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ABSTRACT
Given Michel Foucault’s immense influence on anthropology, assessing his account of pastoral power is an inescapable task for anthropologists who aim to make ‘pastors and priests’ into distinct objects of ethnographic inquiry. I develop a variation on this Special Issue’s theme by returning to Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population and Omnes et Singulatim, and also the essay, ‘The Subject and Power’ to consider what Foucault had to say about pastoral institutions within the genealogy of pastoral power outlined in these works. In the first two sections, I propose taking up a speculative and associational mien in response to Foucault’s provocative claims about the declining vitality of pastoral institutions in the modern West. In the third section, I sketch out how the questions generated through this interpretive practice can help frame an ethnographic inquiry towards understanding the problems and purposes cultural professionals embrace and develop through their involvement in a Hungarian government-funded effort to canonise ‘Transylvania’s good pastor’, the deceased bishop a Catholic archdiocese in Romania, Márton Áron (1896–1980). In the conclusion, I identify the contemporary politics of Catholic memory in the wake of the Second Vatican Council as a blind spot in Foucault’s work, a lacuna akin to his lack of analytical interest in other major twentieth-century political trends.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 James Faubion writes that Foucault serves this precedential role for the anthropology of ethics (Faubion Citation2011, 3–5).
2 According to newspaper reports, the statue was funded by the Áron Márton Catholic Men's Association, the Ministry of Human Resources of the Hungarian Government, the Hungarian National Cultural Fund, the Lakitelek People's University Foundation, and the Gábor Bethlen Fund (Daczó Citation2015).
3 See Martin and Waring Citation2018; Kozelka Citation2022.
4 See, for example, Foucault’s recently published Confessions of the Flesh as well as Niki Kasumi Clements interpretive work on this text (Clements Citation2021; Citation2023).
5 ‘The Subject and Power’ appeared in 1982 as the afterword to Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s volume, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Dreyfus and Rabinow Citation1982).
6 I also take Fassin’s point to be an opportunity to stall questions about whether Foucault’s concern with disciplinary power continued into his study of governmentality. See Collier Citation2009; Golder Citation2007; and Laidlaw’s statement that ‘the subject and power’ lays the groundwork for Foucault on freedom (Laidlaw Citation2014, Citation2018).
7 While Fassin channels the spirit of Foucault’s argument to understand phenomena not included in his theory of power, I channel Foucault to disregard his own statements about how to situate pastoral power. Thus, by focusing on pastoral power in itself, I disregard Foucault own clarifying statement that his analysis of pastoral power is but a vehicle for understanding governmentality.
8 I tend not to distinguish between popular and scholarly, or high- and low-cultural products, but refer to all of it as ‘hagiographical literature’. These publications are hagiographical because canonisation advocates have seen fit to use them to advance Márton’s cause and because it is typical practice in Catholic canonisation initiatives to utilise both low- and high-cultural resources, which in this case have served to construct a public image of Márton as the good pastor. Anthropologists and historians have long noted that canonisation processes rely on doctors and lawyers who provide scientific evidence and juridical procedures to prove miracles while engaging in public cultural debates about secularisation (Baldacchino Citation2011; Bennett Citation2011; Coleman Citation2011; Ditchfield Citation2011; Kaufman Citation2007).
9 See Discipline and Punish (Foucault Citation1979) as well as Foucault’s analysis of psychiatric approaches to mental illness in Madness and Civilization (Foucault Citation1988). In OS, Foucault expresses a similar complaint about the sedimented and routinised state of thinking about state institutions and political power: ‘Everyone knows that in European societies political power has evolved towards more and more centralised forms. Historians have been studying this organisation of the state, with its administration and bureaucracy, for dozens of years (OS, 227). His provocations are intended to shock readers from this habitual epistemological rut.
10 Foucault rereads The Order of Things (Foucault Citation2001) in his discussion of population (STP, 68-72).
11 Foucault himself says, ‘Discipline is essentially centripetal. I mean that discipline functions to the extent that it isolates a space, that it determines a segment. Discipline concentrates, focuses, and encloses. The first action of discipline is in fact to circumscribe a space in which its power and the mechanisms of its power will function fully and without limit’ (STP, 45). In STP, Foucault defines governmentality as ‘the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument’ (STP, 108).
12 See Rose and Miller Citation1992. While sometimes Foucault refers to the management of a population, at other times he identifies governmentality with the ‘regulator of a milieu’ so as to distinguish governmentality from discipline (STP, 29).
13 Drawing on Foucault’s claim in STP that ‘we have still not freed ourselves’ from pastoral power, political philosopher Ben Golder writes that this lecture series ‘traces the historical rise of the Christian pastorate as a technology of power and describes its eventual transposition and transformation into the ‘secular’ reflection on ‘arts of government’’ (STP, 148; Golder Citation2007, 162).
14 Foucault returns so insistently to the concept of governmentality, travelling back across the crosswise pathways through which it emerged to become the state’s dominant technology of power, that eventually he second-guesses the title of the series and suggests that he is also undertaking ‘a history of “governmentality”’ (STP, 77). As subsequent anthropological studies have shown, governmentality generates manifold social service programs: child protective services (Ramsay Citation2017), transitional justice (Bartel Citation2019), international humanitarian aid (Carruth Citation2018), and community-based addiction treatment (Kozelka Citation2022).
15 Foucault states repeatedly that intersubjective bonds of obedience formed in spiritual direction are not only a condition of Christian pastoral care but its very principle. Colin Gordon writes that Foucault aims to defend the proposition, ‘the nature of the institution of the state is a function of changes in practices of government’ over and against theories of the state that give undue priority to institutions (Citation1991, 4).
