Wolf, E. R. (1990). Distinguished lecture: Facing power—old insights, new questions. American anthropologist, 92(3), 586-596.

I ENGAGE T H E P R O B I A M OF POWER and the issues that it poses for anthropology. I argue that we actually know a great deal about power, but have been timid in building upon what we know. This has implications for both theory and method, for assessing the insights of the past and for raising new questions. The very term makes many of us uncomfortable. It is certainly one of the most loaded and polymorphous words in our repertoire. The Romance, Germanic, and Slavic lan- guages, at least, conflate a multitude of meanings in speaking about pouvoir or potere, Macht, or mogushchestvo. Such words allow us to speak about power as if it meant the same thing to all of us. At the same time, we often speak of power as if all phenomena involving i t were somehow reducible to a common core, some inner essence. This conjures up mon- strous images of power, Hobbes’s Leviathan or Bertrand de Jouvenel’s Minotaur, but it leads away from specifying different kinds of power implicated in different kinds of rela- tionships