Since the late 1970s and early 1980s the concept of resistance has become ubiquitous within contemporary cultural anthropology. Theorizing resistance, however, has been problematic from the start and, as I shall argue, a significant part of the problem resides in the anti-psychological position taken by most cultural anthropologists. How can actors protest and resist hegemonic powers if they are not endowed with internalized cultural understandings that motivate such actions? This article briefly reviews some of the resistance literature in cultural anthropology and then focuses upon three ethnographies of resistance, representing three different decades of research and three different theoretical approaches within resistance studies, to demonstrate how different branches of psychological anthropology can enhance our understanding of some of the behaviors that have been labeled ‘resistance’.
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