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Contested Concepts
Seeking to relate ideas to power, we enter an intellectual terrain that many others have already charted, albeit in response to purposes other than our own. These past endeavors have left us a stock of concepts, some of which we can appropriate and use, others of which may no longer be helpful. Legacies are always problematic, and they must be sorted out to answer to new undertakings. Anthropology, for example, has understood “cultures” as complexes of distinctive properties, including different visions of the world, but for long without attention to how these views formulated power and underwrote its effects. Other social sciences have taken up that issue under the name of “ideology,” treating culture and ideology as opposites, not as complementary. In this contrast “culture” was used to suggest a realm of intimate communitarian ties that bind, while “ideology” conjured up scenarios of factional strife among self-seeking interest groups. Thus, “culture” received a positive evaluation, while “ideology” suffered a change in meaning for the worse. Others of our relevant concepts have undergone related transformations.
Such shifts in meaning and valuation have a history, which needs to be spelled out in order to clarify the intellectual issues at stake. A use of terms without attention to the theoretical assumptions and historical contexts that underlie them can lead us to adopt unanalyzed concepts and drag along their mystifying connotations into further work. Tracing out a history of our concepts can also make us aware of the extent to which they incorporate intellectual and political efforts that still reverberate in the present.
Three interrelated issues have persisted in the history of concepts significant for this inquiry. The first is the counterposing of a vision of a march of humanity toward a universal reign of Reason, against an emphasis on the significance of distinctive ways of being human, which ruled people through emotion rather than intellect. This issue entailed a second: if human life was so dominated by tradition and custom, what then was the relationship between cultural ideals and actual behavior? How could it be the case that tradition demanded one course of action, while behavior took a different turn? This question raised a third issue: how were human minds constituted to deal with experience? Were ideas “the atoms and molecules of the mind,” compounded into images through a “mental chemistry” from sensations received from the outside world (Popper and Eccles 1983, 194)? Or were human minds so tutored by custom that external stimuli could only manifest themselves in behavior after passing through the cognitive detectors of language and culture, which processed them into templates for action?
Anthropology confronted these issues in a sequence of historical encounters, and it assembled its stock of working ideas accordingly. Each encounter provoked reactions that later informed the positions taken during the next turn. The issue of Reason against Custom and Tradition was raised by the protagonists of the Enlightenment against their adversaries, the advocates of what Isaiah Berlin called the Counter-Enlightenment (1982). In the wake of this debate, Marx and Engels transformed the arguments advanced by both sides into a revolutionary critique of the society that had given rise to both positions. The arguments put forward by this succession of critics in turn unleashed a reaction against all universalizing schemes that envisioned a general movement of transcendence for humankind. This particularism was directed against Newtonian physics, Darwinian biology, Hegelian megahistory, and Marxian critiques, on the debatable premise that they all subjugated the human world to some ultimate teleological goal. The main target of this reaction was Marxism, which invited attack both for its scientism and for its prediction of a socialist overturn of prevailing society.
Some of these critiques took the form of a refusal to have anything to do with “metaphysics.” These protesters wanted to counter the seduction of abstract theorizing and to return to basics, to a more “natural” and “immediate” relationship with the facts of “real life.” Others refused to countenance any application of the methods drawn from the natural sciences to the study of history, literature, and the arts. They insisted that these disciplines dealt with “mind,” and hence with phenomena that were irregular, subjective, and colorful. Such phenomena, it was argued, were not amenable to the objectifying, emotionally neutral, and generalizing procedures of the natural sciences but required appropriate methodologies of their own.
This discussion takes up the arguments successively advanced by each “turn” and explores some of their implications. It begins with the conflict between the Enlightenment and its enemies, because the anthropological discipline as a whole owes its very identity to the antinomies then laid out. Indeed, it has drawn the bulk of its energy from efforts to negotiate between these distinctive modes of comprehending the world.
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment, a philosophical movement in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, arose as an effort to shake off the weight of institutions and ideas that had immersed the continent in brutal religious and political conflicts and to renew hope by advocating a new vision of human possibilities. In contrast to earlier views that understood the human condition as tainted by “original sin,” the Enlighteners saw humans as neither good nor bad but as perfectible. They spoke in favor of rationalism and empiricism, and they subjected social and political arrangements to skeptical analysis where they appeared to fall short of these ideals. To improve humanity, they advocated new forms of nontheological learning as avenues of reform. They were opposed by numerous movements that arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to counter these assertions, together with the intellectual and political styles associated with them. We owe the notion of “ideology” to the Enlightenment; the concept of “culture,” as well as that of “society,” derive from efforts to reverse the effects of that movement.
The Enlightenment envisaged the past and the future of the world in terms of such powerful yet abstract concepts as Reason and Progress. Its proponents spoke in the name of a common and universal humanity. They hoped to dispel the darkness of the Middle Ages by exposing consciousness to the clarifying light of reason and to free natural instinct and talent from the bonds of accumulated cant and hypocrisy. “Écrasez l’infame!” cried Voltaire, and meant by it a call for the destruction of religious dogma and superstition, the abolition of error, and the installation of a regime of truth based on reason.
The leaders of the Enlightenment did not all think alike, and the movement took variant forms in different regions of Europe. Some of its advocates, such as Condillac and Rousseau, even combined arguments both for and against it in their own work, as did some of the later Romantics who would become their opponents. Thus, Condillac saw reason as fundamental to both human nature and language, but he also gave support to the antagonists of universalism by stressing “the culture-bound quality of national languages” (Aarsleff 1982, 31). Rousseau focused most of his work on elucidating the general predicaments of being human, but he also made much of historical and cultural particularisms, as when he represented himself as a “Citizen of Geneva” in his project for a Corsican constitution and in his plan for the creation of a government in newly independent Poland (Petersen 1995). Conversely, the English and French protagonists of the Enlightenment strongly influenced their German counterpart Immanuel Kant, as well as the nationalist philosopher Fichte (called by some the first National Socialist) and the linguistic relativists Herder and von Humboldt, who came to see in language the quintessential expression of a Volksgeist. Some Enlighteners saw reason incarnated in logic and mathematics; others envisaged a return to Nature through a schooling of the senses. Some looked to education as the chief instrument for the correction of “error,” while others wanted to install the truth by ending the domination of society by “tyrants and priests”; where the true workings of reason were obscured by oppressors, its light could be rekindled by removing these princes of darkness. Still others identified the cutting edge of reason with the novel machine invented by Dr. Guillotine.
Yet all would have resonated to Kant’s slogan of sapere aude, the call to take courage in using one’s own reason to gain and apply knowledge. As Kant saw it, the Enlightenment would permit humanity to shed its immaturity, which had been fostered by dependence on the guidance of others, and bring on a real maturity grounded in the autonomous use of reason. This meant in practice that humans could now break through the limits erected by cultural tradition and political domination and could confront the world rationally, choosing the most efficient means to achieve posited ends.
The appeal to reason, however, entailed consequences. One must not forget to ask who is using reason, rationality, logic, and emotional neutrality to do what to whom. As states and enterprises around the world incorporated the Enlightenment appeal to reason to enhance their managerial efficiency, the application of instrumental logic often exacted an exorbitant price. Rule by reason appealed most directly to state managers and private entrepreneurs and to scientists and intellectuals. Adopted by these strata, it invested them with a professional sense of superiority, which they could direct at the unenlightened obduracy of others. Those charged with dispensing reason can readily tag others as opponents of progress. Down to the present, the protagonists of reason have seen themselves as apostles of modernity. They have advocated industrialization, specialization, secularization, and rational bureaucratic allocation as reasoned options superior to unreasoned reliance on tradition.
One of the ideas that came out of the turmoil produced by the Enlightenment was “ideology.” The term actually had an inventor in Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836), who saw himself as the intellectual heir of the eighteenth-century philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. Arguing against Descartes’s acceptance of “self-evident truths,” Condillac had championed “the testimony of the senses” obtained through observation and experiment, as advocated by the British empiricists Francis Bacon and John Locke. In the wake of the French Revolution, in 1795, Destutt de Tracy was asked by the Revolutionary Convention to create a research center for the “analysis of sensations and ideas” within the newly founded Institut National. Destutt de Tracy defined ideology as the “science des idées” (Barth 1974, 9); his book on the Éléments d’idéologie of 1801 (1824–1826) envisioned the research program of the new center as an effort to study ideas naturalistically, indeed as part of zoology. In the service of this goal one of the members of the institute, Joseph-Marie Degérando (1772–1842), drew up a very modern-sounding study guide for an ethnography of Australian natives.
It soon became evident, however, that the “ideologues” pursued contradictory goals (Hall 1978, 10). On one level, they wanted to understand how people perceived sensations, transformed them into ideas, and then communicated these ideas to others. On another level, they hoped that such inquiries would not only illuminate processes of thought but also produce theories that could free thought from “the yoke of prejudices.” The study of ideology thus embodied from the start a wish to subject ideas to the dispassionate eye of science, and another wish to define the really true ideas that could found a just society and magnify human happiness. The contradiction soon evoked the wrath of no less a critic than Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon had joined the institute enthusiastically in 1797, during the years of his ascent to power. Yet, once embarked on his imperial career and faced with renegotiating relations with the Catholic Church, he began to see the freethinking and republican “ideologues” as obstacles to his assumption of imperial authority. Accusing them of grounding the laws of men in “gloomy metaphysics” instead of basing them on “a knowledge of the human heart and of the lessons of history,” he disbanded their research section in 1803. They became for him major imaginary enemies bent on his undoing. In the wake of the disastrous Russian campaign in 1812, he even denounced them as the chief cause of “all the misfortunes which have befallen our beloved France” (in Barth 1974, 27).
The Counter-Enlightenment
In the wake of the French Revolution, marked first by the Terror and then by French military expansion, many followers of the Enlightenment deserted its cause, convinced like the Spanish painter Francisco Goya that the dream of reason breeds monsters. Other protagonists of the emerging Counter-Enlightenment were true reactionaries who set their faces against any party that advocated universal liberty, equality, and fraternity for all humankind. They felt most directly threatened by the revolution in France, which at one fell swoop abolished distinctions between aristocrats and plebeians. Still others sought to defend feeling, faith, and local tradition against the encroachment of Reason proclaimed by the Enlighteners. At the roots of this reaction lay the protests of people—self-referentially enclosed in the understandings of localized communities—against the leveling and destruction of their accustomed arrangements. Together these varied conservative responses to change ignited the first flickering of the relativistic paradigm that later unfolded into the key anthropological concept of “culture.”
