Journal of Material Culture

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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

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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 d’Etudes africaines, EHESS, Paris, France

Abstract
Techniques are usually defined as efficacious actions on something, that
is, typically, on material substances and artefacts. This definition may be
extended to the techniques of the subject as efficacious actions on the em-
bodied 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 efficacy of the techniques
of the subject may rest on a process of identification between subjects and
objects.

Key Words ◆ efficacy ◆ identification ◆ magic ◆ ritual ◆ subject

◆ techniques

The definition 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 fixed
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:
efficacious technical actions, on the one hand, which have useful effects,
and, on the other hand, those actions which portray the impotence of

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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 efficiency.
Although anthropologists have long since abandoned this view of
ritual as ‘inefficacious action’, I wish to take issue with it, because, in
my view, we have not gone far enough in analysing ritual as efficacious
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 André 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; finally, I will use an ethnographic case
in order to demonstrate that the efficacy of many, if not all, techniques
of the subject may rest on a process of identification 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, François 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,
sacrifice, 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[1902–3/1950]) stated: ‘they are found in natural association and
constantly join forces’ (p. 24). Regarding the definition of ‘technique’, he
wrote: ‘I call technique an act which is traditional and efficacious (and
you can see that, as such, it is not different from the magical, religious
or symbolic act)’ (1950[1936]: 371, my translation). André Leroi-Gourhan,
who, together with André 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 definition of technique or technology as
‘traditional and efficacious 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
sanctified.
Why did cultural technology depart from Mauss’s 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 first
mimeographed manifesto of a series which gave birth to the journal Tech-
niques & Culture in the 1970s. At the time, Cresswell’s ambition was to
expand on Marx’s 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 scientific endeavour. The study of rituals, magic and shaman-
ism was to become the preserve of symbolic anthropology – read ‘struc-
turalism’ – at the Collège de France, on the other side of rue Saint Jacques
in Paris. De facto, ‘technique’ was separated from ‘ritual’ and ‘symbol-
ism’. The overall framework of Mauss, encompassing all the different
kinds of techniques as ‘traditional and efficacious action’ on something,
was abandoned.
As a result, the notion of efficacy, 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 aban-
doned the notion of efficacy. This is the case of Cazeneuve, quoted earlier.
Or else, as Claude Lévi-Strauss had done in the 1950s, it pulled the ques-
tion of efficacy 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 efficacy. However, they did it more or less outside
the field of the anthropology of techniques.
Let me make it clear that this ‘purification’ 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 efficacious action’ on something. Mauss insisted on
both qualifications: 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 classification is that of their comparative efficacy. 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 efficacious 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 efficacy and on
the unity of the different kinds of techniques. However, there is one
point that requires further clarification: efficacious 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 1902–3, Hubert and Mauss published their path-breaking General

Theory of Magic. In chapter 2, they raise the question of definition: how
is it possible to define magic? They do not separate magic and ritual.
They state that magic is definitely 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 char-
acteristics: 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 difficulty in distinguishing techniques from rites. (Mauss, 2001
[1902–3/1950]: 11)

Mauss is concerned with establishing the proof of the efficacy of magic,

ritual, sorcery, etc. He documents all kinds of cases (1950[1926]: 311–30),
for example the fact that, in Australia and New Zealand, some performa-
tive words associated with ritual actions can actually bring about the
death of the person/s who are the object/s of such words/deeds, some-
times 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 Lévi-
Strauss (1958: 183–203) picked up on this discussion by quoting an article
published by Walter B. Cannon (1942) on ‘voodoo death’. However, Lévi-

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Strauss restricts the efficacy 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 effec-

tiveness. 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[1902–3/1950]: 12; original emphasis)

