The Retreat of the Social : The Rise and Rise of Reductionism [1 ed.] 9781782387190, 9781845451752

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The Retreat of the Social

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Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis General Editor: Bruce Kapferer Volume 1

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND GLOBAL CRISIS Critical Perspectives Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 2

GLOBALIZATION Critical Issues Edited by Allen Chun Volume 3

CORPORATE SCANDAL Global Corporatism against Society Edited by John Gledhill Volume 4

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EXPERT KNOWLEDGE First World Peoples, Consultancy, and Anthropology Edited by Barry Morris and Rohan Bastin Volume 5

STATE, SOVEREIGNTY, WAR Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 6

THE RETREAT OF THE SOCIAL The Rise and Rise of Reductionism Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 7

OLIGARCHS AND OLIGOPOLIES New Formations of Global Power Edited by Bruce Kapferer

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The Retreat of the Social The Rise and Rise of Reductionism

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Bruce Kapferer

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Contents z Introduction: The Social Construction of Reductionist Thought and Practice Bruce Kapferer 1

The Relocation of the Social and the Retrenchment of the Elites

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Jonathan Friedman 19

Legends of Fordism: Between Myth, History, and Foregone Conclusions George Baca 31

More Power to You, or Should It Be Less? Christopher C. Taylor 47

Methodological Individualism and Sociological Reductionism Roger Just 58

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Contents

Reductionism and Misunderstanding Human Sociality Thomas Ernst 67

Theories and Ideologies in Anthropology Jukka Siikala 79

Death of the Indian Social Rohan Bastin 89

When Nothing Stands Outside the Self

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André Iteanu 104

From Bell Curve to Power Law: Distributional Models between National and World Society Keith Hart 114

Notes on Contributors 123

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INTRODUCTION The Social Construction of Reductionist Thought and Practice

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Bruce Kapferer

The argument I present here is that the ‘retreat’ in the social sciences from concepts of the social and society (and their reformulation in other terms) is intimately connected to an intensification of reductionist thought and practice. But this, as I will explain, is not merely a feature of the social sciences (where reductionist argument appears to play an increasing role). It could almost be described as a movement (a social movement?) extending well beyond the human and social sciences where the public at large, as it were, is not only being more exposed to non-social even anti-social arguments of a reductionist kind, but appears to be actively accepting and desirous of them. The idea of the social as integral to understanding is being bypassed or, if it is maintained as a key point of reference, emptied of much of the import it once had. The social has become a vacated category. Thus, there is often a shift away from a concern with social relational and interactive structures, as well as institutional and organizational formations. The complexities of their internal dynamics, their structurating processes, and the forces of

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their effects on human action within and beyond them have increasingly been neglected in the social sciences. Anthropology provides a specific instance. Here the recent politics of the discipline has been expressly antistructural, asserting processes of agency and individual subjectivity, some even arguing for a revaluing of a once disparaged methodological individualism (see Rapport 1997). Such a development has forced oppositions (structure versus agency, determinism versus freedom, objectivism versus subjectivism, for example) that are radically distorting and are otherwise negative in consequence. They continue the dichotomies of a modernism to which so many contemporary anthropologists are strongly averse, although they often tend to suppress the modernist dialectic (confirming it in its very suppression), for instance, denying structure while overdetermining the subject. So ethnography has frequently been reduced to individualistic narrative and strategizing, a discourse of subjective intention in which structuring processes are increasingly less explored: either that non-reducible relational betweeness that can become vital in the commitment of interacting partners or those formational structural dynamics of phenomena described as institutions and organizations. These have history and memory integral to their formational dynamic no less than may be claimed for individual human beings (e.g., Douglas 1986). Individualistic diversity has displaced a concern with social complexities and the differentiated and differentiating structurating processes that are integral to the conceptions of the social and of society. For many, a focus on the individual is to address the complexity of human action that, it is claimed, a concentration on the social obscures. The powerful individualist and subjectivist turn in anthropology—a turn that cannot be easily separated from larger political processes of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism—is one factor resulting in notions of

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Introduction

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the social and of society as becoming little else than empty shells of small or no analytical value. Furthermore, the idea of the social, many suggest, is not appropriate to contemporary circumstances of globalization, for which ideas such as networks seem more appropriate with their stress on radiating linkages between nodal points (together with their individualist implications).1 The vacating of the social has opened the way for a triumphal return of categories of analysis that are highly prone to the risks of reduction, which ironically may involve an essentialism or foundationalism (or even a misplaced concreteness) that students of human action might otherwise seek to avoid. Abstractions such as capitalism, consumerism, and the market are thrown around with abandon and often given an unexamined descriptive and explanatory potency. A dangerous economism, together with its overrationalized approach to reality (frequently masquerading as itself the irreducible reality) and a claim that it virtually constitutes primordial ground, is in full force and asserted to be at the heart of the production of the social. The possibility that economic or consumerist processes—indeed, capitalism—are themselves embedded within the dynamics of historically produced social processes is commonly too easily glossed. Other abstractions, often highly philosophized and removed from embeddedness in socio-historical processes to be given a socially determinant role—power, the body, gender, identity, the psyche, violence, etc.—are rife, and in their socially isolated analysis are increasingly pushing aside the concrete exploration of the social. Indeed, a form of totalizing universalism and a new dominance of metropolitan thinking are creeping in, often amidst claims of doing precisely the reverse. I must remark immediately that reductionism is not necessarily to be disparaged and, in a general sense, is

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impossible to avoid if the project of a social science is to be conceived as explanatory and not merely descriptive. Most explanation and theorizing—scientific or otherwise—is reductionist in a broad sense. That is, it tends to engage Occam’s Razor, seeking for the most parsimonious or sharpest explanation of the complex phenomena addressed. However, there are risks in such an orientation that can lead to a kind of reduction that defeats its own purpose. The type of reductionism upon which I concentrate is that which confuses an explanation of a part for the whole, in which the status of the part, in relation to the whole, is assumed rather than defined. Moreover, I am concerned with those kinds of reductionist argument or synecdoche that assert an identity of the part with the whole: for example, that form of argument that assumes that an understanding of human genetics or individual psycho-sexual motivations is not merely necessary for a grasp of the formation of human complexities, but encompasses such complexity or is already the complexity it purports to explain. Such reductionism is frequently imperialist in conception. That is, it is often not merely unaware of the potential limits to its explanatory potential, but is intrinsically antagonistic to any sense of limitation. Moreover, the logical dynamic of such reductionism is to place itself beyond or outside all refutation. It is radically egotistical as it is imperial. Such imperialist reductionism routinely falls foul of its own teleological magic. Thus, as is common in much sociology and social psychology the kind of argument that reconceives processes that are irreducibly intersubjective (e.g., the self) as in fact reducible entirely to independent intra-individual dynamics (missing the possibility that this is already a product of the social being of individuals—what G. H. Mead once described as an internal conversation of gestures). Such misplaced reduction is usually compounded by a radical

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Introduction

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ahistoricity that refuses the possibility of its own relativity. One paradox of this is that such reduction fails to recognize the forces that motivate its own possibility: that is, and in the case of radically anti-societal explanations, that particular reductions are themselves the creations of particular socio-historical processes. In other words, the very tension toward certain kinds of reductionist thinking, the status and respect accorded to them, has more to do with the social and political contexts of their production than any intrinsic value that might attach to their particular kind of explanation. The contemporary acceptance of social biological or neo Darwinist explanations, whether they be of aggression, warfare, or mating practices and love among human beings, has much to say about the political climate of contemporary realities or, dare it be said, patterns of social formation in which such explanations are given credence. Their presumed scientific value is already a sociopolitical value upon which much of their acceptance (truth?) may be founded. Of course, that an explanation or theory is produced within the circumstances of a specific socio-historical context does not negate its scientific plausibility. The context of thought is vital to its imaginary and the scientific potency of this thought is by no means limited to or, indeed, reducible to its context. This is especially so where the thought is itself transcendent of human practice and ultimately not directed to the comprehension of human action. But the situation is far more problematic (which is not to say that it is excluded from the former) when theories directed to explaining or understanding human practice attempt to ignore, by the artifice of reduction, the complexity within which their imaginative possibility was emergent. The reduction (or bracketing as phenomenologists would argue) must be achieved rigorously and systematically and not by fiat, so as to recognize as fully as possible the genesis and status of the

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reduction being made. Its scientific viability is dependent on such an exercise. What may be discerned as the retreat of the social, even to a degree an abandonment of the idea of society as a vital concept, and an encouragement of reductionist argument of a non-rigorous kind, is a social phenomenon. It is part of changes in theoretical fashion that are affected by larger socio-historical processes. In certain ways too, and from a perspective within the social sciences, the retreat is directly related to the kind of vision of the social that once held sway which, if not reductionist in the sense I am chiefly addressing, shared some of the closure that is the characteristic of much reductionism.2 The idea of the social and of society as primary concepts for the understanding of human action, especially for anthropologists and sociologists, drew its impetus in the circumstances of the formation of the modernist secular state in Europe and North America. A political interest in the control, reshaping, and remoralization of the orders composed through the formation of the modern nation-state created the context for a discipline of the social. The work of Comte and of Durkheim and the L’Année school are outstanding examples of the development of a science of society stimulated in such a context and conforming to the structuring of ‘disciplines’ within a modernist university framework or organization of knowledge. Here the idea of the social was explicitly set against visions of individualism and subjectivism, bolstered by a context of French revolutionary and socialist thought. Thus, Comte (who despite his later religious mysticism was influenced by Saint Simon) recommended a positivism that was aimed at recivilizing human beings out of a ‘natural selfishness.’ Durkheim took a somewhat different course, in effect, establishing a ground for a science of the social that had long-consequence, in which ‘natu-

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Introduction

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ral’ human being is already a social being—the social is prior. This idea was, perhaps, most brilliantly argued in Suicide where Durkheim attempted to show that the most individual and reducible of all human acts, suicide, was in fact grounded in the social. His treatment of suicide was effectively directed against that vision of human beings that saw them as being based in self-interest. Killing oneself is in defiance of such a conception and indicated the force of the social over and against the individual motivation to self-preservation (self interest). In Durkheim’s analysis even individual action that did appear to be self-interested was socially conditioned. The individual is a socially produced fact and cannot be otherwise. The argument was powerfully anti-reductionist and explicitly opposed to individualist orientations at the time. Durkheim was impatient with what he saw as the obscurantist philosophical subjectivism of Henri Bergson and its anti-empirical bent. Bergson, as with Durkheim, continues to be influential in debates in which reductionism is at issue. Interestingly, Bergson is highly influential on poststructuralist philosophy, notably Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, which bears a relation to current developments (which occur in a similar moment of socio-political change) that can be associated with the rise of reductionist thinking (see also Iteanu this volume).3 But a larger observation that might be made is that a dialectic of reductionism/anti-reductionism (in its individualist versus social as prior or transcendent aspects) is at the center of modernist visions generally. It is at the heart of social science debates from the very beginning of their formation as university disciplines. Importantly, the swaying of these debates has much to do with shifts and variations in socio-political orders and their legitimating ideologies. Thus, liberal philosophers of the British state at the time of Comte and Durkheim were quick to attack the anti-individualist society orientation.4 This is a ten-

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sion that has continued up to the present day and manifested in much of the contemporary criticism of anthropologists in the French tradition such as Lévi-Strauss and Louis Dumont, especially by those in the line of British liberalism (see Bastin this volume). Ideologies of the Left and Right maintained a powerful tension between society and systemic approaches, on the one hand, and individualist perspectives on the other. However, the opposition between the perspectives cannot be reduced to political orientations too easily. Furthermore, what I generally refer to as reductionism is applicable across the political divide. While there is a tendency in an individualist (instrumentalist) stress toward reductionism this is by no means exclusively so, as is indicated in many so-called poststructuralist positions. Those with a powerful societal emphasis often evince reductionist potential as in the economism of some Marxist orientations or the historicism and materialism across a diversity of perspectives in anthropology. The determinism of these approaches often bears a manic and obsessive affinity with a variety of positions strongly vulnerable to reductionism, such as some orientations within psychoanalysis and psychiatry or those of a sharp methodological individualist persuasion. Nonetheless, recent changes in state ideologies and practices—broadly glossed as neoliberalism—appear to have opened the way for an intensification of reductionist positions in the social sciences, anthropology and sociology especially. The retreat (not to say dying) of socialism, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has removed some of the ideological supports that influenced the maintenance of strong societal and anti-reductionist positions. Here the institutional effects of such changes regarding the universities are of great significance. I refer specifically to the managerial shifts in university organization away from disciplines to

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Introduction

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schools (often a form of downsizing oriented to market demands). This has resulted in greater inter-disciplinary cross-fertilization which while frequently beneficial has also obscured and weakened important theoretical standpoints that were a positive product of the effort to develop a specific disciplinary approach, as in a stress on culture (value, ideology) and the social (structurating processes, practice, social dynamics) in anthropology. The relatively new field of cultural studies is a case in point. This is a field that is more the result of the politics of university reorganization and administrative decision than the result of the birth of an idea that then became formalized as a knowledge/discipline in universities as was the case with anthropology and sociology. There have been attempts to discover an intellectual lineage for cultural studies. The Birmingham School founded by Stuart Hall is sometimes referred to as a founding instance, but its recent disbanding by administrative fiat provides ironic support for my argument. Cultural studies is a refuge for a diversity of subjects in the social sciences and humanities that have thereby been weakened in their commitments to several different frameworks of knowledge practice and, although sometimes fruitful, have misrecognized the contributions of their peers working from other traditions, overlooking and sometimes feebly reinventing the lessons of other work. The idea of culture in many of the humanistic disciplines is vastly different from the concept as it has been forged in debate by numerous anthropologists (see Kapferer 2000 for one recent discussion; Sahlins 2004). The same is true with the concept of society and the social. In the case of anthropology, while its relativism has been hotly debated, it was such relativism, and a powerful attachment to notions of the possibility of radical difference, that was used to question the inherent universalism (reductionism? and racism?) of assumptions derived in a European and North American

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history, that made anthropological concepts of culture and society powerful tools for analysis. They were not mere descriptors or homogeneous and totalizing categories as they have too commonly been trivialized: understandings that reduced notions of society and culture once again to Western commonsense, a commonsense that was indeed part of colonialist hegemonies from whose grip many anthropologists (perhaps unsuccessfully) struggled to wrest them free. The administrative amalgamation of disciplines of which the phenomenon of cultural studies is one example has contributed to the emptying out of categories for analysis which were avowedly anti-reductionist and occasionally their replacement by concepts that in their very abstract quality (power, the body, the visual, the sensory, etc.,) are vulnerable to dangers of reduction and the refusal of complexity, even as they may be mounted against such possibility and to overcome analytical neglect. The amalgamations that are occurring in the social sciences and humanities might also be seen as a form of political attack upon them and an opening up of their terrain, especially in the social sciences, to interest from areas of knowledge in the sciences that regard necessarily reductionist arguments far less problematically than those in the social sciences (although notions of complexity and emergent properties in the sciences indicate a growing difficulty with reductionism). The social sciences have always looked to the physical and biological sciences. While their positivist influence was once hotly debated and provided some ground for an unhealthy division between the sciences and humanities, there has been in recent years a greater and productive openness to the imaginative and speculative contribution of the sciences (but often because of the success of these speculations to capture the popular imagination). The benefits have been clear

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even if some of the cross-fertilization has provoked angry responses (e.g., Sokal 1999). But I note that the involvement of the sciences is not a matter of the free choice of the social scientists or simply an outgrowth of internal intellectual developments. The conjunctions are sometimes a question of intellectual survival (the only way research can be funded). The innovative projects that involve cross participation (e.g., as described by Dosse 1999, for France) are part of government policies and are vulnerable to closure. More to the point, the power in the participation is in the sciences that exert some pressure on forms of explanation that deny the worth of arguments that have hitherto concentrated on the social (an example is recent attempts in anthropology to arrive at so-called cognitivist universalist explanations of religion, which appear to this anthropologist as both hopeless and spuriously scientific) (Whitehouse 2004). The movement away from the concepts of the social and society (their reformation as vacated categories) is a function of processes in the wider social field. It is related to the reformation of the terrain of government which in many ways has encouraged subjectification in the form of an instrumentalizing of “the self-governing properties of the subjects of government themselves in a whole variety of locales and localities—enterprises, associations, neighborhoods, interest groups and, of course, communities” (Rose 1996: 352; also Rose 1991). The decentralization of state bureaucracies, which was once the context for the invention of the social and of society, is now a dynamic that is integral to what Rose refers to ambiguously as “The Death of the Social?” The concomitant growth of an audit culture (see Strathern 2000) is not merely a state practice of surveillance but a phenomenon allied to the technologization of the social, the production of an environment that is largely antagonistic to social explanations of a non-reductive nature.

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All this is not to say that the social sciences have not been complicit in the retreat of the social and the creation of fertile ground for the relative triumph of a diversity of reductionist thinking. The concept of society has been attacked by anthropologists and sociologists as unwarrantedly totalizing and homogenizing. Durkheim is sometimes the target. But even in his hands the idea of the social was in effect a concept that indicated forms and variations in complexity. Eric Wolf has written sharply on the history of commonsense and homogenizing uses of the social, but warns against the abandonment of the concept as it began to be worked out by the increasingly overabused modernists such as Marx, Weber, and Durkheim (and not to discount the significance of often misunderstood figures such as Westermarck and especially Tonnies). Wolf is worth citing on the matter: “Within our discipline, and also outside it, dissatisfaction with the concept (of Society) has led many to shift their emphasis from Society as a total system to the Individual, the individual maximizing, strategizing, plotting, or creating, inventing, altering the inherited circumstances of life. Yet the abstract individual is merely another monad, a timeless reified essence like the conceptual entity it is supposed to criticize and oppose” (2001: 333).5 The kind of argument that Wolf develops is more strongly pursued in poststructuralist arguments that frequently manifest the kind of slippage of which Wolf complains. Possibly the most outrageous contemporary exemplar is Rapport who in his recent book (2003), I Am Dynamite, unwarrantedly, in my view, co-opts Nietzsche into his rampantly individualistic and reductionist view (see also Just this volume for a critique). Rapport is antagonistic to all forms of structural or cultural analysis asserting, among other things the perfect genius of individual creativity, ignoring that such creativity usually achieves its impetus within structural formations and

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Introduction

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often realizes its force in restriction and not in perfect freedom (see Elias 1994 on Mozart).6 Poststructuralists (and North American postmodernists) have been most critical of the concepts of society and of culture as totalizations. This, as I have intimated, is not necessarily independent of neoliberal formations even being internal to their ideological project. The discussion of the porosity of boundaries (and a positive desire to transgress them) in some postmodernist quarters refracts features of contemporary imperializing moves, which does not necessarily discount a larger intellectual value. However, it is worth noting that some of the major directions in post-structuralist thought are not, of course, antagonistic to structure or to concepts of the social. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1988) are cases in point who, for example, draw extensively on anthropological ethnographic analyses of political processes (developed through a concrete exploration of social practices and their cultural conceptualizations) which many of their anthropological followers often appear to distance themselves from. They seem to be attracted by a certain style of incoherency rather than the actual depth of content and thought that these authors evince. Also Deleuze is frequently anti-reductionist when some of those who seem to be in broad accord with his position ignore the implications of his attacks, for instance, on certain kinds of phenomenology and psychoanalysis— perspectives which in these times of the reign of the subject are manifesting a marked return to favor. Deleuze’s discussions of singularities is epistemologically opposed to the, indeed, reductionist (and deterministic) possibility of some phenomenological (and psychoanalytic) orientations. These reduce multiplicity to the One or the Ego and, as in some post Hegelian writing, are still committed to that dialectic that seeks to overcome contradictions in some kind of real or imagined resolvable higher

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unity. Deleuze conceives of a diversity of structural dynamics that derive their energy from the impossibility of their resolution despite their linkage in social and political processes, as in Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the combination of hierarchical and rhizomic processes. Such a poststructuralist position suggests a carrying forward of the notion of complexity that was vital already in the works of Durkheim and many others through the engagement of notions of the social and the cultural. This is not to say that there should be a return to the likes of Durkheim, but it is to suggest that the abandonment of concepts such as the social and the cultural (which in their usage have often been far from the totalizing and homogenizing ideas as frequently presented) risks the creation of a void in which many social sciences may come to destroy the very ground for their contribution and their reason for being.