These conservatives were soon joined by recruits from the new cadre of “nationalists,” who came to resent the ways in which revolutionary France expanded its sway and influence abroad. These new nationalists protested the surging conquests of the revolutionary armies, as well as French claims that they were dispensing freedom by abrogating local custom and installing new civic legal codes premised on teachings of the Enlightenment. The anti-French reaction grew especially strong in the Germanies, primarily in the regions associated with Prussia, although groups in other regions too, such as the Rhineland and Bavaria, long sympathized with the revolutionary cause. The conflict between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment in the Germanies is often portrayed as a battle for the German spirit fought out between France and the true German patriots; but for some decades attitudes were not that clearly polarized. Thus, Kant, Hegel, and Fichte all greeted the advent of the French Revolution with enthusiasm, and they all owed much to Rousseau. Herder, who became a major defender of national identities, was influenced by Condillac, while Wilhelm von Humboldt, who became a leader of the Prussian movement for renewal, spent years in Paris, in association with Destutt de Tracy’s ideologues. Some influential individuals, such as the Baltic “Sage of the North” Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), were Enlighteners in the first part of their lives and enemies of the movement in the second. French and German identities certainly came to be locked in opposition, but this was the outcome of a long process of political change, and not—as nationalists on both sides have depicted it—the result of an instantaneous cultural repulsion.
Viewed in broad outlines, where the Enlightenment celebrated reason the Counter-Enlightenment affirmed a belief in faith and in the primordial wisdom of the senses. Hamann proclaimed that God was “a poet, not a mathematician,” that reason was “a stuffed dummy,” and that Nature was not a repository of primordial virtue but “a wild dance” (Berlin 1982, 169). Where the Enlightenment projected the ideal of a common humanity with universal goals, its opponents exalted differentiation, particularism, and parochial identities. The émigré Savoyard aristocrat Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821)—a founder of sociology, as well as arguably a precursor of fascism (Bramson 1961; Berlin 1990)—rejected human universalism outright: “The constitution of 1795, just like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians. . . . But as for man, I declare that I have never met him in my life” (in Berlin 1990, 59). Others, notably the East Prussian Johann Herder (1744–1803), undertook to write a universal history of humanity but transformed the project into a synthetic presentation of the multiple histories of particular peoples.
Herder read the language and folklore of each people as expressions of its unconscious inner genius, its characteristic Volksgeist. This drew on Condillac’s idea that “each language expresses the character of the people who speak” (in Aarsleff 1982, 346). This formulation could be employed to modify Enlightenment universalism in order to envisage a pluralistic assembly of particular peoples, each seen as imbued with a distinctive “spirit.” One outcome was a fateful conflation of linguistic studies with an ethnically based psychology (Whitman 1984). This orientation was even more evident in the linguistics of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who reinforced the notion that the inner organizational form at the root of each language was neither static nor passive but constituted “a spiritual driving force” (Verburg 1974, 215). Subsequently, as Prussian minister of education, Humboldt channeled the German educational system into Bildung, the schooling of the academically educated elites toward a neo-humanist revival of the classics, including studies in philology and psychology. As the nineteenth century grew ever more nationalist, this fusion of disciplines equipped German nationalists with a new “spiritual” weapon to combat materialism. It also produced a new science of ethnic psychology (Völkerpsychologie), which strove to demonstrate that “the Volksgeist was the unifying psychological essence shared by all members of a Volk and the driving force of its historical trajectory” (Bunzl 1996, 28). This echoed, a half-century later, Destutt de Tracy’s project to establish a science of human ideas, yet it transformed that science from a universal project of humankind into a psychology of national identities.
“Culture” stems from this orbit of German usage. The term was originally processual, being drawn from “cultivation,” or agriculture, and then applied to cultura animi, the cultivation of young minds to aspire to adult ideals. In this later sense it came into Germany in the seventeenth century. There in the eighteenth century its meaning was extended from the development of individuals to include cultivation of the moral and intellectual capacities of nations and humankind (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952, 18–23), The shift in emphasis from “culture” as cultivation to culture as the basic assumptions and guiding aspirations of an entire collectivity—a whole people, a folk, a nation—probably occurred only in the course of the nineteenth century, under the promptings of an intensifying nationalism. Then each people, with its characteristic culture, came to be understood as possessing a mode of perceiving and conceptualizing the world all of its own. For a time ethnologists modified this view by insisting that the components of any one culture were rarely homegrown but rather were assembled over time from many sources and articulated in diverse ways. Yet increasingly, the question of what made the sum of these culture traits cohere was answered by claiming that the aggregates of culture traits from hither and yon were worked into a common totality by the unifying “spirit” manifest in each particular people and in that people alone. Fortified by that inner unity, each separate and distinctive people could resist the universalizing claims of enlightened Reason.
The concept of “society” was transformed in similar fashion. In the first flush of the Enlightenment, people imagined that a new “civil society” would pack off kings and emperors into exile, disband the royally protected social and political corporations, and disassemble the hierarchical arrangements of precedence and privilege. Yet as revolution after revolution leveled gradations and perquisites of rank in one country after another, many began to ask where this process of decomposition would stop and how any kind of integral social order could be restored. How were citizens, now stripped of the robes of status and expelled into the faceless crowd, ever to regain a stake in the new arrangements, a sense of belonging, a foothold in secure and collectively shared values? The search for answers prompted the development of sociology, conceived as a new science able to provide “an antidote against the poison of social disintegration” (Rudolf Heberle, in Bramson 1961, 12). Perhaps social order could once again be stabilized by building up face-to-face social interaction and association in primary groups and by reinforcing these linkages through appeal to common values.
Marx and Engels
This vision of society was challenged from the 1830s on by two kindred spirits from Germany: Karl Marx, a journalist from the Rhineland, and Friedrich Engels, the scion of a family of textile entrepreneurs from Westphalia. They combined in a new way the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment with critiques of the dissolution of institutional ties, as advanced by conservatives (Bramson 1961, 21). The two friends followed the Enlightenment in the conviction that reason could unmask falsehood and proclaim truth. They believed that employing reason would help uncover the sources of human misery, which—like many conservatives of their time—they located in the emergence of individuals disconnected from any web of mutual rights and obligations through the breakdown of older communal ways of life. They further held that humans could reach a greater realm of freedom through reliance on their own efforts, including the use of reason, without invoking the consolations of religion. They did not think, however, that such a transformation could be accomplished by the force of ideas alone, or that the envisioned change would come about by spreading truthful ideas through education. They insisted that human life was shaped not by the workings of the “Spirit” embodied in reason but through production: human practice in transforming nature to answer human needs, by means of tools, organization, and the employment of “practical reason.” Practice does not merely contemplate and observe the world; it works to alter the world, using reason to further the process and evaluate its results.
Marx and Engels were convinced, moreover, that the prevalence of misery and untruth among humans was due neither to original sin nor inherent human incapacity but to a class society with a social system that severed people from communities and interdicted their access to resources. Under these circumstances, the dispossessed were forced to hire themselves out to members of another class who benefited from this transfer of labor, and who developed rationalizations purporting to explain why this state of affairs was to the advantage of possessors and dispossessed alike. Marx and Engels were to call these rationalizations “ideology.”
By the time they adopted the term, “ideology” had lost the initial meaning of a “natural history” or “science” of ideas that Destutt de Tracy had bestowed on it and had come to mean thought formulated to serve some particular social interest. In 1844–1845, in Paris, Marx took notes on Destutt de Tracy, as well as on the materialists of the radical Enlightenment Paul d’Holbach and Claude Helvetius (Barth 1974, 74, 303). At this time he also noted that “ideology” had been transformed from a positive term into one of denunciation.
Marx and Engels adopted this reformulated concept of “ideology” and connected it with their own analysis of capitalist class society. The term “class” to denote a segment of society was then also new in English usage. It derived from the Latin classics of antiquity, where it designated classes of draftees in the call to arms (Quine 1987, 23). In English usage it first meant a cohort in school. Yet references to “lower classes” appeared in England in 1772; “higher classes” and “middle” or “middling classes” followed in the 1790s; and “working classes” appeared in about 1815 (Williams 1959, xiii). Equivalent terms became popular in France in the 1830s (Hobsbawm 1962, 209). A song called “La Proletarienne” appeared there in 1833, together with a call to arms—“Aux armes, Proletaire” (Sewell 1980, 214). By 1837 Marx was writing to his father about the proletariat “as the idea in the real itself” (Bottomore 1983, 74). In 1845 Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England (1971), based on two years of experience in Manchester, and in 1845–1846 the two together wrote The German Ideology (“abandoned to the criticism of the mice” and not published until 1932) (Marx and Engels 1976), in which they addressed both their political economic theory of the working class and the issue of ideology. In that work they also formulated their view that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force” (in Sayer 1989, 6).
In this initial axiomatic statement on ideology, Marx and Engels followed the promptings of the Enlightenment to interpret the “ruling ideas” as forms of “interested error,” presented as ostensible truths intended to mystify the people about social reality and thus wielded as instruments of domination over hearts and minds. Unlike other Enlightenment thinkers, however, they did not ascribe this form of “interested error” either to the workings of a universal human nature or to agents of darkness trying to exploit it. For them humans were “corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective beings,” able to acquire real knowledge of the world by acting upon it, even if by that same token they were also “suffering, limited, and conditioned” creatures (Marx 1844, in Ollman 1976, 78, 80). Mastery of the world through labor, together with the capacity for language developed in the course of laboring together with their fellows, would multiply human knowledge and expand the human grasp upon the world. Practical engagement with the world would produce realistic thought and an “increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of judgement” (Engels 1972, 255) while driving out “fantasies” that took no tangible object and only filled the mind with apprehension and fear.
