involved the stalls
and displays of 150 activist associations and unions from across France,
concerned with everything from human rights and corporate capitalism to
housing, home-birthing and open source software. There were forums and
debates on the WTO, agriculture, state repression, nuclear energy, genetic
modification, colonialism, Palestine, Kurdistan, fair-trade, the liberalization

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

67
Williams: Cultivating Autonomy

of public services and numerous other topics. Despite the diverse range of
their interests, it is the commonality between separate activist associations
which tends to be stressed. They are generally considered to be engaged in
struggles against the domination of the meek by the powerful, all within
the context of neoliberal globalization. While Larzac activists are particularly concerned with the WTO, Palestine, state repression and genetic
modification, they oppose power and domination in all its forms. As part
of what they call the social movement (le mouvement social), a term which
is often used in the singular, their aim is to resist.

The social movement

In a sense, the prerequisite of resistance is a certain autonomy, that of the
social movement itself and that of individual activists. Perhaps it would be
better to say, however, that resistance, in the particular context I consider,
involves a struggle over autonomy over the power to choose, to act independently, to be free of ideology, domination and dependency. Autonomy,
for activists, is something power, in its various forms, denies, and it is something they aim to win, increase and cultivate. It is of constant concern in
their efforts to publicly resist and is also problematically tangled up in many
aspects of their everyday lives.5 Their autonomy, I shall argue, may be best
understood as the product of certain social practices through which power
and resistance come to oppose one another. Let me look first at the social
movement.
Activists from the Larzac and Millau often stress the importance of the
social movements autonomy, by which they mean its independence from
political parties and their power-seeking programmes. This stress on
autonomy is nothing new in the broader context of French political movements. In particular, it was a feature of the anarcho-syndicalists of the early
20th century and of similar movements elsewhere in Europe (Pratt, 2003:
46ff.). Larzac activists, however, often trace the autonomy of the movement
today back to the struggle against the military camp in the 1970s. During
the struggle, I was often told, all decision-making regarding goals, strategy
and means remained in the hands of those 103 farmers whose livelihoods
and land were threatened by the extension of the military camp. They
refused to allow their struggle to be appropriated by parties or, indeed,
by Maoists and other outsiders on the extra-parliamentary left (Martin,
1987: 126) and assimilated to their self-interested agenda.
Today, activists aim to build a mouvement social autonome and ensure the
movements autonomy by organizing in particular ways. While I was in the
field, an association called CUMS (Construire un monde solidaire)6 was
formed to plan Larzac 2003. People were adamant that CUMS be open to
all individuals, unions, societies and associations, but closed to political
parties. This closure was deemed necessary to maintain the movements

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

68
Critique of Anthropology 28(1)

autonomy. CUMS charter (2003) situates it firmly within the framework of

the autonomous social movement . . . outside political parties. In this, it
reflects a tendency in the alterglobalization movement more generally,
independence from parties being an ideal clearly expressed, for example,
in the charter of the World Social Forum (WSF) (Aguiton and Cardon,
2005; see Appadurai, 2002: 28; Nash, 2005: 4). In practice, the distinction
between party and movement is not quite so easy to maintain. The WSFs in
Porto Alegre received important institutional backing from the Brazilian
Workers Party; alterglobalization activists often champion the parties of
Venezuelan president Hugo Chvez or Bolivias Evo Morales; and left-wing
parties do participate in social forums and events such as Larzac 2003. The
ideal of an autonomous social movement, however, remains. Activists tend
to be highly sceptical of parties. The French Socialists come in for the
strongest criticism for having entirely abandoned their principles, with
their stall dismantled at Larzac 2003 and their party secretary attacked
earlier in the year at a G8 counter-summit near Geneva. Those parties that
do manage to gain a certain acceptance by those in the social movement
generally small parties on the far left manage to present themselves as
sharing a distaste of neoliberalism and a desire for social justice.
The social movement is considered a movement of citizens, of ordinary
people, not of the powerful or of those who seek power. The basic difference between a party and a movement, for the activists I knew, consists in
the perceived fact that parties seek to get into power, while the social
movement seeks a better world through forms of resistance and direct
action. The movement is unconcerned to acquire power. It concerns itself
with something more fundamental: the fight for justice, basic rights, the
social good, freedoms and equality for all, and not the power of a few (the
party) over others. Ideally the movement also functions in a way that is
different from political parties, in what people call a horizontal, participatory or bottom up ( partir de la base) way. CUMS thus lacks hierarchical
structures and formal offices in which power can be concentrated. There
is no president or secretary and meetings provide forums at which anyone
can have their say. People are imagined to participate in the movement as
autonomous individuals. In principle, any individual can participate in any
way they see fit, the main criterion simply being a desire to do so, although
in practice there are certainly dominant figures and informal hierarchies
impinging on peoples autonomy and providing a source of considerable
tension.
In the strict and literal sense of the term as activists use it, an
autonomous social movement would thus be one in which political parties
play no significant role. More broadly, however, the term seems to imply an
absence of power, that represented by parties, by the state, by hierarchical
organizational structures, by various techniques of domination, by ideology.
It is power in all its forms that activists oppose and an autonomous social
movement, for them, is one that is opposed to all forms of power. This

