Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf
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both caution about rushing to judgment and a measure of willingness to “let the observations speak for themselves”—this despite the understanding that facts cannot find their voice without some assist from a theoretical scheme.
To pursue the problem of how ideas and power are connected, therefore, I will look to three case studies, following the anthropological tradition of trying to relate observed behavior and recorded texts to their contextual matrix. In each of the cases, I will try to trace out the linkage between power and ideation, placing it in relation to the people’s history and the material, organizational, and signifying forms and practices of their culture.
The three populations on which I will focus are the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, the Aztecs of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Central Mexico, and the Germans who willingly or unwillingly became members of a Third Reich that was supposed to last for a thousand years but collapsed in fire and ashes in 1945. The Kwakiutl have been categorized as a “chiefdom,” the Aztecs as an “archaic” or “early” state, and National Socialist Germany as a distinctive “reactionary-modern” state, combining the apparent modernity of capitalism and technology with a reactionary fascism. This seriation is compatible with an evolutionary sequence, but my aim is not to apply an evolutionary scheme to the study of three sociopolitical systems. Nor am I primarily interested in systematic comparison among the three cases, although I will sometimes juxtapose them in order to highlight contrasts or similarities among them.
My main interest is analytical: I want to find out what we can bring to light by exploring the relation between power and ideas in the cases. I have fastened on these three because each of them is characterized by unusually evocative and elaborate repertoires of ideas and practices based upon these repertoires. Forty years ago, Kroeber suggested that we might come to understand the dimensions and limits of human nature by taking stock, comparatively, of “the most extreme expressions yet found in particular cultures, of the various activities and qualities of culture” (1955, 199). He offered as one such “most extreme expression” the case of human sacrifice among the ancient Mexicans. I present here, as another, the case of National Socialist Germany, because its ideology played a part in the planned slaughter of millions.
I have also added the case of the Kwakiutl. They were one of the groups in Kroeber’s roster of “Minor Civilizations in Native North America” (1962, 61), marked by “unusual intensity of cultural activity” (1947, 28). Mauss wrote of their giveaway ritual, the potlatch, that “such a syncretism of social phenomena is, in our opinion, unique in the history of human societies” (in Allen 1985, 36), and he drew on their ethnology for his famous Essai sur le Don of 1925 (Mauss 1954). For a long time these giveaways served as type-cases of conspicuous consumption (for example, Herskovits 1940). Ruth Benedict portrayed the Kwakiutl as “one of the most vigorous and zestful of the aboriginal cultures of North America” but also as acting in ways that would be called “megalomaniac paranoid” in our culture; what was abnormal among us constituted, on the Northwest Coast, “an essential attribute of ideal man” (in Mead 1959, 270, 275). These judgments have been called into question for equating ritual displays of antagonism and rhetoric with personal psychodynamics. My interest here focuses precisely on that flamboyant ideology and ritual.
These three cultures represent instances of high drama that challenge the ability and credibility of any observer or analyst. Yet, at the same time, they magnify and display structures and themes that might remain more muted and veiled among peoples who are less assertive in their ways of life. Such a claim is of course open to the charge of being both qualitative and subjective; but it is backed by considerable evidence. One of my tasks will be to evaluate that evidence and to suggest alternative explanations where warranted. Each of the cases will show how the people involved responded ideationally to perceived crises, but I shall also try to indicate how the relevant ideas and actions based on them were embedded in material processes of ecology, economics, social organization, and plays of political power. Moreover, to the extent that crises form part and parcel of everyday life, we must recognize that the generally accepted distinction between periods of normality and periods of crisis is to a large extent fictitious. Hence, ideational responses to crisis are not as divorced and separated from the ongoing traffic in mind-dependent constructions and representations as we have sometimes thought. Thus, these three “extreme” and accentuated cases may not be as removed from our everyday experience as we might imagine and hope.
In taking up each case, I will employ an approach of descriptive integration. I use the term to mean that I locate each case in space and time, bring together extant information to exhibit relationships among the domains of group life, and define the external forces that impinge on the people studied. The notion was developed by Kroeber, who spoke of “conceptual integration” in 1936 (1952, 70–71), and taken up by Robert Redfield as “descriptive integration” (1953, 730). They were seeking a specifically anthropological approach that could preserve the “quality” of phenomena and their relations to each other in time and space, as opposed to generalizing and abstract science. For me, the two endeavors—phenomenal particularism and generalization—are not opposed but rather are different but conjoint ways of addressing the same material. Description and analysis of phenomena necessarily involve selection, which assigns priority to some kinds of information over others according to one’s theoretical perspectives. Such perspectives, in turn, are predicated upon generalizations developed within the larger anthropological project of comparison.
There is also, in the three cases, the question of what evidence we can draw on for descriptive integration. Each of the three comes to us through different kinds of records, and each kind requires appropriate handling in its own terms. I believe that this evidence is best interpreted when placed in the contexts of social and cultural life, situated within the parameters of a determinate political economy. Such an analysis should allow us to locate human groupings in the natural world and render manifest the ways in which they transform themselves by transforming their habitats. To see how this is accomplished, we must pay attention to who commands the labor available to the society and how this labor is marshaled through the exercise of power and the communication of ideas. Each of the cases could be analyzed by focusing exclusively on observed behavior, but much would be lost if we were not able also to talk about the motivating affect embodied in ideas, the mind-dependent constructs that drove people to engage in the potlatch, in human sacrifice, or in celebrations of “racial superiority.” These ideas take on forms of their own that are not directly deducible from material or social facts, but they are implicated in material production and social organization and thus need to be understood in such contexts.
I write these lines as an anthropologist, albeit as one who sees his discipline as a link in the more encompassing effort of the human sciences to understand and explicate the multiple human conditions. Historically, anthropology owes its position to the fact that it occupied itself primarily with peoples who for a long time were wrongly thought to be marginal and irrelevant to the pursuit of civilization. This experience allowed anthropologists to take up a privileged vantage point in looking comparatively at peoples across the board, both inside and outside the boundaries set out by the spokespersons for progressive modernity. The other main determinant of anthropology’s special role among the human sciences has been its method of going out to live, for prolonged periods of time, among the people to be studied. This enabled anthropological investigators not only to obtain more rounded views of how people lived their lives but also to confront the discrepancies between announced purposes and de facto behavior. Behavior often fails to follow the scripts laid out in discourses and texts; often too it obeys covert reasons that do not answer to ideal goals. Experience of such discrepancies has caused many anthropologists to be professionally dubious about stereotypes of other cultures sometimes advanced uncritically by their colleagues in allied disciplines.
Yet, while shrewd in these matters, anthropologists have also exhibited an obtuseness of their own. Cleaving to a notion of “culture” as a self-generating and self-propelling mental apparatus of norms and rules for behavior, the discipline has tended to disregard the role of power in how culture is built up, maintained, modified, dismantled, or destroyed. We face a situation of complementary naïveté, whereby anthropology has emphasized culture and discounted power, while “culture” was long discounted among the other social sciences, until it came to be a slogan in movements