Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf
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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