Envisioning Power
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With the originality and energy that have marked his earlier works, Eric Wolf now explores the historical relationship of ideas, power, and culture. Responding to anthropology's long reliance on a concept of culture that takes little account of power, Wolf argues that power is crucial in shaping the circumstances of cultural production. Responding to social-science notions of ideology that incorporate power but disregard the ways ideas respond to cultural promptings, he demonstrates how power and ideas connect through the medium of culture.<br /><br />Wolf advances his argument by examining three very different societies, each remarkable for its flamboyant ideological expressions: the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest Pacific Coast, the Aztecs of pre-Hispanic Mexico, and National Socialist Germany. Tracing the history of each case, he shows how these societies faced tensions posed by ecological, social, political, or psychological crises, prompting ideological responses that drew on distinctive, historically rooted cultural understandings. In each case study, Wolf analyzes how the regnant ideology intertwines with power around the pivotal relationships that govern social labor. Anyone interested in the history of anthropology or in how the social sciences make comparisons will want to join Wolf in <i>Envisioning Power</i>.
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Envisioning Power
Ideologies of
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Perhaps because Gramsci did not want to attract the attention of his prison guards, he was never explicit about how he envisaged the interplay between hegemonic processes and the state. Yet as Mussolini’s chief political captive he surely did not think that state power could be won through song and dance alone. Once it is acknowledged, however, that hegemony must always be projected against the backdrop of the state, it becomes possible to identify hegemonic processes not only in the sphere of civil society outside the state but within state institutions as well. The state manages “ideological state apparatuses,” such as schools, family, church, and media, as well as apparatuses of coercion (Althusser 1971), and state officials contend over policies within these institutional precincts. They do so, moreover, in interaction with society’s open arenas. A number of different studies have exemplified these processes in the fields of education (Ringer 1969; Bourdieu 1989), in the social management of the state (Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Rebel 1991), in penology (Foucault 1977), and in military doctrine (Craig 1971). Anthropologists have made use of the notion of hegemony as well, though all too often stripping it of its political specificity and intent (Kurtz 1996).
Drawing on Italian history, literature, and folklore, Gramsci sought to identify the social groups and cadres that “carried” the hegemonic process, as well as the centers and settlement clusters that took leading roles in the production and dissemination of hegemonic forms. In adopting this perspective, he was strongly influenced by his training in the Italian neo-linguistic (or spatial) school developed primarily by Matteo Giulio Bartoli at the University of Turin. These neo-linguists described language change as a process whereby dominant speech communities built on their prestige to influence surrounding subaltern settlements (Lo Piparo 1979). Anthropologists familiar with the diffusionism of the American culture-historical school will recognize parallels with the idea of culture centers, sites of unusually intense cultural productivity that transmit traits and influences to the surrounding culture areas. Like these ethnologists, Gramsci did not see such relations as merely linguistic but as involving other aspects of culture as well. At the same time, he differed from the American scholars in clearly understanding that the hegemonic process did not move by its own momentum. It summoned up and employed power to produce and distribute semiotic representations and practices, favoring some and disfavoring others. Its effects would thus be uneven in form and intensity, affecting classes and groups differentially. Drawing distinctions among locations and groups of people, the process produced tensions among them, as well as between the hegemonic center and the groups within its sphere of influence.
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