Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf
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answers to such questions, however, also requires us to go beyond the ethnographic present—the moment in which the ethnographer collects and records his observations—to locate the object of our study in time. It is not the events of history we are after, but the processes that underlie and shape such events. By doing so, we can visualize them in the stream of their development, unfolding from a time when they were absent or incipient, to when they become encompassing and general. We may then raise questions about proximate causation and contributory circumstances, as well as about the forces impelling the processes toward culmination or decline.
Earlier Explorations
This undertaking on my part may come as a surprise to readers who have understood my work as falling primarily within peasant studies and world-systems research, and who may think that I am now leaving the hard terrain of reality for the shores of fantasy land. I, however, see this endeavor as a continuation of concerns that have engaged me ever since I first heard of anthropology. The very discipline of anthropology had its beginnings in confrontations with then unfamiliar modes of thought and belief, and it set itself the task of recording and explaining their forms and significance. The German ethnologist Adolf Bastian distinguished between Elementargedanken and Völkergedanken, “universal elementary ideas” and the ideas of particular peoples. Edward Tylor, the doyen of British anthropology, sought to show how the mind evolved through a developing ability to differentiate between subject and object. Numerous scholars hoped to identify the origins and rationales governing “animism,” “totemism,” initiation, magic, or sacrifice. In these attempts, what people thought and imagined was dealt with as manifestations of their particular mental capacities, as exemplifications of the “mind,” without much interest in their links to economy or society.
In contrast to this anthropological absorption in what were then taken as the “absurd beliefs of savages,” the protagonists of the developing disciplines of political economy and sociology in the nineteenth century were less interested in the comparative workings of the mind. They downplayed the possible significance of culturally specific ideas as revelatory of peoples’ essential cultures and visualized ideas primarily as manifestations of social interests in the operations of civil society. Thus, one set of thinkers fastened on ideas as dimensions of distinctive “cultures” but did not address questions of power, while others in the emerging human sciences stressed the role of power in society but defined ideas entirely as mental precipitates of power games, as “ideology,” without much interest in their cultural role as elements of orientation and integration. My present effort hopes to draw these seemingly opposed analytic stances into convergence, by bringing them to bear conjointly upon historically and ethnographically described cases. In many ways, it represents the outcome of several previous explorations in my work and engages their unsolved problems.
I came into the discipline of anthropology at a time when studies of “culture and personality” had won out in the United States over more formalized inquiries into culture-trait distributions in time and space. The guiding idea was that each culture gave rise to a common personality, which was then transmitted transgenerationally through the cultural repertoire of child training. Common socialization and enculturation not only channeled the basic drives but also generated both culturally induced tensions and ways of abreacting these in behavior and fantasy. This model of commonality, it was then thought, would not only apply to small, homogeneous tribal groups but could be extended as well to large and differentiated societies, such as nations.
Speaking as one who for many years earned his keep by teaching courses on culture-and-personality, I would now say that this development within anthropology raised some important questions in asking how people in different social and cultural milieus acquired the knowledge and motivation to be actors and cultural carriers in the societies to which they belonged. In the language of structuralist Marxism, these were questions about how “the subject” is socially and culturally constructed. Yet culture-and-personality studies limited their capacity to find answers by adhering too narrowly to their guiding premises that societies and cultures were mostly homogeneous and that the causes of this homogeneity lay in the prevalent techniques of child training, especially as understood by psychoanalysis.
Today we would pay much greater attention to the differentiation and heterogeneity of social formations and to the multiplicity of social domains beyond the level of family and household. The interest in how “subjects” are formed could also have been more fruitful had it drawn more broadly on other disciplines, ranging from sociology to folkore, in order to grasp the relevant phenomena both processually and in history—to ask how guiding ideas, attitudes, and modes of action were shaped by class rule and hegemony, state policy, law, and public institutions, as well as by child training. One recent effort that moves in this direction is Pierre Bourdieu’s adaptation of Marcel Mauss’s concept of habitus, to show how people acquire “durable and transposable dispositions” through conditioning to the institutional landscape of social settings (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 115–39). These dispositions include the cognitive schemata that order society, which are incorporated into the body until they have “all appearances of objective necessity.” This then allows for inquiry into how people deploy their dispositions in daily life and into how symbolic systems can become instruments of domination.
For myself, having grown up in Central Europe, where many national identities, nationalisms, and nation-states were of but recent origin and where antagonisms among ethnic groups, regions, and classes threatened to tear apart even those nations that had been painfully constructed over the course of a century, the culture-and-personality mode of conceptualizing a national totality seemed utterly mistaken. It assumed that a common repertoire of child training would produce a single national character, and it abstracted personality formation from the historical processes that often required the use of force and persuasion to bring differentiated populations under the aegis of unified nation-states.
My own interests turned me toward learning more about these processes. Nations grew over time through intensified flows of capital and labor; through the unification of currencies and measures; through urbanization and migration from the countryside into the cities; through growing participation in politics; through the expansion of formal education, the hegemonic spread of standard languages, and the widening of channels of communication; through universal military training and the establishment of universal codes of law; through the diffusion of new norms of comportment and etiquette relevant to the expanding “civil society”; as well as through elaboration and proliferation of key ideas that celebrated the new collectivities or proved to be critical of them. These activity systems and institutions seemed to me to merit study in their own right. That was also true of the various nationalisms manifested as systems of ideas, and of the programs and visions of nationhood put forth in each particular case.
Yet clearly, the expansion of national life was uneven. Nations were constructed segmentally and unequally, marked by what the German philosopher Ernst Bloch called “the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous” (1962). Some people and groups were drawn or propelled into the central orbits of national existence; others were ignored, marginalized, or obliterated altogether. There were winners and also losers, unequally distributed over the national terrain and unequally represented in the symbolizations of the nation. More recently, as nation-states have become partners in wider alliances and participants in transnational networks of exchange and commerce, many of these subgroups and regions have reemerged with claims on their own behalf, testing the limits of integration into nations. None of these simultaneously encompassing and differentiating processes was mirrored in concepts of “national character.”
I codified some of these observations early on in an article, “The Formation of the Nation,” published in Spanish as “La formación de la nación” (1953) but never in English. There I argued that the formation of such differentiated and yet stratified societies
involves the growth of new cultural relationships which permit the accommodation of the new groups to each other. The socio-cultural segments of the society must learn them and make them their own. This is true when the ruling segment of one society establishes its dominance over another society. It is also true when culture change within a society causes the emergence of wholly new socio-cultural segments which must establish relations with each other and with the groups which provided