The Essays The essays presented here (all by anthropologists) take a variety of positions on the matter of the retreat of the social. Friedman and Baca explore the contexts of social reformation that are disguised in an apparent retreat of the social and which might yield an ineffective understanding. Friedman examines some of the major contours of political reformation and the relevance of too-easily discarded social analytical categories. Baca critically explores some of the characterizations of modernity and the reductionism underpinning prominent scholars of globalizing trends. Taylor, Just, Ernst, and Siikala examine different forms of reductionism in current anthropological and other understandings of human action. Taylor finds reductionism in the abstract notions of power employed by many of those, for example, uncritically committed to Foucault and whose understandings are not necessarily

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easily applied outside northern European contexts. Just and Ernst in different ways take sharp exception to those who would too easily abandon certain key features of the anthropological project. Just attacks the trivializations of certain recent anthropological approaches to the individual and the subject while Ernst is concerned to remind us firmly of the innovative significance of the ideas of the social and the cultural in anthropological understanding. Siikala demonstrates the importance of in-depth ethnographic work and the dangers of a movement away from it in the context of the radical changes in the university system. Bastin and Iteanu address particularly poststructuralist trends. The former comments critically upon their influence in the field of South Asian studies, a major region for the anthropological and Orientalist construction of the Other. Iteanu addresses one of the most important deconstructionist and poststructuralist scholars, Jacques Derrida, demonstrating the virtual impossibility of doing without a notion of the relational and of structure. Hart brings us back to the themes that opened this collection, concentrating on the revaluation intrinsic in contemporary forms of technical scientific measurement of social processes and how they reflect socio-political transformations. All of the essays demonstrate how an anthropology wishing to avoid some of the abstractions and reductionisms of the past nonetheless should find it impossible to do without a strong concept of the social if anthropology and other social sciences are to fulfill the task of a critical understanding of the diverse realities in which we all must live.

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Notes 1. Network analysis, as developed in anthropology in the 1960s, was concerned with a reconfiguration of ideas of the social that escaped the bounded limitations of then current notions of the social. It was another forming of the social, which attended to complexities that other notions of the concept tended to neglect. Furthermore, it was a technique to identify the structuring dynamic of the social that otherwise might escape the anthropological gaze. 2. Max Gluckman (1964) argued for the development of a strong anthropology conscious of its own limitations in the context of the disciplinary structure of the universities in England at that time. He was not proposing—contra the mainly intentional misunderstanding of his critics at the time—that anthropologists should ignore the findings of other disciplines. Rather, he was insisting that anthropologists should develop their own critical understanding of other’s work from the context of their own powerfully grounded ethnographic experience. He did not want the development of an anthropology that was reductive of its own worth. The closure he argued for was of the kind that enabled interaction of reciprocal value with other disciplines, in fact recognizing the risk of not engaging in a discourse with other scholars who had different sources of knowledge and expertise. As Siikala (this volume) states, the ethnographic tradition of anthropology which is currently under threat is the very lifeblood of the particular contribution that anthropology can make. This tradition is not the mere collection of topical facts—a danger of much anthropology today—but an engagement with ethnography in such a way that it gives up what may be embedded in it. Gluckman in fact argued for a radically deconstructive interrogative ethnography. 3. Bergson, I note, was writing at the turn of the last century and at a time of enormous political and technological changes. He was an intellectual hero of a North America already postmodernist in ideological orientation. His career bears comparison with contemporary poststructuralists in a similar period of massive political and technological change. 4. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen asserted in response to Comte’s positivism that “to me this is like saying, the great object of

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mechanics is to alter the laws of gravitation” (1991: 126). John Stuart Mill, the great philosopher of British liberalism, argued in On Liberty against any state plan to improve the social condition—an object of both the work of Comte and Durkheim. He wrote: “M. Comte, in particular, whose social system, as unfolded in his Systeme de Politique Positive, aims at establishing (though by moral more than by legal appliances) a despotism of society over the individual, surpassing anything contemplated in the political ideal of the most rigid disciplinarian among ancient philosophers” (1989: 17). 5. Wolf argues against the totalizing concept of society concluding, after a discussion of the roots of the concept in a history of Western commonsense, that anthropologists should not cleave to “the inherited abstractions of our political-economic legacy. Rather, we need to invent new ways of thinking about the heterogeneity and transformative nature of human arrangements, and to do so scientifically and humanistically at the same time. The attempt to understand what humans do and conceive economically, politically, socially, morally, cognitively, and emotionally all at once has always been a hallmark of anthropology, and that goal remains a usable and productive program” (1999: 333–334). Quite so. The point is that anthropology has made much of a holistic approach that had, even in, I contend, the bad old days of functionalism, recognized the social and the cultural as complex and highly differentiated. The vision of anthropological idea and practice of social analysis as involving notions that are totalizing and homogeneous is to ignore the history of the subject over the last fifty years and more. It has the character of a modern or postmodern urban myth that might have been constructed by those anthropologists of ‘communities’ largely centered in North America and European locations who sometimes appear to be caught in an imaginary of their own invention. 6. In this context, I recall an interview by the BBC of the Chinese film director Chen Kaige, then still in China, regarding his politically critical film Farewell My Concubine. When asked about how he could make such a fine film in the repressive context of Communist China, Chen Kaige replied to the effect that repression and restriction provide the creative ground for human creativity and ingenuity.

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References Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Athlone Press. Dosse, Francois. 1999. Empire of Meaning: The Humanization of the Social Sciences. London: Minnesota University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1986. How Institutions Think. New York: Syracuse University Press. Elias, Norbert. 1994. Mozart: The Sociology of a Genius. London: Polity Press. Gluckman, Max. 1964. Closed Systems and Open Minds. London: Oliver and Boyd. Kapferer, Bruce. 2000. “Star Wars: About Anthropology, Culture and Globalization.” Australian Journal of Anthropology 11, no. 2: 174–198. Mill, John Stuart. 1989 [1859]. On Liberty and Other Writings. Ed. Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rapport, Nigel. 1997. The Transcendent Individual. London: Routledge. ———. 2003. I Am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power. London: Routledge. Rose, Nikolas. 1991. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge. ———. 1996. “The Death of the Social? Re-figuring the Territory of Government.” Economy and Society 25, no. 3: 327–356. Sahlins, Marshall. 2004. Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sokal, Alan. 1999. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectual’s Abuse of Science. London: St. Martin’s Press. Stephen, James Fitzjames. 1991 [1873]. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Chicago: Chicago University Press Strathern, Marilyn, ed. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies of Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge. Whitehouse, Harvey. 2004. Models of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Los Angeles: Altamira Press. Wolf, Eric. 2001. Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World. London: University of California Press.

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THE RELOCATION OF THE SOCIAL AND THE RETRENCHMENT OF THE ELITES z

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This is an age of regression, the amplification of class relations and their polarization, the withdrawal of the new political classes into luxurious lives along with other dominant classes, while the declining lower end of the social world recedes into poverty and chaos. Overstated as a description, perhaps, but it does, I suggest, situate current trends.

One Generation’s Experience The social has not disappeared, not by any means, but it has become fragmented and redistributed into smaller worlds of sociality. Retreat as intentional practice occurs as a result of the failure of the larger social arena. Let us consider the parameters of this process with respect to elites, middle classes and minorities, and proletarian and subproletarian populations. One might rightly ask to what

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extent the social in just the sense of a public sphere is an imaginary construct of intellectuals rather than a concrete reality. There is a notion of the retreat of the social that has been discussed for some years by Touraine (1992, 1997) as part of a model of the transformation of contemporary society from ‘modernity’ to postmodernity, from industrial to postindustrial. Modern industrial society, held together by the complementary opposition between classes, has come apart and begun to fragment into smaller, culturally based tribes, sodalities, and movements. Social movements are understood as attempts to gain control of the historicity of society, that is, the direction in which change ought to take place. They are in this sense the basic political activity of the modern universe. Class movements were totalizing movements in the sense that they were oriented to the transformation of society as a whole. The Green movements, by contrast, are only interested in this scale of change to the degree to which more narrow goals can be achieved. Thus, Greenpeace is a radical movement that makes no demands on the general structure of contemporary society as long as the destruction of the environment is halted. The traditional class response to this would have been that the environment cannot be saved without a total transformation of the social system that produces such deleterious effects. Other movements are even more limited to issues of the recognition of identity and accompanying rights. This transformation might be that which leaves the long lasting impression among members of the generation born in the 1930s and 1940s that the social has begun to disappear. The eclipse of social movements is of course only one aspect of this experience of change, but it is an expression of the changing conditions in the larger social arena. The entire issue of engagement is crucial: social undertakings of all kinds and the feeling of being part of a larger endeavor, a more or less coherent social world organized in terms of major projects and counter projects.

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Exit Peoplehood ‘The people’ was once a notion associated with sovereignty that is with the collective control of one’s destiny. This is the core of what is expressed in the term ‘democracy’ in a much weaker way. The power of the people is the power over one’s own representatives, governance by the extension of peoplehood. Clastres’s (1987) definition of the ‘anti-chief’ was equivalent to this. The chief was not a representative of the gods to the people, but a representative of the people to the gods, and thus a mere instrument of the people. By defining power in such terms, as a virtual position of control, to be filled by its own absence, the evolution of state power could, in principle, be negated. This was the particularity of primitive societies, not before the state, but against the state. Now whether or not Clastres’s definition has any validity when applied to the societies that he researched, there is a more general logic in his propositions that reflects the condition of modern society, the logic of the nation-state. The public sphere may well be in regression. This has been pointed out by people as different as Baudrillard (1983) who experiences it and Putnam (2000) who has tried to research it. It might be suggested that the logic involved here is one in which position within a socially conceived whole is being replaced by self-definition in terms of internal cultural properties such as ethnicity, gender, and other related categories that serve as a basis of a new bricolage, a totemism which by definition is independent of the larger society at the same time as it might serve as the foundation for a new kind of social order, one that would be systematically pluralist where the cultural categories themselves would be constitutive of the social order. This would amount to a (re)establishment of a kind of homo hierarchicus, on the individualist ashes of a burned out modernism. But we are still clearly in the

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ashes for the most part, perhaps still burning out as well. Why is this reconstitution a strong possibility? Because the atomization of extreme individualism is, simultaneously, a narcissistic regression that demands a larger field of recognition and tends to produce new forms of group coagulation. There is in my understanding a paradox in what is being referred to as increasing individualization. While the body is increasingly the focus of interest and desire and a source of meaning in all forms of discourse, the self has also become increasingly fragile. This new individualism is in fact a narcissistic individuation predicated on a loss of identity in the sense of an implicit life project. Contemporary individualization is a most extreme form of social fragmentation of social existence. This can be contrasted to an individualism implying ‘strong’ subjects in conditions in which there is a clearly defined public arena based on a collective project of general human realization. It is the modernism of Goethe in which movement is the goal, movement toward an ideal state which may never be attained but which provides the subjective engagement necessary for the integrity of the self. The decline of the social project of modernism pulls the rug out from under the self-propelled subject who finds himself/herself increasingly lacking any direction. In this kind of world social projects are replaced by the new cultural projects, referred to above, that have characterized the West over the past two decades. Among these, re-identification has become paramount. Roots, genealogical identification, ideologies of hybridity, multiculturalism and the like are products of this situation. They are not distributed evenly throughout social space. I have suggested that roots tend to gravitate to the bottom of the social order while hybridity is more common at the top where cosmopolitanism reigns. But it should be noted that hybridity and roots partake of the same logic insofar

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as the former term is primarily a mixing of roots and gathering of differences. The ideologies of globalization, diasporization, and transnationalism, all enmeshed with one another, are expressions of this process of fragmentation and redistribution of public spheres. The celebration of the diaspora as producing new public arenas (Appadurai 1993) and the various statements concerning new forms of global citizenship are all part of a reduction of the social inclusiveness of the public. In Appadurai’s work this is also clearly linked to a call for the transformation of the nation-state into a contractual system of degrees of participation and membership, in which the individual clearly takes precedence—in principle, if not in practice—over the collective insofar as identification with the latter is considerably weakened and reduced to a question of utility. What we are left with are what promise to be very strong groups, organized transnationally, with their own public spheres, with either contractual or other exchange relations with similar groups. The latter may tend to entail a set of state functions presided over by third parties,1 perhaps a kind of royalty so as not to be identified with any particular transnational group. Nothing is presupposed about the nature of these transnational corporations, but there is plenty of evidence today to strongly question the degree to which they permit the kind of individual autonomy that is the point of departure for Appadurai’s argument. The most obvious model of this totality is something that we have already seen in history, the Empire or the pluralist colony, about as far as one can get from the Clastrian notion of sovereignty.

Retrenchment If what I recount above concerns the transformation of social experience, and of subjectivity, there is a real social

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process to which this transformation is closely linked which returns us to the initial paragraph. This is an age of real social retrenchment, an age of gated communities. The social has been increasingly relocated within such communities and the gates are both proliferating and taller. This transformation is not one that can be easily generalized. It refers to the past twenty years and it has occurred to different degrees in different parts of the world. Retrenchment eradicates commonalities and enforces difference. At the summit of the world system there is strong evidence of the forging of a number global elites who share the same hotels, clubs, cosmopolitan values, paintings and sculptures, ethnographica, charities, and even ‘blood’ (intermarriage). There is evidence of internal ranking within this population (Wagner 1999), i.e., not any wealthy cosmopolitan can get into the Jockey Club. More important here is the fact that the nature of the position has not changed over the past several hundred years. The cosmopolitan aristocrats of previous centuries identified in ways comparable to today’s elites, which consist not only of corporate elites, but aristocrats and political elites. The apparent mystification involved in cosmopolitan identity is that while representing itself as open and including the entire world, it is socially at least as restricted as any other strong ethnic identity. A recent study testifies to this in the self-identifications of cosmopolitan elites: … j’ai le sang ex-patrié … Je suis américain, de passeport et de nationalité, mais ma famille et celle de ma femme aussi ont un grand nombre de ramifications dans beaucoup de pays, ce qui fait qu’on a toujours eu un pied aux États-Unis, un pied à l’étranger. (Wagner 1999: 116) Mon père était un peu vagabond, et on avait ça dans les veines. Mes frères, c’est pareil: j’ai un frère en Autriche,

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un en Finlande, une soeur en Espagne. Mon père se déplacait beaucoup, et j’ai dû prendre ça. (ibid.: 116)

The hybridity of elite identity that defines itself in terms of openness and multiculturality is at the same time closed in class terms. This is why the metaphor of blood is so apt in self-descriptions. It is in fact the metaphor of class endogamy, i.e., social closure.

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The Transformation of Politics and the Exit of the Elites This retreat can be envisaged as a powerful systemic updraft. This is why it has a generalized effect on all elite formation. Sweden is an instructive case since it expresses such extremely rapid change, having so often been associated with a more local national identity, a high degree of homogeneity, and with an egalitarian emphasis and stress on the Clastrian representativity described above. First in what was once the most egalitarian of European societies, the Gini index (statistical measurement of degree of class stratification) suddenly increased by 25 percent in the 1990s. Since then there has been a rapid cosmopolitanization of political elites, to such an extent that they are now often referred to as a political class. They have raised their own salaries faster than any other salaries in the country, so that this once rather ordinary middle class category now adheres to the upper class in economic terms. They have also increasingly identified out of the country. In an interview some years ago, a minister of integration argued that he was not in fact Swedish because his genealogy included Scottish, German, and Danish descent. In this same period, another minister who had bought a hat for more than $4,000 claimed that she had to look her best when representing the people. While in the 1970s and 1980s Social

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Democratic prime ministers would never have inhabited the national palatial structures made available to them, today things are quite the inverse. And the current prime minister has bought himself a huge estate as well, one that he can surely afford on his current salary. He has also increasingly avoided political debate and has expressed a certain distance to the issues under discussion. While he is against referendums in general, he has curiously avoided the recent debate on the European Constitution. Government officials have been involved in innumerable scandals—using a government jet to return from a football match in Portugal in order to attend a celebration of the Social Democratic union, having a ministerial workshop in luxurious quarters in southern France—all of which has hit the media and been waved away with aristocratic flourish. There has been a general skepticism, referred to above, concerning referendums, which are characterized by many as simply undemocratic!? Most interesting is the fact that the Social Democratic press itself has led the way in this ‘internal’ criticism that has risen to quite furious proportions. The separation from ‘peoplehood’ is in effect a widespread phenomenon in political strategies that has accompanied the fusion of the old left and right into a new center of respectability, while the ‘people’ have become the new dangerous classes. A recent proposition in the EU commission on the reform of democracy has called for the institution of a new form of governance, referred to as ‘organic democracy,’ in which the major actors are Parliament, ‘civil societies’ (in the plural), public spheres that are established by self-organizing agents, such as NGOs; interest groups, such as ethnic groups; and other collective actors, even, apparently, companies. Only the demos is absent (Burns et al. 2000). Interesting in the presentation is the fact that while Parliament, including its parties, is present, those supposedly represented by

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Parliament are not. Now it might well be argued that in a period in which there is virtually no difference between left and right—since both adhere to a certain Third Way or Neue Mitte governed by rules of efficiency in which there is only one way to rule, la voie unique, which both left and right have appropriated in Europe—there is little left for the people to chose between, reflected in the increasing lack of interest in elections and in a generalized concern among elites that the function of representativity is rapidly disintegrating. The solution to this quandary is exit and the direction is upwards, into the stratosphere of pure governance. Thus, the political representatives tend to join the other elites in identifying with the world as a whole. It is interesting in this respect to note that the real global citizens are located here and not at the bottom of the social order. In 1999, Thomas Middelhoff former head of Berteslmann, one of the world’s largest media companies has said of himself: “We’re not foreign. We’re international … I’m an American with a German passport.” Bertelsmann financed the Network for Better Local Government which espouses what is called New Public Management as a replacement for formal democracy, adopted by many international organizations including the World Bank as a model for world governance. The logic of global elite consolidation combines political reconfiguration and the invocation of cosmopolitan identity. This not something new, of course, and I would be wary of defining it as such. The identity form itself is part of the long durée of capitalist civilization from the Free Masonry to the “Anglo-American Establishment” (Quigley 1981), including Cecil Rhodes’s “Society of the Elect,” to the Mount Pelerin Society, the Bilderberg, and other interlocking elite formations. The question is not their existence but their salience. And these are not governing bodies but clubs in which elite identity is forged and reproduced. That is, there is no intentional

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conspiracy involved, but there are clearly effects to be reckoned with in all this overlapping of elites who already have power. The social retreat of the global elites is reflected in the contradiction between cosmopolitan self-identification and the fact that they live in the same small social worlds as the rest of us. Yet they complain of the fragmentation at the bottom of society as a product of xenophobia. Thus, while they have retreated upwards the people in the street who do the same thing do not fit their perspective of the world. This enclavization is not, of course, any newer than the process described above, but it is something that waxes and wanes in changing historical conditions. The past twenty years of Western social history have been marked by increasing segregation and the fracture of the public sphere into a plethora of more local spheres. In Los Angeles, where enclaves have proliferated, it has been said that the reason that crime has declined is that so few venture into the no-mans lands anymore. People stay more or less within their enclaves. Just as in Northern Ireland the violence was concentrated to the border where there was most contact between Catholics and Protestants, where they shared the same bars, streets, and sometimes marriage partners. These are the true hybrid zones (Arantes 1996, on Sao Paolo), the unstable contact zones and violent border areas that have been so well described in the literature. And there are today more borders than ever because there are more people retreating into their own spaces of security. Again, Sweden is exemplary by way of its embracing an official state and elite multiculturalism with hybrid tendencies, while at the same time it is one of the most segregated societies in Europe, with levels of violence, now publicly recognized, that have increased dramatically over the past few years. The elites have taken on, however imperfectly, the Dumontian practice of encompassment of the differences over which they preside.

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If we were to use the metaphor of privatization here we could say that the elites have privatized the state and most of its functions, a phenomenon that has been limited in recent literature to the class-states of Africa (Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou 1997). It should not be surprising that everyone else is doing the same thing, from middle class gated communities to the gangs and other associations that can be found at the multicultural bottom of society. What has disappeared in all of this is the centrality of the national public sphere, one that depended for its very existence on a presupposed people. The retreat of the public is the product of these developments, and it is reinforced by all those discourses that mystify the process by endowing it with the evolutionary properties of millenarian capitalism, the age of globalization, and other euphemisms for our social regression, however modernized it might seem, into a Blade Runner (1982) society.

Note 1. Third party in the sense of not belonging to or representing the population over which they preside.