In this perspective ideology was made to resemble religion, because—like religion—it mystified the real capacity of humans to change nature through active material practice and because it accentuated human dependence upon forces beyond their control. For Marx and Engels such mystification was due not to human nature or human weakness but to the connection of ideology with the contradictions posed by class society. Class society fostered illusions precisely because it was riven by the social polarization into the many who labor and the few who dominate the productive process. To deny or veil the resulting tensions, such a society produced ideology as “a particular, distorted kind of consciousness which conceals contradictions” (Larrain 1979, 50). Marx and Engels thus hoped that reason and political action based upon it could lift the veils of misrepresentation and allow knowledge to go forward unhampered by figments of the mind.
This phrasing of ideology as “the ruling ideas of the ruling class” is useful for its grasp of social realities, but its authors did not specify how it was to be understood. Do managers of the ruling class hire intellectual agents to produce ideas that exemplify their interests, or did they mean that the asymmetrical structure of society determines the conditions under which ideas are produced and propagated? Did their notion of ideology imply that the ruling ideas “reflect” or “mirror” the real power of the ruling class? Marx and Engels used these metaphors frequently. Alternatively, they spoke of ideas as “corresponding” to certain conditions “most appropriate” to them, as when Marx says that Protestantism, “with its cult of abstract man,” is the most “suitable” (entsprechendste) form of religion for simple commodity producers exchanging equivalents of abstract labor (1923, 42). These terms resemble Max Weber’s later concept of “elective affinity” (Wahlverwandschaft) between ideas and group interests, but Marx and Engels did not lay out how social relations were connected with particular ideational representations. Their language suggests a field of force, undergirded by productive relations, setting the terms for how people are to comprehend their world; but they left open the question of how particular forms of ideation arise and how some kinds of representation achieve precedence and power over others. The search for an adequate answer to that question continues in the present.
Soon after Marx and Engels advanced the notion of a link between ruling ideas and ruling classes, this theme vanished from their writings (Balibar 1988). It was replaced in 1867, in Kapital, by a new mode of analysis focused on “the fetishism of commodities.” This phrasing appeared in the context of the notion that things produced for the market—commodities—embodied human labor deployed and allocated under the auspices of capitalist social relations. In this mode of production, human labor power, purchased by the capitalist in labor “markets,” is incorporated into commodities. The workers then lose any connection with what they have produced, which belongs to the capitalist who paid them wages for their labor power. The goods are placed upon “commodity markets,” and the proceeds from their sale belong to the capitalist. Thus animate human labor, which is a physical and cognitive attribute of people, and inanimate commodities produced by that labor are treated as if they belonged to the same category.
The merging of these qualitatively different entities, according to Marx, masks the real social relations that govern the way people are harnessed to the production process. Moreover, when worker-producers of commodities and buyers of commodities are equated, the social relations among workers, employers, and buyers are all made to look like relations among the commodities themselves. “It is nothing but the definite social relations between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” Just as in “the misty realm of religion . . . the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own. . . . So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands” (Marx 1976, 165). This notion does not rely on a model of ideology as distortions and errors promulgated by a ruling class; rather, it traces the source of deception to a particular kind of social reality, that of capitalism. That reality mixes what is real with fictions; as a result, the participants in the transactions are deceived about the reality of capitalist social relations.
Marx drew the concept of fetishism from studies of religion. The term came from the French scholar Charles De Brosses, who described in his book on the Culte des Dieux fétiches (1760) the behavior of West African carvers who supposedly first sculpted wooden images (“a thing made,” feitiço in Portuguese), to then treat them as if they were divine beings. De Brosses, like others after him, saw in this “fetishism” evidence of primitive, nonlogical modes of thought. Marx, however, applied it to the structural effects of a particular mode of mobilizing social labor—that of capitalism.
Marx applied a similar logic to characterize the structure of non-capitalist social formations, where—as he understood it—a chief or despot, standing above individuals or communities, embodied the sway of an encompassing community or state, thus making that wider entity “appear as a person.” This interpretation has been revived in modern Marxian anthropology. For example, Jonathan Friedman used it to characterize the role of the chief in Southeast Asian tribal groups as representative of the higher unity, exemplified in sacrifices to the territorial spirits (1979). Pierre Bonte applied it to the “cattle complex” in African pastoralist societies, where cattle constitute the subsistence base, wealth that underwrites descent marriage, and offerings to the supernaturals: “cattle fetishism is thought of and justified as reproducing the supernatural order” (1981, 38–39).
In the end, Marx’s efforts left open the question of just what it may be in “human nature” that prompts the recurrent emergence in human doings of “phantasmagoric forms.” Since Marx and Engels both saw human consciousness as determined primarily by the historically installed mode of production, they would have been loath to trace fetishism to any proclivities of human minds or to the neuropsychological architecture of the human organism. Yet it has been plausibly argued that humans share general tendencies to engage objects in the world as if they were human and to endow them with human desires, will, and capacities (Godelier 1977, 169–85; Guthrie 1993). These tendencies were abetted by the human possession of language, which postulates abstractions that can then be treated as animate beings and analogically endowed with humanlike capabilities. From this perspective, fetishism represents an escalation of animism, in which entities are treated as animate and superior to humans yet amenable to human entreaties to engage in transactions (Ellen 1988). Therefore, one might rephrase the issue of fetishism in cultural terms and ask which entities come to be selected for this process, under what circumstances, and why. Of special interest would be to ascertain how fetishes, already raised to a position of superiority, model relations of asymmetrical power in society. It may be possible, therefore, to combine Marx’s suggestion that the crucial nexus of structural power governing social labor will produce characteristic representations or misrepresentations in thought with an anthropological analysis of ideational complexes such as fetishism.
Reactions against Metaphysics and Teleology
While the opposing parties of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment disputed the political and intellectual terrain between them under the flags of Reason, Revolution, and Science against Faith, Tradition, and Poetic Subjectivity, a cohort of new protagonists, pursuing a different interest, would alter the terms of the debate. One way they did so was by attacking as “metaphysics” all efforts to subsume human behavior under general laws. Metaphysics was said to pile abstract theory upon abstract theory, until theorizing itself seemed to impede any connections with “real life.” These critics were especially opposed to “grand” theories that they accused—sometimes mistakenly—of trying to tie human fate to a central teleological dynamic. Among the teleologies thus denounced, favorite targets were Hegel’s unfolding of the workings of a world spirit; Marxism, treated as a form of economic determinism; and Darwinism, interpreted as an evolutionary teleology that favored the victors in the “struggle for existence.” The antidote to such universal scenarios was thought to lie in sound, practical, and down-to-earth methodology, without recourse to metaphysics of any kind.
This apotheosis of methodology above theory first took the name of “pragmatism” (Charles Peirce, William James), although a proliferation of intellectual currents added “empirio-criticism” (Ernst Mach) and “logical positivism” (G. E. Moore, Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper) to the antimetaphysical repertoire. The search for a more immediate contact with “real life” caused some of these critics to associate their perspectives with Darwinism and thus reintroduce biological theorizing through a back door, but all embraced the notion that ideas were usable only if grounded in acceptable methods. When it entered anthropology in the early twentieth century, this “pragmatic turn” prompted a decisive move toward fieldwork as the central methodology capable of yielding adequate knowledge about human doings.
REAFFIRMING “MIND”
Another critical response to “metaphysics” did not reject it entirely but opposed efforts to apply the methods of natural science to the study of history and the human sciences. The “subjectivists” thought it was necessary to “declare war on science” (Wilhelm Windelband), since approaches drawn from the natural sciences could not do justice to human vitality in passion, imagination, energy, and will. Science, it was argued, was unsuited to the study of human minds, subjective and autonomous entities that operated through language and culture. Minds had to be studied in the plural, and not as instances of a universal human mind. Therefore, it was also necessary to abandon evolutionary attempts to trace the development of humankind as a whole and to end efforts to define a “psychic unity of man.” Above all, these critics hoped to specify the varied forms through which the mind “apprehended” the world and imposed order upon it. In anthropology, beginning with Bastian and Boas, such attitudes underwrote a “mentalist turn” that emphasized the diversity of culturally constituted “minds.” This programmatic shift focused on language as the major vehicle for human communication, seeing language not as unitary but as manifesting itself in a plurality of languages.
This shift drew in large part on the German reaction against the reign of universal reason preached by the Enlightenment, but it was reinforced as well by political and economic motivations. Early in the nineteenth century, the advent of capitalism had been hailed by many as a breakthrough to a new freedom. Markets were increasingly freed from monopolistic governmental controls and interference, and industrial development promised liberation from tributary dependence and toil; the diffusion of “free” thought held out prospects of delivering the multitudes from the fetters of absolutism and religious orthodoxy. By the end of the century, however, intensifying capitalism had revealed a darker side. Increasingly social critics, both socialist and conservative, pointed to the numbers of people who had been stripped of rights to the resources of field and forest upon which they had once relied for a livelihood, to the uncertainties in industrial employment associated with the business cycle, and to the frequently exploitative character of industrial employment itself. At the same time, increasing numbers of people became aware of the terror and brutality associated with imperialist expansion abroad.
The entrepreneurial class and its supporters came under attack from both the Left and Right, as much for its dedication to Mammon as for its acceptance of the status quo now that its own privileges had been assured. There were reactions against “materialism,” understood as a growing proclivity to luxuriate in material wellbeing. Other critics feared the spread of equality, which they associated with a loss of recognition for individual capacity and achievement. Still others bemoaned the weakening of the sense of heroism and sacrifice once associated with the military aristocracy, the rationalization of social life through the growth of bureaucracy, and the dismantling of comforting traditions.
These various changes made the future seem less promising, sometimes positively threatening. There was widespread concern among the literate about biological and psychological “degeneration,” issuing in Germany in lamentations about “cultural pessimism.” Increasingly this mood called into question the promises held out by the advocates of Reason. The Romantics had already challenged Enlightenment values by questioning the claims of Reason, and these claims had been shaken further from within the camp of Reason itself. The early Enlightenment understood Reason as the strategic cognitive faculty that would reveal the truth of Nature kept hidden by error and superstition; thus stripped bare, Nature would show itself as an orderly system of prudent imperatives. As “the great infidel” Scotsman David Hume pointed out, however, we lack a convincing basis for testing what goes on in our minds against an orderly and causally determined sequence of facts in Nature: all our thinking is “derived either from our outward or inward sentiment.” As a result, Hume asserted, Reason could not guarantee a reliable picture of Nature, and hence one could not derive any rules of ethics from the workings of Nature: “It is not irrational for me to prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my finger” (in Solomon 1979, 73, 76). The Romantic Johann Georg Hamann used Hume to argue that, in the absence of certain and reliable knowledge, any correspondence between Reason and Nature had to be based on “faith.” Thus, as Ernest Gellner put it, Reason “cut its own throat” (1988, 135).