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

69
Williams: Cultivating Autonomy

opposition to power is ideally the movements defining feature, but only

becomes a reality to the extent that the movement is autonomous and antihierarchical. Activists concern with autonomy from political parties is
really an expression of a wider concern to make the social movement independent of the whole realm of power, however power is understood.
Another indication of this is the reluctance to admit a dissenting voice
into the movement. Public debates (dbats) or forums, which activists are
much concerned to organize, almost never involve the participation of
someone with an opposing view of the issue under discussion; never do they
give power a voice (cf. Berglund, 1998: 137ff.). During a meeting of Attac
Millau in preparation for Larzac 2003, there was a debate on this very issue.
Should someone who, due to professional affiliations, was suspected of not
being firmly against neoliberalism be allowed to participate in a forum
Attac was organizing on the commercialization of public health? The
person in question had asked to participate. Those at the meeting worried,
however, that he might hijack the debate for his own ends. He posed a
threat to the social movement because it was feared that, if the man turned
out to be a neoliberal, power might enter where it ought not go, threatening to undo the work of decontaminating minds that Jacques Nikonoff,
national president of Attac, considered it to be Attacs role to accomplish.7
The concern to exclude power thus implies the categorization of
people into activists and dangerous others, members and non-members.
While activists imagine the alterglobalization movement extending the
world over and often describe it as open to all, as a movement of activists
it can never include the powerful. Debate occurs within the movement
between those of like mind, and at workshops, forums and protests the
speakers very often find themselves preaching to the converted. Activists
recognize this and sometimes wryly describe such events as masses
(messes). The social movement is selective and exclusive, in this sense, open
only to those people and ideas that contribute to its ability to resist. Its
closure is a condition of its strength and a measure of its autonomy, an
autonomy that is produced through the concern to exclude power.
The movement today is often described as a counter-power; the
control of power through protest and civil disobedience is its aim. The
place the international antiglobalization movement must have . . . is as a
counter-power and not at all as a power, one person told me. While the
self-declared autonomy from political parties entails that activists do not
aim to take control of the state, they do aim to control the power wielded
by those in government and to actively counter the indiscretions of the
powerful. Power and counter-power ought not to be confused. Following
Larzac 2003, there were calls in certain quarters for Bov to stand for president. His popularity had been boosted by the gathering and his recent
release from prison for his role in the destruction of GM grain. He
disabused people of the idea, however, which was based on a conflation of
power with counter-power and a complete misunderstanding of the role

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

70
Critique of Anthropology 28(1)

of the social movement. For many, Bov included, entering into the halls
of power is not an effective way of changing society. It merely subordinates
you to an unjust social order, fixes you within a hierarchical institutional
framework and robs you of the potential to bring about change. The
question of effectiveness is key. What is important is the ability to oppose
the powerful and their perpetuation of injustice and to give the relatively
powerless a voice.
More recently, Bov himself seems to have been wondering whether or
not the presidency would not serve the interests of ordinary people and of
the oppressed. Newspapers reported periodically during 2006 that Bov
had been considering standing for president if he could gain the support
of the radical left, and in February 2007 he announced his candidacy (Bov,
2007).8 Some see this as a question of political expediency. They trust that
Bov, should he get into power, will not abandon the principles and the
taste for action that have seen the man himself who is sometimes said to
incarnate the movement described as a counter-power. But others are
rather more sceptical and some consider seeking a presidential mandate to
be profoundly mistaken, the error of someone concerned more with his
own aggrandisement than with the social good (see Lesay, 2006). As president, they worry, Bov can only alienate himself from the social movement,
the activist grassroots and ordinary people.
Despite such disagreements over the role of Frances best-known
activist, the logic of counter-power, to use Bovs phrase (quoted in Lesay,
2006: 3), is not a matter of participating in power but of organizing and of
building one big social movement out of diverse and independent social
movements. To effectively resist, the social movement must increase its
strength (rather than its power) relative to the forces of power to which
it is opposed as part of creating what people call a rapport de force. There
are two ways of creating a rapport de force, someone once declared at a
meeting prior to Larzac 2003: through arms, a path firmly rejected by most
alterglobalization activists (the local movement has been self-styled as nonviolent since the struggle against the military camp of the 1970s); and
through numbers. People must be attracted to the movement, convinced
to participate. Attracting the greatest possible number was always the aim
of the organizers of Larzac 2003. Numbers, I often heard it said, make it
impossible for the powerful to ignore the demands of the social movement.
Numbers confer a certain democratic legitimacy (Rose, 1999: 221). Large
numbers are seen to bolster the movements representativeness and are
used to construct it as a democratic force, one that represents ordinary
citizens and that therefore cannot be ignored by government. Activists
always claim to be acting for the common or public good and the public
is often rhetorically enlisted in the movement in the form of public
support. Support, demonstrated in opinion polls and statistics, is a sign
that the movement is strong, that it represents the democratic interest and

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

71
Williams: Cultivating Autonomy

will of the people. Seventy percent of consumers are opposed to GM food,

states a newsletter from one of the Larzacs activist associations in arguing
that the social movement and civil disobedience can therefore count on
important support amongst the collectivity (Larzac Solidarits, 2003: 11).
The greater the numbers, the greater the movements strength, the
greater its autonomy and the greater the opposition between power and
counter-power appears to be. It is in the street, the public space of demonstrations (see Barry, 1999), where numbers and the counter-power of the
movement are most visible and where resistance is best exercised. At
demonstrations where there is a large congregation of people, the
movement emerges as thing-like, a collective force of resistance capable of
having political effects (Weszkalnys, 2004: 117). The crowd of demonstrators attracts people to participate in it, it attracts the police to control
it, and the media who, through their coverage, demonstrate its force and
distribute its message to a broad audience (cf. Canetti, 2000: 15ff.; Hardt
and Negri, 2005: 100).
But even at small protests the autonomy of the social movement is
made apparent and the opposition between power and counter-power is
enacted. Protests very often have the power of the state or capital as their
target. Many are performed outside what are considered the symbols of
the state such as prefectures or courthouses. Other protests target capitalist power, that of the multinationals who produce GM seed or of
McDonalds. At such protests, which may involve barely 100 people, as well
as at marches of hundreds of thousands, power is always considered present
in the guise of security forces and the police, the forces of order, as people
put it. But power tends to be spatially confined and the opposition between
power and resistance to be spatially represented. Resistance creates
autonomous domains of action from which power is excluded. The street
is always appropriated for marches, occupations take over space, GM crop
destructions take control of the fields. The forces of order are often
complicit in this separation of power and counter-power. They frequently
encircle the demonstrators and the space they occupy, or line up against
them, rather than mingling with the crowds as they tend to do at carnivals
and street festivals. At large marches, riot police are visible at the ends of
side streets, lined up across the road, while the protesters occupy the route
of the march and control activity within it. March organizers even form out
of groups of protesters their own Security Service (Service dOrdre) to ensure
order and a trouble-free march. The police play no role and if they are
present, they are invisible. At small demonstrations, police and protesters
often face off against one another. As soon as there is confrontation at
protests the use of tear gas or batons the opposition is made evident.
We are in a logic of opposition someone told me after one such protest
where activists had attempted to gain access to a GM research company and
had been foiled by security and police.