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References Appadurai, Arjun. 1993. “Patriotism and Its Futures.” Public Culture 5: 415–440. Bayart, Jean-François, Stephen Ellis, and Beatric Hibou. 1997. La criminalisation de l’Etat en Afrique. Bruxelles: Editions Complexe. Arantes, A. 1996. “The War of Places: Symbolic Boundaries and Liminalities in Urban Space.” Theory, Culture, and Society 13, no. 4: 81–93. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, or, The End of the Social, and Other Essays. Trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, and Paul Patton. New York: Semiotext(e). Blade Runner. 1982. Ridley Scott, director. Burns, Tom R., Carlo Jaeger, Angela Liberatore, Yves Meny, and Patrizia Nanz. 2000. “The Future of Parliamentary Democracy: Transition and Challenge in European Governance.” Green Paper prepared for the European Union Speakers of Parliament. Brussels: European Commission, Secretariat General. Clastres, Pierre. 1987. Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Quigley, Caroll. 1981. The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden. New York: Books in Focus. Touraine, Alain. 1992. Critique de la modernité. Paris: Fayard. ———. 1997. Pourrons-nous vivre Ensemble? Égaux et Différents. Paris: Fayard. Wagner, Anne-Catherine. 1999. Les nouvelles élites de la mondialisation: Une immigration dorée en France. Paris: PUF.

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LEGENDS

OF

FORDISM

Between Myth, History, and Foregone Conclusions

z George Baca

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Introduction Over the past four decades, politicians and government officials of the so-called advanced industrial countries have scaled back state-sponsored programs in education, healthcare, welfare to the poor, and housing subsidies. In conjunction, international economic organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, have imposed fiscal policies upon developing nations, which disadvantage the poor by retrenching public services. These broad level shifts in the global political economy have been legitimized through a planetary newspeak that centers on such buzzwords as ‘globalization’ positing a ‘new economy,’ which require ‘flexible’ and ‘multicultural identities’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2001). In this way, free trade advocates naturalize these political processes with reductive biological models of society that often assume an autonomous individual, as Kapferer discusses in his contribution to this forum (see also Taussig, Rapp, and Heath 2003).

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Many self-identified leftist anthropologists working in the United States have tried to explain these political changes with the concepts of ‘Fordism’ and ‘flexible accumulation,’ resulting in ahistorical analyses that conflate the political experiences of the United States with diverse European and Asian countries. Moreover, they seek to explain such phenomena as deindustrialization and the growing integration of the global political economy with terms and assumptions based in the mythological discourse of American nationalism, which identifies a few decades as the entirety of American history (Di Leonardo 1985). Such analyses sensationalize the current round of reactionary policies by depicting them as either a ‘break,’ ‘rupture,’ or ‘retrenchment’ of the assumed ideals and virtues of the North American version of the welfare state. In this article, I critically evaluate the usefulness of Fordism and flexible accumulation in regards to the contemporary context. Specifically, I focus on the way that geographer David Harvey (1989, 1996) has used these two concepts to provide a sweeping account of the global political economy during the second half of the twentieth century. Harvey deploys the idea of Fordism in a way that idealizes the postwar politics in ‘advanced capitalist countries’ and conflates the varied and diverse postwar experiences of Japan, the United States, and various European countries into a singular—if not mythic— catchall category of Fordism. Further, I examine a number of influential anthropologists working in the United States, who uncritically adopt Harvey’s concept of flexibility as if it were an axiom; they apply the term in ways that suspiciously converge with American nationalist discourse and universalize the particularities of the American experience. Accordingly, Harvey’s thesis has served as an engine for the crystallization of the Fordism idea, having been uncritically adopted in distilled form by

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many anthropologists, who cite it as the authority on political economy while neglecting the specific local, regional, and national histories in the United States. I argue that the analysis of the contemporary political processes in the United States, during the ‘era of globalization,’ should be compared and related to the specifics of anticommunism and imperialism that shaped its postwar welfare state. A closer look at the historical development of the American welfare state will reveal that the devolution process represents many continuities with socalled Fordism and its concomitant welfare policies. Moreover, the uncritical adoption of Harvey’s theory of flexibility has contributed to many alarming misconceptions about the nature of the political processes in the United States.

Fordism and Flexible Accumulation: A New Axiom In the late 1980s, Harvey’s publication of The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989) redefined debates in the social sciences. He problematized the popularity of postmodern theories and how they celebrated subjectivity, difference, dissonance, and the fall of grand narratives. Moreover, he argued that rather than gaining analytical purchase on the present era of capitalism, many postmodern theories reflected, and were conditioned by, a new phase of capitalism. Harvey, thus, presented the theory of flexible accumulation as an analytic framework for understanding, among other things, the relationship between the then current academic fashions and the structure of global capitalism. Accordingly, his sweeping argument forced scholars to rethink the relationship between academic trends and global political economy.

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Harvey’s analysis begins with an ideal type of Fordism, which he employs to provide an all-encompassing account of postwar political strategies in diverse European countries, the United States, not to mention Japan. Accordingly, he argues that Fordism emerged when managerial strategies and state powers combined to stabilize capitalism:

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The problem of the proper configuration and deployment of state powers was resolved only after 1945. This brought Fordism to maturity as a fully fledged and distinctive regime of accumulation. As such, it then formed the basis for a long postwar boom that stayed broadly intact until 1973. During that period, capitalism in the advanced capitalist countries achieved strong but relatively stable rates of economic growth. Living standards rose, crisis tendencies were contained, mass democracy was preserved and the threat of inter-capitalist wars kept remote. (1989: 129)

Harvey’s model aggregates the experiences of distinct countries—let alone regions within these countries—into a catchall category of advanced capitalist countries. Moreover, he uses the ideal of Fordism to capture the essential features that distinguishes these countries from the ‘developing’ world. It is from this model—which metonymically takes parts of each country’s political economy for the whole— that he dramatizes a gradual shift in the global system, which he locates in the “crisis” of 1973. Accordingly, Harvey holds, flexible accumulation emerged as a “whole set of processes that undermined the Fordist compromise” (1989: 145), as capitalists responded to new global conditions by downsizing certain production sites and moving to areas of the world with lax worker and environmental protections. Such economic restructuring coincided with policy changes whereby the

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national governments cut back the hallmark social programs of the welfare state. These changes in industrial organization and government provision, Harvey argues, were designed to intensify rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation, produced flexible accumulation as representative of a new moment in the history of capitalism. Thus, for Harvey, flexibility refers to new forms of power over workers, what he characterizes as “undermining” the Fordist compromise between capital and labor that developed after World War II. Despite many qualifications about anti-labor practices, militarization, and the imperialism of Fordism, he unwittingly idealizes the welfare state of Europe and North America by contrasting it with the “enhanced powers of flexibility and mobility,” which allow employers to exert stronger pressures on labor. He concludes that “[o]rganized labor was undercut by the reconstruction of foci of flexible accumulation in regions lacking previous industrial traditions, and by the importation back into the older centers of the regressive norms and practices established in these new areas” (1989: 147). On the one hand, it may be surprising that Harvey should come up with such a positive conclusion regarding Fordism. On the other hand, it is less surprising due to the fact that the upheaval of the 1960s passed him by; he had faith in the British state, as he explained candidly in a recent interview: I was always kind of left leaning, but in the 1960s in Britain, you could be sort of left-leaning, but you didn’t have to be radical in any way, because the Labour Party was there, and a lot of us had faith in the Labour Party and its transformative capacities … I went to Baltimore in the wake of the ‘68 uprising, riots, whatever you want to call them, around the death of Martin Luther King, and I was shocked at the conditions I found there. I was really, really shocked that in the wealthiest country in the world,

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people live in chronic impoverishment. I was really upset. So I started to participate much more in the political activism around that … Some of us sat down and read Marx, and I found it a very compelling framework within which I could formulate problems, think through things in terms of my intellectual work. It was also increasingly helpful politically. (Kreisler 2004: 2)

In addition to its idealism, Harvey’s concept is especially problematic when it confronts empirical examples. In his Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (1996), he writes about an industrial accident in a poor rural town—Hamlet, North Carolina. It is puzzling that Harvey draws his empirical example of the dismantling of Fordism from an area of the United States that did not experience the hallmarks of this system of accumulation—unionism, large-scale industrialization, and the other embodiments of “working class power.” He sidesteps this crucial point by incidentally mentioning that North Carolina “has long had the habit of openly touting low wages, a friendly business climate and ‘right to work’ legislation which keeps unions at bay as the bait to pull in more and more manufacturing employment” (1996: 336). Ignoring this history and reducing it to a mere “habit,” Harvey moves on to describe a “cataclysmic industrial accident, at least by the standards of any advanced industrial country” (1996: 335), which occurred at the Imperial Foods chicken-processing plant. He asserts that the labor and health regulations did not meet the “standard of any advanced industrial country,” because flexible accumulation strategies have “dismantled many of the forces and institutions of working class power,” resulting in this “raw capitalism of a particularly exploitative sort” (1996: 338). In this way, he misrecognizes a very old form of industrial organization—one that has defined Southern industrial development after the

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Civil War (Carlton 1982; Carlton and Coclanis 2003; Cobb 1987; Wood 1986). Southern industrialists have long promoted the very labor practices that Harvey calls the “new” phase of flexible accumulation. These historical errors illustrate the way in which the term ‘Fordism’ reifies postwar political processes and gives the welfare state a coherence and solidity that it never attained. By employing the ideal of Fordism as if it were an analytic framework, Harvey has short-circuited important questions about continuities between welfare capitalism and flexible accumulation. The limitations of his framework have prevented him from discerning that Fordism existed as an ideological claim, which industrial elites used to rebuild national economies and imperial holdings from the wreckage of World War II. Historical scholarship on the politics of the 1930s and 1940s illustrates how many of the contemporary aspects of the welfare state, and its vaunted ‘compromise,’ were rooted in the brute strength of militarization (Klausen 1998; Kryder 2000), anticommunism (Dudziak 2000; Plotke 1996), and racist policies (Reed 1999). From the standpoint of historically informed analyses, we can better understand that the postwar welfare state was a complex ensemble of disciplinary strategies that directly led to the very upheaval that Harvey limits to the early 1970s. In this way, he ignores the serious historical question of how each political and economic regime—not just the flexible regime—reformulates the relationship between individuals and the state.

Ideals of Fordism: The Foregone Conclusions of Flexibility Despite the pitfalls outlined above, Harvey’s theory is helpful to the degree that it forces anthropologists to relate ethnography and local history to national and

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global political economic forces. In some respects, one may compare Harvey’s influence on anthropological theory and methodology to that wrought by Wallerstein’s world-system approach of the 1970s. The manner in which anthropologists have received Harvey’s concept of flexibility, however, exposes a telling difference. During the 1970s, anthropologists critically adapted Wallerstein as local and regional experts tested his theory; this critical reception is exemplified by Mintz’s (1977) classic review of Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System (1976). Mintz praised Wallerstein’s synthesis of European military and economic expansion, the integration of diverse economic zones throughout the world into a single system of trade, and the growth of the European national state into a systematic theory. However, Mintz also pointed out that advances in Wallerstein’s synthesis would require criticisms “from regional specialists, and specialists in particular historical periods, who will be able to use their detailed knowledge to test and improve—or disprove—the sweeping and lucid conceptual devices the author is developing” (1977: 253). By subjecting this theory to analyses of empirical evidence from the Caribbean, Mintz exposed inaccuracies in that Wallerstein collapsed the Caribbean and Latin America, along with most of the non-European world, into the category “periphery.” Notwithstanding, Mintz found the “postulation of world system” salutary because it forced anthropologist to raise their eyes from the particulars of local history. “But equally salutary is the constant revisiting of events ‘on the ground,’ so that the architecture of the world system can be laid bare” (1977: 255). Two decades later, anthropologists have become more reluctant to refine critically the sweeping theories of globalization and flexibility than they were when encountering the world system and dependency theories of the 1970s. Instead, many anthropologists have adopted

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Harvey’s concept of flexibility, failing to test its premises empirically. Thus, his claim that a new phase of capitalism materialized in the 1970s has been accepted at face value.1 Anthropologist Aihwa Ong’s well-received Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (1999) illustrates this tendency. She embraces the thesis of flexible accumulation as if it were an axiom, stating: “In The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey identifies flexibility as the modus operandi of late capitalism. He distinguishes contemporary systems of profit making, production, distribution, and consumption as a break from earlier, Fordist model of centralized mass assembly production in which workers were the mass consumers of their products” (1999: 3). Following this law-like pronouncement, Ong is free to describe the experiences of upper class Chinese immigrants, living in Northern California, as embodiments of “new” forms of citizenship. In this way, deductive explanation substitutes for historical specificity: In the era of globalization, individuals as well as governments develop a flexible notion of citizenship and sovereignty as strategies to accumulate capital and power. “Flexible citizenship” refers to the cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions. In their quest to accumulate capital and social prestige in the global arena, subjects emphasize, and are regulated by, practices favoring flexibility, mobility, and repositioning in relation to markets, governments, and cultural regimes. (1999: 6)

Accordingly, Ong’s analysis fetishizes novelty by insisting that the experiences of her informants represent “new cultural logics” of a “new age of globalization,” which in turn she proclaims to be the outcome of “new strategies of flexible accumulation,” before finally con-

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cluding: “New strategies of flexible accumulation have promoted a flexible attitude toward citizenship … Transnational mobility and maneuvers mean there is a new mode of constructing identity, as well as new modes of subjectification that cut across political borders” (1999: 17–18, emphasis added). Consequently, Ong’s fascination with newness precludes a historical understanding of this contemporary matrix of citizenship, capital accumulation, and global migration. When concepts of globalization, such as that promoted by Ong, fail to relate change to continuity they celebrate what Trouillot has called “newness” in ways that “silence much of world history” (2003: 47). Drawing on Mintz (1998), Trouillot argues that recognizing earlier global flows need not result in the contention that nothing has changed. On the contrary: “[B]y helping us screen out that which passes for new and may actually be quite old, the reference to a massive empirical record of five centuries highlights the more profound changes of our present. Having discovered the silencing of the past on a world scale, we are better poised to discover the production of silences about our present” (ibid.: 47–48).

Devolution and the Increasing Power of State Regulation Ong is joined by other anthropologists working in the United States who have adopted Harvey’s theory of flexibility. Theories of flexible accumulation and globalization are very popular in intellectual circles, in part, because they resonate powerfully with the experience of many academics who have watched their governments permit deindustrialization and cutbacks in social services. Thus, the ideal of flexibility captures important aspects of the dynamic changes that have reorganized

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urban environments in the industrial northeast region. This period of change, since the early 1970s, has coincided with anthropology’s growing interest in the study of the United States. Over the past decade, anthropologists working in U.S. cities have produced an exciting corpus of ethnographic data on poverty, power, and welfare reform (Goode and Maskovsky 2001; Kingfisher 2002; Morgen and Maskovsky 2003; Susser 1996). Their analyses have debunked mainstream policy paradigms responsible for pathologizing the poor; the ethnographic evidence generated by these studies illuminates the manner in which political power legitimizes the increasing numbers of poor people in the United States. Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky’s edited volume, The New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics, and Impoverished People in the United States, showcases this rich ethnography and represents the contributions such field research can make to refine the historical specificity of a general paradigm. In addition to rich ethnography, these studies have attempted to relate ethnographic accounts to broader arrangements of power by focusing on the 1996 welfare reform: The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). Consequently, many of these anthropologists have contextualized their analyses of poverty within “the globalization paradigm” in order to theorize connections between welfare state restructuring, economic restructuring, and global economic shifts (Morgen and Maskovsky 2001: 317). Like Ong, they draw on Harvey’s concept of flexible accumulation, as if it provides the theoretical link between ethnography and welfare reform. Accordingly, Morgen and Maskovsky argue that welfare reform embodies class warfare, what they call “aspects of the postFordist strategy of flexible capital accumulation” (ibid.: 321). This approach, therefore, contrasts the present antipoverty policies to an ideal of welfare. As a consequence,

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the authors accept the federal state’s self-presentation that welfare was a well-intentioned program designed to eliminate poverty, and hence unwittingly present a rosy picture of welfare and de-emphasize how welfare policies were intended to regulate the poor more so than they were to regulate capital (see Piven and Cloward 1971). As a consequence of these authors’ failure to analyze the anti-poverty policies in terms of power, they produce a view of the scaling back of welfare as devolution (Goode and Maskovsky 2001), which becomes, in turn, a metaphor that dramatizes the manner in which the federal government has scaled down the welfare state. As Bourdieu (2003) has argued, the state projects that created compulsory education, public health policies, social security, and poor relief, were first and foremost strategies for regulating the working class. Moreover, recent curtailments in state funding for these projects also mark continuity with regard to their regulatory intent. Instead of seeing devolution as a fundamental aspect of state power (Diamond 1951; Corrigan and Sayer 1985) that reveals critical aspects of the continuities in the expansion of power as regulatory mechanisms, the authors see what they term ‘devolution’ as if it were a specific characteristic of the post-Fordist state, which depoliticizes the welfare state and further misrecognizes the production and transformation of state power as regulatory mechanisms for the distribution of resources. This formulation poses two fundamental problems First, it takes provision of welfare as the key characteristic of the state; and, second, in the use of devolution as a metaphor for this betrayal, it promotes the view that devolving power to state and local authorities is a contradiction to the welfare state, and, therefore, as an attribute that can been taken as a key characteristic of the post-Fordist state. Harvey’s idea of Fordism misconceives of the state by viewing it as an empirical given; by assuming that the

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curtailment of social policies previously promoted by the state as a regulatory mechanism, the state can be represented as withering and weakening. Goode and Maskovsky are thus left with a presentation of the federal state that reproduces the ideological version of state agencies, as an empirically singular, coherent, project rooted in popular sovereignty. In contrast, sociologist Abrams suggests that the state is better seen as an “ideological project” when he notes: “The state, in sum, is a bid to elicit support for or tolerance of the insupportable and intolerable by presenting them as something other than themselves, namely, legitimate, disinterested domination” (1988: 76). Therefore, devolution of federal power has a much wider relevance than can be revealed by analyses that concentrate merely on the cut backs in the federal budget. Rather than seek to understand how these changes have reworked the relationship between the state and its subject population, Goode and Maskovsky join Harvey’s chorus as they charge industry with abrogating the Fordist contract with labor by downsizing firms and relocating manufacturing offshore. In this way, they present the view that this shift “began a political and ideological assault on unions, civil rights, on environmental and other regulations, and on the Keynesian policies that had previously sought to regulate the economy with public investment” (Goode and Maskovsky 2001: 5). To conclude, I argue that the political and ideological assault on the unions began with the Wagner and TaftHartley Acts, and that the assault on Civil Rights was contained within the implementation of policies by federal laws in a way that demobilized black progressive politics (see Reed 1999). Moreover, Keynesian policies sought simultaneously to regulate the poor, working people, and capital, such that the now much lamented passing of the welfare state, was a system of regulatory mechanisms

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that produced an immense consolidation of power and wealth in the U.S. As we lament the passing of the welfare state, we must recognize that the production of theory and the method for analysis and understanding of the subtleties of continuity and novelty in transformations of globalization cannot be achieved by circling around the flexible post of an idealized Fordist compromise.

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Acknowledgments I thank my new colleague at Goucher College, Nelly Lahoud, for a trenchant and charitable reading of an early draft. In addition, Jason Antrosio, Pamela Ballinger, Robert Beachy, Victor Braitberg, Bruce Kapferer, Sidney W. Mintz, Boris Nikolov, Janet Shope, and Brackette F. Williams gave me valuable advice on very short notice. Despite my criticism of David Harvey, I wish to note my gratitude to him, as much of this critique derives from the many valuable lessons I learned from his classes as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. I alone am responsible for any remaining errors.

Note 1. For critical treatments of Harvey’s concept of flexibility, see Amin (1994).

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References Abrams, Philip. 1988 [1977]. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State.” Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1: 58–89. Amin, Asch. 1994. Post-Fordism: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2003. Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2. New York: New Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 2001. “Neoliberal Newspeak: Notes on the New Planetary Vulgate.” Radical Philosophy 105: 205. Carlton, David L. 1982. Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880–1920. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Carlton, David L., and Peter A. Coclanis. 2003. The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Cobb, James. 1987. Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877–1984. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Corrigan, Philip, and Derek Sayer. 1985. The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell. Diamond, Stanley. 1951. “Dahomey: A Proto-State in West Africa.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University. Di Leonardo, Micaela. 1985. “Deindustrialization as a Folk Model.” Urban Anthropology 14, no. 1–3: 237–257. Dudziak, Mary. 2000. Cold War, Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goode, Judith, and Jeff Maskovsky. 2001. New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics, and Impoverished People in the United States. New York: New York University Press. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford and New York: Blackwell. ———. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Kingfisher, Catherine Pélissier. 2002. Western Welfare in Decline: Globalization and Women’s Poverty. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Klausen, Jytte. 1998. War and the Welfare State: Europe and the United States, 1945 to the Present. New York: Palgrave. Kreisler, Harry. 2004. “A Geographer’s Perspective on the New American Imperialism: Conversation with David Harvey.”