16 Elsewhere in STP he also notes that spiritual direction ‘will, of course, be institutionalised in a pastorate with its laws, rules, techniques, and procedures’ (STP, 152). Foucault offers this same caveat about the legalistic content of the monastic manuals that he uses to develop his argument about pastoral power (STP, 167).
17 In SP, Foucault describes his interpretation of pastoral power and its historical role in Christianity as an attempt to shift philosophical understanding of the nature and locus of Christianity’s unique innovation and intervention in the humanist tradition derived from ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. ‘It has often been said’, Foucault observes by way of an oblique reference to Nietzsche, ‘that Christianity brought into being a code of ethics fundamentally different from that of the ancient world’. Then, evoking his own perduring concern with relations of power, Foucault writes, ‘Less emphasis is usually placed on the fact that it proposed and spread new power relations throughout the ancient world’ (SP, 782-3).
18 Foucault actually interpolates the word ‘pastor’. In the original text, which Foucault cites as Paulinus’ biography of Ambrose, the emperor urges him to govern as a ‘bishop’ rather than a magistrate (STP, 160-1).
19 Although Foucault notes that salvation ceased to be an assumed end of pastoral care as it became governmentality, he also distances himself from the view that this was a straightforward process of secularisation. Seeing Foucault’s skepticism about the secularisation of pastoral power is a benefit to the stalling maneuver in reading STP apart from later texts. By folding STP into Foucault’s later work, for example, Faubion see Foucault’s project in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 as a tracing of ‘the secularisation and psychiatrisation of the confessional’ (Faubion Citation2011, 25). Foucault says in STP that, ‘[I]n fact, pastoral power in its typology, organization, and mode of functioning, pastoral power exercised as power, is doubtless something from which we have still not freed ourselves’ (STP, 199).
20 Delayed familiarity with the Frankfurt School later prompted such contrite expressions as the following: ‘Now, obviously, if I had been familiar with the Frankfurt School, if I had been aware of it at the time, I would not have said a number of stupid things that I did say and I would have avoided many of the detours which I made while trying to pursue my own humble path’ (Foucault Citation1990, 23).
21 See Bottoni Citation2008. Creating national chapters of the Peace Priest Movement with the express purpose of destabilising the Catholic Church was a strategy used in the Soviet Union and then Eastern European states after Second World War.
22 See work by Claudiu Călin (Citation2015) on this system in the diocese of Timișoara.
23 Twelfth century theologian Thomas Aquinas, for instance, whose writings the Catholic Church has considered authoritative since 1879, describes the rite as preparation for the role of ‘soldiers of Christ’. Pope Leo XIII declared in 1879 that Thomas was ‘prince and teacher of all’ and his theological writings should command the faithful assent of Catholic believers (see Fiorenza and Livingstone Citation2000). In the Summa Theologica Aquinas writes that, ‘in Baptism he receives power to do those things which pertain to his own salvation, forasmuch as he lives to himself: whereas in Confirmation he receives power to do those things which pertain to the spiritual combat with the enemies of the Faith’ (Summa Theologica, III, q 72, art 5).
24 The monograph appeared in the journal Kisebbségkutatás [Minority Studies]. ‘Legendary pastor’ [legendás főpasztor] is an idiosyncratic title for Márton, although government-owned Hungarian newspapers sometimes use it. See kaposvarmost.hu Citation2020. Furthermore, the word legendary is associated with the tradition of Hungarian ethnological travel writing, which dates back to the mid-nineteenth century and became an authoritative state discourse during the socialist period. Kozma crafts a distinctively Eastern European version of the Catholic canonisation hagiography, combining Hungary’s authoritative ‘national science’ of ethnology with Catholic hagiography to engage public cultural debates about European secularisation (Loustau Citation2019; Loustau Citation2022; Kapaló Citation2011; Kürti Citation2000).
25 He urged laypeople to adopt the rite’s new official interpretation that confirmation is not military preparation but rather celebrates the confirmand’s reception of the Holy Spirit. In the words of one participant’s oral historical account, ‘[a]t confirmation, we must speak about the special gift of the Holy Spirit’ (Kovács Citation2013).
26 The stakes for the practice of remembering Vatican II can be quite high in the Eastern European Catholic Church. In other Eastern Europe branches, disagreements over modern and ‘traditional’ ritual practice have become pitched battles that divide monastic and lay communities and result in such drastic measures as excommunication. See, for example, Naumescu’s account of a group of Ukrainian Greek Catholic nuns that refused to adopt the revised Vatican II liturgy at the time when the Greek Catholic Church was bringing its practice into conformity with the Catholic Church. ‘These nuns were excommunicated’, Naumescu comments, ‘and their convent closed’ (Citation2007, 131).
27 He continues, ‘The immense problems this would raise can easily be imagined: from doctrinal problems, such as Christ's denomination as 'the good shepherd', right up to institutional ones, such as parochial organisation, or the way pastoral responsibilities were shared between priests and bishops’ (OS, 236).
28 For example, in OS Foucault rebuts the criticism that he overstates the influence and extension of medieval pastoral practice within feudal societies, acknowledging that ‘this period, contrary to what one might expect, has not been that of the triumphant pastorate’ (OS, 240). He gives the pastorate its due not because it reveals the essence of medieval society but rather because it is ‘particularly important in the history of this government of individuals by their own verity’ (OS, 240).
29 ‘Most of the topics be covers were peripheral and relatively minor in earlier epochs’, Rabinow asserts. ‘In fact, that is his point. He has chosen them because of his current interests and because these topics later to some degree became enmeshed with forms of power’ (1981, 119).
30 A number of scholars have noted what Demetrious calls Foucault’s ‘weariness of contemporary political commentary’ (Demetriou Citation2016, 222). See also Welch Citation2010; Beaulieu Citation2010; Rassmussen Citation2011. For Foucault’s reference to Vatican II, see Foucault Citation1974.