Pastoral power outside Foucault’s Europe: public education and the ‘epistemic authority’ of social scientists in Mexico

Abstract

This article presents a genealogical analysis of the ‘epistemic authority’ practices by social scientists in the public-university field in Mexico. Drawing on Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality and his concept of pastoral power, I will argue that there is a contested, partial yet pervasive continuity between the pastoral techniques of government and education implemented by the Catholic Church and clergy in colonial Mexico and both the current authority practices by secular social scientists and the secular constitutional principles of public education in this country. In arguing this, I will also criticise Foucault’s Eurocentric theorisations by accounting for an overlooked modality of pastoral power.

Keywords:

• pastoral power
• authority
• colonialism
• secularism
• Catholicism

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Jonathan Hearn and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and helpful feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Notes

1. The interviews were part of my doctoral project’s data collection stage. The project investigates whether Catholic discourses shape sociological discourses in Mexico, and if so, how. I collected data through a ‘maximum variation’ case studies approach (Flyvbjerg 2006:230) calls two ‘maximum variation’ case studies, that is, a comparison of two theoretically opposite cultural regions in Mexico (a ‘conservative’ central-western region, and a more ‘liberal’ central region) and their respective Catholic and sociological (local) discourses as units of analysis (Yin 2009). My units of data collection comprised organisations (public universities; Catholic bishoprics) and individuals (social science lecturers, based at sociology, history, communication, politics and education departments; undergraduate and postgraduate students; diocesan and religious Catholic priests). My sources of evidence included interviews with the aforementioned individuals and participant/non-participant observations in academic and religious events. The genealogical exercise the reader will find here is based on a key collateral finding from such investigation – power and authority practices in Mexico’s public-university field. I will not distinguish between the data collected from one and the other cultural region for my findings suggests that power and authority discourses and practices, alongside Catholic and sociological discourses, may take place facing different local conditions yet are configured upon similar rationales, or what an academic who has lived and worked in both regions, called during an interview ‘an authority culture with national scope’.

2. Although interview questions were rather tailored in situ, three main themes were usually covered: (i) the interviewee’s family background – e.g. place of birth, basic education experiences and family religious practices; (ii) the university and social research fields as seen and experienced by the interviewee; and (iii) the interviewee’s academic and personal comments on the relationships between Catholicism and sociology in Mexico.

3. The respondents’ personal identities and institutional affiliations have been deliberately anonymised.

4. Dimensions that can be analysed through a ‘pentacular’ frame crossed by both ‘tactic’ perspectives – i.e. the university as an entity (i) within a context, (ii) situated across time dimensions and (iii) represented/imagined in discourses – and ‘strategic’ angles – i.e. the university as a site of (iv) governmental regulation and (v) guidance of individuals and populations (Ibarra 2001, pp. 278–298).

5. Foucault’s concepts of ‘pastoral power’ and ‘governmentality’ (2007, 2011) have been used empirically to explain a diversity of phenomena in different fields, from ‘animal-centred welfare science’ (Cole 2011), healthcare studies (Tierney 2004, Mayes 2009, Bejerot and Hasselbladh 2011) and social work (Villadsen 2007) to educational research (Schutz 2004, Caughlan 2005, Nielsen et al. 2012), social geography (Blake 1999) and anthropology (Pandian 2008). Whereas I share these authors’ critical views about the unacknowledged use of pervasive ‘pastoral-power’ strategies in everyday-life social settings, my analysis departs from theirs – except for Pandian’s (2008) to some extent – in three respects. Firstly, unlike Schutz (2004) and Nielsen et al. (2012), I will present a historical view of current pastoral power practices. Secondly, my analysis offers not only evidence of educational practices that resemble pastoral power techniques (Schutz 2004, Villadsen 2007, Mayes 2009, Bejerot and Hasselbladh 2011, Cole 2011), but also evidence that those practices do derive from a religious (Catholic) matrix. Thirdly, I will analyse like Pandian (2008) does, a form of pastoral power operating outside European territories.

6. The author seems to acknowledge that he has been subject to the university’s ‘institutionalisation’ which ‘grants security, warrants visibility and misleads our senses’ (2001, p. 26).