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http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Harvey/harvey-con2 .html, accessed 24 September 2004. Kryder, Daniel. 2000. Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State During World War II. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mintz, Sidney W. 1977. “The So-Called World System: Local Initiative and Local Response.” Dialectical Anthropology 2, no. 4: 253–270. ———. 1998. “The Localization of Anthropological Practice: From Area Studies to Transnationalism.” Critique of Anthropology 18, no. 2: 117–133. Morgen, Sandra, and Jeff Maskovsky. 2003. “The Anthropology of Welfare ‘Reform.’” Annual Review of Anthropology 32: 315–338. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press. Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard Cloward. 1971. Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare. New York: Pantheon Books. Plotke, David. 1996. Building a Democratic Political Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reed, Adolph L. 1999. Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Susser, Ida. 1996. “The Construction of Poverty and Homelessness in U.S. Cities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 411–435. Taussig, Karen Sue, Rayna Rapp, and Deborah Heath. 2003. “Flexible Eugenics: Technologies of the Self in the Age of genetics.” Pp. 58–76 in Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science beyond the Two Culture Divide, ed. A. Goodman and D. Heath. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1976. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press. Wood, Phillip J. 1986. Southern Capitalism: The Political Economy of North Carolina, 1880–1980. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

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MORE POWER TO YOU, OR SHOULD IT BE LESS? z

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Christopher C. Taylor

If anthropology is in need of a lesson against reductionism, it would appear that no longer is it in need of one against reification, for this is more often the logical flaw that contemporary anthropologists strive hardest and most consciously to avoid. Yet for all the merits of the critique against reification, it has its downside: it renders us less sensitive to the dangers of reductionism. Quite frequently today the charge of reification is leveled against what was once the discipline’s core concept, the concept of culture, which we are told is overly deterministic, excessively totalizing, and insufficiently sensitive to issues of multivocality and hermeneutic multiplicity. Cultural theorists are accused of investing the concept with too much causal weight and of sheltering it from the tides of history and contingency. Mere museum curators rather than observers of the dynamic human condition, cultural theorists are said to place ‘cultures’ under bell jars and then to claim that culture determines everything. In order to avoid overly reified notions of culture, recent theorists have shifted the discussion and taken up the analysis of power. In rejecting cultural analysis, the

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latter claim that no society has ever possessed a systematically agreed upon vision of itself and its normative structures. Anyone who asserts the contrary has probably been talking to the wrong informants, informants who have a political stake in conveying a single view of their collectivity and its norms, beliefs, and values. To replace this alleged mono-vocalic view of culture, concepts such as agency, struggle, and heterogeneity have taken the baton, becoming the dominant tropes of present day anthropological discourse. Nevertheless, if agency and struggle imply that people are mostly out for themselves and rarely agree, these same champions of heterogeneity assume that there is one thing that is universal among individuals and societies everywhere, and that this is the “will to power” and the propensity to maximize it. If it was once overlooked, power today has become anthropology’s most important human motivation and the one to which all others become rapidly reduced. In place of a reification, then, we have managed to substitute a reduction and in place of Kroeber (1963) and White (1959), we appeal to Foucault (1979). After Foucault we are likely to see power’s hand everywhere, omnipresent and in certain sense, omniscient, for just like Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, it appears to ‘know’ just how to shape social relations without each social actor’s specific awareness of what is going on (Gramsci 1996), and to ineluctably sort people into two categories: the empowered and the disempowered. The summary result of each individual’s quest to maximize power in his or her own sphere of existence produces the overall collective effect of political disparity. Is culture then epiphenomenal, a simple byproduct of power, as the more functionalist among the Foucauldians would have us believe? If so, then we would be deriving a reification from a reduction. Or is power and its expression to be derived from culture, as the “cookie cutter” culturalists

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would have us believe? If so, then we would be deriving a reduction from a reification. How do we extricate ourselves from this epistemological murk? At least part of the solution to this problem is to contextualize power more fully, both cognitively and socially. Do all societies have a similar notion of power and a similar approach to it? We could begin, for example, by taking the indigenous terms that are usually translated by the English word ‘power’ and examining their associations. As some anthropologists have pointed out (Fogelson and Adams 1977), that which is usually translated in English as ‘power,’ rarely occupies the same semantic space. Nor is power lived in the same way from place to place, nor from one historical period to another. Instead of implicitly assuming that the “will to power” manifests itself in similar fashion in every individual and in every society, it behooves us to recall our comparative methodological roots and to look at societies with political arrangements that are radically different from the modern nation-state. After all, if we take Anderson’s work seriously, the modern nation-state was not the social form by which people imagined their communities until the late eighteenth century (Anderson 1991). The anthropologist who, to my mind, most convincingly demonstrates that the “will to power” does not receive uniform expression from one social formation to the next is Pierre Clastres (1974). For Clastres, some peoples in the world refuse the organization of society on the sole basis of power. They refuse master/slave ideology and all the correlates that this carries with it. They refuse the division of society into those who command and those who obey. For Clastres, among the stateless societies of the Amazon basin, the people unambiguously reject the power of one over many. The chiefs among the Guayaki enjoy a degree of prestige and can practice polygyny, but they must be good orators and generous. Yet for

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all their oratorical skills, their speeches are usually ignored, and for all their generosity or rather because of it, they are usually the most impoverished members of their groups. For these peoples what has perennially been viewed as an absence, the lack of a state, should according to Clastres be seen as a presence, the choice of a life where no human being rules over another. Although these societies certainly have politics, it is a politics inextricably bound up with and enracinated in the social. As Clastres terms it, these are societies against the state. Parallel to Clastres, in Marshall Sahlins’s earlier work (1972) on the “domestic mode of production,” we see that in contrast to all depictions of ‘primitive’ economies as economies of deprivation, the people who actually live in such societies procure their subsistence with an average of less than three hours of work per day. These are people who refuse the blandishments of accumulation and the inequalities among human beings that accumulation inevitably brings in its wake. Once again, what has been seen as an absence should be seen as a presence, the choice of a life where no one controls substantially more of the earth’s resources than anyone else and where all members of the group either feast together or starve together. These are economies rooted in and encompassed within the social and it is this social factor that is their driving force rather than their by-product. These are economies against economism. Both Clastres and Sahlins raise serious doubts about what remains a frequent and unstated assumption for those theorists who remain convinced of the primacy of power, that all individuals no matter what society they may come from inevitably seek to maximize economic and political advantage. The maximization thesis is an assumption about human nature that Western social theorists have held for a very long time. It is present in various forms in John Locke (1975), Adam Smith (1976), Thomas Hobbes

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(1965), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1967). Karl Marx (1977) was one of the few early theorists to criticize it and to point out that it serves to perpetuate the social relations that characterize capitalist societies. Viewing the inequalities that capitalism creates as the ineluctable byproduct of natural human proclivities shelters these inequalities from true critique. How can we change our nature? To put this in more contemporary language, Marx was one of the first to recognize the socially constructed nature of human subjectivity. Our view of the nature of the individual, Marx instructs us, is in large part a function of the type of social formation in which we live. Taking this a bit further, the ‘realities’ that we claim to know, often turn out to be simply the ones that we live. Slightly updated versions of the maximization thesis resurface in biopsychological functionalism where the collectivity arises in response to the urging of the individual’s basic needs; in structural functionalism where society creates moral order to attenuate the ferocity of individual competition; in transactionalism where the sum total of individual choices generates the collective form; in rational choice theory where reason leads us to weigh the costs against the benefits; and even in much of postmodern anthropology where culture, science, or even primatology is simply politics by other means (Haraway 1989) and where the only real game in town is the game of power. For many of the latter, the theorist of choice is Michel Foucault. According to Sahlins more recent work (1996, 1999), the current interest in power, inspired by Foucault, takes root in a notion of the inadequate individual and derives its impetus from Judeo-Christian cosmological notions. In Judeo-Christian mythology, history begins when a morally deficient person transgresses: “In Adam’s fall, we sinned, all.” Moreover, if we start off depraved, we also start off deprived, banished from a primeval condition of

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plenitude. To the state of moral abjectness is added material deficiency; hence we are creatures of need, want, and urge. Our expulsion from Eden dooms us to a perpetual search for relief from physiological tensions—sex, hunger, thirst, etc. Knowing the pain of privation and the brevity of this life (nasty, brutish, and short), we seek to maximize our satisfactions. Yet we can only do this in a context of limited means and therefore must compete with others who have similar desires. To satisfy oneself, one must diminish the capacity of others to gratify their desires, thus we strive for domination and control. We crave power because we fear our competitors. But even when one wins the competition, one also loses. In pursuing any single want or desire, others must remain unfulfilled. Every satisfaction is simultaneously a frustration. Moreover, since any attempt to gain satisfaction entails the expenditure of energy and resources, we must learn to make rational choices about what desires can be satisfied and how this can be done in the least demanding or costly way. The pursuit of utility becomes the motivating force behind reason. Sahlins maintains that these culture-bound assumptions provide the backdrop to Western social science models that begin at the axiomatic base of the individual as a needful being, a desiring machine. Society then, becomes either the instrument by which individual needs can be satisfied—Malinowski (1922)— or the mechanism through which conflicting individual demands can be regulated and held in check by collective constraint and pressure—Durkheim (1965). Aspects of very similar notions resurface in Foucault (1979) and others who see struggle at the basis of all human interaction. We struggle against each other in social life and even with ourselves as every individual consciousness is divided and conflictual. Although Foucault differs from Durkheim in many respects, they share these ontological notions. In

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Durkheim the basis of morality lies in the collective, while for Foucault there is no so-called moral discourse outside of power/knowledge nexi that both reflect and reproduce cleavages between the empowered and the disempowered. If there are differences in the posited mechanics of repression, the two share a fundamental vision: for Durkheim collective representations constrain and coerce; for Foucault society is a disciplinary apparatus. In either case the self remains the seat of desire, and the collective, the locus of desire’s regulation or control. For many theorists of the state, such as Trouillot (2001) or Abrams (1988), the state is also primarily a mechanism of repression and in this they concur with Durkheim, Foucault, and others. For some of these theorists, the state’s repression is a necessary evil and the only means by which individuals can temporarily submerge their mutual enmity. For others, enmity never really disappears, but the state’s repression can be overcome by resistance. In neither version is the state seen as shaped by cultural factors; in neither version is there any game in town save that of power. Yet if Clastres and Sahlins are correct in their thinking, as I believe they are, there must be in addition to stateless societies who categorically refuse the power of one over many and to those who refuse economism, state societies that cannot be adequately understood solely through the lens of a universalized Homo economicus or a universalized Homo politicus. Such state societies may have been numerous in the non-Western world. I believe that the premodern state of Rwanda was one of them and that characteristics of this state persisted well into the modern era, even in such an obvious contestation over power as the genocide of 1994. Although I do not have the space here to demonstrate this ethnographically in any great detail, premodern Rwandan kings were once perceived as centrally important in a cosmological process which situated their bodies

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at the focal point of beneficent flows which brought fertility to land, cattle, and people (Taylor 1988). Symbolic analysis of the rituals of kingship reveals that, at a preagentive level, a level that Godelier terms the imaginary (Godelier 1996) and that does not involve the decisionmaking process, there was a great deal of concern with the king’s body and with the bodies of particular Rwandan subjects deemed to be abominations, including breastless women (impenebere) and mense-less women (impa) who could bring drought and other disasters upon the kingdom. Like these desiccated women, kings whose bodies were perceived to obstruct or to act as inadequate catalysts of beneficent flows of fertility were considered abominations and candidates for elimination. Later, however, their deaths would be selectively remembered not as tragedies, but as selfless acts of sacrifice. In reality, these so-called sacrifices were intended to mask Rwandan military defeats (Vansina 1967). In other work, I show that in the popular political literature circulating on the streets of Kigali in the years leading up to the genocide of 1994, journalists and cartoonists employed representations consistent with those of sacred kingship to depict the president of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana (Taylor 2003). When these representations are symbolically analyzed, we see that in many of them President Habyarimana came to resemble an inadequate king, an obstructing body, an impediment to the descent of beneficent flows, and thus a candidate for elimination. But this did not occur at the level of ‘manifest content.’ I do not believe that Rwandan cartoon artists who sketched the president in this way were aware that they were touching profound cosmological themes in their artwork. This is seen in the apparent illogic of their artistry, which can not be understood simply in the agonistic terms of power politics, but must be revealed through an examination of the Rwandan imaginary. From

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this analysis we see that power in this instance did not encompass all human motivation; on the contrary, it was itself encompassed within cosmological schemes expressing levels of human sentiment deeper than those that can be subsumed within any scheme of rational or maximizing action. To be sure, the reification of culture is something that we should avoid, but let us not throw out the baby with the bath water and fall into the reductionist trap of the “will to power.” Just like there can be no obvious crosscultural notion of utility, there can be no obvious crosscultural notion of power. Power is dependent upon other things for its expression. These vary from society to society, from historical epoch to historical epoch, and reside at a level of consciousness that is beneath that of rationality. Some theorists, such as Aijmer, call this level the “pre-discursive” (Aijmer 2000); Godelier calls it the “imaginary.” This “imaginary” level is iconic in nature, consisting of “symbols that stand for themselves” and that defy facile exegesis (Wagner 1986). It is here that the deeper fears and desires of a collectivity reside and these can seldom be expressed directly in a discursive idiom. These deeper fears and desires subtend agency rather than the other way around and they are shared rather than contested. These provide both the base from which power is imagined and the interpretive matrix by which specific actions are judged as either powerful or impotent. Although the nature of power may seem obvious to those who believe they are wielding it (and to anthropologists who believe they are observing it), its longer term effects are always lived, experienced, and interpreted through local systems of meaning, and it is ultimately these meanings that define what is powerful and what is not.

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References Abrams, Philip. 1988. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State.” Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1: 58–89. Aijmer, Goran. 2000. “Introduction: The Idiom of Violence in Imagery and Discourse.” Pp. 1–22 in Meanings of Violence, ed. Goran Aijmer and Jon Abbink. Oxford: Berg Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Clastres, Pierre. 1974. La société contre l’Etat. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Durkheim, Emile. 1965 [1915]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Trans. Joseph Ward Swain. New York: Free Press. Fogelson, Raymond, and Richard Adams. 1977. The Anthropology of Power. New York: Academic Press. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Godelier, Maurice. 1996. L’énigme du don. Paris: Fayard. Gramsci, Antonio. 1996. Prison Notebooks. New York: Columbia University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge. Hobbes, Thomas. 1965 [1651]. Leviathan. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kroeber, Alfred. 1963 [1948]. Anthropology: Culture Patterns and Processes. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Locke, John. 1975 [1689]. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital, Volume 1. New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Will to Power. New York: Random House. Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: AldineAtherton. ———. 1996. “The Sadness of Sweetness; or, The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology.” Current Anthropology 37, no. 3: 395–428. ———. 1999. “What Is Anthropological Enlightenment? Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century.” Annual Review of Anthropology 28: i–xxiii.

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Smith, Adam. 1976. The Wealth of Nations Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Christopher. 1988. “Milk, Honey and Money: Changing Concepts of Pathology in Rwandan Popular Medicine.” Ph.D. diss, University of Virginia. ———. 2003. “Kings and Chaos in Rwanda: On the Order of Disorder.” Anthropos 98: 41–58. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2001. “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization.” Current Anthropology 42, no. 1: 125–138. Vansina, Jan. 1967. L’évolution du Royaume Rwanda des Origines à 1900. Brussels: Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre Mer. Wagner, Roy. 1986. Symbols That Stand for Themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. White, Leslie. 1959. The Evolution of Culture. New York: McGrawHill.

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METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM AND SOCIOLOGICAL REDUCTIONISM z

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Roger Just

Having for nearly a century lived a shadowy existence on the margins of mainstream ethnography, summoned forth only to play bit parts in some exemplary anecdote or illustrative vignette, over the last two decades the individual has emerged to take anthropological center stage. And not just the particular individual (the individual individual, so to speak)—the Nisa or the Tuhami (Crapanzano 1980; Shostak 1981)—but also the generic individual. Of course, the ethnographic foregrounding of individual individuals cannot be decoupled from a theoretical reconsideration of the generic individual, but it is the prominence granted the latter that marks a fairly decisive shift in current explanatory and interpretative paradigms (or at least rhetoric), so that nowadays it is commonplace to remind readers that the individual members of any society discussed are all “agents” actively engaged in “contesting,” “disputing,” “negotiating,” if not “creating” the social or cultural

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rules and norms to which they remain subject only in so far as those rules and norms may be incorporated into their own strategic pursuits. Thus, although I suspect that quite a few people were rather surprised to read in Rapport’s “Introduction” to British Subjects (2002) that “nothing might be found in human experience that could not be found in Britain” (2002: 8), the assertion was not merely a partisan appreciation of the rich variety of cultural forms that exist within Britain today—a variety, by the way, that the essays collected in this edited volume (including his own) admirably demonstrate. Rather, Rapport’s advocacy of an anthropology of Britain is based on a desire to shift the discipline toward what he terms a “post-cultural” (ibid.: 9) and “existential” (ibid.: 10) position in which “what is central to anthropological discovery is the human psyche and this is a universal” (ibid.: 8). Thus, “[a]ll of human life is here, inasmuch as social milieux in Britain could be said to contain all the potential of individual human creativity; in its capacities and its dispositions, the human psyche is a constant” (ibid.: 9). And citing Sartre to the effect that humans are “condemned to be free” (ibid.: 12), Rapport not only wants to put the individual psyche center stage, but also to dismiss all else as props: “[W]hile the forms of sociocultural life often precede and outlive individual users, they possess no life or agency of their own, no logic, consequence or impact beyond their implementation by particular individuals in particular situations and outside these individual usages and interpretations” (ibid.: 11). Of course the psychic unity of mankind has long been an anthropological tenet (or at least an act of faith), and there is a certain truism to methodological individualism: no people, no culture. Moreover, there has always been a tension in anthropology between its once-stated aims as the study of collective life and its (very successful)

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methodological reliance on engagement with a select but all-too-finite number of individuals. ‘Participant observation’—the intimate fieldwork encounter with actual people in actual situations in temporally and spatially confined circumstances—could always be seen to undermine the discipline’s pretensions toward explicit generalizations construed as ‘culture.’ But Rapport’s call for a “post-cultural” and “existential” anthropology is not just a restatement of accepted acts of faith or obvious truisms; nor is it concerned with purely methodological issues. It is a radical attempt to revisit an old theoretical question about the relationship between the individual and the collective and their respective roles in sociological explanation that has long haunted anthropology, but it comes at a time when that question has gained new prominence. That question was there from the beginning, and for Durkheim (1964) it was vital (for on it, he thought, hinged the very possibility of a social science). His answer was decisive: social behavior could not be understood as the mere aggregate of individual choice. But his answer involved both an awkward separation between the “psychological” and the “social” (a separation that he tried to pass off as merely methodological) and an extraordinary emphasis on the ontological priority of the latter (that was frankly metaphysical). In a sense, Boas (1940) and Kroeber (1952a, 1952b) followed suit— though American anthropology’s early elevation of ‘culture’ as a determining force might also be seen as an emergent property of its commitment to combat racial explanations of behavioral difference. And there, for some time, the problem rested. Anthropology was the (comparative) study of society or culture. But it continued to niggle, resulting, for example, in Firth’s (1964) somewhat scholastic distinction between ‘social organization’ and ‘social structure’ in the 1950s, and Barth’s (1966) ‘transactionalism’ in the 1960s. Indeed old problems never die;

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they just get reformulated. And by the mid-1980s, talk of the individual was receiving a new lease of life, for an array of considerations were coming to bear that cast fresh doubt on the legitimacy of anthropology’s concentration on the collective—considerations that were rather less philosophically precise than Durkheim’s, but rather more popularly appealing. To an extent they were political (or perhaps ‘moral’)—the ‘objectification of the other’— that is, the attempt to account for alien forms of life in terms of all-encompassing norms and rules (‘culture’)— was seen as indicative of the inequality of discursive power between observer and observed. Any restoration of parity required at the very least the admission of individual agency on the part of those whom anthropology studied. To an extent they were ‘representational,’ i.e., the belated (or simply naive) realization that the ethnographic reportage of events (writing) could not be equated with the existential immediacy of reality itself (fieldwork). And since that reality could be described (re-presented) from any number of points of view, the extreme, though not very logical, conclusion was sometimes drawn that social reality was at best a narrative imposition (Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1988). So, if all was discourse, the only remaining touchstone of reality was individual experience itself.1 For many, then, the pendulum swung, not so much because of a reconsideration of Durkheim’s (and others’) philosophical reflections, but because society and culture had come to be seen as suspect impositions. Individuals needed to be revealed as themselves. Such, roughly, is the context into which Rapport’s call for a “post-cultural” anthropology now falls, one that will no doubt give it a degree of acceptability; but is it in its own terms plausible? It is, of course, perfectly reasonable to ditch an anthropology that effaces individuals in the interests of all the more elegantly delineating the abstractions of society and