Hume had argued that all our ideas and memories are not “truths of reason” but merely matters of “habit.” As the universal values of the Enlightenment were increasingly challenged by defenders of local and national traditions, such habits came to be understood as variable both in the course of history and among different groups around the globe. This stripped “habits of the mind” of any claim to universal dominion or validity, rendering them instead historically and ethnologically particular and relative. As cultural groups began to look inward and to ask what made them distinctive, furthermore, they began to stress differences in the qualities of their minds, the nature of their special kind of “spirit,” their distinctive kind of subjective “consciousness.”
THE NEO-KANTIANS
This psychological “reorientation” had a specific impact on Wilhelm Dilthey, who sought to replace natural-science models in the writing of history with a phenomenological approach that could delineate meaningful patterns of thought. Dilthey’s concerns were taken up in turn by various schools of “neo-Kantians,” who sought to sharpen the distinction between the natural sciences as nomothetic and the cultural sciences as idiographic. They came to define these idiographic sciences as the study of the mental categories that permit people to construct their distinctive life worlds, and they devoted their energies to developing strict interpretive methods for this kind of study. They accepted Kant’s insistence that the human mind was not a tabula rasa on which perceptions were recorded as on a “white sheet of paper” but an organ that possessed a priori the ability to construct mental categories and thus make knowledge possible. For Kant, as for the neo-Kantians, these categories were not innate in themselves; what was innate was the human requirement for categories in order to inhabit this world, whatever particular conceptual schemata might specify these categories.
How we structure our knowledge of the external world also became a central problem for the anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas, who read Kant in his igloo in Baffin Land in 1883 as the outside temperature hit forty degrees below zero, moved from a “rather hirsute” materialism (Stocking 1968, 140) toward a neo-Kantian conception of culture as a study of “the human mind in its various historical, and, speaking more generally, ethnic environments” (p. 160; also pp. 143, 152). This neo-Kantian emphasis led Boas to a form of ethnography that differed from that of the British functionalists. Where the functionalists emphasized behavior in the genesis of social and cultural forms, Boas saw culture as ideas in action. This understanding was to shape his study of the Kwakiutl, to whom he devoted a major part of his anthropological efforts.
The neo-Kantian movement developed numerous variants, but its two most important “schools” were centered respectively at the University of Marburg and in the Southwestern “cultural province of the upper Rhine” (Hughes 1961, 46), at the universities of Freiburg, Heidelberg, Strassbourg (then in German hands), and Basel. The Marburgers focused on the origins and development of scientific knowledge. Their most notable exponent was Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)—the first Jewish rector at a German university—who charted the changes from substantial to relational concepts in European thought from the late Middle Ages to the present and who later focused on the role played by language in the formation of scientific knowledge. In contrast to the Marburgers, who looked to science as the prototype of knowledge, the South westerners insisted on drawing a sharp line between the nomothetic acquisition of knowledge in the natural sciences and Dilthey’s idiographic method for study of the “sciences of the spirit” (Geisteswissenschaften) that embraced history and the humanities.
WEBER
The most important figure influenced by the Southwestern neo-Kantians was the sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who studied at Heidelberg. Although he achieved considerable intellectual and political prominence in Germany during his lifetime, his work came to be known outside Germany only by slow increments, through translated papers and essays (with his political writings excluded). His major book on Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society) was not translated into English in its entirety until 1968.
Weber’s politics crucially influenced his interests and choice of topics. He was born into a Germany unified by Bismarck, whose power base lay in Prussia. The state was governed by an alliance of Junker landowners with civil bureaucrats and army officers, many of them recruited from Junker families. This class alliance set the new state on the road to industrialization under capitalist auspices, but—in contrast to England, the leader in capitalist development—it did not grant the class of capitalist entrepreneurs a role in managing the affairs of state. Weber wanted a strong Germany, able to play its part in “the eternal struggle for the maintenance and cultivation of our national integrity” (in Giddens 1972, 16). In his estimation, the traditional classes leading Germany were unsuited to the task of building a successful industrial society, while the ascending class of the liberal bourgeoisie and the new class of proletarians were unqualified for political leadership. Thus, his famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of 1920 (Weber 1930) not only was intended to demonstrate the importance of religion in economic development but was written to “sharpen the political consciousness of the bourgeoisie” in Germany (Giddens 1972, 12). To advance German development, Weber said, it would be necessary to break the political power of the Junker class, control the state bureaucracy, and reform the parliamentary system of the state in order to draw the socialist working class into participation in government and to support capitalist development. This, however, would also require separating the workers from their Marxist-inspired Social Democratic leaders, whom he characterized as petit bourgeois innkeepers and revolutionary visionaries, likely to amplify bureaucracy and thus choke off industrial growth.
Weber’s sociology played out a number of neo-Kantian themes. Weber rejected any kind of general causal theory, especially the economic determinism then preached by the Social Democrats, who predicted an inexorable forward march of world history based on the development of the economy. Instead, he always concentrated on the study of particular cases. Sociology might recognize repetitive patterns or variations on common themes and propose “hypothesis-forming models” (Kalberg 1994, 12). Such models might draw on a wide range of comparative studies, but they were merely “ideal types,” to be used to examine particular cases, not to chart any lawlike unilineal process. While Weber saw rationalization—the imposition of a means-ends calculus upon relations—as a recurrent trend in the world and feared that bureaucratic rationalization would enclose the human spirit in an “iron casing” (the usual translation as “iron cage” is in error), he “always refused to present rationalization as the self-unfolding logic of history” (Arato 1978, 191–92).
Weber further denied universal and dominant power to the economic factor: economics was likely to play a major role in framing the possibilities of any concrete situation, but it would co-occur always with multiple other social and ideational factors. Methodologically it was always necessary, Weber held, to investigate the “meanings” that action held for the acting individual, and not to understand people simply as products of social forces. Following the lead of Dilthey, he saw such investigation as involving Verstehen, empathetic understanding reached by putting oneself in the position of others, in order to comprehend how they themselves define their situation and the purposes of their actions. Many of his treatises dealt with ideas that shaped the characteristic orientations to religious or economic action. These orientations always addressed particular social contexts; they defined the “meaning” of action for individuals and underwrote their ability make “sense” of the world. Weber’s study of such orientations and their “carrier” groups retains an enduring importance for our understanding ideas in relation to the conditions of specific social groups. Yet he saw that relationship as potential but not determined, and he refused to develop any general theory of how ideas were shaped in interaction with economy and society. In his most general statement on the matter, Weber opined: “Not ideas, but material and ideal interests directly govern man’s conduct. Yet very frequently the ‘world images’ which have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamics of interests” (in Gerth and Mills 1946, 63–64).
Combining Marxism and Neo-Kantianism
Understanding how Weber related to Marx has long constituted a cottage industry in the social sciences. Some scholars have stressed Weber’s tragic vision of human life as fatefully threatened by rationalization. Others have cast him as a precursor of National Socialism in his views about the need for a state based on concentrated power and his call for a mobilization of the working class on behalf of national capitalist development. For some sociologists, like Talcott Parsons, Weber offered an alternative to Marx. More recently, as time has passed and the passionate disputes of yesterday have become muted, it has become easier to recognize the ways in which the Marxian and Weberian legacies converge and intersect (Turner 1981; Sayer 1991). My own sense is that Marx and Weber complement one another, each addressing a different level of relationships. Even in the period around World War I, however, when the issues underlying their differences still provided flammable tinder for politics, some major figures worked to combine their apparently divergent perspectives and to bring them to bear conjointly upon social science.
With the rise of Marxian methods of inquiry, there developed Marxian variants that attempted to combine Marxism with approaches influenced by neo-Kantian thought. Two of these focus on the relationship between ideas and power and are especially pertinent to anthropological understandings. One is represented by the work of Karl Mannheim (1893–1947); the other, by that of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937).
Mannheim was destined to become one of the “free-floating” intellectuals he later described. Born in Budapest, he joined the radical “Sunday Circle” that included Gyorgy Lukács; and, like Lukács, he fled to Germany in the wake of the failed Hungarian revolution in 1919. Hitler’s grasp for power in 1933 then forced him to move to England. While in Germany, he—like Lukács—came into contact with Max Weber, then intent on developing his neo-Kantian approach to a systematic sociology, and both Lukács and Mannheim would attempt to combine Marx with Weber. In History and Class Consciousness (1971), Lukács used Weber’s concept of “objective possibility” to endow the Marxian proletariat with a “potential” (as opposed to an empirical) class consciousness. Yet where Lukács then opted for communism, Mannheim moved toward sociology.
Mannheim accepted the hypothesis of a link between forms of knowledge and social groupings, but he also insisted in Weberian fashion that class intersected with many other memberships in generational cohorts, status groups, professions, and elites. His methodology, used to demonstrate the ties between social entities and ideas, was “essentially anthropological” (Wallace 1970, 174). His essay on “Conservative Thought” in Germany (1953) pointed to the declining nobility as the main social base of support for an intelligentsia that produced conservative theories. The work also exemplified Mannheim’s major concern with the social role of intellectuals. In a second work, Ideology and Utopia (1936), Mannheim counterposed varieties of ideology that supported the status quo, as against forms of utopian thought that envisioned alternative futures. He delineated different kinds of utopias: the orgiastic chiliasm of Thomas Münzer’s Anabaptists; the liberal-humanitarianism of the Enlightenment, which embraced the idea of rational progress as well as German pietism’s faith in progress under the stewardship of God; conservative counterutopias; and socialist-communist utopias. In Mannheim’s method, each of these perspectives was to be depicted in its own terms, as a prerequisite for an eventual evaluative solution (1936, 98). His great hope was that sociology would affect politics by communicating to the contending participants the sources of their modes of action and would thus facilitate negotiations among them.
