Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf

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      Contested Concepts

      Seeking to relate ideas to power, we enter an intellectual terrain that many others have already charted, albeit in response to purposes other than our own. These past endeavors have left us a stock of concepts, some of which we can appropriate and use, others of which may no longer be helpful. Legacies are always problematic, and they must be sorted out to answer to new undertakings. Anthropology, for example, has understood “cultures” as complexes of distinctive properties, including different visions of the world, but for long without attention to how these views formulated power and underwrote its effects. Other social sciences have taken up that issue under the name of “ideology,” treating culture and ideology as opposites, not as complementary. In this contrast “culture” was used to suggest a realm of intimate communitarian ties that bind, while “ideology” conjured up scenarios of factional strife among self-seeking interest groups. Thus, “culture” received a positive evaluation, while “ideology” suffered a change in meaning for the worse. Others of our relevant concepts have undergone related transformations.

      Such shifts in meaning and valuation have a history, which needs to be spelled out in order to clarify the intellectual issues at stake. A use of terms without attention to the theoretical assumptions and historical contexts that underlie them can lead us to adopt unanalyzed concepts and drag along their mystifying connotations into further work. Tracing out a history of our concepts can also make us aware of the extent to which they incorporate intellectual and political efforts that still reverberate in the present.

      Three interrelated issues have persisted in the history of concepts significant for this inquiry. The first is the counterposing of a vision of a march of humanity toward a universal reign of Reason, against an emphasis on the significance of distinctive ways of being human, which ruled people through emotion rather than intellect. This issue entailed a second: if human life was so dominated by tradition and custom, what then was the relationship between cultural ideals and actual behavior? How could it be the case that tradition demanded one course of action, while behavior took a different turn? This question raised a third issue: how were human minds constituted to deal with experience? Were ideas “the atoms and molecules of the mind,” compounded into images through a “mental chemistry” from sensations received from the outside world (Popper and Eccles 1983, 194)? Or were human minds so tutored by custom that external stimuli could only manifest themselves in behavior after passing through the cognitive detectors of language and culture, which processed them into templates for action?

      Anthropology confronted these issues in a sequence of historical encounters, and it assembled its stock of working ideas accordingly. Each encounter provoked reactions that later informed the positions taken during the next turn. The issue of Reason against Custom and Tradition was raised by the protagonists of the Enlightenment against their adversaries, the advocates of what Isaiah Berlin called the Counter-Enlightenment (1982). In the wake of this debate, Marx and Engels transformed the arguments advanced by both sides into a revolutionary critique of the society that had given rise to both positions. The arguments put forward by this succession of critics in turn unleashed a reaction against all universalizing schemes that envisioned a general movement of transcendence for humankind. This particularism was directed against Newtonian physics, Darwinian biology, Hegelian megahistory, and Marxian critiques, on the debatable premise that they all subjugated the human world to some ultimate teleological goal. The main target of this reaction was Marxism, which invited attack both for its scientism and for its prediction of a socialist overturn of prevailing society.

      Some of these critiques took the form of a refusal to have anything to do with “metaphysics.” These protesters wanted to counter the seduction of abstract theorizing and to return to basics, to a more “natural” and “immediate” relationship with the facts of “real life.” Others refused to countenance any application of the methods drawn from the natural sciences to the study of history, literature, and the arts. They insisted that these disciplines dealt with “mind,” and hence with phenomena that were irregular, subjective, and colorful. Such phenomena, it was argued, were not amenable to the objectifying, emotionally neutral, and generalizing procedures of the natural sciences but required appropriate methodologies of their own.

      This discussion takes up the arguments successively advanced by each “turn” and explores some of their implications. It begins with the conflict between the Enlightenment and its enemies, because the anthropological discipline as a whole owes its very identity to the antinomies then laid out. Indeed, it has drawn the bulk of its energy from efforts to negotiate between these distinctive modes of comprehending the world.

      The Enlightenment

      The Enlightenment, a philosophical movement in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, arose as an effort to shake off the weight of institutions and ideas that had immersed the continent in brutal religious and political conflicts and to renew hope by advocating a new vision of human possibilities. In contrast to earlier views that understood the human condition as tainted by “original sin,” the Enlighteners saw humans as neither good nor bad but as perfectible. They spoke in favor of rationalism and empiricism, and they subjected social and political arrangements to skeptical analysis where they appeared to fall short of these ideals. To improve humanity, they advocated new forms of nontheological learning as avenues of reform. They were opposed by numerous movements that arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to counter these assertions, together with the intellectual and political styles associated with them. We owe the notion of “ideology” to the Enlightenment; the concept of “culture,” as well as that of “society,” derive from efforts to reverse the effects of that movement.

      The Enlightenment envisaged the past and the future of the world in terms of such powerful yet abstract concepts as Reason and Progress. Its proponents spoke in the name of a common and universal humanity. They hoped to dispel the darkness of the Middle Ages by exposing consciousness to the clarifying light of reason and to free natural instinct and talent from the bonds of accumulated cant and hypocrisy. “Écrasez l’infame!” cried Voltaire, and meant by it a call for the destruction of religious dogma and superstition, the abolition of error, and the installation of a regime of truth based on reason.

      The leaders of the Enlightenment did not all think alike, and the movement took variant forms in different regions of Europe. Some of its advocates, such as Condillac and Rousseau, even combined arguments both for and against it in their own work, as did some of the later Romantics who would become their opponents. Thus, Condillac saw reason as fundamental to both human nature and language, but he also gave support to the antagonists of universalism by stressing “the culture-bound quality of national languages” (Aarsleff 1982, 31). Rousseau focused most of his work on elucidating the general predicaments of being human, but he also made much of historical and cultural particularisms, as when he represented himself as a “Citizen of Geneva” in his project for a Corsican constitution and in his plan for the creation of a government in newly independent Poland (Petersen 1995). Conversely, the English and French protagonists of the Enlightenment strongly influenced their German counterpart Immanuel Kant, as well as the nationalist philosopher Fichte (called by some the first National Socialist) and the linguistic relativists Herder and von Humboldt, who came to see in language the quintessential expression of a Volksgeist. Some Enlighteners saw reason incarnated in logic and mathematics; others envisaged a return