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culture. It is equally reasonable to ditch an anthropology that turns individuals into cultural (or social) automata in the service of abstractions that are also granted causal efficacy. Reductionism is the common charge: the X think, do, believe the following—as if they all think, do, and believe the same things, and as if they all have no choice but to do so.2 But having brought individuals center stage (along with their trousseau of strategies, choice, and agency), anthropology’s problem now becomes what to do with society and culture. One way out is to transmute our understanding of ‘culture’ itself from an objectively observable set of traits into a self-consciously selected set of political icons, i.e., we are collectively different (i.e., have a ‘culture’), but only because, as agents, we choose to be, and only in those respects that we so choose.3 Social conformity and cultural difference now become the handmaidens of individual strategic choice—but as Durkheim might argue, who (or what) chooses the available choices? Another way out is to neutralize culture, a ploy much favored by evolutionary psychology, i.e., it can be discounted since in the end it is all the same, a mere iteration of something programmed into the human psyche somewhere in the African savannahs—except now we really do have to read the individual as the universal individual, thus effecting a reductionism far in excess of anything ever inflicted by cultural determinism. A third way out—and it is the position adopted by Rapport—is to subordinate it, to constitute culture simply as the stage, the “sociocultural milieu,” on which the universal human psyche is free to fret and strut its stuff. It must be admitted that at first sight such a position has some kind of common sense appeal. Culture and society at least continue to exist as ‘milieux,’ but anthropology is free to concentrate on real, live human beings (the sort of people we have actually met), negotiating their way through what is simply the accumulated detritus of

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each others’ actions; free, as Rapport puts it, to elucidate “the psychic unity of humankind and the individual differentiation” (2002: 8). But a number of problems (again, old problems) intrude. Rapport insists that although “forms of sociocultural life,” “surface phenomena” as he designates them, “might represent a challenge to individual psychical practice …; in its capacities and dispositions the psyche can be said to exist independently of them” (ibid.: 9). But can so clean a separation really be made? It rather depends on what you mean by the psyche. If the assertion is that the human mind (the human brain?) has species-specific characteristics, or at least potentialities, that are probably culture-independent—that, for example, we all of us possess roughly the same cognitive apparatus, powers of reasoning, imaginative abilities, and surges of emotion—then yes.4 But that is the old act of faith we were all brought up on. Remember Lévi-Strauss (and he was a late-comer)? But if we consider not just our abilities to think, but what we think about; not just that we can imagine, but what we imagine; not just that we have hopes and fears, but what we hope for and are frightened of, then the ‘psyche’ (at best a term of art) is inextricable from its ‘sociocultural milieu.’ This does not deny individual agency, individual difference, individual calculation, negotiation, interpretation and all the rest—but it does mean that sociocultural milieux are part and parcel of the individual agent’s existential consciousness. To pretend otherwise is tantamount to inflicting a psychic lobotomy. Curiously, citing Bateson (1972)—yet another who gave serious thought to the relationship between the collective and the individual—Rapport does seem to cede that point. The identities of individuals, he states, “and those of the worlds they inhabit take shape, achieve significance and become themselves at the same time; here are ‘organism[s] plus environment[s],’ as Bateson put it, coming into being and maintaining themselves as one

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living thing: an ‘organism-in-its-environment’” (2002: 11). But how does one reconcile this stance with Rapport’s insistence that the human psyche exists independently of sociocultural milieux that are no more than lifeless “surface phenomena?” They are alive precisely by their instantiation in the “psyches” of individual agents (since we are what we know, what we think, what we feel, what we fear), which means, amongst other things, that the individual human psyche is neither universal nor constant except in its most stripped down form—except, that is to say, in its very capacities to apprehend, take on, and synthesize itself with its environment, i.e., its sociocultural milieu. Psychology, neurobiology, the brain sciences, may begin to reveal something about that process, but an ethnographically based postcultural anthropology is unlikely to, for as Rapport himself reminds us, we cannot enter into others (and to be frank, most of the time we cannot enter into ourselves). What we can ethnographically observe and enter into (what we take on every day of our daily lives) are sociocultural milieux, instantiated in the very deeds, acts, and words of individuals.5 By contrast, to dismiss this on the truism that human beings only apprehend, take on, and synthesize their sociocultural milieux as individuals (individual organisms?), and to commit ourselves instead to a study of “the psychic unity of humankind and the individual differentiation” (2002: 8), without, at the same time, being able to say much about either the neurobiological processes that constitute that “psychic unity” or the hidden internal states that distinguish one individual from another, seems to me to lead to an amazingly impoverished anthropology. Faute de mieux, we are reduced to reciting a mantra to the effect that the custom, the rite, the institution, the practice, the myth, the whatever is, for the individual, a site of contestation and negotiated meaning (in rather the same way

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as ‘functionalists’ so often ended up lamely repeating that the custom, the rite, the institution, the practice, the myth, or whatever else served to promote the maintenance of the social whole). At the same time, we reduce every bit of human creativity—from the Q’ran to even the notion of the ‘individual’ itself—to inert ‘context.’

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Notes 1. Here I cannot resist adding that if, as the argument went, we are all historically situated subjects (hence the impossibility of any objective stance), then, by the 1980s, the historical shift of anthropology’s primary locus to the United States did seem to involve the adoption of that nation’s own cultural fetishization of the individual, noted from de Tocqueville onwards, and elegantly put into comparative perspective by Dumont (1972). 2. A word of caution, however: quite how many anthropologists of, say, the 1960s really did subscribe to such views, even implicitly, could seriously be questioned—as it has been by Sahlins (1999). 3. See, for example, Linnekin’s (1992) brave but somewhat uneasy piece that offers both qualified endorsement and critique of this move. 4. I say no more than ‘probably’ because some form of sociocultural milieu is almost certainly necessary even for the development of such potentialities. 5. And as Geertz succinctly observed: “Culture is public because meaning is” (1973: 12).

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References Barth, Fredrik. 1966. Models of Social Organization. London: Royal Anthropological Institute. Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Paladin. Boas, Franz. 1940. Race, Language and Culture. New York: Free Press. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: TwentiethCentury Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1980. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Dumont, Louis. 1972. Homo Hierarchicus. London: Paladin. Durkheim, E. 1964 [1895]. The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: The Free Press. Firth, Raymond. 1964 [1954]. “Social Organization and Social Change.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 84, 1954. Reprinted in Essays on Social Organization and Values, ed. Raymond Firth. London: Athlone Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kroeber, Alfred L. 1952a [1917]. “The Superorganic.” American Anthropologist, 1917. Reprinted in The Nature of Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 1952b [1949]. “The Concept of Culture in Science.” Journal of General Education, 1949. Reprinted in The Nature of Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Linnekin, Jocelyn. 1992. “On the Theory and Politic of Cultural Construction in the Pacific.” Oceania 62, no. 4: 249–263. Rapport, Nigel, ed. 2002. British Subjects: An Anthropology of Britain. Oxford: Berg. Sahlins, Marshall. 1999. “Two or Three Things That I Know about Culture.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5, no. 3: 399–421. Shostak, Marjorie. 1981. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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REDUCTIONISM AND MISUNDERSTANDING HUMAN SOCIALITY z

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Thomas Ernst The central importance of contingency as a denial of reductionism in the sciences devoted to the understanding of human evolution, mentality, and social or cultural order strikes me as one of the most important and least understood principles of our intellectual strivings. — Stephen Jay Gould (2004: 225) The dissipation of energy by the regular laws of nature is by these very laws accompanied by more and more favorable to its reconcentration by chance. — Charles S. Peirce (cited in Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 303)

Part I: General Problems of Reductionism Reducing human character, characteristics, and behavior to biological conditions of people or specific categories of them has long been an aspect of science, and emerges from The Enlightenment. It is in some senses a part of an heroic attempt to find the cause and effect explanations

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of everything—to provide consistent explanation of everything from falling stones to the determinates of ‘intelligence’ and criminal minds. These explanations are based in materiality. Gould (1981) provides a good summary of much of this. In the 1970s, biological explanations of behavior resurged in popularity. For example, Ray Myers, who did long-term ethnographic research on prison guards and administration, especially at Bathurst Gaol and Oberon correctional institution in New South Wales, says that the period can be marked readily by the almost complete abandonment of regular psychological testing and the introduction of blood and urine testing as an aspect of the surveillance of inmates (personal communication). In the middle of the 1970s, after the earlier crude attempt by Eysenck and Jensen to explain differences in IQ scores by racial differences, sociobiology emerged and was widely discussed and hotly debated. The key works were Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) and the more strident Dawkins’s volume, The Selfish Gene (1976). The developments surrounding these works are well summarized in Bateson (2001); Dover (2001); Gould (2001); Rose (2001); Rose and Rose (2001). Sahlins (1977) is a serious and effectively argued response to the rise of sociobiology. The debates between sociobiologists and their critics petered out in the 1980s, leaving approaches both pro and con in curricula and research. What sociobiology did (unlike the race and intelligence theories) was to develop a view of a roughly universal human nature, with a single goal of successful genetic reproduction; the variations as well as the overwhelming similarities are directed by natural selection. Most of all, Wilson insistently claimed it was scientific: “His account of human nature, he claims exactly coincides with that classical objectivist stance of science as ‘the view from nowhere’ ” (Rose

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2001: 115). This, as has been pointed out, ran into increasing difficulty as the privileged nature of scientific knowledge became less comprehensively appealing. It is enmeshment in social relations and cultural understandings from which its perspectives proceed (see discussion in ibid.: 116ff.). Following a period of quiescence, the new emphasis of evolutionary psychology appeared. Its claims are again simple, and although it attempts to distance itself from sociobiology, it follows logically from it. The general perspective is that human nature was established by Darwinian selection after a long successful period of adaptation up through the Pleistocene. This gendered and established charter can be used to explain a variety of behaviors such as the greater likelihood that a stepfather or lover living with a child’s mother is more likely to abuse the child (Daly and Wilson 1998). As Hillary Rose points out, their genetic explanation of parental love runs into trouble when confronted with the lower levels of abuse against adopted children: “For where parenting intentionality of both adults has been carefully assessed, this social selection protects children even better than shared genes” (2001: 122). Finally, there is Wilson’s newest book, Consilience (1998), which is a plea for a vision of a unified science based theory of knowledge. The argument is elegantly taken apart in the final section of Gould’s posthumously published The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox (2004). He quotes Wilson’s most general characterization of consilience: The central idea of the consilience worldview is that all tangible phenomena from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics … The strategy

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[of reductionism] that works best in these enterprises is the construction of coherent cause-and-effect explanations across levels of organization. Thus the cell biologist looks inward and downward to ensembles of molecules, and the cognitive psychologist to patterns of aggregate nerve cell activity … No compelling reason has ever been offered why the same strategy should not work to unite the natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities. The difference between the two domains is the magnitude of the problem, not the principles needed for its solution. (Wilson 1998: 221–222, cited in Gould 2004: 193)

The problem is, of course, that the principles are not the same—even in the natural sciences. There are different ‘laws’ for sub-atomic particles and billiard balls. Most processes have complex and probabilistic qualities and there are contingencies that interrupt and are magnified through time in these processes, as the quotation from Peirce, writing about the second law of thermodynamics and entropy, at the head of this section indicates. Prigogine and Stengers go further and insist upon the importance of the cultural location of the sciences: “Today we believe that the epoch of certainties and absolute oppositions is over. Physicists [and indeed any scientists] have no privilege whatsoever to any kind of extraterritoriality. As scientists, they belong to their culture, to which, in turn, they make an essential contribution” (1984: 299). I now wish to move to the specific discipline of anthropology. I explore an example within that discipline of movement away from reductionisms that persisted (and persist) even in a thoroughgoing relativism.

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Part II: Cultural Formations in Anthropology The dogma of the part reflects the dogma of the whole. — Marshall D. Sahlins (1963: 44) Descartes’ rule ‘to trust only what is completely known and incapable of being doubted’ is, therefore, part of a method that is motivated and sustained more by a quest for certainty than a search for truth.

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— Martin C. Dillon (1988: 10)

The starting point of this section is consideration of some early work by Sahlins. It considers some changes in his thoughts about the Fijian family in Moala, where he conducted research. I choose this example as it marks a crucial point in his eventual development and defense of a radically non-reductionist approach to culture. In 1957, in a much-reprinted paper in the American Anthropologist, “Land Use and the Extended Family in Moala, Fiji,” Sahlins looks at families in two villages on Moala, and tries to explain why ‘traditional’ family form is represented at a much higher frequency in one village, despite other markers of modernization being relatively greater in that village. His explanation at that point resided in the appropriateness of the traditional extended family form for the organization of the work of exploiting diverse and widely scattered subsistence resources. The head of family’s senior wife allots the daily or more extended tasks drawing upon the authority of her position. The same is said to happen among the males who are organized by rank in terms of seniority in relation to the head of the household and behave in terms of a detailed etiquette, analogous to chiefly etiquette, indicating this.

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In 1962, in Sahlins’s monograph Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island, the picture begins to change. There is a “great complex of seniority etiquette which permeates and shapes interpersonal familial behavior” (for males; it is important to recall that seniority etiquette is much attenuated among females) (Sahlins 1962: 117). This mannered behavior is not exclusive to family life, however: “The seniority etiquette is not simply a domestic etiquette. It is rather the etiquette of seniority of descent and is appropriate in larger social contexts and between people of lower and higher rank generally” (ibid.: 116–117). It goes further. Ultimately, in terms of maintaining good order, the chief had less resort to force than did a household head: “[A]ctually he dared not [use force], for force was not his monopoly, and if he lived by the club he might then die by it” (ibid.: 118). It becomes obvious that the organization of male labor in Moala requires no more complex a set of etiquette than the organization of female labor. To understand the household, it is useful as Sahlins puts it in a critique of Murdock 1960, to avoid “this perspective, this looking from the inside out” and to consider that “[i]t may be more revealing to take the opposite tack, to look from the outside in” (1963: 44). His conclusion about Murdock’s general approach is that “This is fundamental with Murdock. Structure is the crystallization, the dogmatization, the social precipitate of individual action” (ibid.). Why recall these points from the anthropology of four decades ago about matters that became part of out ‘bread and butter’? The first reason is the simplest. The sociocultural is disappearing in a great deal of anthropology. Partly this is due to an emphasis on ‘agency’ which frequently returns us to Murdock’s individuals without even the statistics, rather than undertaking the seriously difficult tasks of exploring agency and freedom culturally. It is partly due to discharging our perceived responsibilities to

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people with whom we work by either focusing on ourselves or by celebrating particular individuals as coauthors or primary actors within an individually oriented “star system” of cultural biography. This is perhaps the greatest omission, for it removes agency, action, etc., from social context. The major reason more importantly marks a point where Sahlins, always a cultural anthropologist, recognizes a major problem with adaptive approaches to culture—they ‘explain’ culture in non-cultural terms. Where is the ‘outside’ of the different tack that Sahlins mentions in 1963? It is not an objective observer’s position, outside the sociocultural world of the subjects. It is looking from the subjects’ outside context in. So as well as bemoaning the disappearance of the sociocultural from cultural anthropology, Sahlins provides a more dramatic and thoroughgoing critique of reductionism. His perspective over the next forty years involves understanding human beings as cultural beings only. This position achieves an explicit expression in Sahlins’s volume Culture and Practical Reason (1976), written after a period of consideration of structuralist perspectives. By this point, he is developing a thoroughgoing opposition to any reduction out of the understanding of humans as cultural beings (see also Sahlins 1977). As Kapferer writes, Sahlins “is frequently critical of what amounts to the Bad Faith of those anthropologists who might carry the cultural flag but ultimately deny its import by explaining or understanding human activity through a reduction to the non-cultural properties of human beings” (1998: 1). He finds unacceptable the reduction of anything cultural to a specific expression of any universals from the biological through the economic to the sociological. An important aspect of this is Sahlins’s rendering such approaches as cultural themselves. Within the cultural,

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the cultural cannot be viewed from nowhere, to use Hillary Rose’s phrase about science (2001: 115). In Sahlins’s insistence on non-reductionist perspectives in the study of culture, there is a second important achievement. What distinguishes his work is that in his attempts to understand specific cultural formations in their own terms is the attempt to break away from Western-dominated philosophies and perspectives. In this way, he tries to remove the contradictions and oppositions that anthropology frequently sets up while not erasing difference (see particularly, Sahlins 1995). In doing this, Sahlins overcomes difficulties that sometimes “stifled the capacity of anthropology to open up the significance of other formations of cultural understanding and practice for the general enquiry into the nature of human being” (Kapferer 1998: 1–2). And that is the crux of a position that is appropriately critical of reductionist explanations in anthropology, be they ‘individualist,’ textual, psychological/psychoanalytic, materialist, etc. The individualist positions are particularly interesting, for anthropologists sometimes see individuals and individualism being ‘released’ by the homogenizing and culturally destructive advance of Capitalism. Of course they are not. They are part of perspective from within our ‘culture of Capitalism.’

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Summary … then my contact with the social in the finitude of my situation is revealed to me as the starting point of all truth, including that of science and, since we have some idea of truth, since we are inside truth and cannot get outside it, all that I can do is describe truth within the situation. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty (cited in Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 299)

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This article is organized around three points. All are opposed to reductionist explanations of human sociality, and seem appropriate for reductionism in the biological sciences as well. The first point is that reductionist models place their faith in the greater accuracy of the perspective shoring them up. • For example, biologists place faith in physics and chemistry, sociologists in ecological, psychological, or entified individualist explanations. At the base, physicists traffic in outcomes that are reversible in time. It is difficult to imagine this at this point as the basis of a unitary science that can explain what biology and anthropology want to know. These two latter disciplines deal in actions that are irreversible. There is an arrow of time. • The second is that they all require a consistency, relatedness, and absence of contingency which is simply not part of the worlds examined in the biological and human sciences. • The third is that explanations of human society, or indeed, physics and biology, are made from within human social worlds. They are situational.

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If we return to the end of Part I, we see what Prigogine and Stengers deny to science. A ‘science’ in whose name the biological and material reductionists surveyed in Part I are indeed ‘within their culture.’ It is misunderstanding this position within that that has limited the achievements (which are, to be sure, real) of scientific reductionism. Within its sociocultural milieu, reductionism has also given authority to what are primarily political and not ‘scientific’ statements in the forms sociobiology and studies linking ‘race’ and ‘intelligence.’ It diminishes the social (especially inequalities) to categorical physicality, e.g., race, gender, immutability of human behavior, etc. The practitioners often present themselves as heroic intellectuals struggling against establishment knowledge. This is despite the perennial recurrence of these perspectives in various guises for over one hundred and twenty years. I refer readers to the Web site www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/ taboo/toc_taboo.html for examples and references. The bête noire for most of the authors is Stephen Jay Gould. Dillon, in his discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, says that “all meanings, both those which are manifest in the flux of the perceptual world and those which are extracted from it and arrested in language, are subject to historical processes of becoming. This follows from the principle of contextual relevancy” (Dillon 1988: 78). Also, as Gould and others make clear, there is time, there is history, and there is complexity produced by contingency.

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References Bateson, Patrick. 2001. “Taking the Stink Out of Instinct.” Pp. 157–173 in Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology, ed. Hillary Rose and Steven Rose. London: Vintage. Daly, Martin, and Margot Wilson. 1998. The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dillon, M. C. 1988. Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dover, Gabriel. 2001. “Anti-Dawkins.” Pp. 47–66 in Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, ed. Hillary Rose and Steven Rose. London: Vintage. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton. ———. 2001. “More Things in Heaven and Earth.” Pp. 85–105 in Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, ed. Hillary Rose and Steven Rose. London: Vintage. ———. 2004. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox. London: Vintage. Kapferer, Bruce 1998. Sahlins and a Culture-Radical Anthropology: Sorcery, Consciousness, and the Historical Conjuncture. Speech for the retirement of Marshall D. Sahlins. University of Chicago. Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. 1984. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. London: Fontana Paperbacks. Rose, Hillary. 2001. “Colonising the Social Sciences?” Pp. 106–128 in Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, ed. Hillary Rose and Steven Rose. London: Vintage. Rose, Hillary, and Steven Rose, eds. 2001. Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology. London: Vintage. Sahlins, Marshall. 1957. “Land Use and Extended Family in Moala, Fiji.” American Anthropologist, New Series 59, no. 3: 449–462. ———. 1962. Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1963. “Remarks on Social Structure in Southeast Asia.” Journal of The Polynesian Society 72, no. 1: 39–50. ———. 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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.

