to defend their own ways of life against capitalist encroachment. This may indeed be the case, but it also may not be: the nature of the variable relation between capitalism and the settings it penetrates persists as an open question. There clearly are groups in which one set of cultural understandings remains dominant to the exclusion of others and that refuse any truck with alternatives to their own way of life. Yet there are assuredly others in which people can and do combine diverse lifestyles and modes of thought and learn to negotiate the contradictions. That range of variation demands attention and explanation; it poses problems to be investigated, not certainties to be assumed.
If Marx and Engels retain relevance for us in this endeavor, it does not mean that their work contains the answers to all our questions. Their writings are full of pertinent ideas, along with notions invalidated since (“caduques,” according to Maurice Godelier [1970, 110]). While they predicted many crucial aspects of capitalist development, the realization of a socialist future has not corresponded to the ways they imagined it. We also need to confront the fact that the development of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and neuropsychology in the twentieth century has called into question the modes in which Marx and Engels, like many of their contemporaries, thought about “consciousness.” There is a lack of fit between Marxian postulates, however liberally applied, and the ways in which anthropologists have gone about their work of depicting and analyzing other cultures and societies.
Three Cultures
It has been a hallmark of the anthropological approach to submit its presuppositions to the test of direct and intensive encounters with culturally specified populations. This kind of experience has been especially important when the behavior observed in a field location and the utterances recorded there proved to be at odds with the expectations of the investigator. Repeated encounters with cultural differences gave to the anthropological enterprise both caution about rushing to judgment and a measure of willingness to “let the observations speak for themselves”—this despite the understanding that facts cannot find their voice without some assist from a theoretical scheme.
To pursue the problem of how ideas and power are connected, therefore, I will look to three case studies, following the anthropological tradition of trying to relate observed behavior and recorded texts to their contextual matrix. In each of the cases, I will try to trace out the linkage between power and ideation, placing it in relation to the people’s history and the material, organizational, and signifying forms and practices of their culture.
The three populations on which I will focus are the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, the Aztecs of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Central Mexico, and the Germans who willingly or unwillingly became members of a Third Reich that was supposed to last for a thousand years but collapsed in fire and ashes in 1945. The Kwakiutl have been categorized as a “chiefdom,” the Aztecs as an “archaic” or “early” state, and National Socialist Germany as a distinctive “reactionary-modern” state, combining the apparent modernity of capitalism and technology with a reactionary fascism. This seriation is compatible with an evolutionary sequence, but my aim is not to apply an evolutionary scheme to the study of three sociopolitical systems. Nor am I primarily interested in systematic comparison among the three cases, although I will sometimes juxtapose them in order to highlight contrasts or similarities among them.
My main interest is analytical: I want to find out what we can bring to light by exploring the relation between power and ideas in the cases. I have fastened on these three because each of them is characterized by unusually evocative and elaborate repertoires of ideas and practices based upon these repertoires. Forty years ago, Kroeber suggested that we might come to understand the dimensions and limits of human nature by taking stock, comparatively, of “the most extreme expressions yet found in particular cultures, of the various activities and qualities of culture” (1955, 199). He offered as one such “most extreme expression” the case of human sacrifice among the ancient Mexicans. I present here, as another, the case of National Socialist Germany, because its ideology played a part in the planned slaughter of millions.
I have also added the case of the Kwakiutl. They were one of the groups in Kroeber’s roster of “Minor Civilizations in Native North America” (1962, 61), marked by “unusual intensity of cultural activity” (1947, 28). Mauss wrote of their giveaway ritual, the potlatch, that “such a syncretism of social phenomena is, in our opinion, unique in the history of human societies” (in Allen 1985, 36), and he drew on their ethnology for his famous Essai sur le Don of 1925 (Mauss 1954). For a long time these giveaways served as type-cases of conspicuous consumption (for example, Herskovits 1940). Ruth Benedict portrayed the Kwakiutl as “one of the most vigorous and zestful of the aboriginal cultures of North America” but also as acting in ways that would be called “megalomaniac paranoid” in our culture; what was abnormal among us constituted, on the Northwest Coast, “an essential attribute of ideal man” (in Mead 1959, 270, 275). These judgments have been called into question for equating ritual displays of antagonism and rhetoric with personal psychodynamics. My interest here focuses precisely on that flamboyant ideology and ritual.
These three cultures represent instances of high drama that challenge the ability and credibility of any observer or analyst. Yet, at the same time, they magnify and display structures and themes that might remain more muted and veiled among peoples who are less assertive in their ways of life. Such a claim is of course open to the charge of being both qualitative and subjective; but it is backed by considerable evidence. One of my tasks will be to evaluate that evidence and to suggest alternative explanations where warranted. Each of the cases will show how the people involved responded ideationally to perceived crises, but I shall also try to indicate how the relevant ideas and actions based on them were embedded in material processes of ecology, economics, social organization, and plays of political power. Moreover, to the extent that crises form part and parcel of everyday life, we must recognize that the generally accepted distinction between periods of normality and periods of crisis is to a large extent fictitious. Hence, ideational responses to crisis are not as divorced and separated from the ongoing traffic in mind-dependent constructions and representations as we have sometimes thought. Thus, these three “extreme” and accentuated cases may not be as removed from our everyday experience as we might imagine and hope.
In taking up each case, I will employ an approach of descriptive integration. I use the term to mean that I locate each case in space and time, bring together extant information to exhibit relationships among the domains of group life, and define the external forces that impinge on the people studied. The notion was developed by Kroeber, who spoke of “conceptual integration” in 1936 (1952, 70–71), and taken up by Robert Redfield as “descriptive integration” (1953, 730). They were seeking a specifically anthropological approach that could preserve the “quality” of phenomena and their relations to each other in time and space, as opposed to generalizing and abstract science. For me, the two endeavors—phenomenal particularism and generalization—are not opposed but rather are different but conjoint ways of addressing the same material. Description and analysis of phenomena necessarily involve selection, which assigns priority to some kinds of information over others according to one’s theoretical perspectives. Such perspectives, in turn, are predicated upon generalizations developed within the larger anthropological project of comparison.
There is also, in the three cases, the question of what evidence we can draw on for descriptive integration. Each of the three comes to us through different kinds of records, and each kind requires appropriate handling in its own terms. I believe that this evidence is best interpreted when placed in the contexts of social and cultural life, situated within the parameters of a determinate political economy. Such an analysis should allow us to locate human groupings in the natural world and render manifest the ways in which they transform themselves by transforming their habitats. To see how this is accomplished, we must pay attention to who commands the labor available to the society and how this labor is marshaled through the exercise of power and the communication of ideas. Each of the cases could be analyzed by focusing exclusively on observed behavior, but much would be lost if we were not able also to talk about the motivating affect
