Volume 74, Number 4, October 2001
E-ISSN: 1534-1518 Print ISSN: 0003-5491
DOI: 10.1353/anq.2001.0037
John L. Mccreery
Getting To Persuasion
Anthropological Quarterly – Volume 74, Number 4, October 2001, pp. 163-169

The argument of this article is that persuasion is a topic largely neglected by anthropologists, who prefer to see human behavior as conforming to cultural rules or driven by social forces. Drawing on his experience in the advertising business in Japan, the author examines persuasion in light of cultural heuristics available to would-be persuaders striving to create different types of social relationships.

In contrast, the martial arts traditions to which MT refers are rooted in Daoist/Buddhist ideas in which the primary form of liberation is liberation from desire, ultimately the attainment of a state of no-self in which questions of submission or rebellion are moot. In this context, freedom is not liberation from external authority imposed from outside the self. It is, instead, liberation from the desires that constitute the self, leaving the body free to go with the flow of nature instead of fighting against it.

Just once in my own life did I have an experience whose memory resonates with these thoughts. As an undergraduate, i was taking a judo class to satisfy a PE requirement. A complete novice and not in great shape, I was paired with an advanced student who was also larger and stronger than I was. When we stood up to fight and grasped the collars of our gi (judo jackets), I gave up and relaxed as totally as I could, hoping to minimize the pain of the fall. The next thing I knew my opponent was flying over my shoulder. That never happened again; I was always too self-conscious about getting into the right mood. But in that moment, I and the universe were one. I did what came naturally, as free as I have ever been in my life. But, of course, “I” wasn’t there. The self that worries about submission or rebellion was absent.

Essentially, entering into training in a dojo involves subjection to the will of a teacher; your action within the dojo is not “free” in an individual sense. And yet the whole pedagogy is structured around the notion of the individual’s “will” to pursue mastery of the art, and their freedom to leave.

Seen from a distance it has always seemed to me that mastery enjoys pride of place in Japanese martial arts in a quite different sort of way than domination does in American competitive sports. I don’t know if that makes domination/freedom a binary opposition or not…

I think in practice, within the bits of western liberalism that I live with and study, the term “ethics” is pretty much exclusively understood in the Kantian sense, and I find it a depressing word —

you mention the phrase “he acted ethically” as an attribution of good, but I can’t see it deployed as anything other than damning with faint praise or ass-covering. A kind of bare-bones basic requirement: “he didn’t break any explicit rules”.

My little pet peeve doesn’t really leave Foucault’s concept entirely unscathed, though, because ascetic ethics in general have a whiff of limiting moral thought to the prohibition of evil, rather than a positive conception of the Good Life, both in the enjoyment of one’s own life and in solidarity with others.

As a subjective moral ponderer (rather than, I guess, a judgement-suspending ethnographer), this is my problem with philosophies such as Jainism or veganism.

On the other hand, the discussion of freedom also makes me think of dojo/martial-arts culture. As someone who trains in a traditional Japanese martial art, I often think of this when I hear or read those clumsy statements about individual freedom not being an “Asian value”.

Because it’s complicated. The traditional dojo represents a different configuration of freedom than classical europe-based liberals are used to thinking of, and I’m not sure if I can put it across concisely. Essentially, entering into training in a dojo involves subjection to the will of a teacher; your action within the dojo is not “free” in an individual sense. And yet the whole pedagogy is structured around the notion of the individual’s “will” to pursue mastery of the art, and their freedom to leave. And there are some interesting unspoken ways in which contradictions can be resolved.

Given the amount of use of ideas of governmentality, I think that the pointer to Faubion’s extension of Foucault in terms of ethics and the making of the self sounds very interesting.

This sits in an interesting counterpoise to Mackintyres work in “After Virtue” on the shaping of ethics in every-day practice. His point is quite simple, that to operate within groups of others one has to mediate ones desires, and that this is the ground of ethics emerging. Its an interesting thesis followed up by Wenger and Lave in their work on communities of practice, ooking at the social basis of learning. This is particularly interesting because Wenger came out of an Ai background, and so focussed on the differences between machine algorythm learning and social learning, where modification of the overall sense is required, and within social relations (this is an extension of the implications of neural networks as well as of practice theories.)

What I find particularly interesting in this is the implication that ethics are also implicated with people’s day to day interaction with materia in material practices. That a la Latour the sense of self is worked out through social agency that is implicated with the material. I think these lines of enquiry give a spin towards exploring the materiality of Foucault’s early work on insutitions and discourse, without falling into the traps of linguistic determination that his later work, oriented towards day to day practices, seemed to be avoiding.

This might allow the rather thing conceptions of governmentality to be fleshed out and materially grounded somewhat. Very interesting discussion, and of course you are an Anthropologist.