I think everyone would agree that the efficacy of sorcery is a different

kind of efficacy 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 ques-
tions: who is to assess the efficacy, 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 scientifically 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 efficacy 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 performa-
tive 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 efficacious 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 contro-
versies of the 1960s to 1990s. Foucault, of course, is the one who made
extensive use of the notions of ‘technologies of the subject’ and ‘tech-
niques of the self’. He underscored two aspects of the technologies of
the subject, that is, first, 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 subjec-
tivities through the body and through material and ideological contrap-
tions (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 tech-
nologies 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 radical-
ized in the first 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 dimen-
sion of the body as être-au-monde (being-in or being-to-the-world), but did
not depart significantly from the philosophy of consciousness and the
cogito until later in his life.
Foucault (together with Althusser, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, etc.) was
notorious for having rejected this notion of the subject transparent to
himself/herself because it no longer fitted 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 un-
conscious 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 find any authori-
tative 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 ‘Körperschema’ developed by Schilder (1935), and on Gestalt
theory. Foucault does not question the notion of a ‘body’. However, it is
not that difficult 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 efficacious 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
efficacious? This is the central question I wish to raise in the present
article. I think the answer is definitely yes, they belong with the tech-
nologies of the subject, and, yes, they are efficacious. Rituals aim at
shaping not only the status of people, but their subjectivities. The efficacy
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 percep-
tive activity. One drinks and eats, fasts, walks and accomplishes pilgrim-
ages, kneels down, recites mantras, sings and plays music, puts on special
kinds of garments, performs sacrifices by means of animals and material

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substances and offerings, etc.2 The subjects are transformed by these prac-
tices. 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 efficacious action on
something.
Mauss’s remark can be translated by saying that there is no technol-
ogy of the subject that does not involve an efficacious 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 discon-
nected 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 efficacious action on matter involves the imple-
mentation 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
efficacious action on matter and on the subject, we can overcome the
divide between subject and object, material culture and the body, tech-
nology 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 efficacious action? That is, what is the know-how, what
is the chaîne opératoire, 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 Lévi-Strauss (1958: 205–26) in his article on ‘symbolic
efficacy’, 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 efficient means of acting on a subject. More precisely, in the human
species, what could be called the ‘bodily culture’ or the ‘culture of sensori-
motoricity’ 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 Körperschema).

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Thanks to the development of neurocognitive sciences, we now have

a fine-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 identifies with his embodied objects. As
I have already suggested, a subject may be a subject-with-his-embodied-
fountain-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, contain-
ers, 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
identifies 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, fingers, 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 identification. 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 identification needs further elabora-

tion. It has been the object of much attention in psychoanalysis. Conse-
quently, I will borrow my definition from Laplanche and Pontalis’s
Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (1967). They say that ‘identification’ 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 identifications. (p. 187, my translation)

Taking that definition 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-embodied-
objects, then identifying with a subject entails identifying with its bodily-
cum-material culture. In the classical oedipal identification, if a young
boy identifies with his father and with the male sex, he will adopt male
material culture. Gender studies have repeatedly emphasized this dimen-
sion of identification when it applies to the choice and use of toys, games,
sports and clothing. However, as Winnicott (1971) has repeatedly under-
scored, many identifications 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
efficacy of the technologies of the subject in producing, shaping and trans-
forming it may be largely due to the most efficient process of identifica-
tion 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 efficacy. 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 ritualist’s
goal is to efficiently 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 efficiently achieved some-
thing else, which is to maintain the identifications 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 office 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

profitably considered as including the technologies of objects and the
technologies of the subject. Furthermore, as Mauss said, it may be con-
tended that the two are intimately interwoven. Producing a violin neces-
sarily 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 sophisti-
cated techniques of the self and to identify with his or her workshop,
tools, skills and final 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 tech-
nique implemented on a daily basis in the care of young infants or in
adult body care. Techniques, therefore, are traditional and efficacious
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, Lévi-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, specifically, 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 significantly from the point of view I develop in the present article.
On the other hand, underlying the present article, there are philosophical
options regarding the subject of the kind developed by Slavoj Žižek (1999).
Discussing them, however, would go beyond the scope of this article.
2. This research was conducted with the research group ‘Matière à Penser’
(MàP). This expression may be transformed into ‘Matière à Politique’,
‘Matière à Religion’, ‘Matière à Développement’, etc., when material and
bodily cultures constitute the mediations of power, religion, development,
and so on (see Bayart and Warnier, 2004).

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◆ J E A N - P I E R R E WA R N I E R is Professor Emeritus at the Centre d’Études

Africaines (Ceaf) at EHESS (L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris).
His research interests are material culture, praxeology, Foucault, the Cameroon
Grassfields and Africa. Significant recent publications include Régner 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. Laburthe-
Tolra). Address: Centre d’Études Africaines, EHESS, 96 boulevard Raspail, 75006
Paris, France. [email: jp-warnier@wanadoo.fr]

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