Gramsci combined Marx and neo-Kantianism in a different way, developing an approach to understanding how ideas are generated and distributed within a field of force. Born in Sardinia, he went on to study linguistics in Turin, where he was drawn into politics and became a leader of Italian communism. Arrested by the fascist regime in 1926, he was sent to prison, where he died in 1937.
A major influence on Gramsci was his intellectual engagement with the philosopher, historian, and political figure Benedetto Croce. Croce’s historical work focused primarily on Italy, but he was strongly influenced by Dilthey and fused his vision of a psychological and phenomenological history with the Italian idealist tradition. Croce intentionally neglected the social and economic side of history and wrote Italian history as a political quest for moral consensus and liberty. Gramsci criticized Croce for his idealism but sought to translate his “ethico-moral moments of consent” into Marxian terms. He did this through his writings on the concept of “hegemony,” in which he argued that class domination and influence did not merely rest on the formal political system and the state-operated apparatus of coercion but spread beyond state and politics into the social and cultural arrangements of daily life. “To win hegemony, in Gramsci’s view,” writes Terry Eagleton, “is to establish moral, political and intellectual leadership in social life by diffusing one’s own ‘world-view’ throughout the fabric of society as a whole, thus equating one’s own interests with the interests of society at large” (1991, 116).
The concept of hegemony has political roots. Initially used by Lenin to refer to political domination, it was elaborated by Gramsci to suggest that in the capitalist societies of the West—contrary to what might be true in Eastern Europe—political power could be gained through the construction of a predominant consensus rather than through revolutionary violence. In the West, states did not preempt all social arenas, relying instead on managing society through social and cultural influence; this, in turn, would allow opposition parties to resist this influence by developing counterhegemonic forms of their own. The balance between hegemony and counterhegemony would always be in flux. Thus, hegemony was envisaged not as a fixed state of affairs but as a continuous process of contestation.
As a political leader in a country only recently unified and marked by strong local and regional traditions built up around numerous towns, each surrounded by its own rural dependency, Gramsci was keenly aware of the sterility of a class-oriented politics anchored in a paradigm of a generalized working class conscious of universal interests. His political project was therefore to draw into an alliance segments of the working class, peasant groups, artisans, white-collar employees, and fractions of other classes. Such an alliance would then function as a “historic bloc”—unified politically as well as “culturally” under the leadership of the Communist Party and its allies.
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.
In identifying the cadres at work in cultural dissemination, Gramsci was especially interested in how intellectuals, whom he saw as ideological specialists in formulating and explaining bodies of ideas, interacted with the carriers of what he called “common sense,” the general understandings current among the popular masses. He saw this interaction as dynamic, with donors and recipients of ideas engaged in active interchange, each motivated by their own interests and perspectives. Since such interchanges were always contested, they gave rise to “unstable equilibria” between superordinates and subalterns.
Both Mannheim and Gramsci sought to combine Marxian grand theory with the local, regional and national particularism demanded by the neo-Kantians. For both men, this took the form of arguing that class was a major determinant of social alignments but that it was only one such determinant among many others. Both Mannheim and Gramsci related modes of ideation to the role of particular classes and groups, and both thought that common ideas might have a role to play in the rise of wider movements. Gramsci’s work, in particular, offers a perspective on how such coalitions, organized to expand and solidify cultural influence, connect with power. Both figures were also concerned with how ideas were generated and disseminated, an interest that underlies their efforts to comprehend the role of intellectuals. This interest focused explicitly on the group affiliation and activities of particular kinds of “brain-workers.” Yet it represents an advance from the mere charting of the relationship of ideas to interest groups, toward understanding how in fact ideas were constructed and propagated.
Pragmatism in Anthropology
Pragmatism had already scored major victories in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but its impact on anthropology came later, in the period in and around World War I, and at first affected England primarily. There British functionalism—associated with the names of Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown—began to insist on looking at systems of ideas in terms of their practical contributions to activity systems and societal arrangements. This stance excluded a concern with understanding ideas in their own right. Such a practice-oriented approach appealed to Marxists, especially those who preferred to regard ideas as epiphenomena of a determinant economic base. This pragmatic view of ideas was reinforced further by the rise of logical positivism—less a philosophy than an attitude of distrust of abstractions—which was ready to relegate all statements that failed to pass the test of logical consistency and empirical verification to the scrap heap.
The ascendance of these new perspectives yielded both benefits and losses. Tying ideas to their social context challenged scholars to go beyond seeing ideas as the abstract musings of the Spirit and to grasp their connections with the world. Discounting the influence of ideas and ideologies, however, also exacted a political and intellectual price, in that it caused the followers of pragmatism to neglect the significance of ideas in rousing and mobilizing people for action. Thus, many a well-intentioned rationalist simply would not believe, until it was too late, that scientifically unverifiable and irrational ideas could yet appeal to large numbers of people, and that beliefs in witchcraft, eliminationist anti-Semitism, or millenarianism could be taken seriously by apparently reasonable persons.
The new intellectual pragmatism proved extremely influential in anthropology, initially with markedly positive results. By emphasizing practice over ideation, stressing what was done over what was thought and said, functionalists and Marxists—each in their own way—scored important theoretical and methodological points. They educated anthropologists to separate statements of rules about what ought to be done from descriptions based on the observation of actual behavior, and they encouraged them to think about how rules related to action as a problem to be explored and not taken for granted. Until World War I, generations of anthropologists and folklorists had simply assumed that in studying “customs” they were also studying, simultaneously, ideas and the ways in which they were carried out in daily life. For them custom was “king”—“the tyranny of custom” confined behavior within prescribed limits. The new pragmatists, who preached “going to the people” or doing “fieldwork,” challenged the unquestioned axiom of uniformity and its transgenerational replication through custom. Asking questions about the interplay of rule and behavior, pattern and action, structure and agency thus goes back in anthropology some sixty years.
Also long with us has been the related issue of how we are to imagine the unity of a “culture.” Despite their announced refusal of metaphysics, many pragmatists in fact relied on theoretical premises to guide their work, and this was true also of anthropologists who preached the virtues of fieldwork. Malinowski followed Mach in understanding science as a practical human adaptation to nature, which enhanced the chances of biological survival, and he understood psycho-bio-cultural integration as functional in the pursuit of “life.” Radcliffe-Brown, in turn, followed Émile Durkheim in projecting the image of “society” as a solidary whole, pivoted on a social structure that provided a scaffolding for the allocation of jural rights and duties. Yet as soon as account was taken of the discrepancy between rules and behavior, it became evident that cultures and societies were internally differentiated and that this heterogeneity might give rise to very different concerns and expectations. Social and cultural arrangements varied by gender, birth order, generation, kinship, and affinity; by position in the division of labor and in the allocation of resources; by access to knowledge, information, and channels of communication; by accidents of the life cycle and life experience. There was a diversity of rules, as well as a diversity of behavior. Yet if this were so, how were such diversities brought together into unifying systems? That question has not yet received a satisfactory answer.
The pragmatic turn accentuated the difference between what was stipulated in rules and codified in ideas and what was actually done. It also initiated studies of how different activity systems in culture and society—and the ideas connected with them—were orchestrated in order to provide solutions to the practical problems of life. Considering how ideas fitted into social relations was clearly a gain, although looking at how imaginings function in group life furnishes no answers to why the relation obtains. Indeed, functionalism was intended explicitly to avoid “why” questions about origins, causes, or possible alternatives.
Developments in Linguistics
Each phase in the formulation of concepts aimed at explicating humankind, either in its universal aspect or in its national particularities, entailed notions of the role of language in shaping human minds and actions. During the Enlightenment, Condillac shifted interest away from efforts to define the fundamental logical structure of the mind toward a concern with how language grasped sensations and experience by means of signs. Prominent at the time was the thought that laying bare the roots of words could reveal how the human experience of interacting with nature might first have suggested signs to protohumans. Then the increasingly nationalist nineteenth century generally abandoned such inquiries into the panhuman origins of language and turned instead to the study of particular languages.
These studies were formulated along two different lines. One took its lead from Humboldt, who understood each language as an expression of vital energeia, motivated by each people’s drive to express its spirit through a particular “inner form” of language. This approach converged with the neo-Kantian effort to render manifest the categories of thought informing the idiographic history of particular peoples. It came to influence American anthropology through a line of investigators that extends from Humboldt to Heyman Steinthal (Humboldt’s literary executor and one of the founders of Völkerpsychologie) to Franz Boas (Kluckhohn and Prüfer 1959, 19), Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Whorf. These scholars all built upon Humboldt’s strong linguistic relativism, while demurring from his occasional suggestion that some languages might have achieved a higher state of perfection than others.
The other mode of inquiry, a comparative philology associated primarily with the name of Franz Bopp, sought to reveal historical linkages among languages by tracing similarities among formal patterns of grammatical elements, as well as by noting continuities in meaning. The efforts of these comparative philologists to recover a common Indo-European protolanguage contributed to the development of historical linguistics. With its intense formalism, their research avoided any attempt to explain the relationship of language to mind, but it did emphasize the autonomy of language in setting up “the formal patterns of grammatical elements through which words are linked and differentiated” (Culler 1977, 61).
From 1860 on, a strong reaction developed against both “the German mystical school” and Bopp’s formalism. Scholars such as the linguist Michel Bréal and the historian-psychologist Hippolyte Taine argued that there was need for a return to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment view of language as a human activity (Aarsleff 1982, 290–91, 293–334). That new linguistics was subsequently formulated by the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), who heeded Bréal’s call for the study of language as an activity that “has no reality apart from the human mind” (in Aarsleff 1982, 382); but he combined this perspective with insights derived from the German neogrammarians, who strongly emphasized the intrinsic patterning of grammar. In his courses in Paris and Geneva (1881–1891, 1907–1911), as well as in the posthumous Cours de linguistique générale (1916), edited by some of his students, Saussure argued that language was neither the expression of a Volksgeist nor a set of independent forms. In place of a concept of language that supplied words as tags for sensations received from the external world, Saussure defined language as a purely internal mental “faculty governing signs” (1983, 11), free from any involvement with an “informing spirit.” With that faculty, humans could create self-regulating systems of signs in the mind and thus prove able to convey and receive information by arranging and rearranging linguistic signs in purely formal ways. The systems created by this internal faculty he called langue, language. Each such langue could be characterized by rules, which arranged the elements available to it and maintained the formal relationships thus constituted. A language was able to reproduce itself as long as these relationships obtained.