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

72
Critique of Anthropology 28(1)

Autonomy lived
I shall now look at the practices whereby activists cultivate in both themselves and others a certain individual autonomy in which they are supposedly freed from neoliberal ideology and the power of consumer society, and
made capable of participating in the struggle against domination. This
cultivation of autonomy is part of a technique of resistance. I shall focus on
what it means to be or to become an activist. To become an activist one
must first become aware (prendre conscience) and one must then endeavour
to act coherently, as people put it. Both of these are moral imperatives.
Both imply developing a sort of autonomy from power. Implicit, again, is
an opposition between power and resistance.
Activism is considered a choice, a choice made by aware and responsible individuals. Unlike the Bolivian social movements discussed by Sian
Lazar (2004b), where participation in demonstrations is obliged by an
authoritarian union hierarchy, Larzac activists believe that people cannot
be compelled to participate in the social movement, they must do so of
their own accord. However, someone whose mind is infected by the
neoliberal virus, to adopt a metaphor much liked by Attac presidents
(Cassen, 2003), is just not going to want to take to the streets. Delivering
them from ideology and making them conscious through education thus
becomes a major concern. This, of course, is nothing particularly new.
Feminists have long been concerned with consciousness raising and
Marxist intellectuals with making the workers conscious of their historical
position as part of the process of transforming a class-in-itself into a classfor-itself, thus creating a truly revolutionary force (Pratt, 2003: 14).
For Larzac-Millau activists, becoming aware entails developing a
consciousness of the existence of injustice, oppression and domination. It
means coming to an understanding that these are the products of power
and ridding oneself of various ideological assumptions, those of neoliberalism, for example, which have it that the free market makes not for
inequality but for public good (see Dumont, 1977: 61ff.). This process of
becoming aware is an ongoing one; it is considered a developmental
process through which one is formed as a person. One woman described
activism to me as something you mature into and people often speak of
an volution in their thinking whereby they become increasingly aware.
They conceive of the person as a being that constantly evolves. The struggle
of the 1970s is often seen by Larzac activists as a period of collective
evolution. It turned obedient and authority-fearing peasant farmers into
politically savvy and critical ones; ideological blindness gave way to an
enlightened awareness of power and domination (see Alland, 2001: xxxv).
The mark of awareness, then, is a certain autonomy of mind, an ability
to think critically, that is brought about by gradually excluding power in the
form of ideology. With the goal of increasing awareness in the general
public, activists engage in a range of pedagogical activities: forums, public

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

73
Williams: Cultivating Autonomy

debates, information evenings, article writing and so on. Many protests

have a pedagogical aim, indeed, education is often their principal aim.
They are often targeted at the media, or at journalists who are likely to be
sympathetic, and described as actions mdiatiques. Actions such as the
McDonalds dismantling or the invasion of the Louvre on 14 July 2003 in
protest at state repression of the social movement (symbolized by Bovs
imprisonment) are performed for the press and are self-consciously
spectacular (cf. Castells, 1997: 106; Touraine, 2001: 57ff.). Spectacle (like
large numbers) provides an important way of attracting journalists who, if
they themselves can be educated, then play a key role in carrying the activist
message to a wider public and stimulating an evolution of debate. GM
crop destructions or neutralizations are here exemplary.9 They are
designed to provoke public debate and to force the issue of genetic modification in agriculture onto the political agenda (cf. Pagis, 2005: 5). The
lack of debate that activists perceive is indicative of a lack of awareness of
the ways in which GM companies seek total control of world agriculture
(particularly through patenting) in their own private interest. It justifies, in
part, the necessity of uprooting GM field trials as a way of highlighting,
with the assistance of media coverage, the true agenda of biotechnology
firms.
While the media are considered an essential ally in the struggle against
forms of domination and the sympathies of journalists are cultivated,
activists themselves engage in direct forms of pedagogical practice in order
to raise public awareness and convert people to their cause. Often their
concern is to put the truth on display in the form of facts. At the Hour of
Silence for Palestine, a weekly activist gathering in the streets of Millau
which normally consisted of around 20 people, there were often large
hand-written displays of the numbers of Palestinians killed and the destruction wrought by the Israeli army on homes and fields. The facts were stated
bluntly. In January: 70 Palestinians killed by Israeli armed forces, on the
night of 1213 May, 33 houses destroyed, 58 families cast into the street, 15
injured, this week . . . in the Gaza strip, 200 hectares of agricultural land
razed. There were often displays calling for a boycott of produce that was
made in Israel and identifying brands of clothing, orange juice, avocados,
lemons and other fruit likely to be of Israeli provenance in an attempt to
create educated shoppers out of those who passed. One day, someone
brought along large photos graphically depicting what the captions called
suffering and massacre. In addition, someone usually handed out one
or two A4 pages to passers-by, providing them with greater detail, argument
and a language of interpretation for what was going on in Palestine. One
leaflet told, in terms that were common, of Palestinians hunger and
humiliation, of their resistance, of Israels crimes against humanity and
its Palestinian victims, of its brutal and murderous colonization, of its
daily violation of . . . human rights, of how it asphyxiates the Palestinian
economy, of the apartheid in Palestine. Such language was considered to

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

74
Critique of Anthropology 28(1)

refer to the basic facts of the domination of one people over another in
which Palestinians go hungry, are killed, have their lives disrupted.
Importantly, such facts are intended to interpellate, as Richard Clarke
puts it (2003: 121), to shock and to awaken people to injustice.
Becoming aware, for the activists I met, means understanding this
fundamental truth of injustice and oppression, and disabusing oneself of
any notion that Palestinians are mere terrorists, that Israel is merely defending itself against an enemy that aims at its annihilation. Such ideas are
considered to belong to the realm of ideology and power, justifications for
domination and brutality. However, the truth to which people must be
educated, activists tend to argue, is that the Israelis are aggressors and
colonizers, and Palestinians are victims. Faced with Israeli aggression,
Palestinians can only resist. The world is thus understood in terms of a
series of opposed categories: oppressor and oppressed, aggressor and
victim, power and counter-power, power and resistance. This is a language
that is used in many contexts and not just with reference to the Israel
Palestine conflict. To be aware is to place oneself on the side of counterpower, to liberate oneself from power.
In addition to cultivating awareness through forms of pedagogical
activism, becoming aware is also considered a moral task faced by the individual (cf. Berglund, 1998: 11; Humphrey, 1997). Becoming aware is a
moral imperative and a process through which activists cultivate in themselves a certain autonomy as part of an effort to resist. On the one hand,
this is a question of actively informing oneself, seeking out what is true,
distinguishing the truth from what one person called the shameless lies
that the mainstream press tends to deal in. The mass media, despite their
pedagogical usefulness, are much criticized for their biased representation of the facts and for misinforming the public. Faced with such a
situation it becomes imperative that activists inform themselves by recourse
to alternative information sources within the activist network websites,
journals and newspapers, political associations, or events such as Larzac
2003 and the European Social Forum.
On the other hand, however, activists feel compelled to seek out
injustice even in their own lives. They need to ask: how does injustice touch
me and what can I do about it? The question is a very practical one and the
key to becoming an aware individual. The transformation of society begins
with raising our own awareness (une conscientisation de nous-mme), one
woman said to me. We have to become aware of whats not right and that
inequalities exist and start by changing things in our own lives . . . Personally, I have a lot of things still to change. This woman, who came to the
Larzac in the 1970s and who was one of the most active activists I knew, was
much concerned with making an effort to consume differently by buying
fair-trade, organic or locally made produce, avoiding goods made by multinationals or in Asian sweatshops, buying for need and not in support of
that infernal economic machine of global capitalism.

