Since the early 1970s, anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to questions of power and inequality.

Since the early 1970s, anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to questions of power and inequality. This attention has taken many forms, including, for example: critiques of the discipline that identify power relationships anthropology has been entangled with (e.g. colonialism) (Willis, Lewis); analysis of the complexities of fieldwork (Paredes): critiques of the uses of the culture concept (Trouillot and Abu-Lughod); cultural analysis of contemporary systems of power and inequality (Martin). All of these involve reflections on the relationship between power and knowledge production. Write an essay that examines how at least 2 anthropologists we have read in the second section of the course examine forms of power and inequality in relation to knowledge production. How do the authors you chose make contributions towards understanding forms of power and inequality? How do they link concerns about power and inequality with questions of knowledge—e.g. about how knowledge is produced, by whom, to what ends—and/or how systems of knowledge, such as science, can contribute to forms of social inequality, hierarchy, or oppression?

There are many ways to do this question. One way I might suggest is to take one of the earlier authors, Willis or Lewis, and discuss how they made interventions by critically discussing anthropology (which is a form of knowledge production) and then relate how a later author—such as Trouillot, Abu-Lughod, Paredes, Martin or Harding—can be seen as building on the earlier interventions or contributing new insights into the relationship between knowledge and power.