The corollary of this new understanding was that ideas or knowledge structures could no longer be understood as having a stable content and significance in their own right but were merely temporary effects of particular ways of using language and employing signs. The “true nature of things may be said to lie not in things themselves, but in the relationships which we construct, and then perceive, between them” (Hawkes 1977, 17). Saussurean linguistics thus abandoned any notion of an immediate encounter with the world through language and began to treat reality as portrayed selectively by humanly imposed codes. This move, however, severed any physical or psychological link between the linguistic indicators (signifiers) and what they indicated (the signified). The indicators were no longer connected with their designata by any intrinsic relationship with reality. What seemed firm and stable now became merely provisional and contingent; the link between signs and what they “stood for” became arbitrary. The forms produced by this arbitrary connection had to be learned anew in each generation, by children from parents, and by linguists and ethnologists from their local tutors.
For Saussure a langue was a system located in the mind that made speech (parole) possible. Because the system of langue was for him closed, homogeneous, and self-regulating, it would also constitute an appropriate object for scientific inquiry, while parole, speech, was not properly part of the language system. It consisted for him merely of the heterogeneous and unpredictable ways in which individuals, differentiated by motivation and temperament, actualized or “executed” that system across a wide range of circumstances. This treatment of language did not have its source in neo-Kantianism as such, although his concept of the linguistic community was influenced by the work of Durkheim, who may be read as the protagonist in an ongoing argument with Kant. Durkheim’s conclusion to The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, first published in 1915, agreed with Kant that human ideation was governed by “permanent moulds for the mental life” that “are not made only to apply to the social realm; they reach out to all reality” (Durkheim 1947, 440). But it disagreed with Kant’s locating the forms taken by these categories in the individual: the idea of all at the root of classifications could not have come from the individual, but only from society (p. 441). Saussure’s linguistic categories, like Durkheim’s “collective representations,” were attributes of a collectivity, through a “faculty of mind” at work in that collectivity. Saussure, like the neo-Kantians, therefore accorded precedence to mental schemata over experience in dealing with the world, contributing to the forcefulness of the mentalistic turn.
Yet if Saussure’s structuralist view of the workings of langue constituted the main strength of his approach, his view of speech as a domain of free variation through individual choice has proved the weak point of Saussurean linguistics. As such, it has invited criticisms, and also theoretical modifications and alternatives. One source of criticism was from linguists who agreed with Saussure that the gift of language resided in the mind but who thought that he had not gone far enough. Thus, Noam Chomsky took him to task for restricting langue to a system of static grammatical properties and for failing to recognize that grammatical rules also governed the creative construction of sentences uttered in the language of everyday life (1964, 59–60). Yet in making this critique, Chomsky himself revived the Saussurean dichotomy of langue and parole, now rebaptized as “competence” and “performance,” with “competence” defined as the proper arena of linguistic concern and “performance” accorded only secondary status.
A quite different kind of critique raised questions about the relationship of langue and parole to variation in external social contexts. Three such critical stances bear particularly on the question of the relationship between ideas and power. One was that of Malinowski, who described himself as an “ethnographic empiricist.” Malinowski elaborated his influential perspective on language and linguistics on the basis of field materials gathered in fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands between 1914 and 1918. He acknowledged that language had structure but at the same time distanced himself from Saussurean structuralism by asserting that language was “a mode of action, rather than a counter-sign of thought” (Firth 1964, 94).
Another critique of Saussure’s langue was put forward by the Russian linguist Valentin N. Vološinov, who in 1929 published Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, which combined the perspectives of Marxism and linguistic structuralism. After it appeared in English translation in 1973, a review noted that it practically predated “all contemporary interests ranging from semiotics to speech act theory” (Yengoyan 1977, 701). The book is also notable in that its authorship remains uncertain; it may have been written in whole or in part by Mikhail Bakhtin and published, for political reasons, under Vološinov’s authorship. For Vološinov/Bakhtin it was crucial that language was lived out socially, by different cohorts of people interacting in different social contexts. He criticized the assumption that signs were univalent within any speech community and varied only through individual choice in the course of speech. Instead, he argued, signs were likely to be emitted with “accents” that varied by social categories, such as gender, generation, class, occupation, or status or by different interpretations of tradition. Such “multiac-centuality,” he noted, could turn communication into “an arena of struggle” (1986, 23) rather than a chorus of concord.
A third approach to language that went beyond the Saussurean model derived from the American pragmatist and logician Charles Peirce (1839–1914), whose work became important in semiotics in the 1960s. Peirce had argued that “the study of language ought to be based upon a study of the necessary conditions to which signs must conform in order to fulfill their function as signs” (in Parmentier 1994, 11). If no inherent causative relationship exists between an indicator and what it “stands for” in the world, then their mutual association has to be explained, justified, and certified on other grounds. According to Peirce, every linguistic and cultural sign or set of signs that ties an indicator to its designatum must come accompanied by another sign, which refers to the previous sign and defines and explicates it. This sign he called the “interpretant” (Peirce 1955, 100). Each sign functioning as an interprétant requires still another interpretant and sign to define it in turn, thus making semiosis “an infinite process,” “an endless series” (in Parmentier 1994, 27).
In the wake of such critiques, there developed in the 1960s and 1970s various efforts to modify the picture of langue advanced by Saussure and to question the dominant role of grammar defended by Chomsky. The aim of these endeavors was instead “to develop a theory of language in its social context, rather than a theory of grammar,” to delineate which elements of the social context affect the production and understanding of language in natural settings (Lavandera 1988, 6). Focusing on speech in context could, in turn, inform us about who is using and manipulating cultural and linguistic forms, in relation to whom and under what circumstances. Such efforts to consider how language and culture are caught up, implicated, and deployed in social action also open up possibilities for investigating the contextual role of power in language use.
Signs and Power
The study of signs began with linguistics, which initially defined signs as elements deployed in the system of langue. Yet it soon became apparent that gestures, colors, tones, apparel, or foods could also serve as signs in appropriate contexts and that, in fact, anything and everything could assume the function of a sign in human communication. The study of language could thus be seen as part of a more general science of all kinds of signs and sign-functions, semiotics.
This expanded interest in signs suggested to some that the notoriously ambiguous concept of “culture” could be made more precise in semiotic terms. One way this was pursued was by drawing on Peirce. The Italian semiotician Umberto Eco took Peirce’s approach to signs and related it to the workings of culture. Accepting the premise that signs do not exist in natural reality, Eco pointed out that they depend for their formulation and function upon the network of practices and communications we call culture. In such networks they appear always with other signs, which relate to one another through likeness or contrast. The dimensions of similarity and difference are also defined culturally, The relation of signs to one another and to the contexts in which they may be used further requires an “interpretant” (in Peirce’s terms), which clarifies what a sign is about by adducing further signs that place it into the web of culture of which it forms a part (1976, 67).
Signs that assume the function of interpretants have a special role in the exercise of power, because the capacity to assign cultural significance to signs constitutes an important aspect of domination. Power can determine (“regulate”) the interpretants that will be admissible, emphasized, or expunged (Parmentier 1994, 127–28). It not only certifies that a sign and its denotatum are cognitively appropriate; it stipulates that this sign is to be used and who may so use it. It can also regulate which signs and interpretants are to be accorded priority and significance and which are to be played down and muted.
The exercise of power over interpretants and their use is clearly a social process that requires study in its own right. To that end, Pierre Bourdieu has suggested the utility of thinking about communication as operating within linguistic fields or “markets.” In these fields not all participants exercise the same degree of control over the processes of communication. Speakers address each other from different social positions, and their differential placement determines how they do so. For Bourdieu, “language is not only an instrument of communication or even of knowledge, but also an instrument of power. One seeks not only to be understood but also to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished. Whence the complete definition of competence as right to speak, that is, as right to the legitimate language, the authorized language, the language of authority. Competence implies the power to impose reception” (in Thompson 1984, 46–47).
Not all individuals are equally competent in pursuing their interests in the exchange of linguistic actions and counteractions. Some people excel in the knowledge of what can be appropriately exchanged with whom; others lack that knowledge. Nor do such transactions go forward automatically and without conflicts of interest. Power is involved in deciding who can talk, in what order, through which discursive procedures, and about what topics. As Lamont Lindstrom has put it in the context of a field-based study in Vanuatu, “Control of the questions—even more than control of the answers—maintains social inequalities in that such control helps frame and make sense of felt desire.” In this way, “the powerful set the conversational agenda and, by this means, establish inequalities more difficult to perceive or challenge” (1990, 13).
When we combine the insights from semiotics that point up how priority is accorded to some interpretants over others with an understanding of how differential controls operate in the communicative process, we are led to ask how ideologies can be derived from the general stock of ideas. I earlier defined ideology as a complex of ideas selected to underwrite and represent a particular project of installing, maintaining, and aggrandizing power in social relationships. The selection and management of interpretants and control over verbal communication are strategic operations in ideological construction.
Frequently, these functions are assigned to “intellectuals,” part-time or full-time specialists in the communication process, a theme addressed by Mannheim and Gramsci. It may be that human minds or neural systems are constituted to avoid incoherence and to resist “cognitive dissonance” (Festinger 1957); yet it also seems to be the case that not all people are equally concerned with creating cognitive coherence (see Fernandez 1965). Some take on the special role of exercising such functions; this is the case in societies at all levels of complexity.
There is an “intellectual politics in the creation of culture” (Verdery 1991, 420), especially salient in situations where the exercise of structural power is based on the control of culturally available knowledge. Katherine Verdery has stressed the importance of communicative competence in socialist societies, where “language and discourse are among the ultimate means of production” (p. 430). Verdery describes these societies as characterized by states that depend on a mix of coercion and symbolic consensus, but her point applies as well to those marked by weak states or lacking states altogether, where performative speech-acts often play a major role and where words are thought to convey effective power. Performatives are utterances that do something, that accompany an action “not to report facts, but to influence people” (Austin 1962, 234); they promise something, issue orders, warn of trouble, or initiate a change of conditions, such as declaring someone to be married or installing a personage in a seat of power and prestige (Austin 1976). Bourdieu has rightly cautioned against the tendency of speech-act theorists to assume that the power of performative speech derives from language itself. He stresses that the speech-act lacks power and validity unless it is institutionally authorized and carried out by a person with the appropriate cultural credentials (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 148). Thus, competence in enacting performative speech is both a source of power and a demonstration of it.
