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In this article I provide a brief outline of the concept of governmentality, as I understand it. Then I move to a discussion of its limits as a form of power, and discuss how an awareness of limits opens up ways to examine governmentality ethnographically.1
Governmentality
Defined succinctly as the "conduct of conduct," government is the attempt to shape human conduct by calculated means. Distinct from discipline, which seeks to reform designated groups through detailed supervision in confined quarters (prisons, asylums, schools), the concern of government is the wellbeing of populations at large. Its purpose is to secure the "welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, et cetera" (Foucault 1991a:100). To achieve this purpose requires distinctive means. At the level of population, it is not possible to coerce every individual and regulate their actions in minute detail. Rather, government operates by educating desires and configuring habits, aspirations and beliefs. It sets conditions, "arranging things so that people, following only their own self-interest, will do as they ought" (Scott 1995:202).2 Persuasion might be applied, as authorities attempt to gain consent. But this is not the only course. When power operates at a distance, people are not necessarily aware of how their conduct is being conducted or why, so the question of consent does not arise.
The will to govern, and more specifically, the will to improve the welfare of the population, is expansive. In Foucault's definition it is concerned with "men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with... wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with all its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, et cetera; men in their relation to. . .customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking, et cetera; and lastly, men in their relation to. . .accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death, et cetera" (Foucault 1991a:93). Experts intervene in these relations in order to adjust them. They aim to foster beneficial processes and mitigate destructive ones. They may operate on population in the aggregate, or on subgroups divided by gender, location, age, income or race, each with characteristic deficiencies that serve as points of entry for corrective interventions.
To improve populations requires the exercise of what Foucault identified as a distinct, governmental...