Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf
Читать онлайн книгу.
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