Journal of Material Culture 2009 Warnier 459 70

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Technology as Efficacious Action on Objects . . . and Subjects

Jean-Pierre Warnier Journal of Material Culture 2009 14: 459 DOI: 10.1177/1359183509345944 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mcu.sagepub.com/content/14/4/459
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TECHNOLOGY AS E F F I CAC I O U S AC T I O N O N OBJECTS . . . AND SUBJECTS
J E A N - P I E R R E WA R N I E R
Centre dEtudes africaines, EHESS, Paris, France Abstract Techniques are usually defined as efficacious actions on something, that is, typically, on material substances and artefacts. This denition may be extended to the techniques of the subject as efcacious actions on the embodied human being. Consequently, the relevance of the anthropology of techniques may be extended from the material world to the human subject. This article draws on the work of Hubert, Mauss, Foucault and others, and on an ethnographic example to suggest that the efcacy of the techniques of the subject may rest on a process of identication between subjects and objects. Key Words efcacy identication magic ritual subject techniques
The denition of ritual that I like best as preposterous as it is was given by the French sociologist Jean Cazeneuve (1976) in his Sociology of Ritual. Ritual, he says, is an action which is repeated according to xed rules, and the accomplishment of which does not seem to produce any useful effect (p. 12, my translation). Let us put aside the questions of repetition and of unchanging rules. Indeed, any ethnography of ritual shows the extent of its variations. Instead, let us focus on the question of the effects of ritual. In line with basic utilitarian traditions, Cazeneuve presents two kinds of actions: efcacious technical actions, on the one hand, which have useful effects, and, on the other hand, those actions which portray the impotence of
Journal of Material Culture http://mcu.sagepub.com Copyright The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals/journalspermission.nav Vol. 14(4): 459470 [13591835 (200912) 10.1177/1359183509345944]
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J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 1 4 ( 4 )
man and seem to have no connection with any useful technical act actions that are the object of magic, religion and ritual. These actions do not have any useful effect, nor do they represent any kind of efciency. Although anthropologists have long since abandoned this view of ritual as inefcacious action, I wish to take issue with it, because, in my view, we have not gone far enough in analysing ritual as efcacious technology, and we still have some way to go towards a comprehensive and systematic approach to technology that would include ritual, magic and religion together with technical action applied to material things and artefacts. My argument will proceed in four steps. First, I will argue that the Francophone anthropology of techniques, although inspired by Marcel Mauss and Andr Leroi-Gourhan, has restricted the object of techniques to the material world; second, I will pick up on the work of Marcel Mauss to underscore his argument that technology applies both to the material world and to the human person or subject; third, I will consider the technologies of the subject as worth including within the domain of the anthropology of techniques; nally, I will use an ethnographic case in order to demonstrate that the efcacy of many, if not all, techniques of the subject may rest on a process of identication between subject and objects.
THE RESTRICTED DEFINITION OF TECHNIQUES USED BY THE FRENCH ANTHROPOLOGY OF TECHNIQUES
Something strange occurred in the 1970s, when cultural technology mushroomed in France under the leadership of Robert Cresswell, Pierre Lemonnier, Franois Sigaut and others around the journal Techniques & Culture and the research laboratory of the same name. This strange thing was a departure from the views expressed by Marcel Mauss that magic, sacrice, sorcery, shamanistic practice and technical arts could be put together into a single category of techniques because all of them have tangible effects that can be assessed and described, and because, as Mauss (2001[19023/1950]) stated: they are found in natural association and constantly join forces (p. 24). Regarding the denition of technique, he wrote: I call technique an act which is traditional and efcacious (and you can see that, as such, it is not different from the magical, religious or symbolic act) (1950[1936]: 371, my translation). Andr Leroi-Gourhan, who, together with Andr Haudricourt, was explicitly referred to as one of the founding fathers of cultural technology, shared a similar point of view. How did cultural technology depart from these views? It achieved this by focusing on a narrow denition of technique or technology as traditional and efcacious action on matter. It did not rule out the action
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Warnier: T E C H N O L O G Y A S E F F I C A C I O U S A C T I O N
