Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf
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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,