Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf
on the observation of actual behavior, and they encouraged them to think about how rules related to action as a problem to be explored and not taken for granted. Until World War I, generations of anthropologists and folklorists had simply assumed that in studying “customs” they were also studying, simultaneously, ideas and the ways in which they were carried out in daily life. For them custom was “king”—“the tyranny of custom” confined behavior within prescribed limits. The new pragmatists, who preached “going to the people” or doing “fieldwork,” challenged the unquestioned axiom of uniformity and its transgenerational replication through custom. Asking questions about the interplay of rule and behavior, pattern and action, structure and agency thus goes back in anthropology some sixty years.
Also long with us has been the related issue of how we are to imagine the unity of a “culture.” Despite their announced refusal of metaphysics, many pragmatists in fact relied on theoretical premises to guide their work, and this was true also of anthropologists who preached the virtues of fieldwork. Malinowski followed Mach in understanding science as a practical human adaptation to nature, which enhanced the chances of biological survival, and he understood psycho-bio-cultural integration as functional in the pursuit of “life.” Radcliffe-Brown, in turn, followed Émile Durkheim in projecting the image of “society” as a solidary whole, pivoted on a social structure that provided a scaffolding for the allocation of jural rights and duties. Yet as soon as account was taken of the discrepancy between rules and behavior, it became evident that cultures and societies were internally differentiated and that this heterogeneity might give rise to very different concerns and expectations. Social and cultural arrangements varied by gender, birth order, generation, kinship, and affinity; by position in the division of labor and in the allocation of resources; by access to knowledge, information, and channels of communication; by accidents of the life cycle and life experience. There was a diversity of rules, as well as a diversity of behavior. Yet if this were so, how were such diversities brought together into unifying systems? That question has not yet received a satisfactory answer.
The pragmatic turn accentuated the difference between what was stipulated in rules and codified in ideas and what was actually done. It also initiated studies of how different activity systems in culture and society—and the ideas connected with them—were orchestrated in order to provide solutions to the practical problems of life. Considering how ideas fitted into social relations was clearly a gain, although looking at how imaginings function in group life furnishes no answers to why the relation obtains. Indeed, functionalism was intended explicitly to avoid “why” questions about origins, causes, or possible alternatives.
Developments in Linguistics
Each phase in the formulation of concepts aimed at explicating humankind, either in its universal aspect or in its national particularities, entailed notions of the role of language in shaping human minds and actions. During the Enlightenment, Condillac shifted interest away from efforts to define the fundamental logical structure of the mind toward a concern with how language grasped sensations and experience by means of signs. Prominent at the time was the thought that laying bare the roots of words could reveal how the human experience of interacting with nature might first have suggested signs to protohumans. Then the increasingly nationalist nineteenth century generally abandoned such inquiries into the panhuman origins of language and turned instead to the study of particular languages.
These studies were formulated along two different lines. One took its lead from Humboldt, who understood each language as an expression of vital energeia, motivated by each people’s drive to express its spirit through a particular “inner form” of language. This approach converged with the neo-Kantian effort to render manifest the categories of thought informing the idiographic history of particular peoples. It came to influence American anthropology through a line of investigators that extends from Humboldt to Heyman Steinthal (Humboldt’s literary executor and one of the founders of Völkerpsychologie) to Franz Boas (Kluckhohn and Prüfer 1959, 19), Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Whorf. These scholars all built upon Humboldt’s strong linguistic relativism, while demurring from his occasional suggestion that some languages might have achieved a higher state of perfection than others.
The other mode of inquiry, a comparative philology associated primarily with the name of Franz Bopp, sought to reveal historical linkages among languages by tracing similarities among formal patterns of grammatical elements, as well as by noting continuities in meaning. The efforts of these comparative philologists to recover a common Indo-European protolanguage contributed to the development of historical linguistics. With its intense formalism, their research avoided any attempt to explain the relationship of language to mind, but it did emphasize the autonomy of language in setting up “the formal patterns of grammatical elements through which words are linked and differentiated” (Culler 1977, 61).
From 1860 on, a strong reaction developed against both “the German mystical school” and Bopp’s formalism. Scholars such as the linguist Michel Bréal and the historian-psychologist Hippolyte Taine argued that there was need for a return to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment view of language as a human activity (Aarsleff 1982, 290–91, 293–334). That new linguistics was subsequently formulated by the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), who heeded Bréal’s call for the study of language as an activity that “has no reality apart from the human mind” (in Aarsleff 1982, 382); but he combined this perspective with insights derived from the German neogrammarians, who strongly emphasized the intrinsic patterning of grammar. In his courses in Paris and Geneva (1881–1891, 1907–1911), as well as in the posthumous Cours de linguistique générale (1916), edited by some of his students, Saussure argued that language was neither the expression of a Volksgeist nor a set of independent forms. In place of a concept of language that supplied words as tags for sensations received from the external world, Saussure defined language as a purely internal mental “faculty governing signs” (1983, 11), free from any involvement with an “informing spirit.” With that faculty, humans could create self-regulating systems of signs in the mind and thus prove able to convey and receive information by arranging and rearranging linguistic signs in purely formal ways. The systems created by this internal faculty he called langue, language. Each such langue could be characterized by rules, which arranged the elements available to it and maintained the formal relationships thus constituted. A language was able to reproduce itself as long as these relationships obtained.
The corollary of this new understanding was that ideas or knowledge structures could no longer be understood as having a stable content and significance in their own right but were merely temporary effects of particular ways of using language and employing signs. The “true nature of things may be said to lie not in things themselves, but in the relationships which we construct, and then perceive, between them” (Hawkes 1977, 17). Saussurean linguistics thus abandoned any notion of an immediate encounter with the world through language and began to treat reality as portrayed selectively by humanly imposed codes. This move, however, severed any physical or psychological link between the linguistic indicators (signifiers) and what they indicated (the signified). The indicators were no longer connected with their designata by any intrinsic relationship with reality. What seemed firm and stable now became merely provisional and contingent; the link between signs and what they “stood for” became arbitrary. The forms produced by this arbitrary connection had to be learned anew in each generation, by children from parents, and by linguists and ethnologists from their local tutors.
For Saussure a langue was a system located in the mind that made speech (parole) possible. Because the system of langue was for him closed, homogeneous, and self-regulating, it would also constitute an appropriate object for scientific inquiry, while parole, speech, was not properly part of the language system. It consisted for him merely of the heterogeneous and unpredictable ways in which individuals, differentiated by motivation and temperament, actualized or “executed” that system across a wide range of circumstances. This treatment of language did not have its source in neo-Kantianism as such, although his concept of the linguistic community was influenced by the work of Durkheim, who may be read as the protagonist in an ongoing argument with Kant. Durkheim’s conclusion to The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, first published in 1915, agreed with Kant that human ideation was governed by “permanent moulds for the mental life” that “are