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

75
Williams: Cultivating Autonomy

All this is part of seeking a certain autonomy from capitalism, consumer

society, the state and other realms where power is considered to operate,
an autonomy that is lived out. Many on the Larzac attempt to do this in one
way or another. They aim, to varying degrees and in various ways, to live
relatively simply, in full respect of the environment and their fellow human
beings, and to maintain a control over their own lives that they feel an
uncritical integration into the world of wage work and consumption would
make impossible. A stand-out example is the farm of Mas Razal. In 2003,
the farms handful of inhabitants, the first of whom arrived in 1996, had a
project to create what they imagined would be a more or less autonomous
community beyond the reach, as much as possible, of consumer society.
Their aim was to abandon capitalism and to build a micro-society that was
horizontal and egalitarian as opposed to the hierarchical society into which
most are integrated and subordinate. The idea was to live ecologically, to
build their own housing, to grow their own food, to rely on what was locally
available for the majority of their needs and not to depend on such things
as nuclear energy or the market economy. Were against the system . . .
for us the aim is to get out of it. By getting out, we stop feeding it, one
person explained. When, thinking of the many mass protests I had been on
with Larzac activists, I asked why the aim was to get out of the system rather
than actively changing it, the reply was unequivocal: getting out is
changing. It serves no purpose to march against nuclear power and then
to plug into the national grid, he told me.10 Their aim was thus to live out
in everyday life the ideals to which they aspired, to be radically anticapitalist. Because they rejected capitalist society, they withdrew from it
in an attempt to create a locally based society that was autonomous of
capitalism. This, for them, was a political act, an act of resistance.
The Community of the Arche (ark), established on the plateau in the
1970s to assist in the struggle against the military camp and based on principles of non-violence and simplicity, is similarly oriented toward trying to
be as autonomous as possible, as one of its members put it. By this he
meant escaping dependence on big business (Roquefort, for example, and
supermarkets) and avoiding capitalist excess in both production and
consumption. But he was also speaking of an individual and spiritual
autonomy. Arche members stress the importance of grappling with the way
domination dwells within your own person and the way ones own behaviour participates in reproducing forms of domination, conflict or inequality. Everyone, they believe, has an aggressive side that it is imperative
to control if one is serious about creating a better world. One man told me
that we [members of the Arche] are not non-violent . . . but people who
try to . . . manage our own violence. . . . Violence is inherent to all and it
needs to be managed. . . . First recognize it . . . and then get rid of it little
by little. In order to change the world, one must continually engage in
work on oneself (travail sur soi), as Arche members call it, something that
involves an exercise in self-development and the cultivation of autonomy as

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

76
Critique of Anthropology 28(1)

one gains control over oneself. The aim is to change the way one engages
with the world by bringing an awareness of self to all social situations in
order to live by ones non-violent beliefs and help to create a non-violent
world.
Seeking an awareness of self or a more autonomous existence, like
consuming differently and making other changes in ones daily life, is
indicative of a desire to live coherently, that is, to live in accordance with
your principles, to ensure an agreement between ideas and practice,
between the way you think about the world and the way you act in it.
Coherence (cohrence) is part of the definition of what an activist is or should
be. An activist, as Bov put it, is someone who tries to have a coherence
between their life, as lived everyday, and the ideas in which they believe and
wish to develop. The Larzac is often considered a place where people
manage, more than elsewhere, to live out their ideals. Bov told me that
there was no break between activism and daily life on the Larzac. Here,
he said, we are lucky to be able to have a coherence between the everyday
and our [activist] ideas. If the communities of the Arche and Mas Razal
provide evidence of this, so too do the attempts of many farmers since the
end of the military camp struggle to diversify their agricultural practices so
that they accord somewhat more closely with their ideals of a non-intensive,
non-productivist, non-profit-oriented agriculture. Some have cut ties with
Roquefort and instead produce their own cheeses; others sell direct to the
consumer rather than depending, at some point, on large-scale retail
outlets; many have gone organic.
Incoherences, however, are common and are much criticized by
activists themselves. On one of the monthly walks I used to go on with
Larzac activists, one woman, hot and thirsty, pulled out a can of Coca Cola.
What? I exclaimed. Where are your principles? She replied, a little
sheepishly, that it was true that she shouldnt really be drinking coke given
her anti-multinational opinions, but she needed the lift the caffeine gave
her and didnt drink coffee. She said she would try to get hold of some
fair-trade coke. Another woman, drawing on her experiences of Germany,
pointed out to me how common it was for activists in France to arrive at
protests and meetings in cars one person, one car although oil symbolized globalization. Others point to the incoherence of the intensive agricultural practices encouraged by the sheepfold given a general rejection
of productivist agriculture, or of shopping at supermarkets while affirming that the supermarket is a tool of imperialism. Some consider Bov,
the most visible face of the movement, to have become a media commodity and to have a market value, a somewhat dubious quality in a
person who affirms, on behalf of an entire movement, that the world is
not a commodity. They worry that his arguments convince less than his
image sells and that the whole strategy of courting the media is a somewhat
incoherent one. Larzac 2003, although seen by many as a great success,
was also criticized for other kinds of incoherence. I often heard examples

