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Anthropology differs from other disciplines in the extent to which it emphasizes the indirect and concealed manifestations of power, understood in its simplest terms as the ability to influence the decisions and behavior of others. Power is also commonly understood as influence that is generative of dominant ideas and institutional structures rather than narrowly repressive. A sharp break from ethnographies that were concerned with sources of power in the absence of the state took place in the 1970s as many anthropologists took positions of postcolonial critique. Under these circumstances, anthropology then turned to such concepts as hegemony (Gramsci), cultural capital (Bourdieu), and power-knowledge and governmentality (Foucault) in efforts to come to grips with the ways that power manifests itself through knowledge and everyday practice as much as through more recognizable institutional forms. Expansion of the scope of ethnography is currently producing more refinement of the methods and concepts for identification of its forms and realms of influence.
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