on persons, yet the latter were almost, though not entirely, ignored, whether these were patients to be cured, criminals to be punished, enemies to be mystified, sorcerers to be exposed, or believers to be sanctied. Why did cultural technology depart from Mausss synthetic views? Mostly, in my opinion, because its matrix had shifted from a Maussian anthropology to a Marxist and materialistic one. This is quite explicitly stated in the early publications of Robert Cresswell, and in the rst mimeographed manifesto of a series which gave birth to the journal Techniques & Culture in the 1970s. At the time, Cresswells ambition was to expand on Marxs ethnographic notebooks by studying the productive forces from an anthropological point of view. The technical work of the agriculturalist, the pastoralist, the smith, the smelter, etc. was to be the focus of this scientic endeavour. The study of rituals, magic and shamanism was to become the preserve of symbolic anthropology read structuralism at the Collge de France, on the other side of rue Saint Jacques in Paris. De facto, technique was separated from ritual and symbolism. The overall framework of Mauss, encompassing all the different kinds of techniques as traditional and efcacious action on something, was abandoned. As a result, the notion of efcacy, of cause and effect, shifted, lock, stock and barrel towards cultural technology and withdrew from the domain of ritual, religion, magic, etc. Reading the literature of the 1970s on ritual and symbolism, it is clear that some authors completely abandoned the notion of efcacy. This is the case of Cazeneuve, quoted earlier. Or else, as Claude Lvi-Strauss had done in the 1950s, it pulled the question of efcacy towards a comparison with psychoanalysis and with the actions that speech alone (compared with bodily motions and material culture) can do. Later on, several anthropologists Maurice Godelier among them tried to bridge the gap between speech and the body, between ritual and efcacy. However, they did it more or less outside the eld of the anthropology of techniques. Let me make it clear that this purication process, as it were, may have been the price to be paid for the development of the anthropology of techniques and for its very rewarding achievements which allow us, from now on, to go one step further by trying to bridge the gap between the anthropology of techniques and the anthropology of more obviously symbolic practices as techniques. What I have tried to do over the last 10 years was to pull together material culture studies, cognitive science and various other theories, which make it possible to pick up on the intuition of Marcel Mauss regarding the unity of technology and on the central issue of technology as traditional and efcacious action on something. Mauss insisted on both qualications: actions have to be transmitted by tradition and they
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must have a tangible effect. In his article on bodily techniques, for example, one of the criteria put forward by Mauss (1950[1936]: 374) for their classication is that of their comparative efcacy. Comparing the resting postures of the Australian and French soldiers during the First World War, he says that the squatting technique of the Australians was far more efcacious than the standing, seated or reclining technique of the French because it could be practised regardless of location and weather conditions. All these are techniques of the body. In my view, Mauss is quite right on the question of efcacy and on the unity of the different kinds of techniques. However, there is one point that requires further clarication: efcacious action on what? What is this something technology is supposed to act upon? Another thing I wish to stress is that, in 2009, our concepts, our vocabulary, our theories are not those of Marcel Mauss, and we have to update the concepts and verbal expressions of the Maussian theory.
ACTION ON WHAT: MATTER, THE HUMAN PERSON, OR BOTH?
In 19023, Hubert and Mauss published their path-breaking General Theory of Magic. In chapter 2, they raise the question of denition: how is it possible to dene magic? They do not separate magic and ritual. They state that magic is denitely a technique:
Ritual acts . . . are essentially thought to be able to produce much more than contract: rites are eminently effective; they are creative; they do things. It is through these qualities that magical ritual is recognizable as such. In some cases even, ritual derives its name from a reference to these effective characteristics: in India the word which best corresponds to our word ritual is karman; action [etc.] . . . However, human skill [techniques] can also be creative . . . From this point of view the greater part of the human race has always had difculty in distinguishing techniques from rites. (Mauss, 2001 [19023/1950]: 11)
Mauss is concerned with establishing the proof of the efcacy of magic, ritual, sorcery, etc. He documents all kinds of cases (1950[1926]: 31130), for example the fact that, in Australia and New Zealand, some performative words associated with ritual actions can actually bring about the death of the person/s who are the object/s of such words/deeds, sometimes within a few hours. He is very intent on gathering reliable medical evidence for such cases. But the reverse is also true: these ritual actions can restore health very quickly, even in cases of genuine bodily ailments, such as a broken limb or a deep wound. It is interesting to see that LviStrauss (1958: 183203) picked up on this discussion by quoting an article published by Walter B. Cannon (1942) on voodoo death. However, Lvi-
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Strauss restricts the efcacy of the process to belief, speech and the deprivation of social and emotional support by the group. Material and bodily techniques/cultures are not taken into consideration. How is it possible to distinguish technology proper from ritual or magical technology? The answer given by Hubert and Mauss is that ritual movements and gestures have
