in human sacrifice, or in celebrations of “racial superiority.” These ideas take on forms of their own that are not directly deducible from material or social facts, but they are implicated in material production and social organization and thus need to be understood in such contexts.
I write these lines as an anthropologist, albeit as one who sees his discipline as a link in the more encompassing effort of the human sciences to understand and explicate the multiple human conditions. Historically, anthropology owes its position to the fact that it occupied itself primarily with peoples who for a long time were wrongly thought to be marginal and irrelevant to the pursuit of civilization. This experience allowed anthropologists to take up a privileged vantage point in looking comparatively at peoples across the board, both inside and outside the boundaries set out by the spokespersons for progressive modernity. The other main determinant of anthropology’s special role among the human sciences has been its method of going out to live, for prolonged periods of time, among the people to be studied. This enabled anthropological investigators not only to obtain more rounded views of how people lived their lives but also to confront the discrepancies between announced purposes and de facto behavior. Behavior often fails to follow the scripts laid out in discourses and texts; often too it obeys covert reasons that do not answer to ideal goals. Experience of such discrepancies has caused many anthropologists to be professionally dubious about stereotypes of other cultures sometimes advanced uncritically by their colleagues in allied disciplines.
Yet, while shrewd in these matters, anthropologists have also exhibited an obtuseness of their own. Cleaving to a notion of “culture” as a self-generating and self-propelling mental apparatus of norms and rules for behavior, the discipline has tended to disregard the role of power in how culture is built up, maintained, modified, dismantled, or destroyed. We face a situation of complementary naïveté, whereby anthropology has emphasized culture and discounted power, while “culture” was long discounted among the other social sciences, until it came to be a slogan in movements to achieve ethnic recognition.
This state of affairs has a history. The chapter that follows, “Contested Concepts,” examines how this past has contributed to shaping our theoretical capabilities in the present. I there consider the historical background that first gave rise to our theoretical constructs and delineate the circumstances that sometimes rendered them fighting words of political and intellectual contests. I then turn to the three cases. Readers with an interest in the history of ideas will want to follow the arguments in “Contested Concepts”; others may wish to go directly to the case studies. How the chapters are ordered does, however, pursue a purpose. If, as Karl Marx wrote, “the tradition of all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (1963, 15), that holds for anthropologists as much as for the people they study. Understanding whence we have come sets the terms for how we work through our case material and for the conclusions we draw from it.
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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
