interested in how intellectuals, whom he saw as ideological specialists in formulating and explaining bodies of ideas, interacted with the carriers of what he called “common sense,” the general understandings current among the popular masses. He saw this interaction as dynamic, with donors and recipients of ideas engaged in active interchange, each motivated by their own interests and perspectives. Since such interchanges were always contested, they gave rise to “unstable equilibria” between superordinates and subalterns.
Both Mannheim and Gramsci sought to combine Marxian grand theory with the local, regional and national particularism demanded by the neo-Kantians. For both men, this took the form of arguing that class was a major determinant of social alignments but that it was only one such determinant among many others. Both Mannheim and Gramsci related modes of ideation to the role of particular classes and groups, and both thought that common ideas might have a role to play in the rise of wider movements. Gramsci’s work, in particular, offers a perspective on how such coalitions, organized to expand and solidify cultural influence, connect with power. Both figures were also concerned with how ideas were generated and disseminated, an interest that underlies their efforts to comprehend the role of intellectuals. This interest focused explicitly on the group affiliation and activities of particular kinds of “brain-workers.” Yet it represents an advance from the mere charting of the relationship of ideas to interest groups, toward understanding how in fact ideas were constructed and propagated.
Pragmatism in Anthropology
Pragmatism had already scored major victories in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but its impact on anthropology came later, in the period in and around World War I, and at first affected England primarily. There British functionalism—associated with the names of Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown—began to insist on looking at systems of ideas in terms of their practical contributions to activity systems and societal arrangements. This stance excluded a concern with understanding ideas in their own right. Such a practice-oriented approach appealed to Marxists, especially those who preferred to regard ideas as epiphenomena of a determinant economic base. This pragmatic view of ideas was reinforced further by the rise of logical positivism—less a philosophy than an attitude of distrust of abstractions—which was ready to relegate all statements that failed to pass the test of logical consistency and empirical verification to the scrap heap.
The ascendance of these new perspectives yielded both benefits and losses. Tying ideas to their social context challenged scholars to go beyond seeing ideas as the abstract musings of the Spirit and to grasp their connections with the world. Discounting the influence of ideas and ideologies, however, also exacted a political and intellectual price, in that it caused the followers of pragmatism to neglect the significance of ideas in rousing and mobilizing people for action. Thus, many a well-intentioned rationalist simply would not believe, until it was too late, that scientifically unverifiable and irrational ideas could yet appeal to large numbers of people, and that beliefs in witchcraft, eliminationist anti-Semitism, or millenarianism could be taken seriously by apparently reasonable persons.
The new intellectual pragmatism proved extremely influential in anthropology, initially with markedly positive results. By emphasizing practice over ideation, stressing what was done over what was thought and said, functionalists and Marxists—each in their own way—scored important theoretical and methodological points. They educated anthropologists to separate statements of rules about what ought to be done from descriptions based 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