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

77
Williams: Cultivating Autonomy

of how it failed to live up to its slogan other worlds are possible. The whole
gathering was seen by some as large-scale and expensive, relying on sales of
beer and T-shirts to break even, and reproducing the relations of capitalism rather than enacting alternatives. During the clean-up, one of those
helping said to me that the volunteers (bnvoles) of whom there were
thousands asked to selflessly give of themselves were essentially little
more than workers whose labour was exploited to ensure a profit, or at
least to avoid a loss, given the 1.2 million outlay. They were necessary to
make money.
Given that activists are thoroughly embedded in globalized relations of
production, consumption and exchange, a certain incoherence is, perhaps,
inevitable. Achieving coherence is highly problematic. But it remains an
ideal and, indeed, a moral imperative because by acting coherently activists
distance themselves from the power of capitalism, consumer society and
neoliberalism, they banish it from their lives and thereby partially fulfil
their vocation as activists. To banish power is to create an autonomous space
in which to live your life, itself an act of resistance. This is something that
requires effort, an ongoing attention to the way you act in the world that is
part of the developmental process of becoming aware.
Through seeking to become aware and to live coherently, activists
produce themselves as autonomous individuals and ideologically cut themselves loose from the otherwise deterministic social forces that fashion
people as good consumers, obedient to the needs of capitalism. Awareness,
they believe, liberates them. They develop an understanding of the truth
that is independent of the conditioned blindness of capitalist ideology, an
autonomy of mind that is the basis for creating a united world. To live
coherently and autonomously is similarly to liberate oneself from power. It
is to engage in an everyday politics of resistance.

Power, resistance and autonomy

What I have tried to show with the preceding ethnography is how the resistance of French alterglobalization activists involves a self-conscious cultivation of certain sorts of autonomy: the autonomy of the social movement,
which ideally emerges as a counter-power; and the autonomy of individuals,
activists empowered by their critical awareness of the workings of power and
who attempt to live out their ideals in everyday life. The autonomy of both
activists and the movement as a whole is understood to consist of their
relative independence from power. It cant be taken for granted because
power, in the form of ideology, always has a tendency to contaminate
peoples minds, as activists often put it, just as the power of multinationals
or the state has a tendency to dominate their lives. As well as being
defended, autonomy is something that must be won and increased in the
process of resisting. The struggle with power is thus a struggle over

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

78
Critique of Anthropology 28(1)

autonomy. Autonomy is what separates power from resistance, in a sense,

thus dividing the world into two.
I am here making a claim about particular people, the practices in
which they engage and their vision of the world. But what broader implications does my ethnography have for anthropological theory? Is autonomy
useful as an analytical notion? A number of anthropologists have been
concerned with this question. Their effort to eliminate the dichotomy
between power and resistance, as Robert Fletcher puts it (2001: 56), has
led them to question the very notion of autonomy. Previously, it is argued,
power and resistance had been understood as things opposed historical
forces (capitalist and working classes), or public and private transcripts
with resistance emerging from an originary space of autonomy beyond the
reach of power (Moore, 1998: 352), from a space of autonomous
consciousness (Fletcher, 2001: 48), or from an authentic and whole
subject (Kondo, 1990: 224). But neither domination nor resistance are
autonomous, in the words of Haynes and Prakash (1991: 3). Resistance
and power are inseparable, the argument goes, and there can be no
autonomous or originary domain of resistance (see also Abu-Lughod,
1990; Mitchell, 1990; OHanlon, 1991; Reed-Danahay, 1993).
This idea that power and resistance are of the same cloth and that
autonomy is a red herring has a particular theoretical genealogy. Many of
the authors I cite above are inspired by Foucaults work in Discipline and
Punish (1977 [1975]) on power as productive of human subjectivities and
by a much cited passage from The History of Sexuality (1990 [1976]: 95):
resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power (e.g.
cited in Abu-Lughod, 1990: 42; Fletcher, 2001: 56; Moore, 1998: 353). From
a Foucauldian perspective, the actors who resist are produced by power.
Power thus creates possibilities for resistance; it enters into us and becomes
the foundation on which resistance may be built (although power may
appear, through Timothy Mitchells effect of enframing [1990: 569], to be
external to us). Autonomy, here, is nowhere to be found because power
dwells within us all; or, alternatively, autonomy is everywhere in the form
of the autonomous individual, for example because it is an effect of
power. In the latter case, autonomy readily becomes part of a technique of
domination and the forms of neoliberal governmentality to which I allude
in the introduction to this article.
Foucault, it must be said, is very interesting on power, but resistance is
something about which he has relatively little to say. The aim of the anthropologists of resistance who draw on his work, however, has been to free us
from what Lila Abu-Lughod called the romance of resistance (1990), the
idea that that those who resist are untouched by power or that power is
somehow ineffective. This romance is reflected in the claims of scholars of
social movements about the way movements have alternative visions[s]
(Nash, 2001: 1522), speak a language that appears to be entirely their
own (Melucci, 1996: 1), practise cultural innovation (Escobar, 1992: 70),