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———. 1977. The Uses and Abuses of Biology. London: Tavistock. ———. 1995. How ‘Natives’ Think About Captain Cook, For Example. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, Edwin O. 1975. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. ———. 1998. Consilience: The United Knowledge. London: Little Brown.

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THEORIES

AND IDEOLOGIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY

z Jukka Siikala

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The Fate of Ethnography It has been claimed that anthropology is in a terminal decline. If so, according to my interpretation, part of this is self-generated. The intellectual suicide of the discipline is closely connected to the decline of serious ethnographic research. The classic backbone of the discipline has been called ‘salvage-ethnography.’ This critical concept implies that ethnography has interest only in the past or faraway places, and this kind of ethnography does not form the basis of the discipline’s current theoretical body. This kind of reductionism—reducing the distance between the anthropologist and the object—not only has led to the deletion of time and miles, but also has had the extreme result of focusing on individual experiences. With growing demands of reflectivity, self has become the object, and thus the empirical content of anthropology has been reduced to Western experiences of the world. Theoretically significant difference has been wiped out in the process. On the other hand, we witness a proliferation

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of ethnographies done by everybody else but anthropologists. In the following, I look at the recent anthropological practices that unintentionally promote the discipline’s own death and connect them to the shifts in the position of anthropological theory and its nature. In his classic essay on ideology and the anthropological scientific community, Dumont (1992) expressed his concerns about the state of anthropology. His essay is based on his observations and analysis of the discipline in the 1970s, but much of it is still relevant today. Dumont complains about the prevalence of transitory fashions rapidly succeeding each other and the way that this leads to deplorable discontinuity in the development of the discipline. He acknowledges the lack of consensus about the general framework of the discipline’s ultimate aims and program. Thus, anthropology is living in a permanent scientific revolution. Dumont attempts to explain this situation by referring to the ways in which the discipline is open to the ideology or ideologies of the surrounding society. According to the ultimate telos of various scientific orientations, he distinguishes three kinds of activities differently affected by the ideological surrounding. First, he finds specialized research activities in a defined domain of anthropology where one can find agreement about the problems to be solved. Second, the approaches adopted in these domains have competing and mutually incompatible modes of explanation that, despite the differences, can enter into dialogue on the basis of general scientific principles. From these two anthropological activities he distinguishes a third, which he characterizes as “approaches or would-be approaches, which,… in the guise of a specific anthropology, are in reality intent [on] subjecting anthropology to nonanthropological concerns” (Dumont 1992: 204). Dumont identifies these concerns as fundamentally opposed to anthropological principles because the ideology behind them is individualistic.

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In the 1970s, Dumont was still longing for a professional community that could achieve consensus about its aims and thus be able to resist external ideological inclinations and pressures. In the ensuing quarter of a century, the conditions of the production of scientific knowledge and the ways its dissemination is conditioned have transformed dramatically, and these transformations have had an effect on the nature of anthropological theorizing. Before discussing these changes, it is necessary, however, to look at the different types of anthropological theories. Noro (2001), a sociologist, has developed an illuminating classification for sociological theories that is relevant also for anthropology in general. The first type of theoretical discussions can be grouped as explanations of complex social phenomena. These are theories that are based on an analysis of empirical materials and can be called research theories. As empirical generalizations, they are open for empirical criticism. On the basis of research theories, a second type of theoretical formulation, known as general theory, can be constructed. The relationship of general theory to empirical material is not direct but mediated through research theories. Research normally operates on the basis of these theories. In addition to these two types of theoretical constructs, Noro stresses the importance of a third kind of theoretical discussion, which he calls Zeitdiagnose. According to Noro, the rise of Zeitdiagnose (for which no English concept has been established) is connected to the “transition from the ‘breakthrough to modernity’ within the modern epoch … into modernity. Modernity implicates increasingly greater changes in one’s experience and turns historical time into shorter and shorter ‘moments.’” Thus, the present moment, or, as Noro puts it, “the now-moment (Jetztzeit), becomes the focus on describing an epoch.” Hence, the Zeitgeistanalyse aims at conceptualizing the contempo-

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rary experience of the modern world for those who live in it and try to grasp the fleeting moment. If we look at the historical fate of anthropological theorizing by applying these distinctions of theoretical genres, we can find significant changes in the popularity and importance of analogical genres of anthropological theories through time. An excellent example of these conjunctures is provided by the fate of the Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology. For Lévi-Strauss in 1941, finding these reports in a secondhand bookshop was a revelation: “I can hardly describe my emotion at this find. That these sacrosanct volumes, representing most of our knowledge about the American Indians, could be found for sale alongside commonplace books was something I had never dreamed of” (1983: 50). Publishing this kind of research was the task of different scientific societies around the world. The Société Finno-Ugrienne, Polynesian Society, Borneo Research Council, and other similar societies produced ethnographic materials and research theories based in their classic series. These old volumes are still venerated today, but not because of their contents. Lévi-Strauss regarded them as essential research materials, but with escalating prices buyers today have a mere antiquarian interest in possessing them. Instead of being used for “reading, analysing and commenting” (ibid.: 51), they have become objects to collect.

New Role of Ethnography The changes that resulted in this deplorable situation are connected to the criticism of anthropology’s colonial nature and the political incorrectness of the othering inherent in the description of ‘natives’ (see, e.g., Kuper 1988). Besides a rising anthropological self-awareness, this development can be connected to two other trends. Put in the context of the aforementioned demands of modernity’s need for self-

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awareness, the criticism can be recontextualized. Anthropologists did a pretty bad job in the service of colonialism, as Goody (1995) has reminded us. Turning the anthropological gaze on oneself succeeded much better in its service to modernity’s need for an eternal analysis of Jetztzeit by criticizing the representer, not the representation. Difference was transformed into hierarchy—generating othering and labeled politically incorrect—and fieldwork at home became more and more popular as part of a self-reflective search for ‘the moment.’ The critical political program that demanded the repatriation of the discipline had a very strange bedfellow. With neoliberal research politics from Thatcher and Reagan onwards, the economic possibilities for extended fieldwork have been undermined since the 1980s. The radical criticism of professional tradition and conservative politics ultimately had the same aim, and both undermined the foundational practices of the discipline of anthropology. This erosion was not limited to anthropology, which is just a minor part of intellectual academic life institutionalized mainly in the universities. The whole university system has been transformed through the capitalization of knowledge that ominously has led to an amalgamation of interests among the previously separate institutions of state, industry, and universities (Etzkowitz 1998). The organizing principle of this unified interest is no longer the interest of the academic community in a traditional sense; rather, knowledge is ‘produced’ for its application. With the development of information technology, biotechnology, and genetics, the path from basic research to commercial application has shortened, and the quick applicability makes this process understandable. Learned traditions have been replaced by commercial applicability as the criterion for the quality of research, at the same time as the administration of academia has been transformed to imitate corporate models

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of commodity production with quality controls based on the new aims of the activity. The kind of anthropology that Lévi-Strauss found in the secondhand bookshops of New York produces very little material for commercial applications. Ethnographic descriptions and anthropological research theories are already applications—even in a double sense. They are applications of the conceptual apparatus of the author to describe the ways that the people under study apply their cultural systems in various situations. To commercialize these results of anthropological inquiry is difficult, and therefore a need has arisen to produce marketable products that have a demand. That demand has been provided by mainly two groups of customers with different interests, and these interests have had a profound impact on the kind of anthropology done today. The roots of both can be found in Britain and its dwindling anthropological community. Britain provided the stimulus for the emergence of cultural studies, which in its original form was still closely tied to social structures and paid attention to problems such as class. Transatlantic travel changed its nature considerably, cut it loose from its social anchoring (Davies 1995), and turned it into commercial activity. The dominance of cultural studies in publication markets, aided by the neoliberal funding policy, lured anthropologists into staying at home, crying, “Exotic no more” (MacClancy 2002). Studying at home meets the demand of a reading audience whose main interest is the Zeitdiagnose and thus the generalized identity of the modern individual and the nature of the moment. When publishers state that they do not publish research anymore, but only books, they define ‘book’ as a commodity. As cultural studies has taught us, modern individuals define and express their individuality through consumption and thus commodities. Consumers expect to find in the commodity their own self, not the self of somebody else. Thus, anthropology at home turns into

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anthropology of familiarity, the material of which is all already known, and the only new in it is its presentation. American anthropology has another version of the compulsions with the experiences of the contemporaries in its infatuation with identity politics. In a multicultural society, the differential experiences of various groups find their own image in the anthropologies of this and that group produced by their own. Thus, anthropology has been turned into one version of the media products wherein people have to find their own voice and, thus, find themselves. As a result, anthropology is grouped with other disciplines (e.g., sociology, cultural studies) that do ethnographic research in an attempt to represent society to itself. The interest in the literary nature of anthropology is very much understandable on the basis of this. If the only novelty in ethnographic description is the way it is said, attention is naturally drawn to the modes of depiction rather than the contents.

Anthropology as Social Engineering In a commodified world, the identity-audiences determine to a large extent the policies of the major publishers. Besides this consumer demand there exists, however, another structurally different audience for anthropological research. Application of anthropological insights into the problems of development has been pushed forward, and not only by the representatives of the discipline (Mars 2004); it has also be looked for by the international institutions, corporations, and organizations that are the main players in the development business. If in the ‘anthropology at home’ genre we can find a strange conflation of reading audience’s interests and ethnography’s contents, the conflation is even more dramatic in the anthropological analysis of development.

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One of the main projects of classic anthropology was to find new questions on the basis of exploration. Of course, this project was connected to the expansion of the West to unknown parts of the world. The expansion has been completed, and the result is the present all-encompassing global economic system. Our universe does not expand any more, and finding new questions is more and more intellectually challenging. The fate of applied anthropology projects has therefore been to accept the questions formulated elsewhere. In this, anthropology is again not alone. The intellectual development in the social sciences after the 1980s has been described as “a process … which can now be fully recognized as an almost total breakdown of social critique” (Wagner 1999: 349). The loss of critical registers is connected to the way in which the main projects of the social sciences have in fact been defined by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other organizations of the corporate world (Boltanski and Chiapello 2003). How the definition of questions determines the answers is apparent in the different answers given to the questions of development. The World Bank orchestrated structural adjustment programs and advocated reducing public expenditure, privatizing state-owned enterprises, contracting out government services, abolishing subsidies, subjecting civil servants to corporate mechanisms and market forces, and promoting transparency of local governments to make them accountable for local communities. The countertheories of development advocate people-centered development, local-level social action based on community empowerment, and participation involving the poor and excluded—and women. This requires decentralization and devolution of government and the promotion of selfgenerated grassroots development (Take care of yourself!) (Schoeffel 2003). The answers and the actual social consequences of the programs are identical—despite the claims of contrary intentions. The “New Leviathan” proposed by

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Kapferer (2002) is able to incorporate into a unified field of effects even conflicting intentions through defining the conditions of questioning. Universal applicability of these programs means that differences and new options have been wiped out; thus, the actual basis of anthropology—cultural difference—has been eliminated.

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Ultimate Reductionism The university system, the main locus of production of anthropological knowledge, has become, by the reintegration of institution’s, government’s, and corporation’s interests, a research and development institution that is supposed to provide answers instead of questions (Readings 1999: 173–174). This has eliminated radical difference from anthropological inquiry, and some anthropologists in turn have transformed vice into an imagined virtue and provided these answers, either for identity-audiences at home or social engineers in service of development or well-fare state. In Dumont’s terms, this has led to an extreme form of socio-centricism, focusing on individuals and the assumed universalism of the values of our own culture (Dumont 1992: 207). From this fact derives the ‘mother of all reductionisms’ and its two sides. Anthropological analysis tends to move in the area of “democratic residue” (Chomsky 1993), wherein Zeitgeist issues, such as individual agency, strategy, identityconstruction, etc., are possible, or, on the other hand, in the realm of externally defined questions with its predetermined answers. The ultimate result is a complete denial of anthropology’s own specificity in denying the particularity of our own culture and society and supposing that our values have a universal validity.

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References Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. 2003. “Die Arbeit der Kritik und der Normative Wandel.” Pp. 58–80 in Norm der Amnweichung, ed. Mario von Osten. Zurich: Voldmeer. Chomsky, Noam. 1993. The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many. Tucson: Odonian Press. Davies, Ioan. 1995. Cultural Studies and Beyond: Fragments of an Empire. London and New York: Routledge. Dumont, Louis. 1992. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Etzkowitz, Henry. 1998. “Innovation in Innovation: The Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations.” Social Science Information 42, no. 3: 293–337. Goody, Jack. 1995. The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918–1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 2002. “The New Leviathan and the Crisis of Criticism in the Social Sciences.” Social Analysis 46, no. 1: 148–152. Kuper, Adam. 1988. The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion. London and New York: Routledge. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1983. Structural Anthropology, Volume 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacClancy, Jeremy, ed. 2002. Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mars, Gerald. 2004. “Why We Must Apply Anthropology.” Anthropology Today 20, no. 1: 1–2. Noro, Arto. 2001. “ ‘Zeitdiagnose’ as the Third Genre of Sociological Theory.” Paper presented at European Sociological Association Conference. Helsinki, 28 August. Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Schoeffel, Penelope. 2003. “Small Is Not Beautiful: Central Government and Service Delivery in the Pacific.” Discussion paper in State, Society and Governance in Melanesia. Australian National University, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Canberra. Wagner, Peter. 1999. “After Justification: Repertoires of Evaluation and the Sociology of Modernity.” European Journal of Social Theory 2, no. 3: 341–357.

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DEATH OF THE INDIAN SOCIAL z Rohan Bastin

Louis Dumont has a lot to answer for.

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— Declan Quigley1

The figure of Dumont continues to loom large in the anthropology of South Asia, notwithstanding the fact that arguably the last thing he published on India was the preface to the 1980 edition of his masterpiece Homo Hierarchicus.2 Yet what Dumont shows in that preface is that he has loomed large while and perhaps because other anthropologists have pointed accusatory fingers at him, especially those from Britain and within the tradition of British social anthropology and social science. So what was it that so ruffled the feathers of the British bulldog? Was it Dumont’s attack on the atomistic individualism of British social theory? Was it that he appeared to reduce every aspect of Indian caste to the structural dyad of pure and impure? Was it his argument (more fully developed in Dumont 1977) that the ideological notion of the economic as a distinct social category is the product of a historical juncture, and that historical materialist or Marxian analysis is as much an ideology as it is a theory

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of ideology? Or was it simply Dumont’s insistence that India is seen in its own terms, and not from the (ideological) position that stressed the fundamental inequalities and injustices of the Indian social system as something in need of change? Was Dumont, in short, a conservative apologist for caste writing in an era in which the social was regarded as something that could be changed? One of Dumont’s strongest critics has been the Indian anthropologist, André Béteille, whose extensive and important writings have dealt specifically with social inequality in contemporary India.3 Many years ago, Béteille generously gave me his time and argued that, in his view, Dumont could not confront the shocking immediacy of contemporary India and so was driven into a romanticized construction in which the fundamental value of holism is developed as a means of glorifying an Indian past. Modern India, what Béteille himself writes about, can thus be ignored as merely grubby colonially corrupted modernity. Béteille rejects such a view as conservative and flawed because it ultimately cannot explain the origins of such modernity. Béteille also recounted Richard Gombrich’s story of how the philosopher, Sir Karl Popper, when he looked at his son-in-law’s copy of Homo Hierarchicus, returned it unfinished declaring Dumont to be a fascist! When one considers the extent to which Dumont was influenced by Popper’s philosophical bête noire Hegel, the reaction begins to make sense. Stern stuff! A romantic, a fascist, and someone Current Anthropology is willing to describe as having “a lot to answer for” (Quigley 1996: 289). One imagines that when eventually the discipline of anthropology formally establishes its House Committee on un-anthropological activities (if it has not already) that Dumont will be part of some ‘Paris 10.’ However, what exactly is Dumont’s misdemeanor and in what ways does the new critique of Dumont reflect a retreat of the social? What I argue here

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is that Dumont’s project of an anthropological comparison of historical forms of social value, a project framed within modernist ideals (Madan 2001), comes under a different kind of attack from contemporary anthropologists when compared to the anthropologists critical of Dumont in the 1960s and 1970s (like Béteille). Earlier arguments pit hierarchy against stratification and stress empirical evidence over the history of ideas. In contrast, current discourse distances itself from a high modernism that pursues the comparison of ideal forms of social value. While postmodern critique also argues for the empirical, it valorizes current global forms of ideology and practice as it rejects the concept of social value as the exploration of alternative modes of being and their formation, which was at the heart of Dumont’s scholarly project. I address the contemporary attacks on Dumont through Inden’s Imagining India (1990) in which Dumont is criticized for producing a totalized account of Indian caste because, in Dumont, we find a combination of Hegelian absolutism and a Durkheimian glorification of the social whole. I must emphasize that Inden is not restricted to an attack on Dumont and indeed in several places makes very similar points to Dumont’s. For example, Inden’s central concern with how (largely British) scholarship on India expressed and validated a mechanistic social theory is precisely the gauntlet Dumont threw down in Homo Hierarchicus.4 Inden’s point is that such social theory was well suited to the governance of India (and Britain) through which the imperial order was consolidated. In the spirit of Said’s Orientalism (1978), Inden describes how India was defined in a condition of alterity as the only ground of difference against which the civilizing center defined itself. Western scholarship on India is strongly marked by such an alterity grounded in rational self-celebration, and Inden explores this through a detailed scholarship of different historians, Indologists,

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philosophers, and social scientists. He singles out both John Stuart Mill and Hegel as major influences in the nineteenth century, Herbert Risley, Max Weber and Louis Dumont in the twentieth. Critical to the social theories developed or assumed by all of them was an image of a total social order, either as an atomistic mechanism for the British empiricists or as an organic unity for the rationalizing idealists. The dominant characteristic of this order was caste: The representations of India as a civilization dominated by caste are legion. Commentative texts that portray caste as suffering from the distortions of condensation and displacement abound, never mind the explanatory accounts which claim to reveal the origin of caste. Indian society is over determined by caste, proliferating separate castes and subcastes by the hundred and thousand for no good reason, while at the same time becoming more rigid and impermeable. Caste is, furthermore, displaced in this discourse on to every area of Indian life: it is associated with race and occupation, religion and status, land control, and psychic security, with birth and death, marriage and education. Indian thoughts and actions are separated from each other; there are always discrepancies between caste rules and actual behavior. (Inden 1990: 82–83)5

Inden argues that the governmental motivation for reducing the characterization of Indian society to caste stems from a basic orientation to a notion of Indian society. Such an orientation itself stems from a theory of ‘civil society’: a holistic notion that something called ‘society’ exists, and above all exists in relation to the state. Concepts of ‘culture’ tend to follow upon such concepts as ‘society,’ and knowledge of ‘culture’ tends to contribute to the overall process of an essentializing and totalizing reification of the social. This has been the fundamental error involved in “imagining India,” but it is

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clearly part of a broader error of modernist social theory that becomes particularly problematic when applied to non-Western ‘society.’ Following the philosopher, R. G. Collingwood, Inden argues instead for the depiction of India as a polity in which caste relations are present, but neither necessarily fixed, determinant nor the definitive feature. The social world is in a condition of flux and interpenetration between shifting conditions of rule and their articulation of individuals and groups (Inden 1990: 28). Inden thus argues against the assumption of the existence of ‘civil society’ in India; this notion of civil society being a metropolitan state category. The idea of polity, on the other hand, seeks to avoid such a separation as state and civil society. Caste becomes here not the pillar of society, but a potent expression of citizenship that shifts in the changing historical circumstances of the complex polity. In that sense there is no caste system as a pan-Indian phenomenon and no pristine and authentic caste order that best approximates to the ideal caste system.6 By developing upon Collingwood’s distinction between society and polity, Inden hopes to present a more dynamic view of India where not only change and transformation are constant (rather than having been simply brought about in colonialism or grubby modernity), but also India is rendered as more than a simplistic representation of systemic alterity by which the West can (as simplistically) imagine and celebrate itself. Inden’s critique is valuable. His rejection of simplistic totalization and the search for social essences recognizes India as worlds of possibility and not simply as a mirror of a Western metropolitan imaginary. The rejection singles out long-recognized flaws in the anthropology of India, such as the emphasis on the village and the conflation of the village with the society, the concomitant failure to understand urban formations when urbanization has a very long history on the sub-continent, the associated

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neglect of cash economies in preference for ‘shares in the harvest’ and the failure to understand inter-caste relations as not somehow expressions of relations of parts within a unified whole. However, Inden goes beyond the longstanding empirical recognition of these and other flaws (of which the work of Fuller, Parish and Quigley is representative) by criticizing the intellectual foundations of the orientation to the total social order. Thus he proposes that rather than see a single network that is Indian society, we recognize complex and shifting arrangements of social relations. Some of these are grounded in caste, but not all and some are grounded in localized caste orders that are predicated as such, but not all. This opens the way to understanding certain caste orders as independent of but co-existent with other caste orders. Closely related to this, we can also rethink the different articulations of more peripheral groups in localized caste orders and kingdoms, such as the role of traders or the role of tribal populations or the role of religious minorities. There is no longer a sense of a requirement to forge a single system in which every group is defined in relation to a whole, or groups articulated in broader social networks are required to profess the same general religion as the Brahmins. Here I am thinking of the Syrian Christians in Kerala, but also of other non-Hindu religions including Jainism, Islam, and Roman Catholicism. Trade and traders thus receive greater acknowledgment than they do in the conventional social scientific account, and with that, the history of the Indian economy is treated less as a history of ill-developed or proto-cash economies vis-à-vis some Occidental yardstick. In a closely related sense, tribal populations become looked upon not as primitive survivals from pre-state formation, and as groups that could survive because the subsequent state formations were weak, but as peripheral peoples engaged in shifting forms of articulation with civilized communities.

