thus signals who has power over whom.
Ideas in Culture
In contemporary anthropology, conceptions of the relationship between power and ideas are embedded in approaches to culture. A central question in how culture is to be understood is whether priority in explanation should be accorded to material or to ideational factors. This issue has surfaced repeatedly, with “materialists” and “mentalists” locked into arguments about the validity of their respective stances. The present inquiry takes the view that materiality and mentality need not be opposed, and it draws theoretical insights from both camps.
Among the major contributors to these debates, Marvin Harris holds a strongly materialistic position. Harris has resolutely defined the premise of his explanatory strategy as “the principle of infrastructural determinism.” This principle joins Marx with Malthus and accords priority in explanation to observable behaviors in both production and reproduction. Since production and reproduction are “grounded in nature they can only be changed by altering the balance between culture and nature, and this can only be done by expenditure of energy” (Harris 1979, 58). Harris acknowledges the legitimacy of a concern with mental constructs; indeed, he readily grants the possibility that subject-dependent “emics” may be studied objectively “by relying on an operationalized scientific epistemology” (p. 35). Yet for him “thought changes nothing outside of the head unless it is accompanied by the movement of the body and its parts,” and ideas are consequences of energy-expending body activities that affect the balance between population, production, and resources (p. 58).
If Harris downplays the ideational realm, the French anthropologist Louis Dumont has set aside behavior in the material world to focus exclusively on “systems of ideas and values” (1986, 9), on “ideological networks” (p. 24). He uses the term “ideology” for ideas in general, in the tradition of Destutt de Tracy, rather than taking the later sense of the concept as ideas placed in the service of power, and he sees himself as carrying on the work on “representations” of Durkheim’s student Mauss (Dumont 1986). Dumont speaks of “the global ideology” of “a society, and also of the ideologies of restricted groups such as a social class or movement,” or of “partial ideologies” characterizing a subsystem of society, such as kinship (1970, 263). His major concern is with ideological systems at the level of entire societies, and he sees them as “central with respect to the social reality as a whole (man acts consciously and we have direct access to the conscious aspect of his action)” (pp. 263–64). At the same time, he holds that ideology “is not the whole of society” and needs to be placed in relation to “the non-ideological aspects.” These two aspects may turn out to be complementary; how they are actually related is a matter of finding evidence, producing “proof” (p. 264).
To ascertain the nature of ideologies central to whole societies, Dumont has proceeded comparatively, first investigating ideology in India principally on the basis of Brahmanic texts, then—more recently—using the writings of major political economists and philosophers to define the ideology of Western economics. This project has led him to counterpose one ideology to the other in terms of a generalized contrast—between a homohierarchicus of non-Western societies and a supposed homo aequalis of the West. In the course of these studies, Dumont has offered valuable insights on particular ideological themes. Bruce Kapferer (1988), for example, has used Dumont’s ideas selectively in his insightful comparison of two nationalisms, one derived from a hierarchically conceived cosmology in Sri Lanka and the other from the egalitarian cosmology of Australia. My own work on National Socialism has benefited from Dumont’s studies of German ideas. In practice, however, Dumont neglects alternative voices and traditions that competed with the exemplary protagonists he chooses to discuss, and he concentrates on ideas without reference to the patterns of behavior that helped institutionalize these ideological forms. In this emphasis, ideal patterns of thought seem impelled by an internal logic of mind.
Where Harris privileges behavior over ideas and Dumont studies systems of grand ideas to the exclusion of behavior, Clifford Geertz has focused on questions of meaning. Citing Weber’s belief “that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” Geertz defines culture semiotically as “those webs of significance” and sees his task as “an interpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz 1973, 5). Anthropology must attend, he argues, to how interacting people interpret and construct their own actions and the actions of others. They do so through recourse to symbolic models or blueprints, culturally available “symbolic templates” for action and of action. In a discussion of “ideology as a cultural system,” he decried studies of ideology that did not take account of the “figurative language” of culturally significant symbols. Ideologies, according to Geertz, can be due either to “strains” in the fabric of society or to efforts to assert a group interest in the face of opposition, but neither “strain” nor “interests” will be understood unless they can be rendered into culturally specified symbolic templates or models (1973). Geertz’s contribution lies in this emphasis on how understandings are “envehicled” in symbols, in the course of social action. That, however, is only a first step. What remains problematic in Geertz is how we are to think about these symbolic vehicles. Do some have more bearing on the exercise of power than others? Are some more resistant and enduring, others more evanescent and secondary? How are they “carried” into social life and by whom? How and in what contexts are they foregrounded, reproduced, and amplified?
Geertz drew some of his inspiration for a symbolic approach to action from Weber, but Weber’s interest lay in developing an objectifying sociology that could provide “causal explanations of action” (Kalberg 1994, 49). Weber did indeed take account of how subjective motivations and evaluations of meaning orient people toward action, but the thrust of his work was directed at showing how subjective assessments led people to take up patterned courses of action, which then caused them to participate in a social order in certain ways (pp. 23–49). In contrast, Geertz defined his own project not as a search for cause and effect but as enhancing the understanding of other cultural milieus through the “explication” and “translation” of significant symbols (1973, 408). His metaphor for “culture” was not that of an interconnected system of variables but that of the loosely jointed and easily disjointed octopus (p. 408).
As a result, Geertz moved from a more directly objectifying Weberian approach, evident in his The Religion of Java (1960), toward more literary readings of the ethnological evidence. This led him to favor “thick description” of symbolic actions in the immediate context of their occurrence and away from trying to comprehend these contexts as scenarios within larger structures. He thus raised our awareness of symbols in social action, while rejecting efforts to understand such action in relation to economics and politics.
Other scholars, however, have taken on such efforts, attending to symbolic action but framing it within cultural or political histories that pay heed to the larger dimensions. Two may be mentioned by way of example. Sherry Ortner has traced the monastery-building movement among the Sherpa of Nepal to enhanced merit making by “big people” trying to compensate for a loss of political influence and to gains made by “little people” through wage labor and entrepreneurship. In the course of this movement, she argued, people drew repeatedly on culturally available schemas to enact culturally typical relations and situations. Such cultural schemas are “durable” (1989, 61).
Richard Fox has analyzed Mohandas Gandhi’s efforts to challenge Britain in the struggle for Indian independence and to use the resulting confrontations to move the country toward his own vision of spiritual and humane renewal. Focusing on Gandhi’s “experiments with truth,” Fox wrote a “culture history” of how individual intentions interacted with the contingent workings of cultural hegemony, which sometimes allowed room for action and at other times shut the door on new possibilities (1989). For Fox, “There is no weight of tradition, only a current of action” (1985, 197). Culture is not a given to be reenacted but is “always in the making,” “the sum and state of social confrontations at the particular moment or the moment just past” (1985, 206).
Fox