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

79
Williams: Cultivating Autonomy

propose significant discourses of difference (Escobar, 2001: 158), or

foster . . . alternative modernities (Alvarez et al., 1998: 9). These writers
place emphasis on social movements difference and on their autonomy
from power (cf. Fox, 1997; Starn, 1992).
But it is the highly influential James Scott, whose great virtue . . . was
to challenge the [concept] of hegemony (Fletcher, 2001: 46), who has
come in for particular criticism for entertaining the idea that power and
resistance occupy separate and autonomous spaces (Fletcher, 2001; Gal,
1995; Mitchell, 1990: 563; Moore, 1998: 351). Scott, Donald Moore argues,
assumes some sort of autonomous, sovereign self and his idea of hidden
transcripts points to sites . . . power does not saturate or colonize (1998:
3501, emphasis removed). Moore suggests that such realms of autonomy,
in Scotts view, are what allow people to resist, to see past hegemonic
frameworks, to penetrate and demystify the prevailing ideology based on
their daily material experience, to cite Scott himself (1985: 317). But
Scotts mistake is to think that such an autonomous space of resistance
exists. Rather than conceiving of a space of subalternity, insurgency, and
resistance outside of power, domination, or hegemony, the challenge
becomes to understand their mutual imbrication, Moore writes (1998:
353), while Fletcher insists that resistance must be seen as a product of
power (2001: 56).
For critics of a Foucauldian approach, however, abandoning the idea of
an autonomous space of resistance imposes an hegemony a notion whose
excesses Scott was concerned to argue against that, in a sense, is utterly
izek, Foucaults
watertight. The baby goes out with the bathwater. For Slavoj Z
absolute continuity of resistance to power and his lack of a notion of antagonism do away with any sort of political subject who might resist (1999: 251,
2567). While Steven Lukes, in a recent book on power, suggests that
Foucaults ultra-radical concept of power as all-pervasive and productive
leaves little room for agency, freedom, rationality or autonomy (2005: 957,
1067; see also Sangren, 1995).11 And without these things, how can there
be resistance worthy of the name? If resistance is to be seen as a product of
power, as Fletcher would have it, what sort of resistance is it? If power is
everywhere and real autonomy nowhere, does the notion of resistance even
make theoretical sense? Is the cultivation of autonomy and awareness on the
part of Larzac activists a case of their resistance or of their failure to escape
a regime of domination and governmentality in which autonomy is central?
Are the ways in which they live or the manner in which they organize the
movement evidence of their autonomy or of their lack of it?
But I think such questions are not very productive ones. The whole
debate over autonomy has been one in which autonomy is too readily
understood in theoretical terms as something absolute, something you
either have or lack. Autonomy appears as an all-or-nothing concept. If you
can assert it, well and good. And if you can argue, on the basis of theory or
observation, that any claims to autonomy are unwarranted, then autonomy

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

80
Critique of Anthropology 28(1)

dissolves away as a result. All you are left with is false consciousness or ideological domination or political posturing or some such thing. The problem
with this is that autonomy is a central part of the world in which activists
live. To suggest that they are not really autonomous dismisses what, for
them, is a very important notion; to affirm that they are accepts their vision
of things uncritically. Importantly, however, autonomy is not just an idea as
it is within the realm of social theory. As an idea it is a very important one,
but it is also acted out. Autonomy is done, it involves particular social practices, it is something that, in one form or another, activists create. One must
take the practice of autonomy seriously and explore just what autonomy
means, as opposed to treating it as a theoretical abstraction.
This article, then, has been an attempt to give autonomy a certain
ethnographic thickness (see Ortner, 1995). It seems to me that an all-ornothing, absolutist, abstract view of autonomy makes very little social
sense. A socially embedded and variable understanding of autonomy, in
contrast, makes focusing on the meaning and practice of autonomy
essential. It makes it important to explore the sense in which people are
autonomous and the social relations autonomy involves. There might
actually be areas of social existence that escape, more or less, the reach of
power, ideas that cant be reduced to the dominant ideology, spaces that
might be considered relatively autonomous or alternative, but whether
there are or not and precisely what this might mean is an ethnographic,
not a purely theoretical, question. Any autonomy Larzac activists might
have or exercise is never something absolute, always something relative,
always socially and historically situated, and always complex and full of
meaning. Their desire for autonomy is expressed in the attempt to do and
think things in slightly new and alternative ways that exclude the logic of
the market, reject the ideological assumptions of neoliberalism, refuse the
hegemony of multinationals and all forms of power and hierarchy.
As is clear from my ethnography, however, this is just a straightforward
matter. Central to the very meaning of autonomy, in this context, is
struggle. Autonomy, rather than being either a prerequisite of their resistance or an illusion, is an ideal for which activists must fight given the ideological and material forces demanding their acquiescence to the status quo.
It is something to increase, to cultivate, to win from the clutches of power.
The politics in which they engage, both in the public domain and in
everyday life, involves a struggle over autonomy over freedom, agency, the
power to choose, to act independently, to be free of ideology, domination
and dependency. The more of it activists have, the less they are subject to
power, the more able they are to resist, and the more they produce a
dichotomy between power (the state, the WTO, multinationals, neoliberal
ideology, hierarchy) and resistance (the social movement, activistindividuals, autonomous communities, equality) as an ethnographic and
empirical, rather than abstractly theoretical, fact.
Struggle is also at the core of Moores argument. Resistance, he
says, drawing on Gramsci, emerges not from an originary site but from

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

81
Williams: Cultivating Autonomy

oppositional practices, which, unlike Scotts absolute and essential spaces

of resistance, are always relational and dynamic (1998: 353). But Scott, in
questioning just how total and autonomy-denying hegemony really is, need
not fall back on the idea that hidden transcripts depend on an absolute and
essential autonomy. Autonomy may well be relative or relational, which
seems somehow to have been Gramscis position. Although at times he
presents the hegemony of the historically progressive class as entailing an
almost necessary intellectual subjugation of other social groups (1971: 60),
Gramsci is also concerned with the contingency of struggle (see Laclau and
Mouffe, 1985). Like hegemony, autonomy, which is a term Gramsci uses, is
something for subaltern groups to acquire through struggle as they develop
their own conception of the world . . . which manifests itself in action, if
only in flashes (Gramsci, 1971: 327, quoted in Lukes, 2005: 4950). Their
autonomy tends to be more limited and partial than integral (1971: 52;
see Moore, 1998: 352). The idea of hegemony may thus imply that spaces
of resistance are not entirely autonomous, but it does not imply that an
alternative vision of things is impossible, that there is no degree of
autonomy at all or that some form of autonomy cannot be won.
Activists can never be completely autonomous of the forms of power to
which they are subject and which, as Foucault aimed to show, enter into
their very being. My aim, however, has been to argue for an autonomy that
is social, historical, variable and the subject of struggle. Foucault argued
that modern forms of power produce persons as autonomous agents, individuals who internalize discipline and govern themselves. But in the idea of
autonomy, one that has become ubiquitous in the modern era,12 is
contained the idea of resistance of not acting in accord with power and
of not being touched by it. Autonomy does, in this sense, make resistance
possible. For resistance to then become effective, for it to emerge as a social
force, autonomy must be increased and cultivated. If autonomy is an effect
of modern forms of power, it is equally the effect of resistance (cf. Mitchell,
1999). Autonomy is created in the process of resisting. The autonomy of
the French social movement and of the activist individuals who participate
in it, and the opposition between power and resistance, are produced and
reproduced through organizing, protesting, educating, attempting to live
coherently and critically reflecting on ones own existence. These are practices through which the hegemony of the dominant is challenged.