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A vision of a total social order colors and obscures the representation of India, but for Inden no more so than in the work of the followers of Hegel who emphasize most a totalizing and reductionist account. Weber is one of these, but the approach is most clearly evident in the work of Dumont, who brings to his Hegelian approach a Durkheimian glorification of the social whole and of the nature of personal freedom available through this social whole (Inden 1990: 78, 152–154). Notwithstanding Dumont’s critique of the conventional Western sociology of caste as wrongly grounded in concepts of the atomized individual and of ranked social units as autonomous parts within the whole, and notwithstanding his subsequent work on the history of Western ideology (which Inden does not address), Inden argues that Dumont failed to identify the proper subject of critique as the Western pursuit of totalization. Put simply, and using Inden’s figures of Mill and Hegel as representative of the two modes of totalization, one could say that Dumont attacks the empiricist Millsian, but simply from the perspective of the idealist Hegelian. Thus, Dumont was able to retain a totalizing perspective; a perspective wherein totalization is further marked by its alterity vis-à-vis the atomized West. The Indian caste system’s ideological template of ritual purity, holism, and ranked difference in, and only in, the context of the whole are the critical grounds for such a totalization in alterity. For Inden, however, such totalization is not true to the Indian situation, its history, especially its colonial history, and particularly its variations. Echoing the shrill cry of other critiques of Dumont, Inden questions Dumont’s analysis as, at best, a partial truth. He criticizes the historical specificity of the material Dumont used to depict the ideology of caste, but, I reiterate, he does so through deconstructing the intellectual position within which Dumont situates his analysis rather than applying the conventional critique via highly localized village or micro-regional analysis.

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A further line of Inden’s critique supports a more recent series of attacks on Dumont other than the empiricist critiques dating from the 1960s. Derived largely from postcolonial historiography, several works argue that Dumont’s depiction of caste resonates with a Brahmincentric view that became dominant in the circumstances of colonial bureaucracy that stressed a unitary system with the Brahmins at the apex (Breckenridge and van der Veer 1993; Dirks 2001; Raheja 1989). The Brahminic view dovetailed neatly with an Hegelian stress on totalization and devalued the place of the Brahmins’ earlier patronage—Indian kingship—leaving India vis-à-vis the West represented with a history of weak or non-existent state formations, or in other accounts, with a form of despotic rule in which the state and civil society stood completely separate; the former giving no purpose or direction to the latter. For example, the concept of the Asiatic mode of production and/or Oriental despotism can be seen as developing on this fundamentally Hegelian point; a point that ties neatly with dominant perspectives on India’s traditional cash economy as well as on tribal populations as survivals due to weak states. Such a perspective was also fed by a nineteenth-century anthropological focus on tribal populations forming the basis of the ethnographic corpus. The supposed aboriginality of tribal populations and the subsequent speculations concerning the tribe-caste continuum inform subsequent scholarship as well as supposedly colonialist/orientalist vestiges such as the Anthropological Survey of India, which becomes as ironically anachronistic as a brand new 1950s Royal Enfield motorcycle. In relation to Dumont, whose own critique of tribalism in respect to the Pramalai Kallar (1986b) is ignored, the historical critique of caste as a colonial construct basically declares that Dumont and the colonial administrators whose surveys formed the basis of the theorizing were sold a pup by a bunch of Brahmins.

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The critique of Dumont is thus a critique of the modernist project of anthropology and in that regard it is a critique of modernism in general. This is demonstrated in one small section where Inden barely contains his contempt for the Chicago school of comparative religion and its links to Jungian theory. For a “retailer of the sacred” (Inden 1990: 122 fn. 36) like Eliade (succeeded in that role by Doniger), India is imagined through the same Hegelian totalizing view of rational self-celebration now tied to a Kantian idea of knowledge (as self-knowledge) and not, as Dumont does, to a Durkheimian attention to the social. This other modernist marriage generates a form of scholarship on Indian religion and spirituality rather than caste that nevertheless obeys the same erroneous logic of totalization and alterity. Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Stella Kramrisch, Heinrich Zimmer, and especially Joseph Campbell7 are depicted as neo-Kantians who argue for self-renewal through identification with the unity of a mythical corpus straddling East and West, but explicit in the East while being forced underground (into the often repressed unconscious) in the West (ibid.: 80). Although Inden does not make this comparison, one can say that, in a very similar manner to Dumont’s theory of hierarchy (non-modern) versus egalitarianism (modern), in which the egalitarian individualist social formation is the suppression of hierarchical holism, the neo-Kantians regarded the mythos explicit in India as the suppressed mythos in the West, suppressed that is by logos yet to realize the grander human project of individuation. India thus provides the seeker with a window to the soul—with a means of recovery of a lost holism (the self). However, the India in question is that same India of alterity created by the West: a representation and not, therefore, the India of numerous possibilities. Modernist philosophers and historians of religion such as the members of the Eranos Circle are thus associated with Orientalist scholarship

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pursuing false totalizations and essentialist reductions.8 Inden declares that thinkers such as these provide modern Western individuals with “exotic anti-commodities” (Inden 1990: 124) that can provide momentary escape from so-called materialism, and, thereby, vicarious justification for such materialism through the “Tibetan sculpture on the coffee table” (ibid.: 124). What I have described, then, is a critical juncture in South Asian scholarship where the highly influential figure of Dumont, whose work has been routinely attacked over the years, receives an apparent coup de grace from Inden through a postmodern and postcolonial interrogation of Dumont’s intellectual roots. Imagining India is thus a very important book that does more than deconstruct social scientific views of totalization, but also offers through Collingwood’s idea of the polity an alternative approach to totalization. In this respect, I disagree with one of Inden’s critics, Milner (1994: 12–14) who argues that Inden’s approach is only negative. Inden is forcing us to rethink our scholarship, not necessarily to abandon it. However, Milner also has a point. The Dumontian project remains important in contemporary India just as much as in social science. Concepts like Indian society, civil society, and the state, are extremely important to many Indians (and others) and cannot be dismissed via a flick of the postmodern wrist. Moreover, one can also ask how these alternative concepts of polity and citizenship, when applied to the contemporary Indian social order, seek to position India in a postmodern global order of difference and hybridity. Where the mechanistic totalization described by Inden represents the zeitgeist of the modern nation-state formed in the conditions of colonial rule, does the pluralistic fluidity he seeks to offer as an alternative not also reflect a contemporary situation? Put another way, is Inden’s ‘polity’ a critique of previous social theory as somehow wrong, or

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actually proof that all our attempts to theorize only ever reveal our thoroughgoing and indeed inescapable embeddedness in current situations (what I take to be one of Dumont’s great insights)? For the totalizing theory Inden associates with Dumont and rejects was, it appears, held by at least some of the protagonists of the system—the Brahmins. Moreover, it remains a critically important ideology in the post-independent nation-state that struggles less and less with the problem of communalism as it favors more and more an imagined India comprised solely of Hindus, both sedentary and mobile along the striations of global capital. It may not have been an accurate social account, but it was not wrong. And just as it was an account favored by certain segments of the colonial order, both European and indigenous, one can ask whose view is it that the situation was/is actually more fluid? Is it not interesting that such a view, which fits so neatly with a contemporary postmodern perspective, also fits very neatly with the advocates of global ‘scapes’ such as ‘ethnoscapes’ (Appadurai 1996)? Consider, for example, the much-vaunted condition of mimetic hybridity celebrated by Bhabha (1994) as an aspect of colonial resistance or even more weakly as an ironic simulation of times past (Breckenridge and van der Veer 1993: 10). Is it not striking that such an account serves to celebrate the authenticity of the emerging Indian transnational bourgeoisie whose interests in the Indian ‘polity’ dovetail with the interests of ‘Empire’ as they seek to deny those far from tired categories of capitalist practice like class and hegemony? Here we can take a great lead from Inden’s work and turn its criticism back upon itself, not in order to dismiss it or to declare in the manner of an Inquisitor that Inden “has a lot to answer for.” Rather, we can use this approach to agree that we are, as scientists, “hemmed in by history” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 109), and thus we are,

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through the uniqueness of our moment, as capable as anyone of arriving at a sense of truth if and only if we interrogate that moment as the source of our truth as well as interrogating our ‘truths’ as symptomatic of our moment. So when we identify a growing discourse on the death of the social, we should not ask who is right and who is wrong and who should be condemned, but what does this say about our current situation? Here, Dumont’s project of exploring in a comparative way the nature of social value should be acknowledged for its tremendous influence, including on the work of Inden and others. The connection between this project and structures of dominance, both colonial and postcolonial, must be explored, but not at the expense of somehow imagining that our present moment, values and scholarship are immune from the new world order.

Notes 1. Quigley’s provocative opener to his review, published in Current Anthropology (1998), of Fuller’s Caste Today and Parish’s Hierarchy and Its Discontents. 2. One could also say that Dumont continued to write on India right through to his final work on German Idealism (1994) because he had a clearly worked out research agenda to explore the historical and philosophical roots of modernity of which the specifically Indian works Homo Hierarchicus (1980) and Affinity as a Value (1983) were a part. In these terms, it is extremely important to consider Dumont’s non-Indian works, especially From Mandeville to Marx (1977) and Essays on Individualism (1986a). 3. See, for example, Béteille (1992). 4. The trope of the gauntlet comes from Douglas’s preface to the 1970 Palladin edition of Homo Hierarchicus republished in Douglas (1975).

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5. See also Breckenridge and van der Veer (1993) who attribute these representations to Orientalist views of some sort; also Appadurai (1996) and Dirks (2001). The value of Inden’s account is that he unpacks this ‘Orientalist’ label, rather than assumes its automatic critique via an a priori power-knowledge functionalism. 6. The caste system/caste order distinction is Dumont’s. He treated the former as the ideological template and the latter as the actual examples of lived realities of caste society. Critically, for Dumont, there was tremendous slippage between system and order with the former being very much the ideological abstraction or imaginary institution. Unfortunately, many of Dumont’s critics, especially within the British empirical tradition, have missed this point. 7. Here Inden is hoisted by his own petard because he cites examples of Campbell’s work in order to condemn everyone he associates with Jung and Eliade. The serious scholars on Indian religion like Zimmer and Kramrisch are overlooked, leaving Campbell playing a role not dissimilar to what Inden, Dirks, and others claim the Brahmins played under the British: falsely representing their own view as the only view. I have no problem with the critique of Campbell, but it does not extend to Zimmer, Kramrish, and Doniger. 8. The Eranos Circle of scholars of comparative religion formed around Jung in 1933 under the patronage of Olga FroebeKapteyn. One could cite, for example, Jung’s declaration in his inaugural address to the first Eranos Circle meeting that only “the Orient has achieved completion: the West is a concatenation of inadequacies” (cited by Campbell 1980: xi).

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References Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Modernity. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Béteille, André. 1992. Society and Politics in India: Essays in a Comparative Perspective. London: Athlone Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Breckenridge, Carol, and Peter van der Veer. 1993. “Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament.” Pp. 1–22 in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press. Campbell, Joseph. 1980. “Editor’s Foreword.” P. xi in Man and Transformation Papers of the Eranos Yearbooks. Volume 5, Bollingen Series XXX. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dirks, Nicholas. 2001. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1975. Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Dumont, Louis. 1977. From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1980 [1966]. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1983. Affinity as a Value: Marriage Alliance in South India with Comparative Essays on Australia. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1986a. Essays on Individualism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1986b. A South Indian Sub-Caste: Social Organization and Religion of the Pramalai Kallar. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1994. German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Inden, Ronald. 1990. Imagining India. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Madan, T. N. 2001. “The Comparison of Civilizations: Louis Dumont on India and the West.” International Sociology 16, no. 3: 474–487.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. “The Philosopher and Sociology.” Pp. 98–113 in Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard M. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Milner, Murray. 1994. Status and Sacredness: A General Theory of Status Relations and an Analysis of Indian Culture. Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quigley, Declan. 1998. “The Hierarchy Trap.” [A review of C. J. Fuller (ed.), Caste Today, and Steve Parish, Hierarchy and Its Discontents.] Current Anthropology 39, no. 2: 289–291. Raheja, Gloria Goodwin. 1988. “India: Caste, Kingship, and Dominance Reconsidered.” Annual Review of Anthropology 17: 497–522. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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WHEN NOTHING STANDS OUTSIDE THE SELF z

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André Iteanu

In anthropology, as well as in the other disciplines that constitute social science, it becomes increasingly clear that the notions of society and of the social, such as developed by the inventors of sociology, are gradually marginalized or, if I can use a term drawn from psychology, repressed. Consequently, the space that formerly constituted a fertile object of research has been fragmented. This situation is worrying, especially for the survival of an independent social analysis and critique. If the notion of sociality is no longer acceptable, then as Derrida puts it: “Each time, no matter how faithful one wants to be, one betrays the singularity of the other one addressed” (2004: 12).1 Then, finally, as the other has become to a large extend unreachable, each time one considers a social question, the next minute, it falls into pieces and returns to dust like an “uneducable ghost who has never learned to live” (ibid.). If I earlier used the term ‘repressed’ to describe what happens to the notion of society, it is because the movement that criticizes it does not simply rest on scientific grounds but constitutes above all a moral injunction. In

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its view, the notion of society is not only ‘objectively’ wrong, but it reveals as well the unacceptable moral posture of those who use it. To dismantle it thus becomes a radical act against all forms of colonialism and hegemonies. This specific form of radicalism, whose aim, by now, has grown into deconstructing any sort of sociality, invokes, for me, a scene of Buñuel’s (1974) film, The Phantom of Liberty, where in a fancy bourgeois home, the characters are shown chatting amiably, sitting on toilet bowls around a dinner table. Suddenly, one of the guests stands up, rushes to the bathroom, locks the door, and hastily starts eating. In this sequence, as in the rest of the film, Buñuel denounces the relativity and bourgeois ridicule of all social norms: it is just as ridiculous to eat at a table as to sit on toilet bowls. Socially constructed rules and distinctions are all equally arbitrary and politically constraining. What really matters figures somewhere else, in the individual creative act. In France, these ideas have had a wide audience among the intellectuals of the ‘May 68 generation,’ for whom Louis Buñuel was a crucial reference, and this generation is partially responsible for the situation in social science that I described above. It is of course daring for me to suppose that French intellectuals had such a global influence. However, almost everyone nowadays quotes Bourdieu, Foucault, and Derrida as main sources of inspiration. And is not this French-inspired deconstruction the keyword of all these discourses? The intellectual genealogy that I invoke here is not only my construction, as Derrida himself acknowledges his position in relation to the May 68 generation: I use this word [generation] somewhat loosely. One can be the ‘anachronic’ contemporary of a ‘generation,’ past or to come. To be faithful to those who are associated to my generation, to be the keeper of a differentiated, but

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common, heritage, has a twofold meaning: firstly, it means to hold on to shared requirements, from Lacan to Althusser, through Levinas, Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze, Blanchot, Lyotard, Sarah Kofman, etc.; not naming so many intellectuals, writers, poets philosophers, fortunately still alive, whose heir I am as well, and so many people abroad, sometimes even closer. (2004: 12)

The thinkers of the May 1968 movement, to whom Derrida refers here as his inspiration and to which he belonged, were in search of some form of liberté that could remain compatible with the ideal of égalité. This quest, of course, was not new, but their situation was original in that they attempted to achieve their goal while maintaining distance from the old Christian and Marxist authoritative ‘societal’ ideologies, which, at that point, they had already rejected. From the shattered image of these ideologies, they retained a ‘revolutionary’ nostalgia and an inflexible atheism, illustrated, for example, by Derrida, when he says: “If I had invented my form of writing, I would have done it as an endless revolution” (2004: 12). For some of them, these two dimensions eventually combined into an actual suspicion for anything that, like a ‘society,’ could be considered as encompassing the individual. It would be fascinating to construe a history of ideas to grasp the movements that brought, in a specific historical context, these two ‘requirements’ to combine into a devaluation of the notion of society. This could be done along the lines that Dumont traced to deal with the German ideology, because from a comparative anthropological perspective, the May 68 situation is closer than one would imagine to that of post–French Revolution Germany (Dumont 1994). As Dumont showed, the rise of individualism in Germany from the eighteenth century onward was a reaction of the

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German ideology to the philosophy of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. This rise, Dumont argued, led to an intensification of its contrary, the holism that triggered World War II. To put it too simply, confronted by the success of the French Revolution, the Germans had to find their own way to appropriate the French reformulation of individualism. Considering the historical context, their ambition to outdo the French brought them into a dynamic of intensification. From a comparative point of view, Dumont saw this movement as an acculturation of the German ideology by the French one. In my view, the May 68 movement was as well a form of acculturation of a French ideology by an American one. France, the former intellectually and politically dominant power, was now obviously overtaken by the United States. Its intellectuals then tried to devise a new ideology that would surpass the American one. but on their own terms. This movement took the form of an intensification of the French secular individualism. On the French side, this attempt was coeval with the beginning of a very uneasy relationship with America. No more kisses from the French girls for American soldiers; in 1966 de Gaulle decided to disengage France from the military branch of OTAN. The May 68 movement emerged two years later. It closely followed the American protests against the Vietnam War, which later metamorphosed into the hippie neo-religious movement. Although they kept an eye on their American ‘elder brother,’ those who started the May 68 movement in France oriented it as a ‘revolutionary’ movement that later turned into the social critique movement of which Derrida claims to be the heir (see supra). As in Tocqueville’s comparison (1863), atheist France was again contrasting with religious America. The gap between the French and the American 1960s movements results from the fact that there is always an amount of misunderstanding in the relations between cul-

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tures (see Sahlins 1984). This misunderstanding expresses social differences or, if one prefers, society itself. The Germans interpreted the French notion of the individual in their own way as bildung (self-cultivation). When many years later, in their turn, the French watched Americas youth protest against the Vietnam War, they bypassed its religious and nationally centered dimensions.2 Conversely, American social science scholars have adopted the position of the May 68 French thinkers as if they were not in the least blasphemous. It is true that the texts that these thinkers produced could lead to misunderstandings. For example, in the same interview earlier quoted, while talking about the future of Europe, Derrida argues: “What we algebraically call ‘Europe’ must take some responsibilities for the future of the human kind, for that of international law—this is my faith, my belief” (2004: 13, my italics). Here Derrida purposefully associates a religious lexicon (‘faith’ and ‘belief’) to a social entity, that of Europe, taken in its ‘algebraic’ sense. This terminological contrast may not mean much, but it is spectacular and therefore conceals another more discreet hiatus that concern Europe’s social status. Indeed, how could an algebraic entity, even if it goes by the name of Europe, take any responsibility at all, in any sense of the term? The only way to understand this is to admit that Derrida proposes a new sense of relation that would evoke a kind of responsibility that neither binds nor transforms the holder. Thus, in spite of an overt religious vocabulary, Derrida does not indulge here in a pseudo religious form of thinking but, on the contrary, makes an utmost effort to construct a purely secular non-transcendent form of relation. So what is behind this relation? An ‘algebraic’ expression minimally requires that its composite elements are discrete and strictly separated from one another. In short, these elements must be compatible with the theory of

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sets. This theory constructs well-defined and bordered sets consisting of interchangeable elements (at least from a given set point of view). It is ironic that it is exactly this conception of society, which requires homogeneity and clear-cropped borders, that was the principal target of most deconstructionist critics. Although theoretically disputable, this algebraic conception of sociality remains highly tempting in the view of a social critique. By starting from individual elements and rejecting the reference to an encompassing whole, it offers the capability to highlight the arbitrariness of any social form, and thereby erects moral and political judgments into universal standards. Its main shortcoming is, however, that it contradicts widespread, well-established social practices. For example, in the above-cited interview, in the context of the gay community demand for the legalization of gay marriage, Derrida makes the following statement: If I were to make the laws, I would simply propose the disappearance of the word and of the concept of ‘marriage’ in the civil and secular legal code (code civile et laique). ‘Marriage’ which is a religious, sacred, heterosexual value—that includes promise of procreation and eternal fidelity, etc.—is a concession made by the secular state to the Christian church—particularly in its monogamous dimension that is neither Jewish (monogamy was only imposed upon Jews by Europeans after the last century, and only a few generations ago, it was not compulsory in Jewish North Africa), nor, as we clearly know, Muslim. Having suppressed the word and the concept of ‘marriage,’ which constitute an ambiguity or a hypocrisy, sacred and religious, that has no place in a secular constitution, we would replace them by a contractual ‘civil union,’ a sort of generalized PACS,3 improved, refined, flexible, and adjusted to partners, whose sex and number are not subject to any restriction.