7. His ‘chronography’ of the university in Mexico comprises five micro-periods: unregulated expansion in the 1960s and 1970s; a re-ordering period in the late 1970s and 1980s; a ‘de[con]struction’ period (2001, pp. 346–349) led by economic austerity during mid and late 1980s; a ‘catastrophe zone’ (1988–1990) where/when the university was re-directed towards a rhetoric of managerial planning and regulation (2001, pp. 349–351); and a ‘reconstruction’ phase (2001, p. 351) when the university’s economicist systems of supervision control and salary incentives begin their consolidation. Although Ibarra articulates these periodisations upon macro-indicators and regulatory literature by government sources, the case of Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (public university at Mexico City) and its organisational/governmental changes are the main, and only, empirical references discussed at length (2001, pp. 382–406).

8. Although I will also draw from the single lecture Foucault delivered in Stanford University in 1979 (2011), I will use these lectures (2007) as main references since the analyses here seem to me more extensive and thorough than the concise yet somewhat rushed 1979 lecture where Foucault’s arguments are basically repeated, paraphrased or only slightly modified.

9. Foucault traces juridical mechanisms back to medieval ‘legal systems’ (2007, p. 6) – see also Tierney’s account (2004, p. 274) on why Foucault ‘abandoned’ a similar juridical standpoint in his account of the concept of power.

10. Foucault’s use of the adjective ‘Western’ is frequent and may obscure what post-colonial scholars Boatcã et al. (2010), more accurately, call ‘multiple Europes’, among them: (i) a ‘heroic Europe’ or Hegel’s ‘heart of Europe’ which would include France, England and Germany, (ii) the once dominant Spanish and Portuguese empires, currently ‘peripheries’ within Europe, and (iii) the Balkans and the European Southeast, or the (once) stereotyped ‘frontier between civilisation and barbarism’ (2010, pp. 4–5).

11. The practice of confession implemented officially in the early thirteen century reportedly served this aim (Foucault 2007, p. 190, 194, 203, 2011, pp. 238–239). See also Ibarrra (2001, p. 272, 274).

12. Foucault suggests five main types of challenges to Christian pastoral power or ‘counter-conducts’ (2007, 204–216): (1) practices of ascetism where the individual fights with himself and so becomes his own guide, (2) Christian communities, e.g. the Hussites, where the legitimation of the priest and his sacramental power were fundamentally challenged (see also Foucault 2011, p. 241), (3) personal experiences of mysticism, (4) the return to Scripture in the Middle Ages and onwards and (5) eschatological beliefs.

13. Police, Foucault notes, ‘makes statistics necessary, but also makes statistics possible’ (2007, p. 315).

14. Nahuatl term; a ‘king’ in Mexico’s pre-Hispanic political system.

15. For a less dramatic and more recent example of counter-conducts by students, see Ramos’ (2000) account of the student movement whose protests against the rise of university fees in 1999 preceded a 10-month strike in Mexico National University.

16. Thus, public education granted by the state shall be ‘based on scientific progress and shall fight against ignorance, ignorance’s effects, servitudes, fanaticism and prejudice’ (The Political Constitution… 2005, 7).

17. The internal regulations of one of the universities I visited state, for example, that ‘[t]he favouring of political or religious propaganda, as well as acts against decency shall be sanctioned’ – the documents I am referring to in this section were accessed through the institutions’ websites. In order to secure the anonymity of my data sources, the name of this and other institutions where I conducted data collection will not be disclosed.

18. At the time of the interviews, all the respondents held full-time lecturing positions in various social science departments of three public universities.

19. A parallel whose plausibility was not entirely acknowledged by the three former Catholic seminary students whose academic stances were clearly secular.

20. cf. Ibarra’s (2001, pp. 315–316) attribution of pastoral power to psychoanalysts.

21. See, for instance, his discussions of the raison d’État by Italian and French seventeenth-century thinkers (2007, pp. 287–290) or his analysis of the concept of police anchored upon the cases of Germany, Italy and France (2007, pp. 313–328). See also footnote 10 above.

22. Southern region in Mexico.

23. For further references see also Verastique (2000) and Serrano (2001).

24. Blake (1999) argues, interestingly, that further up in the Northern territories of America, the ‘government projects’ of the British crown and the French Catholic missionaries (the Oblates of Mary Immaculate) in nineteenth-century British Columbia were ‘widely divergent’ and incommensurable (1999, p. 91).