Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf

      Preface

      For some time I have thought that much good work in the human sciences falls short of its mark because it is unwilling or unable to come to grips with how social relations and cultural configurations intertwine with considerations of power. Anthropologists have relied heavily on notions that see cultural coherence as the working out of cultural-linguistic logics or aesthetics. As a result, they rarely have asked how power structures the contexts in which these promptings manifest themselves or how power is implicated in the reproduction of such patterns. I articulated this concern in an address to the American Anthropological Association in 1990, “Facing Power.” Yet if anthropologists have favored a view of culture without power, other social analysts have advanced a concept of “ideology” without culture, taking it as ideas advanced by elites or ruling classes in defense of their dominance, without attention to the specificities of cultural configurations.

      This book seeks a way out of this impasse. The project for it began with reading and discussion in a workshop on ideology that I conducted in 1984 with students in the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology at the City University of New York. It was then carried forward in graduate courses on the history of theory and on ideology, concluding with a seminar on “Ethnography and Theory” in 1992. I am grateful to the students who took part in these efforts and who made teaching at CUNY a memorable experience. My research and writing thereafter were facilitated by a generous fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

      My interest in the Aztecs dates back to my first visit to Mexico in 1951, where I learned much of what I know from Pedro Armillas, Angel Palerm, René Millon, and William T. Sanders. The upheavals produced by German National Socialism provided the main drama of my adolescence and early adulthood and significantly shaped my personal and professional concerns. Work on the Kwakiutl formed part of my anthropological education; as an undergraduate at Queens College I wrote an honors paper on the redistributive functions of chiefship.

      I presented initial versions of the material on National Socialist Germany (1991) and on the Aztecs (1992) as Brockway Lectures on the Anthropology of Crisis at the CUNY Graduate Center. More recently I was able to discuss the project before the Research School on Historical Anthropology/Sociology, University of Lund, with Jonathan Friedman as my host (1995); in the Ethnological Seminar, University of Zurich, guided by Jürg Helbling, in the framework of “theoretical discussions in present-day anthropology” (1996); and in a colloquium organized by Anton Blok at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research (1997).

      For advising me on sources or sharing their own writings with me, I am indebted to Johanna Broda (history, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Davíd Carrasco (religion, Princeton University), Enrique Florescano (history and anthropology, Mexico City), Michael E. Harkin (anthropology, University of Wyoming), Thomas Hauschild (anthropology, Marburg), Pierre-Yves Jacopin (anthropology, Neuchatel), Joseph Jorgensen (anthropology, University of California at Irvine), Cecelia F. Klein (art history, University of California at Los Angeles), Ulrike Linke (anthropology, Rutgers University), Alfredo López Austin (anthropology, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Richard A. Koenigsberg (Library of Social Science, Elmhurst, New York), Joyce Marcus (Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan), Irene Portis-Winner (semiotics, Cambridge, Massachusetts), Kay A. Read (religious studies, DePaul University), Wayne Suttles (anthropology, Portland State University), Pamela Wright (anthropology and linguistics, New York), and Rudolf A. M. van Zantwijk (anthropology, University of Utrecht). Several friends located materials for me that I might otherwise never have seen, I also want to offer thanks to the many scholars on whose work I have drawn. Special appreciation is due to three demanding and thus helpful critics: Barbara J. Price (anthropology, Columbia University), who read an early draft of my chapter on the Aztecs; Hermann Rebel (history, University of Arizona), who dissected my first efforts to write on National Socialism; and Jane Schneider (anthropology, City University of New York), who read the entire manuscript and clarified some of my arguments. My friend Archibald W. Singham, political scientist-activist, always sure that “the next round is ours,” said to me shortly before his death in 1991 that “it was time to meditate.”

      I