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And for those who would want to be bound by marriage in the strict sense of the term—for which my respect remains complete—they could do it with the religious authority of their choice. (2004: 13)

In this passage, Derrida’s proposition to suppress marriage altogether poses a serious political problem, as the gay community, to which this comment answers, actually demands the right to marry. Earlier in the same interview, Derrida explains that he signed a petition supporting gay marriage, but the contradiction he creates remains unresolved. Nonetheless, what strikes me most is Derrida’s treatment of marriage itself, as his argument does not take into account that marriage is not only a religious (viz. Judeo-Christian) institution, but exists under different forms in all societies in the world. Anthropology has taught us that everywhere marriage goes much beyond linking two people together and controlling sexuality. Marriage organizes relations between two families, two groups, and even sometimes, two moieties. It is an initiation4 and an exchange, for Lévi-Strauss (1969), the most fundamental of them all. It is a way of accommodating society in time, of linking the past to the future, historically, biologically, and politically, a way to metaphorize similarity and otherness; to come to terms with the fact that everything contains its contrary, though not to the same degree; to establish ontology and to put it into question; and to limit the illusion of any sort of teleology. Therefore, to consider marriage as a purely religious institution is clearly reductionist. Instead, Derrida proposes a contract entirely founded on individual volition and devoid of any reference beyond itself. As he has done with Europe, Derrida conceives of marriage as an algebraic sum. However, even in this impoverished form, can such a contract be thought apart

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from its relations? To use his example, let us imagine that four people, irrespective of their gender, make such a contract. Could they then be considered as independent from the social context in which they live? What about their parents, their cousins, those they formerly made similar agreements with, their previous children? And what would happen to the children of such a contract? Will they have four parents or two, whose identity will be determined by genetic analysis? Or will the parties of this contract be able to decide freely about being parents to these children or not? And will they decide collectively or individually? Above all, as previously, can such an algebraic entity be considered as capable of responsibility at all? All these questions are not mere fantasies, but crucial to most people in all societies of the world. Can we reasonably believe that they could be adequately accommodated by a contract strictly limited to the parties to this contract? I argue that this position is fraught with artificiality. The practice in France and elsewhere in the West of all those unmarried couples who lead a very similar life to those who are married directly contradicts Derrida’s position. They share a living place; quite often envisage, or have, children whose responsibility they share; visit their families; and commonly insist that they know and exchange with each other. It is this logic of similarity of practices that underpins claims by a number of gay people that they should be entitled to marry, if they wish. Furthermore, when asked why they do not marry, considering that they already lead a quasi-married life, most partners to these unmarried couples claim that they do not wish to be bound by a contract. Or to put it differently, they want to practice a form of ‘marriage’ that embeds them into a social webbing, but not by contract. In my view, these elements point toward a radical distinction in the societies concerned between practices and

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discourses. They therefore contradict the premises of Derrida’s (1978) analysis of the social, which identifies one with the other. In the case of marriage, the couple’s practice tends to perpetuate, under a modified form, an institution universally constructed out of relations. These practices therefore are remarkably opposed to and resist the tremendous modifications that have occurred in the realm of representation around the world, at least from the eighteenth century onward, of which Derrida claims to be the ‘heir.’ I believe that the recognition of the structural nature of the tension between resistant practices and ever changing representations, can constitute a starting point to revive a notion of sociality that could counteract the current fragmenting movement that threatens to leave us with nothing that can stand outside the individual, that is, with no social relations at all.

Notes This article was written before the death of Jacques Derrida. I now sadly dedicate it to his memory. 1. Derrida (2004: 12): “Je suis en guerre contre moi-même.” This interview has been republished in Le Monde, 12 October 2004. 2. Curiously, although in France Tocqueville is part of any curricula in social science, everyone continues to believe that the American democracy is, like the French one, opposed to religion. This accounts for the current misunderstanding in France of the religious positions of George W. Bush. 3. In France, a recent law has established a civil contract, called PACS, between members of unmarried couples, irrespective of their gender, which assures the holders economic rights equivalent to those of married individuals. 4. In the sense that it promotes the married partners to a different social status.

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References Buñuel, Luis. 1974. The Phantom of Liberty. Film. Xenon Entertainment. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Trans. with introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2004. “Je suis en guerre contre moi-même.” Le Monde, 19 August, 12–13. On the Web at http:// www.lemonde.fr/web/recherche_articleweb/1,13-0,36375883,0.html, and in English at http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/082704H.shtml. Dumont, Louis. 1994. German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. Sahlins, Marshall. 1984. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1863. Democracy in America. Trans. Henry Reeve, Esq. Cambridge, Mass.: Sever and Francis.

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FROM BELL CURVE TO POWER LAW Distributional Models between National and World Society

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Statistical patterns can be found in nature and society. Their distribution may conform to mathematical models. Thus, if two unbiased dice are rolled a thousand times, the number seven will occur with six times the frequency of two or twelve. The resulting histogram will be symmetrical with one peak where the mean, median and mode coincide. Or take a large sample of adult human beings and measure their height. Most cases will fall between five and six feet with very few less than four or more than seven feet. Because this is a continuous variable, the results can be plotted on a graph to which a curve may be fitted. It too will have a single peak with fantails on the high and low ends. We call this the ‘normal’ distribution or popularly the ‘bell curve.’ For more than a century, statistical inference has largely been based on this curve with its parameters of mean and standard deviation.

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More recently, another statistical pattern has been making the headlines. If you count the number of hits on seven thousand Web sites in a given day and plot them according to frequency, the curve hugs the vertical and horizontal axes, indicating a few very large numbers (headed by Yahoo) and many small ones (yours and mine). If the same data are plotted on a log-log scale, the result is a straight line sloping down from left to right. This is a typical manifestation of something called a ‘power law’ distribution. A similar formula describes the frequency of words used in natural language; and the distribution of molecular reactions in cells reveals a few hubs linked to most reactions and many weakly connected molecules. The ‘new science of networks,’ basing its statistical approach on the physics of complexity, has been announced by authors such as Barabasi (2002) and Watts (2003). Just as, in the late nineteenth century, the normal distribution seemed to lend unity to statistical patterns emerging in a number of apparently unrelated fields, such as criminology, astronomy and plant genetics, now the power-law distribution appears in fields as disparate as the World Wide Web, stock markets, air transport, Hollywood actors’ networks, electric power grids, urban hierarchies, and molecular biology. Empirical phenomena lend weight to the mathematical models used by statisticians, but their relative prominence in our collective imagination reflects how we experience society in history. Durkheim and Mauss proposed in Primitive Classification (1970) that the forms through which we perceive cultural order in the world are social in origin. They supported this claim with reference to Australian totemism, the classification of animals corresponding to clan organization, and to Chinese astrology, which reflected the hierarchical organization of that society. Marx had already pointed out that Darwin’s evolutionary biology shared many features with the Victorian

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capitalism of his day—the individualism, the idea of progress, natural selection as market competition, and so on (Gerratana 1973). Modern statistics took off a century and a half ago as a way of regulating people through enumerating them. Soon the normal distribution became the basis for the development of ‘parametric’ or inferential statistics. The very word normal says it all—conformity to a standard revealed by a central tendency, meaning that a population can be described in terms of an average type. The key assumption is randomness. This means that every member of a group has an equal chance of being selected. The democratic premise is obvious. This is an egalitarian as well as an atomistic model. Moreover, the quantities have to be measured on an interval scale, so that size is a continuous variable, not broken up into the separate classes of nominal or ordinal scales. Paradoxically, the bell curve, in the hands of writers like Charles Murray (Hernstein and Murray 1994), later became notorious for sustaining racist theories of intelligence and educational performance; but this should not divert our attention from the underlying properties of the model. Does the recent rise to prominence of the power-law distribution, with its premise of extreme inequality, tell us something about our collective experience of society today? Power laws have been known for some time. In the nineteenth century, when urban economy was relatively free of national controls, they were discerned in the dramatically uneven growth of cities. Later both Zipf (1949) and Pareto (1972) proposed something similar in the form of rank-order distributions, the one for word frequencies and the other for income distribution. Pareto is credited with discovering the 20/80 rule—the idea that 20 percent of the people own 80 percent of the wealth. But the premise of inequality contained in this rule was not adapted to the ideology of twentieth-century society, and

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it remained an anomaly. The ‘normal’ image of the natural and social world gained credibility from reflecting the premises of the national societies formed to regulate industrial capitalism. In the last century, anthropologists transposed the idea of the nation-state as the typical form of society to ethnographic descriptions of so-called primitive societies, thereby demonstrating that the model of cultural homogeneity was universal. The power-law distribution is characterized by a few very large quantities and many small ones. The curve reflects an exponential rate of growth. In network science, it is commonly observed that networks consist of a few hubs with many links and a large number of weakly connected nodes. The discovery of power laws is related to the physics of complexity, the attempt to study interconnectivity in a non-reductionist way (as opposed to the isolated atoms of the random universe). This science is mainly concerned with the edge between order and chaos and with critical moments of transition, as when chaotic water molecules assume the rigid pattern of ice. It is now thought that self-organization, including life, flourishes in this interstitial zone. Specialized study of networks in social science arose in the 1950s as a result of the development of graph theory in mathematics. This theory was based on a number of assumptions that are now seen to be unrealistic. It described an inventory of nodes whose number is fixed and remains unchanged throughout the life of the network. Second, all nodes are equivalent and are linked together randomly. These assumptions of randomness, stasis, and equivalence, were unquestioned for forty years. Territorial states lent some credibility to networks configured in their own image. Thus, road maps do not diverge markedly from the model, each center having roughly the same number of links as the others.

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Milgram (1967) conducted an experiment to see how many personal links would be needed to connect any two individuals in the United States. He found the median number of links was 5.5 and this gave rise to the popular idea of “six degrees of separation,” that all humanity is connected on average by six links. This ‘small world’ phenomenon does not sit well with the assumptions of a random universe. Then it was discovered that most Hollywood actors were linked by two or three degrees to Kevin Bacon through appearances in the same movies. Granovetter (1973) established that job-seeking networks formed clusters with weak links conducting information between them. And the typical clustering of networks was modeled by Watts and Strogatz (1998). But until now the basic assumptions of original graph theory still held. The key shift emerged with the recognition that some network nodes are hubs and some persons are ‘connectors’ (Gladwell 2000). People vary enormously in their ability to make social connection and in this they resemble the air traffic grid of the United States, with a few O’Hares and many small airports. By now networks were coming to be seen as intrinsically unequal in the size distribution of nodes and dependent on a few highly connected individuals. But what produces this effect? Barabasi (2002) established the fit between the pattern of Web site links and the power-law distribution. Such networks are ‘scale-free’ and they lack the parameters of the normal distribution. There is no characteristic node in the continuous hierarchy described by the power law. The exponential character of the curve reflects the fact that networks grow over time and the skewed distribution of links may be accounted for by ‘preferential attachment.’ Growth with preferences both accounts for the hub phenomenon (early comers tend to attract more links) and requires us to abandon graph theory’s key assumptions of randomness, stasis and equivalence. This is consistent

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with the market principle that ‘the rich get richer.’ Indeed in the network economy, as the Microsoft case confirms, it can even be summarized as ‘winner takes all.’ The winner is often unpredictable until one node crosses a threshold and takes off. The trick is to find the threshold. When hubs are undermined, the network as a whole may be visited by ‘cascading failure.’ The convergence of world markets and the Internet has multiplied opportunities for scale-free networks. If corporate hierarchy was well suited to the era of mass production for national markets, the rise of a Web or network model of economy involves a shift from vertical integration to flat, virtual integration, as Castells (2001) has long insisted. I have shown in a recent book (2001; www.thememorybank.co.uk) that when the money circuit is detached from real production and trade, the market is revealed as a weighted and directed network, with the mass of ordinary stocks following a few market leaders. Already the power-law distribution has been harnessed to predictive models based on analysis of the movement of the eight or so main stocks in a given sector. “Nature normally hates power laws,” says Barabasi. Hitherto physicists have found them near the critical point of phase transitions, as when a metal is magnetized. Even if it can be shown to be regular, exponential growth is unpredictable. Statisticians can only say that sometimes a variable crosses a threshold and then it takes off. We have been led to believe for more than a century that the bell curve is preponderant in the physical world and this has helped to make prevailing social ideologies ‘natural.’ European societies still largely hold to these ideologies. But the Americans have long held that income inequality is inevitable, and today even the radical democratic wing of Internet society—the bloggers and the peerto-peer activists—tends to accept the fact of power-law distribution, claiming that as long as choices can be made

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freely (equal opportunity), this inequality is acceptable, one might say ‘natural’ or even ‘normal.’ This whole paradigm shift in scientific and statistical models coincides with the breakdown of the nationstate’s monopoly of society and with it the corporatist premises of twentieth-century economy, such as jobs for life and social planning. For a quarter-century now, neoconservative liberals have subordinated national economy to global markets; and the digital revolution has given us a new emergent model of society in the Internet. The norm of this new world market is stark inequality. The egalitarian premises of nation-states, seeking to curb capitalism’s polarizing tendencies, have given way to a world society in which the winner takes all. We may or may not be on the way to a world order capable of curbing the excesses of capitalism. But for now the power law is king. It is a different model of statistics, for sure. Perhaps it captures society poised between national and world forms. Or maybe we have reverted to the imbalance between market and state typical of the nineteenth century, before national regulation aspired to curb domestic capitalism. The pressing political question for humanity is whether new forms of association will enable us to harness the polarities of the network economy for common ends. There is an objective basis of sorts for these statistical models in nature and society. But the one that attracts most attention in a given period is likely to reflect underlying tendencies in social experience. Having been raised in the heyday of British social democracy, only to face the new liberalism now, I feel like I have had to internalize a radical paradigm shift at several levels. The shift from bell curve to power law is one way of talking about this momentous transition. When I carried out fieldwork in Ghana during the 1960s, I was amazed by how migrants found their relatives, after traveling five hundred miles to an unknown

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city of a million people. They had no addresses or phone numbers written down. When they arrived in the central lorry park, they would look for someone wearing Northern dress and ask him where they could find people like themselves. Directed to a particular district, they would seek out a leading figure in the ethnic community. They might then be directed to someone else from their home village. By all means, within an hour or two, they would be sitting with their relative. These African migrants knew that we live in small worlds connected by fewer links than most of us imagine. They used contingent human encounters and network hubs like local big men, not street maps. Their method was news to me then, but it should not be now.

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References Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. 2002. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus. Castells, Manuel. 2001. The Internet Galaxy. London: Oxford University Press. Durkheim, Emile, and Marcel Mauss. 1970 [1905]. Primitive Classification. London: Cohen and West. Gerratana, Valentino. 1973. “Marx and Darwin.” New Left Review 82: 60–82. Gladwell, Malcolm. 2000. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown. Granovetter, Mark. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78: 1360–1380. Hart, Keith. 2001. Money in an Unequal World. New York and London: Texere. First published as The Memory Bank (2000). London: Profile. Hernstein, Richard, and Charles Murray. 1994. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Free Press.

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Milgram, Stanley. 1967. “The Small World Problem.” Psychology Today 2: 60–67. Pareto, Vilfredo. 1972 [1906]. Manual of Political Economy. London: Macmillan. Watts, Duncan. 2003. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. London: Heinemann. Watts, Duncan, and Steven Strogatz. 1998. “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks.” Nature 393: 440–442. Zipf, G. 1949. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

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NOTES

ON

CONTRIBUTORS z

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George Baca is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Goucher College in Baltimore. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2003, and is currently completing a manuscript on the relationship between racial politics and militarization in the American South. Rohan Bastin teaches anthropology at James Cook University, Australia. His research interests include religion, ethnicity, and social change in Sri Lanka and south India. His most recent publication is The Domain of Constant Excess: Plural Worship at the Munnesvaram Temples in Sri Lanka (2002). Thomas Ernst is currently a visiting fellow in the Research Centre for Public Philosophy and Applied Ethics, Australian National University Canberra. His research interests include sociocultural formations and lifeworlds, cultural conceptualizations of social relatedness, and everyday understandings of politics and history. His most recent publication is “Land Stories and Resources: Some Impacts of Large-Scale Resource Exploitation on Onabasulu Lifeworlds” (2004) in Mining and Indigenous Lifeworlds in Australia and Papua New Guinea, edited by Alan Rumsey and James Weiner. Jonathan Friedman is Directeur d’Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Lund, Sweden. He has done research and written on Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Europe, as well more general issues concerning structuralist

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and Marxist theory, models of social and cultural transformation, and, for the past twenty-five years, the anthropology of global process, cultural formations, and the practices of identity. His most recent publications are Globalization the State and Violence (2003); with R. Denemark, B. Gills, and G. Modelski, World System History: The Science of Long-Term Change (2000); and with Kajsa Ekholm-Friedman, Essays in Global Anthropology (2004).

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Keith Hart teaches anthropology part-time at Goldsmiths College London and lives in Paris. He has taught at many universities around the world, but especially at Cambridge, where he was Director of the African Studies Centre and won the first teaching prize in the humanities and social sciences. He is author of Money in an Unequal World (2001), which forms the starting point for a Web site administered between Paris, London, Mumbai, and Bangalore (www.thememorybank.co.uk) that is being developed as an interactive membership community. André Iteanu is Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He has done fieldwork among the Orokaiva of Papua New Guinea and with the youth generation in Cergy-Pontoise, north of Paris. For several years he has led the research center ERASME of the CNRS, and the Ecole des Hautes Etude en Sciences Sociales. He recently finished a documentary film, Letter to the Dead (2002), and published “Hommes et Femmes dans le Temps” in Sexe Relatif ou Sexe Absolu (2001) and “Violence et Territoire en Banlieue Parisienne” in Vengeance, edited by R. Verdier. Roger Just is Professor of Social Anthropology and Head of Department at the University of Kent. His research interests include the anthropology of southern Europe, family and migration, ethnicity and nationalism, and maritime anthropology. His publications include A Greek Island Cosmos: Kinship Community on Meganisi (2000) and Women in Athenian Law and Life (1989).

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Bruce Kapferer is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, and has held major teaching and research posts in Australia, England, Scandinavia, Holland, and the U.S. He has published books and articles on the basis of his ethnographic field research in Zambia, Sri Lanka, and Australia. His major work in recent years has concentrated on ritual, politics, and nationalism. Currently, he is engaged in a comparative study of modern state systems and their histories of transformation, with particular reference to South Africa, India, Sri Lanka, and Australia. A forthcoming publication, co-edited with Angela Hobart, is Aesthetics in Performance: Formations of Symbolic Construction and Experience (2005). Jukka Siikala is Professor of Social Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Helsinki. He has done extensive research on Polynesian cultures. In addition to colonial and religious history, he has written on contemporary politics in the Pacific, as well as university and research politics. His recent publications include “Chiefs and Impossible States,” in Communal/ Plural: Journal of Transnational and Cross-Cultural Studies (2001), and an edited volume, Departures: How Societies Distribute Their People (2001), published by the Finnish Anthropological Society. Christopher C. Taylor is Professor and Chair of the Anthropology and Social Work Department, University of Alabama at Birmingham. His research interests include symbolic anthropology, medical anthropology, and violence, with fieldwork in Rwanda during 1983 to 1985, 1987, and 1994, and in Côte d’Ivoire in 1998. His major publications are Milk, Honey and Money (1992) and Sacrifice as Terror (1999).

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