What has been said about ideology in communication, including the role of intellectuals, applies to nonverbal as well as verbal communication. An important contribution of semiotics is its emphasis on the fact that cultural mandates are not only coded into verbal linguistic forms but are all-pervasive in humanly constructed worlds. The built environment can be shaped semiotically to condense the verbal interpretants around certain emblems and thus convey imperative messages to the beholder. This is seen in such modern phenomena as the Colonial Williamsburg restoration (Parmentier 1994, chap. 6) and the orchestration of Baroque art with music, massed processions, and elaborate ritual performances (Turner 1988) and also in the great prehistoric sites of ancient megapolities like Teotihuacan or Borobudur. Similarly, ideological condensation of interpretants marks particular art forms, such as Mozart’s operas that comment on the contradictions of the Enlightenment in Austria (Till 1993), Richard Wagner’s myth-making Gesamtkunstwerk, and Leni Riefenstahl’s film “Triumph of the Will” celebrating a National Socialist party congress. All ideologies enshrine an aesthetic of sign communication in their very mode of construction.
A special vehicle of ideology that usually combines verbal and nonverbal communication to generate messages in condensed form is ritual. Maurice Bloch has described ritual as a mode of performance in which propositions are muted and played down, while the force of illocutionary speech and performatives is magnified. The addition of dance and music to speech heightens the emotional impact of performatives still further, while diminishing the cognitive component in communication (1974, 1977). In the ritual process, the participant enters a spatially and temporally structured environment and moves through it guided by a prescribed script that dictates bodily movements and emotional responses. In the process, ritual reshapes bodies and minds through the performance itself (Bell 1992, 98–101). Participation in ritual, Roy Rappaport has argued (1979, 194), also obviates discussion of belief and publicly signals adherence to the order in which one participates. Requiring people to take part in ritual or abstaining from ritual thus signals who has power over whom.
Ideas in Culture
In contemporary anthropology, conceptions of the relationship between power and ideas are embedded in approaches to culture. A central question in how culture is to be understood is whether priority in explanation should be accorded to material or to ideational factors. This issue has surfaced repeatedly, with “materialists” and “mentalists” locked into arguments about the validity of their respective stances. The present inquiry takes the view that materiality and mentality need not be opposed, and it draws theoretical insights from both camps.
Among the major contributors to these debates, Marvin Harris holds a strongly materialistic position. Harris has resolutely defined the premise of his explanatory strategy as “the principle of infrastructural determinism.” This principle joins Marx with Malthus and accords priority in explanation to observable behaviors in both production and reproduction. Since production and reproduction are “grounded in nature they can only be changed by altering the balance between culture and nature, and this can only be done by expenditure of energy” (Harris 1979, 58). Harris acknowledges the legitimacy of a concern with mental constructs; indeed, he readily grants the possibility that subject-dependent “emics” may be studied objectively “by relying on an operationalized scientific epistemology” (p. 35). Yet for him “thought changes nothing outside of the head unless it is accompanied by the movement of the body and its parts,” and ideas are consequences of energy-expending body activities that affect the balance between population, production, and resources (p. 58).
If Harris downplays the ideational realm, the French anthropologist Louis Dumont has set aside behavior in the material world to focus exclusively on “systems of ideas and values” (1986, 9), on “ideological networks” (p. 24). He uses the term “ideology” for ideas in general, in the tradition of Destutt de Tracy, rather than taking the later sense of the concept as ideas placed in the service of power, and he sees himself as carrying on the work on “representations” of Durkheim’s student Mauss (Dumont 1986). Dumont speaks of “the global ideology” of “a society, and also of the ideologies of restricted groups such as a social class or movement,” or of “partial ideologies” characterizing a subsystem of society, such as kinship (1970, 263). His major concern is with ideological systems at the level of entire societies, and he sees them as “central with respect to the social reality as a whole (man acts consciously and we have direct access to the conscious aspect of his action)” (pp. 263–64). At the same time, he holds that ideology “is not the whole of society” and needs to be placed in relation to “the non-ideological aspects.” These two aspects may turn out to be complementary; how they are actually related is a matter of finding evidence, producing “proof” (p. 264).
To ascertain the nature of ideologies central to whole societies, Dumont has proceeded comparatively, first investigating ideology in India principally on the basis of Brahmanic texts, then—more recently—using the writings of major political economists and philosophers to define the ideology of Western economics. This project has led him to counterpose one ideology to the other in terms of a generalized contrast—between a homohierarchicus of non-Western societies and a supposed homo aequalis of the West. In the course of these studies, Dumont has offered valuable insights on particular ideological themes. Bruce Kapferer (1988), for example, has used Dumont’s ideas selectively in his insightful comparison of two nationalisms, one derived from a hierarchically conceived cosmology in Sri Lanka and the other from the egalitarian cosmology of Australia. My own work on National Socialism has benefited from Dumont’s studies of German ideas. In practice, however, Dumont neglects alternative voices and traditions that competed with the exemplary protagonists he chooses to discuss, and he concentrates on ideas without reference to the patterns of behavior that helped institutionalize these ideological forms. In this emphasis, ideal patterns of thought seem impelled by an internal logic of mind.
Where Harris privileges behavior over ideas and Dumont studies systems of grand ideas to the exclusion of behavior, Clifford Geertz has focused on questions of meaning. Citing Weber’s belief “that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” Geertz defines culture semiotically as “those webs of significance” and sees his task as “an interpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz 1973, 5). Anthropology must attend, he argues, to how interacting people interpret and construct their own actions and the actions of others. They do so through recourse to symbolic models or blueprints, culturally available “symbolic templates” for action and of action. In a discussion of “ideology as a cultural system,” he decried studies of ideology that did not take account of the “figurative language” of culturally significant symbols. Ideologies, according to Geertz, can be due either to “strains” in the fabric of society or to efforts to assert a group interest in the face of opposition, but neither “strain” nor “interests” will be understood unless they can be rendered into culturally specified symbolic templates or models (1973). Geertz’s contribution lies in this emphasis on how understandings are “envehicled” in symbols, in the course of social action. That, however, is only a first step. What remains problematic in Geertz is how we are to think about these symbolic vehicles. Do some have more bearing on the exercise of power than others? Are some more resistant and enduring, others more evanescent and secondary? How are they “carried” into social life and by whom? How and in what contexts are they foregrounded, reproduced, and amplified?
Geertz drew some of his inspiration for a symbolic approach to action from Weber, but Weber’s interest lay in developing an objectifying sociology that could provide “causal explanations of action” (Kalberg 1994, 49). Weber did indeed take account of how subjective motivations and evaluations of meaning orient people toward action, but the thrust of his work was directed at showing how subjective assessments led people to take up patterned courses of action, which then caused them to participate in a social order in certain ways (pp. 23–49). In contrast, Geertz defined his own project not as a search for cause and effect but as enhancing the understanding of other cultural milieus through the “explication” and “translation” of significant symbols (1973, 408). His metaphor for “culture” was not that of an interconnected system of variables but that of the loosely jointed and easily disjointed octopus (p. 408).
As a result, Geertz moved from a more directly objectifying Weberian approach, evident in his The Religion of Java (1960), toward more literary readings of the ethnological evidence. This led him to favor “thick description” of symbolic actions in the immediate context of their occurrence and away from trying to comprehend these contexts as scenarios within larger structures. He thus raised our awareness of symbols in social action, while rejecting efforts to understand such action in relation to economics and politics.
Other scholars, however, have taken on such efforts, attending to symbolic action but framing it within cultural or political histories that pay heed to the larger dimensions. Two may be mentioned by way of example. Sherry Ortner has traced the monastery-building movement among the Sherpa of Nepal to enhanced merit making by “big people” trying to compensate for a loss of political influence and to gains made by “little people” through wage labor and entrepreneurship. In the course of this movement, she argued, people drew repeatedly on culturally available schemas to enact culturally typical relations and situations. Such cultural schemas are “durable” (1989, 61).
Richard Fox has analyzed Mohandas Gandhi’s efforts to challenge Britain in the struggle for Indian independence and to use the resulting confrontations to move the country toward his own vision of spiritual and humane renewal. Focusing on Gandhi’s “experiments with truth,” Fox wrote a “culture history” of how individual intentions interacted with the contingent workings of cultural hegemony, which sometimes allowed room for action and at other times shut the door on new possibilities (1989). For Fox, “There is no weight of tradition, only a current of action” (1985, 197). Culture is not a given to be reenacted but is “always in the making,” “the sum and state of social confrontations at the particular moment or the moment just past” (1985, 206).
Fox emphasizes the play of contingency in cultural innovation or constraint; Ortner stresses cultural replication. Hence, Fox calls approaches such as Ortner’s “culturology” (1985, 106), while Ortner accuses Fox (and me) of holding that cultural structures exist “external to actors” (1990, 84). The approaches seem opposed, but they are so only to the extent that they allow generalizations to cover phenomena that are themselves heterogeneous and contingent. Individual and group contestation is clearly important, but participants rarely come to it without previous entanglements. They always bring “scripts” that shape their understandings of their situation; yet these scripts are never free of contradiction. Moreover, cultural hegemony is not a seamless web of domination but a panoply of processes of varying intensity and scope. Whether the structures of communication are negotiable or completely closed is not predictable in advance but becomes apparent only after the skirmishing has begun.
