Introduction

Empowerment practice claims an ability to liberate the oppressed largely through self-organization, self-motivation, self-invention, and even "self-clarity". Empowerment as a goal and a practice, that is, a method to achieve its goal, started out with actual political and social oppression in mind. Empowerment practice is an expression of American complacency that engages in the literary theatrics of liberation. The popularity of empowerment practice has accelerated enormously since the 1960s, coinciding with its pacification, its vulgarization, and the decline of its novelty. Empowerment practice is ceremonial to the extent to which it lacks an immediate production function, in which case it would seem to perform as a social drama that serves to express social values. Empowerment practice as ceremony offers an explanation for its persistence and perhaps a step toward the resolution of a basic difficulty in the literature of ceremonial functions: the isolation of cause.