Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf
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(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.
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