Notes
1 My research was made possible with a doctoral scholarship from the New
Zealand Tertiary Education Commission. Early versions of this article were
presented at seminars of the Cambridge University Social Anthropology Society
and Sussex University Anthropology Department. Thanks to all who gave
comments. I would particularly like to thank Gisa Weszkalnys and Sian Lazar
for reading various drafts, and four anonymous reviewers for their very helpful
criticisms.

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

82
Critique of Anthropology 28(1)
2 The term antiglobalization movement is thus something of a misnomer,
although activists do still use the term antimondialisation with reference to their
politics.
3 For accounts of the events see Bov and Dufour (2000: 16ff.), Alland (2001:
169ff.), and the Spcial Anti Mac Do in the Larzac activist newspaper (GLL,
1999).
4 The book is published in English as The World is Not for Sale (Bov and Dufour,
2002).
5 Cf. Smith (2004) on the complex meaning of autonomy for Totonac organizations in Mexico. The result of their drive for autonomy and self-determination,
he argues, would be a hybrid construction (2004: 409) involving increased
political power, juridical independence and the revival of religion and subsistence agriculture, but also state aid and participation in global coffee markets.
6 Constructing a united world.
7 Attac counts many public intellectuals among its members. It is often described
as a movement for popular education oriented towards action (Attac, 2000:
26). On Attac see also Ancelovici (2002) and Pagis (2005).
8 Bov eventually received 1.32 percent of the vote in the 2007 presidential
elections.
9 On the anti-GM movement in Europe see Heller (2001), Levidow (2000),
Purdue (2000), Schurman (2004), Scott (2000), Stone (2002), Taussig (2004).
10 Three-quarters of Frances electricity is nuclear.
11 Lukes argues that the final Foucault rejected his own ultra-radical view of
power.
12 See, for example, Schneewind (1998: 13) on Kants conviction that individuals
are autonomous agents who impose morality on [them]selves; Mauss (1985),
Dumont (1986), Berman (1980) and Taylor (1989) on Western notions of the
individual; Rosanvallon (1992: 13ff.) on the new conception of individual
autonomy that universal suffrage required; Barry et al. (1996) on governmental techniques for producing individual, state, society, economy as autonomous
domains.

References
Abu-Lughod, Lila (1990) The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of
Power through Bedouin Women, American Ethnologist 17(1): 4155.
Aguiton, Christophe and Dominique Cardon (2005) Le Forum et le rseau: pour
une analyse des formats de participation au sein du mouvement altermondialiste, paper presented at LAIOS and lAFSP conference Cultures et pratiques
participatives: une perspective comparative, Paris, 2021 January.
Alland, Alexander (with Sonia Alland) (2001) Crisis and Commitment: The Life
History of a French Social Movement, 2nd edn. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic
Publishers.
Alvarez, Sonia E., Evelina Dagnino and Arturo Escobar (1998) Introduction: The
Cultural and the Political in Latin American Social Movements, in Sonia E.
Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino and Arturo Escobar (eds) Cultures of Politics, Politics of
Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements, pp. 129. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Ancelovici, Marcos (2002) Organizing against Globalization: The Case of ATTAC
in France, Politics & Society 30(3): 42763.

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

83
Williams: Cultivating Autonomy
Appadurai, Arjun (2002) Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the
Horizon of Politics, Public Culture 14(1): 2147.
Attac (2000) Tout sur Attac. Paris: Mille et Une Nuits.
Barry, Andrew (1999) Demonstrations: Sites and Sights of Direct Action, Economy
and Society 28(1): 7594.
Barry, Andrew, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (1996) Introduction, in
Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (eds) Foucault and Political
Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government, pp. 117.
London: UCL Press.
Berglund, Eeva (1998) Knowing Nature, Knowing Science: An Ethnography of Environmental Activism. Cambridge: The White Horse Press.
Berman, Marshall (1980) The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the
Emergence of Modern Society. New York: Atheneum.
Bov, Jos (2007) Dclaration de candidature de Jos Bov, Le Monde 1 February.
Bov, Jos and Franois Dufour (2000) Le Monde nest pas une marchandise : des paysans
contre la malbouffe (entretiens avec Gilles Luneau), revised edn. Paris: ditions la
Dcouverte.
Bov, Jos and Franois Dufour (2002) The World is Not for Sale: Farmers Against
Junkfood, trans. Anna De Casparis. London: Verso.
Brown, Michael F. (1996) On Resisting Resistance, American Anthropologist 98(4):
72935.
Canetti, Elias (2000 [1962]) Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart. London:
Phoenix Press.
Cassen, Bernard (2003) On the Attack, New Left Review 19: 4160.
Castells, Manuel (1997) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 2: The
Power of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Clarke, Richard W.J. (2003) Voices from the Margins: Knowledge and Interpellation in Israeli Human Rights Protests, in Richard Ashby Wilson and Jon
P. Mitchell (eds) Human Rights in Global Perspective: Anthropological Studies of
Rights, Claims and Entitlements, pp. 11839. London: Routledge.
Cruikshank, Barbara (1999) The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
CUMS (2003) Charte du Collectif Construire un Monde Solidaire, Construire un
Monde Solidaire, http://www.monde-solidaire.org/spip/article.php3?id_article=19
Dumont, Louis (1977) From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic
Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dumont, Louis (1986) Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological
Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Escobar, Arturo (1992) Culture, Economics, and Politics in Latin American Social
Movements Theory and Research, in Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez
(eds) The Making of Social Movements in Latin America, pp. 6285. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Escobar, Arturo (2001) Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and
Subaltern Strategies of Localization, Political Geography 20(2): 13974.
Fletcher, Robert (2001) What Are We Fighting For? Rethinking Resistance in a
Pewenche Community in Chile, Journal of Peasant Studies 28(3): 3766.
Foucault, Michel (1977 [1975]) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin.
Foucault, Michel (1990 [1976]) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley. London: Penguin.
Fox, Richard (1997) Passage from India, in Richard Fox and Orin Starn (eds)