a special kind of effectiveness, quite different from their mechanical effectiveness. It is not really believed that the gestures themselves bring about the result. The effect derives from something else, and usually this is not of the same order. Let us take, for example, the case of a man who stirs the water of a spring in order to bring rain. This is the peculiar nature of rites which we might call traditional actions whose effectiveness is sui generis. (Mauss, 2001[19023/1950]: 12; original emphasis)
I think everyone would agree that the efcacy of sorcery is a different kind of efcacy from that of cooking a meal, carving a mortar from a piece of wood, or smelting a bloom of iron. However, I think this answer is a disappointing one, mainly because it leaves open quite a few questions: who is to assess the efcacy, and according to what criteria? Will the native blacksmith, the Western engineer, or the anthropologist do so according to their own respective criteria? Just because some notion once considered scientically valid has been disproved, this does not turn past error into magical belief (or ritual, or sorcery), remarks Gilbert Lewis (1986: 421). It is disappointing mostly because it leaves open the question of the thing on which the action is supposed to produce an effect. To answer that very question, let me draw an analytical distinction between two different kinds of techniques depending not on the kind of efcacy but on what the technique is applied to in order to achieve what kind of end. As I said, technique may be applied either to matter or to the human subject. In both cases, the means may be the same: bodily motions, the use of material things and of associated speech especially performative words or technical comments non-verbal procedural knowledge, embodied, situated and distributed cognition. However, the target will be different. It will be either matter or the human subject. I will take matter as something rather unproblematic although it is not. Matter is what the anthropology of techniques is all about. It concerns the transitive action of an actor, a worker, an artisan (not a subject) on the matter to be transformed. As regards the subject as a target of technology, as something on which the efcacious and traditional action may be applied, let me now raise a number of questions.
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THE TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SUBJECT
Hubert and Mauss use the words individual, person, total man. Not the subject. It seems to me that, at the beginning of the 21st century, the term subject is more adequate, despite all the ideological controversies of the 1960s to 1990s. Foucault, of course, is the one who made extensive use of the notions of technologies of the subject and techniques of the self. He underscored two aspects of the technologies of the subject, that is, rst, the way a given governmentality acts upon a subject at the very point where the subject takes himself/herself as the object of his/her own actions so as to shape his/her subjectivity and, second, to subject himself/herself to various kinds of power. Moreover, says Foucault, power is addressed to the body and reaches the subjectivities through the body and through material and ideological contraptions (or dispositifs). Foucault developed the theme of the technologies of the subject from the two sides of the coin: how the subject governs himself/herself and takes himself/herself as an object of his/her own actions; and how the subject is subjected to a sovereignty, or, as he says, to a subjectifying governmentality. In both cases, it is a question of power and agency which, according to Foucault, is mediated by what he calls the body. The Foucauldian view on the technologies of the self and the technologies of the subject is stimulating because it opens up new ways of looking at power, but it also raises a number of questions that I now discuss. The shift from the Maussian person to the Foucauldian subject is, I think, an important aspect of the debate at hand. The philosophy of the subject started in earnest with Descartes and his cogito. It was radicalized in the rst half of the 20th century and culminated with the subject as conceived by Christian and atheist humanistic philosophy as a being conscious of himself/herself, with a call for the exercise of freedom. A subject full of his/her deeds and transparent to himself/herself. Following Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty added the important dimension of the body as tre-au-monde (being-in or being-to-the-world), but did not depart signicantly from the philosophy of consciousness and the cogito until later in his life. Foucault (together with Althusser, Lacan, Lvi-Strauss, etc.) was notorious for having rejected this notion of the subject transparent to himself/herself because it no longer tted with what the human and social sciences were saying about human beings. Lacan and his views about the subject, which is a subject as a consequence of being divided up and not of anything else, played an important role in that rejection. In a nutshell, and in Freudian parlance (from which Lacan distanced himself), the subject of the cogito is obliged to come to terms with its unconscious as repressed, which belongs with itself and yet is foreign to it.