Going well beyond the Geertzian emphasis on “characteristic symbolic forms” or Ortner’s “cultural schemas,” Marshall Sahlins has applied Lévi-Straussian structuralism, premised on the supposed operations of the mind, to define the cultural structures at work in particular societies. In contrast to Lévi-Strauss, however, Sahlins used structuralism to engage history. To visualize the continuity of structures, he borrowed from Fernand Braudel the notion of structures lasting through the longue durée (which Braudel had applied mainly to the enduring dimensions of geography and ecology) but extended it to cover the mental structures of whole cultures. He thus defined, for Hawaii, an overall structure that opposed two contrastive sets of elements: on one side, heaven and sea, gods and chiefs, and masculinity and male generativity, which are associated with foreign invaders who come by sea, take wives from the natives of the land, and implant culture by introducing the customs of sacrifice and taboo; and, as its opposite, underworld, land, commoners, femininity and female powers, wife-givers, natives of the land, and nature (1977, 24–25). At the same time, he argued that these elements were historically combined or opposed in different ways and were adjudged differently when viewed from different positions within the system, thus opening up the total structure to possibly “unstable and meaningfully negotiable” permutations (1977, 25). On top of this, the entire Hawaiian structure was challenged by the advent of European seamen, traders, and missionaries, who imported alternative Western structures into the novel “structure of conjunction” (also a Braudelian term). In seeming paradox, therefore, Sahlins holds that such systems maintain themselves precisely through reconstruction and accommodation; the structure is said to maintain itself by changing. Even though critics have interpreted Sahlins as essentially concerned with the persistence of an unchanging cultural structure over time, his central concern has been to ask “how does the reproduction of a structure become its transformation?” (1995, 8).
Yet laying out the cultural structure can only be a first step in comprehending how “native” categories partition the world into oppositions and levels of oppositions. To grasp what these categories and oppositions imply, one must go beyond the structuralist method to ask questions about the structure itself, especially how it came to be and what role it played in founding and sustaining the differential powers and inequalities that flowed from it. That would involve stepping outside the structure, to view it comparatively in the perspective of another structure or in a longue durée of successive structures in history. Furthermore, it would be important to consider how the structure worked to contain its own contradictions, especially since Hawaiian sociopolitical organization itself habitually set successors in the direct line of chiefs against collaterals (Valeri 1990, 173). How the structure “works,” in other words, requires knowing what the structural categories and their organizational logic are “about.” It may be the case that power is always exercised through culturally particular categories and meanings, but how power comes to control social labor must be formulated in other terms.
Sahlins holds that neither Hawaiians nor any other people can step outside their cultural categories to deal with reality, for “material effects depend on their cultural encompassment. The very form of the social existence of material forces is determined by its integration in the cultural system” (1976, 206). In contrast, Roy Rappaport insists that anthropology can adopt both an “etic” approach whose frame of reference is the community of science and an approach that engages the subjective understandings, the “emics” of the people themselves. As an ecological anthropologist, Rappaport began by attempting to trace “the effects of culturally informed behavior on biological systems: organisms, populations and ecosystems” (1971, 243); at the same time, and contrary to Harris, he argued that native understandings have a part to play in activating ecosystemic variables, which can, in turn, be stated in the etic terms of the scientific observer. For Rappaport, therefore, how the “cognized environment” (as understood by the people studied) intersects with the “operational environment” (the model of reality constructed by the scientist) remains an open problem, where Sahlins denies the validity of this kind of distinction.
Rappaport has also contributed a scheme for studying the natives’ “cognized models.” For him, such models have a structure, an architecture grounded in “ultimate sacred postulates” which, in turn, support understandings about the nature of entities in the world, rules for dealing with them, ways of registering fluctuations in the conditions of existence, and schemata for classifying the beings encountered in everyday life. In contrast to symbolic approaches that confine themselves to the study of culturally specific metaphors, Rappaport’s scheme suggests that it may become possible to compare cognitive models cross-culturally. However, in its present form, it probably works best for systems that ensure stability through ritual but is less applicable to arrangements in change that rely on power.
Discussion
In following the contestations between the proponents and opponents of Enlightenment through Reason, and their aftereffects, it becomes clear that these were not abstract theoretical debates. The affirmations of utterly opposed claims to the truth became arguments and counterarguments over power and status advanced by contending interests. While increasingly assertive commercial classes allied to expanding rationalizing states presented themselves as the party of the future, besieged social classes and locally based political elites countered this claim by exalting tradition, parochialism, true inner spirit, the social bonds of intimacy, and local knowledge. Many of the foundational concepts of the social sciences were hammered out in such contests over the control and distribution of power and bear the imprint of their political affinities. Revolutionary and Imperial France asserted dominance over Europe in the name of rationalism, secularism, and equality; the Germanies responded with traditionalizing and “spiritual” countermovements in the name of “culture.”
At the same time, both cohorts of interlocutors were locked into a common field of social and political interaction and were speaking to the same issues, although one did so from a position of strength through victory and the other from a position of defeat and victimization. Thus, one side accentuated the promises held out by the rationalist vision, while the other focused on the ways in which rationalist techniques would suppress parochial interests and loyalties by installing regimes of more perfect domination. As a result, the concepts put forward—reason and ideology, culture and society, practice and metaphysics—were not only placed in opposition but were reified as emblems of contrasting orientations, each concept objectified and animated as a bounded and holistic entity endowed with a capacity to generate and propagate itself.
When the sets of opposing arguments are placed in their social context, however, they can be seen to intertwine. When Reason is no longer abstractly set off against Culture, one can visualize how it is activated or resisted, in culturally specified ways, within institutional settings such as scientific laboratories, administrative offices, and schools. In this way, phenomena once set apart by absolute distinctions can yield to more integrative understandings.
The same point may be made about the counterposition of “class” and “culture.” When first introduced in their present-day senses, these concepts appeared to be wholly incompatible, especially when deployed in political discourse. Yet they do not exclude each other; they occur together and overlap in various ways. Both terms, in fact, claim too much and also too little. They suggest that “classes” or “cultures” represent totalities in their own right—homogeneous, all-embracing entities, each characterized by a common outlook and capable of collective agency.
The advocates of “class” assumed that a common position along a gradient of control over the means of production entails a common interest shared by all members of the class and, hence, common propensities for action. Yet class and classness are better understood in terms of relations that develop historically within a social field. That field subsumes diverse kinds of people, rearranges them, and causes them to respond to new ways of marshaling social labor. One can then speak of the “making” of a class (as did E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class [1966]) out of disparate groups of people, who bear diverse cultural heritages and yet must adjust them to the requirements of a new social order. Similarly, a class may be “unmade” and its members scattered and reallocated to different groupings and strata.
The advocates of “culture,” for their part, have generally thought that whatever underlies cultural commonalities—be it language, upbringing, customs, traditions, race—will produce sentiments of identity, social solidarity, love of country, and aversion to cultural “others.” Yet, as with class, the forces postulated as generating culture were never strong enough in and of themselves to produce the envisioned unifying effects. Historically, both classness and culturehood needed to be mobilized and reinforced to come to fruition: in many cases, the requisite energies emerged from the turmoil of politics and war.
If class can be wedded to culture, then culture too needs redefinition. The initial use of the concept in the service of the Counter-Enlightenment stressed a supposed inner unity, marked by a continuity through time from primordial beginnings. A “culture” was thus conceived as the expression of the inner spiritual force animating a people or nation. This understanding was carried into anthropological usage, together with the implicit or explicit expectation that a culture constituted a whole, centered on certain fundamentals that distinguished it from others. It was also seen as capable of reproducing and regenerating itself and as able to repair any tears in its fabric through internal processes.
Once we abandon this view of a culture as a reified and animated “thing,” the problem of how to understand cultural phenomena must also change. What comes to be called “culture” covers a vast stock of material inventories, behavioral repertoires, and mental representations, put in motion by many kinds of social actors, who are diversified into genders, generations, occupations, and ritual memberships. Not only do these actors differ in the positions from which they act and speak, but the positions they occupy are likely themselves to be fraught with ambiguity and contradiction. As a result, the persons who occupy them may be required to act and think in ambiguous and contradictory ways. This becomes most obvious when people must confront changes imposed from outside, but it is likely to mark any situation of social and cultural change.
Given this differentiation, neither a language-using community nor a body of culture bearers can share all of their language or culture, or reproduce their linguistic or cultural attributes uniformly through successive generations. As Anthony Wallace has pointed out, social relations depend not on a “replication of uniformity” but on “the organization of diversity” through reciprocal interaction (1970). Culture is not a shared stock of cultural content. Any coherence that it may possess must be the outcome of social processes through which people are organized into convergent action or into which they organize themselves.
These processes of organization cannot be understood apart from considerations of power, and they may always involve it. One must then attend to how that concept is understood. To think of power as an all-embracing, unitary entelechy would merely reproduce the reified view of society and culture as a priori totalities. It will be more productive to think of power relationally, but it then follows that different relationships will shape power differently. Power is brought into play differently in the relational worlds of families, communities, regions, activity systems, institutions, nations, and across national boundaries. To conflate these various kinds of power would lead us into the trap of national character studies, which saw socialization and its effects on personality replicated in every domain and on every level of a national society. At the same time, how power operates on different levels and in different domains, and how these differences are articulated, becomes an important research question—something to be demonstrated, not assumed.
The same caveat is in order as we try to understand how power in social relationships works to draw cultural and linguistic forms into coherence. If it is no longer possible for us, as it was for our predecessors, to assume that culture and language replicate themselves through the impersonal force of “custom” or through some hypothetical human need for cognitive consistency, then we must try to identify the instrumental, organizational, or ideological means that maintain custom or underwrite the search for coherence. There may be no inner drive at the core of a culture, but assuredly there are people who drive it on, as well as others who are driven. Wherever possible we should try to identify the social agents who install and defend institutions and who organize coherence, for whom and against whom. And if culture was conceived originally as an entity with fixed boundaries marking off insiders against outsiders, we need to ask who set these borders and who now guards the ramparts.
We thus need to make our received concepts more flexible and operational, but we must not forget the relational value of concepts like culture, which—whatever its limits—sought connections among phenomena, in contrast to the earlier “custom.” Similarly, Marxian concepts have always seemed to me productive, because they broke down the dividing lines between history, economics, sociology, and politics from the start. Relational approaches are especially important when we deal with ideas, an undertaking that always threatens to divorce mental constructs from their historical and physical contexts. These approaches will guide the case studies on Kwakiutl, Tenochca (Aztecs), and National Socialist Germany that follow, to show how culturally distinctive patterns of ideation interdigitate with material and organizational processes.
‘Nakwaxda’xw Chief Tutlidi giving away a copper in honor of his son at Fort Rupert, 1894. A segment of the copper has been broken off in the manner prescribed for distribution. Photograph by O. C. Hastings. (American Museum of Natural History)