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

84
Critique of Anthropology 28(1)
Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest, pp. 6582.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Gal, Susan (1995) Language and the Arts of Resistance, Cultural Anthropology
10(3): 40724.
GLL (1999) Spcial Anti Mac Do, Gardarem lo Larzac 228 (supplment).
Graeber, David (2004) Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm Press.
Gramsci, Antonio (1971 [192935]) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2005) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of
Empire. London: Penguin.
Haynes, Douglas and Gyan Prakash (1991) Introduction: The Entanglement of
Power and Resistance, in Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash (eds) Contesting
Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, pp. 122. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Heller, Chaia (2001) From Risk to Globalisation: Discursive Shifts in the French
Debate about GMOs, Medical Anthropological Quarterly 15(1): 258.
Humphrey, Caroline (1997) Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of the Discourse of
Moralities in Mongolia, in Signe Howell (ed.) The Ethnography of Moralities,
pp. 2547. London: Routledge.
Kondo, Dorinne (1990) Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a
Japanese Workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards
a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.
Larzac Solidarits (2003) Dsobissance civile, Bulletin dInformation Larzac
Solidarits (November): 1113.
Lazar, Sian (2004a) Education for Credit: Development as Citizenship Project in
Bolivia, Critique of Anthropology 24(3): 30119.
Lazar, Sian (2004b) Citizenship and Collective Political Agency in El Alto, Bolivia,
paper presented at Senior Seminar, Department of Social Anthropology,
Cambridge University, 20 February.
Lesay, Thomas (2006) Jos candidat? Jos prsident?, Gardarem lo Larzac 27: 3.
Levidow, Les (2000) Pollution Metaphors in the UK Biotechnology Controversy,
Science as Culture 9(3): 32551.
Lukes, Stephen (2005) Power: A Radical View, 2nd edn. Houndmills, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Marshall, Peter H. (1992) Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London:
HarperCollins.
Martin, Didier (1987) Larzac: utopies et realites. Paris: LHarmattan.
Mauss, Marcel (1985[1938]) A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of
Person, the Notion of Self, trans. W.D. Halls, in Michael Carrithers, Steven
Collins and Steven Lukes (eds) The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy,
History, pp. 125. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Melucci, Alberto (1996) Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Mitchell, Timothy (1990) Everyday Metaphors of Power, Theory and Society 19:
54577.
Mitchell, Timothy (1999) Society, Economy, and the State Effect, in George
Steinmetz (ed.) State/Culture: State-formation after the Cultural Turn, pp. 7697.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Moore, Donald S. (1998) Subaltern Struggles and the Politics of Place: Remapping

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

85
Williams: Cultivating Autonomy
Resistance in Zimbabwes Eastern Highlands, Cultural Anthropology 13(3):
34481.
Nash, June C. (2001) Globalization and the Cultivation of Peripheral Vision,
Anthropology Today 17(4): 1522.
Nash, June C. (2005) Introduction: Social Movements and Global Processes, in
June Nash (ed.) Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader, pp. 126. Oxford:
Blackwell.
OHanlon, Rosalind (1991) Issues of Widowhood: Gender and Resistance in
Colonial Western India, in Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash (eds) Contesting
Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, pp. 62108. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Ortner, Sherry (1995) Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,
Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 17393.
Pagis, Julie (2005) Conditions sociales du consensus dans un contexte daction
collective. Attac et la Confdration paysanne. Enqute ethnographique sur
deux configurations locales, paper presented at LAIOS and lAFSP Conference, Cultures et pratiques participatives: une perspective comparative,
Paris: 2021 January.
Pratt, Jeff (2003) Class, Nation and Identity: The Anthropology of Political Movements.
London: Pluto.
Purdue, Derrick A. (2000) Anti-GenetiX: The Emergence of the Anti-GM Movement.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Reed-Danahay, Deborah (1993) Talking about Resistance: Ethnography and
Theory in Rural France, Anthropological Quarterly 66(4): 2219, 2406.
Rosanvallon, Pierre (1992) Le Sacre du citoyen: histoire du suffrage universel en France.
Paris: Gallimard.
Rose, Nikolas (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ross, Kristin (2002) May 68 and Its Afterlives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sangren, P. Steven (1995) Power against Ideology: A Critique of Foucaultian
Usage, Cultural Anthropology 10(1): 340.
Schneewind, Jerome B. (1998) The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral
Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schurman, Rachel (2004) Fighting Frankenfoods: Industry Opportunity Structures and the Efficacy of the Anti-biotech Movement in Western Europe, Social
Problems 51(2): 24368.
Scott, Ian M. (2000) Green Symbolism in the Genetic Modification Debate, Journal
of Agricultural & Environmental Ethics 13(34): 293311.
Scott, James C. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Scott, James C. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Smith, William D. (2004) The Topology of Autonomy: Markets, States, Soil and Selfdetermination in Totonacapan, Critique of Anthropology 24(4): 40329.
Starn, Orin (1992) I Dreamed of Foxes and Hawks: Reflections on Peasant
Protest, New Social Movements, and the Rondas Campesinas in Northern
Peru, in Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez (eds) The Making of Social
Movements in Latin America, pp. 89111. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Stone, Glenn Davis (2002) Both Sides Now: Fallacies in the Genetic-modification
Wars, Implications for Developing Countries, and Anthropological Perspectives, Current Anthropology 43(4): 61130.

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015

86
Critique of Anthropology 28(1)
Taylor, Charles (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Taussig, Karen-Sue (2004) Bovine Abominations: Genetic Culture and Politics in
the Netherlands, Cultural Anthropology 19(3): 30536.
Touraine, Alain (1968) Le Mouvement de mai ou le communisme utopique. Paris: Seuil.
Touraine, Alain (2001) Beyond Neoliberalism, trans. David Macey. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (2001) The Anthropology of the State in the Age of
Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind, Current Anthropology
42(1): 12538.
Vuarin, Pauline (2005) Larzac 19711981: la dynamique des acteurs dune lutte
originale et creatrice, Masters thesis, Universit Panthon-Sorbonne (Paris 1).
Weszkalnys, Gisa (2004) Alexanderplatz: An Ethnographic Study of Place and
Planning in Contemporary Berlin, PhD thesis, Cambridge University.
izek, Slavoj (1999) The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London:
Z
Verso.

Gwyn Williams was the Leach/RAI Fellow for 20056 in the Department of
Anthropology at the University of Sussex. His book, Struggles for an Alternative
Globalization: An Ethnography of Counterpower in Southern France, will be published by
Ashgate in 2008. [email: gwyn.williams@cantab.net]

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at University of Aegean on April 28, 2015