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Consequently, the subject is divided up between the two. The division process is what produces a subject. The subject may exist or it may not. It is not a given. It cannot be ontologized. It is never where it thinks it is. It is not a pure consciousness transparent to itself, but opaque and divided up.1 What is a body? Can the technologies of the subject be adequately described as techniques of the body following Mauss? There is no evidence that Foucault ever read Mauss, and I did not nd any authoritative comment on this point by the philosopher. I can only remark that the Foucauldian notion of a body is a rather crude one. Merleau-Ponty had tried to elaborate on it by relying on the notions of image of the body and Krperschema developed by Schilder (1935), and on Gestalt theory. Foucault does not question the notion of a body. However, it is not that difcult to elaborate on the work of Foucault along the lines of the unconscious or the psyche: we cannot talk of a body unless a subject has emerged, that is, unless a division of sorts has taken place in the ontogenesis of the subject. We cannot talk of a body when it is not immersed in language and material culture. If material culture mediates power and the technologies of the subject as well as being the end product of technology as efcacious action on matter, how does it (that is, material culture) relate to the subject? In my view, material culture is partly included in the subject. It belongs with the body in motion. A subject is a subject-with-its-objects in motion. Of course, all objects are not embodied at the same time. Particular objects may be incorporated and excorporated at a turn. That is, every single object is contingent to the subject and the body, but material culture is an essential component of the subject in the human species, just as language is. Going back to magic, sorcery, rituals, techniques of the self, can we see them as belonging with the technologies of the subject, and are they efcacious? This is the central question I wish to raise in the present article. I think the answer is denitely yes, they belong with the technologies of the subject, and, yes, they are efcacious. Rituals aim at shaping not only the status of people, but their subjectivities. The efcacy of their action can be assessed to some extent. It would be interesting to elaborate on the methodological dimension of this assessment, although I will not do this here. The mediations of the ritual action are the material things that are used during the ritual, together with the body and words. In the case of religious rituals, there is not a single religious practice in the world that does not involve sensori-motor conduct and the use of material culture in an essential way. By sensori-motor conduct, I mean any bodily motion aiming at something and involving ipso facto a perceptive activity. One drinks and eats, fasts, walks and accomplishes pilgrimages, kneels down, recites mantras, sings and plays music, puts on special kinds of garments, performs sacrices by means of animals and material
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substances and offerings, etc.2 The subjects are transformed by these practices. Their identities are shaped and they experience bodily and psychic changes. However, one may object that, in rain-making rituals, for example, the explicit aim is not to shape subjectivities but to bring about rain. This would need an extensive discussion that cannot be accommodated in a short article. In a nutshell, I think producing rain is the manifest goal of the ritual. But, from an analytical point of view, the latent goal, and the most important one, is to act on the subjects themselves. This remark brings us back to Marcel Mauss, who said that magic and technology are often mixed up because they all belong to an efcacious action on something. Mausss remark can be translated by saying that there is no technology of the subject that does not involve an efcacious action on matter and the body, and vice versa. The anthropology of techniques was developed through and on the assumption that technology is a transitive action on matter, and that the question of the subject can be disconnected from the study of work aimed at shaping matter. It seldom raised the question of its feedback on the subjectivity of the worker and on the fact that technology as efcacious action on matter involves the implementation of technologies of power, of the self and of the subject. That kind of question is not part of its agenda. By considering technology as efcacious action on matter and on the subject, we can overcome the divide between subject and object, material culture and the body, technology and magic, religion or ritual.
EFFICACY AND IDENTIFICATION: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC CASE
With regard to the technologies of the subject, what are the means or the tools of any efcacious action? That is, what is the know-how, what is the chane opratoire, similar to the know-how in any technical act? How can one produce a subject, shape it, transform it? A partial answer was given by Lvi-Strauss (1958: 20526) in his article on symbolic efcacy, which predicates it on speech alone. In a series of publications (2001, 2006, 2007, 2009), I explored a different line of thought. I contend that bodily cum material culture is probably the most common and the most efcient means of acting on a subject. More precisely, in the human species, what could be called the bodily culture or the culture of sensorimotoricity is implemented through material culture and vice versa. Through sensori-motor conducts, material objects such as a bike, a fountain pen or a dwelling, are incorporated and disincorporated into what Schilder (1935) called the image of the body (in German, in a more graphic way, he called it Krperschema).
