The Anatomy of Power: European Constructions of the African Body

ISBN 1 86888 092 3. xiv & 220 pp. 

"It is difficult to find a single colonial or post-colonial society in which the hospital doctor, psychiatrist, nurse, public health official, and many other representatives of the socio-medical sciences are not present. It is equally impossible to identify any setting where the population has no knowledge of how to act and react in the ritual of the medical examination by the doctor, inspection by the aid worker, interrogation by the anthropologist, or enumeration by the census officer. "Using Foucault's thinking on the relationship between power and knowledge, the author of this extraordinary book analyses the way in which the body of `"The African" has itself been analysed in Western thought from the Renaissance to the present. 

Conventional analyses of colonialism view the body and society of the African as having pre-dated European conventions - the regressive practices of colonial occupation are seen as having disfigured a pre-existing known identity. Against this perspective, this book argues that socio-medical technologies were and are the creative underbelly of social control, actively inventing the African body, mind and society itself as objects amenable to analysis and domination. A history of the present, the book marshals an impressive array of documentary records - from the texts of renaissance mythology and natural science in the Classificatory age, to Bantu anatomy and "the African personality" in the twentieth century. As such it not only provides a critical edge to debates around colonialism and African identity, it is also an invaluable new reservoir of source materials for scholars with a passion for knowing the body politic and its anatomy of power.