by a common outlook and capable of collective agency.
The advocates of “class” assumed that a common position along a gradient of control over the means of production entails a common interest shared by all members of the class and, hence, common propensities for action. Yet class and classness are better understood in terms of relations that develop historically within a social field. That field subsumes diverse kinds of people, rearranges them, and causes them to respond to new ways of marshaling social labor. One can then speak of the “making” of a class (as did E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class [1966]) out of disparate groups of people, who bear diverse cultural heritages and yet must adjust them to the requirements of a new social order. Similarly, a class may be “unmade” and its members scattered and reallocated to different groupings and strata.
The advocates of “culture,” for their part, have generally thought that whatever underlies cultural commonalities—be it language, upbringing, customs, traditions, race—will produce sentiments of identity, social solidarity, love of country, and aversion to cultural “others.” Yet, as with class, the forces postulated as generating culture were never strong enough in and of themselves to produce the envisioned unifying effects. Historically, both classness and culturehood needed to be mobilized and reinforced to come to fruition: in many cases, the requisite energies emerged from the turmoil of politics and war.
If class can be wedded to culture, then culture too needs redefinition. The initial use of the concept in the service of the Counter-Enlightenment stressed a supposed inner unity, marked by a continuity through time from primordial beginnings. A “culture” was thus conceived as the expression of the inner spiritual force animating a people or nation. This understanding was carried into anthropological usage, together with the implicit or explicit expectation that a culture constituted a whole, centered on certain fundamentals that distinguished it from others. It was also seen as capable of reproducing and regenerating itself and as able to repair any tears in its fabric through internal processes.
Once we abandon this view of a culture as a reified and animated “thing,” the problem of how to understand cultural phenomena must also change. What comes to be called “culture” covers a vast stock of material inventories, behavioral repertoires, and mental representations, put in motion by many kinds of social actors, who are diversified into genders, generations, occupations, and ritual memberships. Not only do these actors differ in the positions from which they act and speak, but the positions they occupy are likely themselves to be fraught with ambiguity and contradiction. As a result, the persons who occupy them may be required to act and think in ambiguous and contradictory ways. This becomes most obvious when people must confront changes imposed from outside, but it is likely to mark any situation of social and cultural change.
Given this differentiation, neither a language-using community nor a body of culture bearers can share all of their language or culture, or reproduce their linguistic or cultural attributes uniformly through successive generations. As Anthony Wallace has pointed out, social relations depend not on a “replication of uniformity” but on “the organization of diversity” through reciprocal interaction (1970). Culture is not a shared stock of cultural content. Any coherence that it may possess must be the outcome of social processes through which people are organized into convergent action or into which they organize themselves.
These processes of organization cannot be understood apart from considerations of power, and they may always involve it. One must then attend to how that concept is understood. To think of power as an all-embracing, unitary entelechy would merely reproduce the reified view of society and culture as a priori totalities. It will be more productive to think of power relationally, but it then follows that different relationships will shape power differently. Power is brought into play differently in the relational worlds of families, communities, regions, activity systems, institutions, nations, and across national boundaries. To conflate these various kinds of power would lead us into the trap of national character studies, which saw socialization and its effects on personality replicated in every domain and on every level of a national society. At the same time, how power operates on different levels and in different domains, and how these differences are articulated, becomes an important research question—something to be demonstrated, not assumed.
The same caveat is in order as we try to understand how power in social relationships works to draw cultural and linguistic forms into coherence. If it is no longer possible for us, as it was for our predecessors, to assume that culture and language replicate themselves through the impersonal force of “custom” or through some hypothetical human need for cognitive consistency, then we must try to identify the instrumental, organizational, or ideological means that maintain custom or underwrite the search for coherence. There may be no inner drive at the core of a culture, but assuredly there are people who drive it on, as well as others who are driven. Wherever possible we should try to identify the social agents who install and defend institutions and who organize coherence, for whom and against whom. And if culture was conceived originally as an entity with fixed boundaries marking off insiders against outsiders, we need to ask who set these borders and who now guards the ramparts.
We thus need to make our received concepts more flexible and operational, but we must not forget the relational value of concepts like culture, which—whatever its limits—sought connections among phenomena, in contrast to the earlier “custom.” Similarly, Marxian concepts have always seemed to me productive, because they broke down the dividing lines between history, economics, sociology, and politics from the start. Relational approaches are especially important when we deal with ideas, an undertaking that always threatens to divorce mental constructs from their historical and physical contexts. These approaches will guide the case studies on Kwakiutl, Tenochca (Aztecs), and National Socialist Germany that follow, to show how culturally distinctive patterns of ideation interdigitate with material and organizational processes.
‘Nakwaxda’xw Chief Tutlidi giving away a copper in honor of his son at Fort Rupert, 1894. A segment of the copper has been broken off in the manner prescribed for distribution. Photograph by O. C. Hastings. (American Museum of Natural History)
3
The Kwakiutl
If the connections between power and ideas can be unraveled by focusing on instances in which both dimensions are dramatically evident, one promising scenario is offered by the people long called Kwakiutl by anthropologists, as well as others. The Kwakiutl have furnished a type-case of a “chiefdom,” a term applied to societies that are neither simple nor lacking in social stratification but are without the complex architecture of states. They are headed by personages endowed with managerial authority, “chiefs,” who can overrule segmentary interests yet are not able to marshal their subjects with a fully fledged apparatus of coercion that can compel obedience. Chiefs usually derive this authority from a culturally constructed connection with supernatural forces, and they are thus in a position to endow their political functions with a unique cosmological aura.
The name for the people that became known to outsiders as Kwakiutl was used by Franz Boas and George Hunt in their inquiries in the field, as well as in their writings, and thus passed into general use in both professional and popular writings. The people now want to be known as Kwakwaka’wakw, speakers of the Kwakwala language, of whom the four tribes of Kwakiutl who inhabited the village of Tsaxis adjacent to Fort Rupert form a part. For clarity’s sake, I shall refer to this group as Kwakiutl or Tsaxis Kwakiutl, and to the Kwakwala speakers in general as Kwakwaka’wakw. Expunging “Kwakiutl” from the literature altogether seems counterproductive.
Examining the case of the Kwakiutl will involve us in ethnography, to detail some of their unfamiliar characteristics, but I shall also try to be historical, to highlight changes in their society and culture. These changes often responded