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Thanks to the development of neurocognitive sciences, we now have a ne-grained knowledge of the inscription of learned sensory-motoricity and the regular use of objects in the motoricity areas of the central nervous system, particularly in the pre-frontal cortex, by means of what Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia (2008) call the mirror neurones and the canonic ones. Such recent research casts a sharp light on what Schilder had already noticed, that is, a kind of synthesis between subject and object in motion, to such an extent that the subject identies with his embodied objects. As I have already suggested, a subject may be a subject-with-his-embodiedfountain-pen writing an article, or a subject-cum-Boeing 707 in the action of piloting. This is where an ethnographic case may be usefully brought into the picture. In several recent publications (2006, 2007, 2009), I have tried to show that the people of Mankon (Cameroon) have a sophisticated bodily cum material culture focused on envelopes, openings, surfaces, containers, the human skin, and on all the actions pertaining to the transit of substances through the apertures of the body and all kinds of vessels. People identify with containers and, since Mankon is a kingdom, the king identies with a pot full of unifying ancestral life substances. More precisely, for example, mothers give a daily massage to their newborn babies until they are able to walk. They work the skin of the infant with palm oil or industrial baby lotion, beginning with the shaved scalp and working all the way down to the toes, paying much attention to the folds of the skin around nose, mouth, ears, ngers, toes, genitals, buttocks, etc. They do not leave a single square millimetre of the skin untouched. Similarly, adults focus health practices on the skin. Rituals of marriage and succession are performed by anointing the skin with a mixture of palm oil and crimson camwood. Such practices turn the bodily surface of the subject into a supple, shiny and healthy envelope. Although this is not explicitly verbalized in an emic way by the Mankon, I would gloss such practices by saying that young infants, adults, brides, grooms and successors are manufactured as leak-proof, sound vessels in order to retain healthy substances and all the principles of fertility and well-being within their skin-container. In other words, they are made to identify with material containers. No doubt, the facts that the human body itself is a container with a cutaneous envelope and openings, and that the self is built as an envelope by anaclisis on the lived experience of the skin envelope as indicated by Didier Anzieu (1985), play an important role in such an identication. This is underscored by the elaborate and extensive use of all kinds of material containers and substances embodied through sensori-motor conducts, and by the care that is paid to the openings and surfaces of people and containers alike in order to store given substantial contents and to make them circulate.
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If such is the case, the notion of identication needs further elaboration. It has been the object of much attention in psychoanalysis. Consequently, I will borrow my denition from Laplanche and Pontaliss Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (1967). They say that identication is:
the psychological process by which a subject assimilates an aspect, a property, an attribute of another subject, and transforms itself, totally or partially, on the model of the latter. Personality constitutes and differentiates itself through a series of identications. (p. 187, my translation)
Taking that denition at face value, it would seem that a subject can only identify with another subject and not with material objects. Yet, if I am right in saying that a subject is always a subject-with-its-embodiedobjects, then identifying with a subject entails identifying with its bodilycum-material culture. In the classical oedipal identication, if a young boy identies with his father and with the male sex, he will adopt male material culture. Gender studies have repeatedly emphasized this dimension of identication when it applies to the choice and use of toys, games, sports and clothing. However, as Winnicott (1971) has repeatedly underscored, many identications take place across the gender divide. A girl may identify with male persons of her environment, and a boy with female persons. I may identify with my mother as a musician, in which case I will incorporate a musical instrument through apprenticeship and identify with it. I may not select the piano played by my mother, but I may direct my choice to the violin or the saxophone. In a short article like this, it is not possible to unpick this argument in detail. Yet what I have written may be enough to suggest that the efcacy of the technologies of the subject in producing, shaping and transforming it may be largely due to the most efcient process of identication through the apprenticeship of bodily-cum-material culture. And, to go back to Mauss and to the questions raised in the introduction to this article, we can see how ritual, magic and religious practice involve bodily motions propped up against given material cultures, and how they may identify the subjects and have a tangible efcacy. Therefore they belong with techniques. Of course, this is an etic rendering of an emic experience of quite a different nature. When performing a rain ritual, the ritualists goal is to efciently produce rain, and the ethnographer has to take this performance seriously. However, at the same time, the anthropologist is in a position to contend that this technique has efciently achieved something else, which is to maintain the identications of the performers. In many cases, both points of view emic and etic will coincide. This is the case, for example, in a Cameroon kingdom when notables anoint the skin of an incumbent of a high ofce with palm oil and camwood. The notables will make use of their performative non-verbal knowledge to work on the skin of the successor; and the anthropologist will make use
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of his verbalized knowledge to state that this amounts to the shaping of a healthy and supple envelope which will retain the good (ancestral, and more mundane) substances stored in it.
FOR A UNIFIED ANTHROPOLOGY OF TECHNIQUES
I would argue, then, that the anthropology of techniques would be most protably considered as including the technologies of objects and the technologies of the subject. Furthermore, as Mauss said, it may be contended that the two are intimately interwoven. Producing a violin necessarily implies the production of a subject who will become a skilled artisan through a protracted apprenticeship, including the training of sensory-motor know-how. This artisan will have to implement sophisticated techniques of the self and to identify with his or her workshop, tools, skills and nal product. Similarly, anointing a successor is the last step in the techniques of palm-oil and powdered camwood manufacture. And the act of rubbing the body of the candidate makes use of a technique implemented on a daily basis in the care of young infants or in adult body care. Techniques, therefore, are traditional and efcacious actions applied preferentially either to matter or to the subject, but most often to both at the same time.
