Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf

in location and timing, as well as in the nature of the sociocultural segments and their activity systems, would render this process uneven and cause it to be shot through with conflicts. It was more likely that the outcome would favor the rise of heterogeneous social arrays than the development of homogeneous national or sub-national totalities.

      How groups and social segments are drawn into a nation—economically, socially, politically, and in the realm of ideas—was then, and remains for me now, a problem to be explored. My first book, Sons of the Shaking Earth (1959a), attempted to depict the historical trajectory of Mexico as a succession of the different ways in which quite varied groups and units were brought into relationship with one another at different phases over time. Each phase, and the integrative processes that characterized it, had ramifying effects on what was to follow. I see much of my work as efforts to amplify this perspective—to think about how different aggregates and organizations of people, operating on diverse territorial and institutional levels, are drawn into more extensive units, only to be then reshuffled and repositioned into alternative arrangements at some later moment in history.

      I thought then, and still do, that if we were going to come to grips with such complex and tension-laden processes we would also have to develop a better grasp of how they were rendered and expressed in ideation. My first effort specifically focused on how ideas relate to power was cast in a functionalist mode. An early publication on “The Social Organization of Mecca and the Origins of Islam” (1951) argued that expanding commerce subverted lineage separatism in the city, setting up pressures toward a new form of organization that could transcend the narrowness and limitations of lineage organization. The new form of organization was the community of the faithful (umma), built up around the worship of one overarching god. That god, previously only the deity of the non-kin clients of kinship units, was installed as the dominant figure of the entire collectivity, now recodified as a unitary body of believers rather than as members of separate bodies of kin. My article was based on less acquaintance with Arabic and other Near Eastern sources than was required, and I have properly been taken to task for its shortcomings by a number of better-informed specialists (Eickelman 1967; Aswad 1970; Dostal 1991). It was also strongly influenced by British structural-functionalism, and in its own terms was relatively unsophisticated in relating religious phenomena functionally and causally to social structure. Yet it did connect changes in social organization, understood as a structure of distributed rights and duties, with changes in collective representations—in this case the representation of a transcendent “god”—and it did so by paying attention to the particular “form of thought” that inspired that conception.

      A few years later I tried to explain the Mexican image of “The Virgin of Guadalupe” (1959b) as a collective representation of Mexican national identity. The icon of the Virgin had played an important role at several junctures of Mexican history. The rebel-priest Father Miguel Hidalgo initiated his movement for independence from Spain in 1810 with an emblem of the Virgin in his battle flag. A hundred years later, during the Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata’s agrarian rebels decorated their wide-brimmed straw hats with images of the Virgin. The Catholic Church elevated the Virgin to the status of patroness over all the Americas, and the cathedral housing the image of “the dark-hued Virgin” in Mexico City became a major pilgrimage center for people from all over the country. When I first went to Mexico in 1951, many houses in rural villages bore signs that read: “We are neither Protestants nor Communists—we believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe.” In this case the questions were how the icon brought together the sentiments and longings of quite various strata of the population, Indians as well as non-Indians, and how this convergence upon a common symbolism might have taken place. I realized later that the questions, as well as the work based on them, were unusual for their time. They raised issues of differential power at a time when anthropology in general tended to think of native ways in terms of acting out a static “culture.” They introduced history as a dimension, calling for us to look at the making of a key symbol as the outcome of processes unfolding over time. They put forth the idea that a common collective representation might be fashioned from very diverse discourses and imaginings of people stationed in different social and cultural positions.

      A subsequent, more ambitious experiment (1969) proved unsatisfactory. It tried to construct and then contrast structural “homologies” in society and symbolism on the northern, Christian littoral of the Mediterranean and its southern, Muslim side. This drew some inspiration from the various structuralisms in vogue in the 1960s, such as that of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and of the sociologist of literature Lucien Goldmann. My own effort to think in these terms, however, projected an overly abstract and ahistorical scheme of structural oppositions upon very heterogeneous elements and levels of society and culture. The result reinforced the lesson that structural analysis required close attention to the specificity of elements in one structural set at a time. It was not a shortcut to knowledge.

      I tried to heed that lesson when I later wrote Europe and the People Without History (1982). The title was ironic, the point being that all the people who were drawn into the widening orbit of Europe-centered capitalist expansion had histories, indeed that their histories were part of ours and ours part of theirs. To make that point I did pay rather close attention to reports of peoples’ concrete lives and fates, especially to emphasize that incorporation into the circuits of capital and labor under capitalist conditions was not a uniform process but was likely to vary according to the circumstances that obtained in different corners of the world.

      In characterizing the capitalist mode of production and how it affected the social formations that it drew into its ever widening orbit, I made use of certain Marxian concepts. These concepts seemed to me especially productive in tracing out the lineaments of structural power over how social labor is mobilized and deployed. They continue to be valuable, I believe, for their call to attend to how material production, organization, and ideation intersect, and to how this intersection is not frozen at some moment of history but unfolds in tension-producing changes over time and space. They furthermore raise the question of how the division of labor in society—especially in class-divided society—impinges on the production and distribution of ideas. I became convinced that structural power in any society entails an ideology that assigns distinctions among people in terms of the positions they occupy in the mobilization of social labor.

      Some critics argued that by taking this approach I was peddling “cosmologies of capitalism” and that I was underplaying the fact that many groups around the globe cling to their cultural forms and employ them to defend their own ways of life against capitalist encroachment. This may indeed be the case, but it also may not be: the nature of the variable relation between capitalism and the settings it penetrates persists as an open question. There clearly are groups in which one set of cultural understandings remains dominant to the exclusion of others and that refuse any truck with alternatives to their own way of life. Yet there are assuredly others in which people can and do combine diverse lifestyles and modes of thought and learn to negotiate the contradictions. That range of variation demands attention and explanation; it poses problems to be investigated, not certainties to be assumed.

      If Marx and Engels retain relevance for us in this endeavor, it does not mean that their work contains the answers to all our questions. Their writings are full of pertinent ideas, along with notions invalidated since (“caduques,” according to Maurice Godelier [1970, 110]). While they predicted many crucial aspects of capitalist development, the realization of a socialist future has not corresponded to the ways they imagined it. We also need to confront the fact that the development of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and neuropsychology in the twentieth century has called into question the modes in which Marx and Engels, like many of their contemporaries, thought about “consciousness.” There is a lack of fit between Marxian postulates, however liberally applied, and the ways in which anthropologists have gone about their work of depicting and analyzing other cultures and societies.

      Three Cultures

      It has been a hallmark of the anthropological approach to submit its presuppositions to the test of direct and intensive encounters with culturally specified populations. This kind of experience has been especially important when the behavior observed in a field location and the utterances recorded there proved to be at odds with the expectations of