Key concept: power practice questions.

Ong studied Malay women working in foreign-owned electronics plants in a Malaysian free trade zone around 1980, where production was timed to the minute and supervised closely. She recorded episodes in which workers on the shop floor fell into spirit possession, halting the line until a ritual specialist was called. Her analysis presents these episodes as

• proof that the women were unsuited to the demands of industrial employment
• a survival of earlier belief, unaffected by the new organisation of work
• an organised strike coordinated by the workers' own trade union representatives
• an idiom in which factory discipline was contested without open confrontation

Answer: an idiom in which factory discipline was contested without open confrontation

Ong reads possession as a response to a new regime of time and surveillance, expressed in a locally available idiom rather than in the language of industrial bargaining. Reading it as unsuitability or as mere survival removes the power relation from the case.

Working in rural Haiti in the 1980s and 1990s, Farmer argued that patients who did not complete tuberculosis treatment were not acting on beliefs about sorcery: when transport, food supplements and medicines were provided, the same patients completed the course. He used the case to argue that

• cultural beliefs about illness are irrelevant to the work of medical anthropology as a field
• poverty can only be addressed once patients' beliefs about illness have first been changed
• unequal social arrangements, rather than culture, accounted for the outcomes
• the patients concerned had simply misunderstood the diagnosis they had been given

Answer: unequal social arrangements, rather than culture, accounted for the outcomes

Farmer's target is the habit of explaining poor outcomes among the poor by their supposed beliefs, when the constraints are material and institutional. He does not claim beliefs never matter; he claims they were doing no explanatory work in this case.

Scott lived from 1978 to 1980 in a rice-growing village in Kedah, Malaysia, where combine harvesters and double cropping had recently cut the work available to poorer households. He recorded no strikes and no organised protest, but a steady traffic of foot-dragging, pilfering from the fields, sabotage of machinery and unrelenting gossip about the meanness of the richer families. His account of this conduct is that

• it was the beginning of an organised political movement that would emerge into the open within a few years
• it was too scattered and too self-interested to count as anything more than ordinary petty crime in the village
• it was resistance in the form available to people for whom open confrontation would be costly and futile
• it shows that the poorer households had accepted the new arrangement and were merely grumbling about it

Answer: it was resistance in the form available to people for whom open confrontation would be costly and futile

Scott's argument is that the absence of rebellion is not evidence of consent. Where the powerful can retaliate easily, opposition takes forms that are deniable and leave no leaders to arrest — which is precisely why such conduct is easy to misread as apathy or as crime.

Gupta spent time in the offices of a north Indian district administration, watching applications for welfare payments be recorded, mislaid, reopened and adjourned. He found that many of the poorest applicants never received what they were entitled to, without any official refusing them and without bribery being the main obstacle. His argument about this is that

• arbitrariness in the ordinary working of the state is itself a form of violence against those least able to absorb delay
• the outcome should be attributed to corruption, since it is the only mechanism by which entitlements are diverted, as several of the applicants themselves maintained
• the officials were deliberately targeting particular applicants and concealing that intention behind procedure
• the fault lies with applicants who did not present their claims in the form that the written procedure requires

Answer: arbitrariness in the ordinary working of the state is itself a form of violence against those least able to absorb delay

The point is that no one has to intend the outcome for the outcome to be lethal: files that circulate slowly, requirements that shift and records that go missing distribute harm along existing lines of poverty. Calling it corruption locates the problem in individual wrongdoing and lets the routine off the hook.

A health ministry sets targets for vaccination coverage, publishes district rankings, sends reminders to households and trains volunteers to record who has not attended. Nobody is compelled, and officials describe the programme as raising awareness. In Foucault's vocabulary the arrangement is best described as

• the government of a population through measurement and targets, working on how people conduct themselves
• sovereign power, since the ministry could in principle compel attendance at the clinic by passing a law
• an absence of power, since taking part in the programme is entirely voluntary
• structural violence, since inequalities in health will persist despite the programme

Answer: the government of a population through measurement and targets, working on how people conduct themselves

The programme works on a population through statistics and comparison rather than on individuals through commands, and it recruits people to manage themselves. Reading the absence of compulsion as an absence of power is the error the concept was formulated against.

In a school where the speech, references and manners of one section of society are treated as simply correct, pupils from other backgrounds come to explain their poorer results by saying that they are not clever. Bourdieu's term for a domination that works because those subject to it accept the standard being applied is

• structural violence
• symbolic violence
• charismatic authority
• the hidden transcript

Answer: symbolic violence

Symbolic violence requires misrecognition: the standard is taken as legitimate by those it disadvantages, so the outcome is experienced as personal failure. Structural violence, in Farmer's sense, names harm produced by unequal arrangements whether or not anyone regards them as right.