Notes 1. In the 1970s and 1980s, the subject became a bone of contention between the supporters of a neoliberal ideology and a number of philosophers. The former charged Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, Lvi-Strauss, etc. with being responsible for the death of the subject of humanism. The culprits were lumped together under the blanket term of structuralists although some of them (Foucault, in particular) had emphatically said that they could not be considered as such. Foucault, specically, was devoting all his endeavours to theorizing the subject, but in a different way. The neoliberals needed the conscious and transparent subject, who, as an individual in a society made of individuals, could be considered as the responsible agent of his/her deeds, including his/her successes and failures. Poverty, unemployment, social deviance, could be blamed on the subject, which would partially exonerate the state of having to care for such social ills. In contrast, the rich, as the agent of their own wealth, had to be credited for it, and allowed adequate rewards. There are clear philosophical options behind neoliberalism that depart signicantly from the point of view I develop in the present article. On the other hand, underlying the present article, there are philosophical iz options regarding the subject of the kind developed by Slavoj Z ek (1999). Discussing them, however, would go beyond the scope of this article. This research was conducted with the research group Matire Penser (MP). This expression may be transformed into Matire Politique, Matire Religion, Matire Dveloppement, etc., when material and bodily cultures constitute the mediations of power, religion, development, and so on (see Bayart and Warnier, 2004).
2.
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References Anzieu, D. (1985) Le Moi-peau. Paris: Dunod. Bayart, J.-F. and Warnier, J.-P. (eds) (2004) Matire politique. Le pouvoir, les corps et les choses. Paris/Yaound: CERI-Karthala-UCAC. Cannon, W.B. (1942) Voodoo Death, American Anthropologist 44 (new series): 16981. Cazeneuve, J. (1976) Sociologie du rite. Paris: PUF. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1967) Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse. Paris: PUF. Lvi-Strauss, C. (1958) Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon. Lewis, G. (1986) The Look of Magic, Man 21(3): 41437. Mauss, M. (1950[1926]) Effet physique chez lindividu de lide de mort suggre par la collectivit (Australie, Nouvelle Zlande), in Sociologie et anthropologie, pp. 31130. Paris: PUF. Mauss, M. (1950[1936]) Les techniques du corps, in Sociologie et anthropologie, pp. 36586. Paris: PUF. Mauss, M. (in collaboration with Henri Hubert) (2001[19023/1950]: A General Theory of Magic. London: Routledge. Rizzolatti, G. and Sinigaglia, C. (2008) Les Neurones Miroirs. Paris: Odile Jacob. Schilder, P. (1935) The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energies of the Psyche. London: Kegan Paul. Warnier, J.-P. (2001) A Praxeological Approach to Subjectivation in a Material World, Journal of Material Culture 6(1): 524. Warnier, J.-P. (2006) Inside and Outside, Surfaces and Containers, in C. Tilley et al. (eds) Handbook of Material Culture, pp. 18695. London: Sage. Warnier, J.-P. (2007) The Pot-King: The Body and Technologies of Power. Leyden: Brill. Warnier, J.-P. (2009) Rgner au Cameroun. Le Roi-pot. Paris: CERI-Karthala. Winnicott, D. (1971) Playing and Reality. London: Routledge. iz Z ek, S. (1999) The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso. J E A N - P I E R R E WA R N I E R is Professor Emeritus at the Centre dtudes Africaines (Ceaf) at EHESS (Lcole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris). His research interests are material culture, praxeology, Foucault, the Cameroon Grasselds and Africa. Signicant recent publications include Rgner au Cameroun. Le roi-pot (2009, Editions CERI-Karthala), The Pot-King: The Body and Technologies of Power (2007, Brill), and Ethnologie, anthropologie (2003, PUF, with P. LaburtheTolra). Address: Centre dtudes Africaines, EHESS, 96 boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France. [email: jp-warnier@wanadoo.fr]
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com/ of Material Culture

Technology as Efficacious Action on Objects . . . and Subjects

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TECHNOLOGY AS E F F I CAC I O U S AC T I O N O N OBJECTS . . . AND SUBJECTS

THE TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SUBJECT

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