Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf

      1

      Introduction

      I want, in this book, to explore the connection between ideas and power. We stand at the end of a century marked by colonial expansion, world wars, revolutions, and conflicts over religion that have occasioned great social suffering and cost millions of lives. These upheavals have entailed massive plays and displays of power, but ideas have had a central role in all of them. Ideas have been used to glorify or criticize social arrangements within states, and they have helped warriors and diplomats to justify conflicts or accommodations between states. Ideas have furnished explanations and warrants for imperialist domination and resistance to it, for communism and anticommunism, for fascism and antifascism, for holy wars and the immolation of infidels. They also reach into our everyday lives: they inform discussions about “family values,” prompt some people to scare their neighbors by burning crosses in their yards, cause believers to undertake long pilgrimages to Mecca or Lourdes or to await the Second Coming in a Rocky Mountain retreat.

      Nevertheless, an analytic understanding of how power and ideas intermesh has eluded us and remains a matter of debate. Some scholars accord ideas a Platonic existence in human “minds,” or endow them with an independent capability to motivate and move people. Others regard them primarily as rationalizations for self-interested conduct or as accompaniments of behavior, lacking significance “in the long run.” The long run may be seen as dominated by natural selection, by the forces of the unconscious, or by the ultimately determinant role of the economy.

      Arguments about how to think about ideas have marked out the intellectual pathways of American anthropology. Few anthropologists have followed those, such as Cornelius Osgood (1940, 25), who have attempted to reduce everything to ideas, but the field has accorded ideas a dominant role throughout its history. When Alfred Kroeber and Talcott Parsons, the leading doyens of anthropology and sociology respectively in the mid-twentieth century, staked out the boundaries between the two fields, anthropology was assigned the study of “patterns of values, ideas, and other symbolic-meaningful systems as factors in the shaping of human behavior and the artifacts produced through behavior” (1958, 583). This legacy to anthropology strongly reinforced the penchant for mentalistic interpretations.

      To counter this “idealist expropriation of culture,” the anthropologist Marvin Harris has insisted on granting priority in the study of culture not to ideas but to objectively verifiable behavioral facts recorded by observers employing an operationalized scientific epistemology (1979, 284). Harris did not exclude an interest in what the natives themselves think about their lives, but he treated with maximal suspicion any explanation for behavior derived from putative cognitive rules or guiding ideas. He asserted that “No amount of knowledge of ‘competent natives’ rules and codes can ‘account for’ phenomena such as poverty; underdevelopment; imperialism; the population explosion; minorities; ethnic and class conflict; exploitation, taxation, private property; pollution and degradation of the environment; the military-industrial complex; political repression; crime; urban blight; unemployment; or war. These phenomena . . . are the consequence of intersecting and contradictory vectors of beliefs, will, and power. They cannot be scientifically understood as manifestations of codes and rules” (Harris 1979, 285). Perhaps so. Yet “beliefs and will” surely involve ideas that code belief and inform will. How one might conceptualize the relation between ideas and power remains to be more fully specified.

      In taking up this inquiry, my aim is not to develop a formal theory of the relationship between two mega-abstractions—something that is probably impossible because ideas come in many different kinds and variants, as does power. As an anthropologist, I believe that theoretical discussions need to be grounded in cases, in observed streams of behavior, and in recorded texts. I want to find ways of interrogating such materials to define the relations of power that are played out in social arrangements and cultural configurations, and to trace out the possible ways in which these relations of power implicate ideas.

      Ideas, Power, Communication

      If I use the old-fashioned term “ideas,” it is not to return to a now obsolete view of ideas as units held and stored in the mind, which replicate within the organism stimuli received from the world outside. Given what we now know about the workings of human neuro-cognitive systems, knowledge can no longer be visualized as a simple “reflection” in the mind of what goes on in the external world. Whether one believes that “minds” (or, rather, human neurological systems that include brains) merely edit what enters from outside or themselves construct cognitive and emotional schemata that can address the world but are not isomorphic with it, we must work with some variant of the neo-Kantian postulate that minds interpose a selective sieve or screen between the organism and the environment through which it moves. This, of course, is rendered even more evident by the work of anthropologists whose studies have taught them that panhuman “minding” is further inflected and conjugated from culture to culture.

      Humans inhabit a world, a life space, characterized by imperative constraints and potential opportunities, but the ways in which they adapt to these life spaces is only partially programmed by their biology. They must rely on their nervous systems to construct models of the world and its workings, but these models are not identical with that world, and the connections mapped out between an experienced reality and how it is represented are complex and variable. Thus, any attempt to account for ideas and systems of ideas must juxtapose both dimensions with the aid of theoretically informed guesses.

      I speak of ideas in this context because I hope to underline that such mental constructions have content: they are about something. They also have functions; they do something for people. Striving to lay out the features of the world, they seek to render it amenable to some human use. In doing so, they play a part in bringing people together, or—alternatively—in dividing them. Both cooperation and conflict invoke and involve plays of power in human relationships, and ideas are emblems and instruments in these ever shifting and contested interdependencies.

      I want to draw a distinction between “ideas” and “ideology.” The term “ideas” is intended to cover the entire range of mental constructs rendered manifest in public representations, populating all human domains. I believe that “ideology” needs to be used more restrictively, in that “ideologies” suggest unified schemes or configurations developed to underwrite or manifest power. Equating all ideation with ideology masks the ways in which ideas come to be linked to power. The questions of when and how ideas are thus concentrated into ideologies, and how ideologies become programs for the deployment of power, cannot be answered by merging ideology with ideation as a whole. They demand a separate kind of inquiry.

      Conceptualizing power presents difficulties of its own. Power is often spoken of as if it were a unitary and