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Author : David Graeber
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One man is a king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is the king. —Karl Marx, Capital, 63
Of the many wonderful tales Moor told me, the most wonderful, the most delightful one, was “Hans Röckle.” It went on for months; it was a whole series of stories... Hans Röckle himself was a Hoffman-like magician, who kept a toyshop, and who was always “hard up.” His shop was full of the most wonderful things—of wooden men and women, giants and dwarfs, kings and queens, workmen and masters, animals and birds as numerous as Noah got into the Ark, tables and chairs, carriages, boxes of all sorts and sizes. And though he was a magician, Hans could never meet his obligations either to the devil or to the butcher, and was therefore—much against the grain—constantly obliged to sell his toys to the devil. These then went through wonderful adventures—always ending in a return to Hans Röckle’s shop.
—Eleanor Marx, on her father Karl’s bedtime stories (in Stallybrass 1998:198) </quote>>
In this final chapter I want to move from an emphasis on value and exchange to the other side of the equation proposed in chapter 4 and to talk a little bit about the phenomenon of social power. Odd though it may seem, I think the easiest way to do this will be to look at the notion of fetishism—one that has cropped up periodically over the course of the book but that I have not so far fully developed.
Mauss’ project of investigating “archaic forms of social contract” has a distinctly nineteenth-century ring to it, but it seems to me there is still something very important here for the twenty-first. I began this book by saying that social theory is at something at an impasse, in part, because it has boxed itself into a corner where it is now largely unable to imagine people being able to change society purposefully. I have argued that one way to overcome this problem is to look at social systems as structures of creative action, and value, as how people measure the importance of their own actions within such structures. If so, then one is necessarily seeing “society” as to some degree an intentional thing. Even if it does not embody some sort of collective project, it is at least made out of them, and acts as their regulative principle.
The problem is that in Western social thought, social contract theory is one of the only idioms in which it has been possible to talk about society this way, and it is a woefully inadequate one. To imagine society as a contract is to imagine it in distinctly market terms. Given the tremendous power of economistic ideologies in the world today, relentlessly hammered in on everyone in a thousand different ways, words like “contract” have become pretty obviously unsalvageable—there is no way to use them without assumptions about isolated individuals (usually assumed to be males about forty years old) coming to a rational agreement based on self-interested calculation. Those who think differently simply don’t have the power or influence to create new definitions in peoples’ minds, or at any rate, any significant number of them. Mauss tried to change the way we think about contracts in “The Gift,” and even though the essay was enormously influential in other ways, his efforts had no effect whatever.
All this is very frustrating because it effectively leaves us without a language with which to discuss some very important phenomena. Since Marx, we have been used to talking about how social orders become naturalized; about how what are ultimately arbitrary conventions come to seem like inevitable constituents of the universe. But what about the degree to which social orders are not naturalized? Even among those societies Mauss would consider the most “archaic,” there are always some social arrangements that were seen as created through mutual agreement, and, I strongly suspect, always a certain degree to which the social order as a whole is not seen as something inherent in the nature of the cosmos but can be seen as something which is in some sense the product of mutual consent or agreement— if only as one possible perspective among many. And when it does, it is, clearly, not in the sense imagined by Hobbes or subsequent market theorists. It is not as a collection of individuals interested only in acquiring as much as possible of the things they want who make a rational calculation that they can only do this efficiently by agreeing to respect one another’s property or honor commercial agreements. It is as people who already have profound and ongoing commitments to others who see themselves as extending something of the same sort to a larger group—something which does indeed, as Mauss was perhaps the first to recognize, imply a kind of elementary communism, an agreement to treat others’ perceived needs and interests as matters of significance in and of themselves. One need only look at the Iroquois case to find an example that corresponds almost exactly to what Mauss had in mind. Society was seen not as something given but as a human creation, a set of agreements, which were the only alternative to endless cycles of destructive violence. The story of the origins of the League does begin with something very like a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” The difference was that the Iroquois did not see the danger of violence as arising from the fact that humans were solitary individuals competing over scarce resources, but because they assumed them to already be enmeshed in relationships with others—relations which were in fact so intense, and so intimate, that the death of a loved one could cause them to descend into paroxysms of destructive fury. The way of creating society, in turn, was through establishing long-term open-ended commitments: whether to bury one another’s dead or to be willing put aside principles of property rights when faced with a sufficiently profound need, as revealed in another’s dream.
Among the Five Nations, of course, there was no internal market. For this reason it’s quite interesting to compare the North American case with what was happening in West Africa around the same time, in the sixteenth century. There European merchants arrived (at first, in search of gold) to discover a complex patchwork of societies, most of which had not only been tied into larger circuits of trade for centuries but had their own markets, currency, and forms of self-interested exchange. Trade with the newcomers came to be regulated by ritual objects that the Europeans referred to as “fetishes,” on which they were asked to swear oaths and that were held to bind together otherwise unrelated people in contractual obligations. The power ascribed to such objects were in this case quite similar to the sort of sovereign power imagined by Hobbes: not only were they tokens of agreement, but they were themselves capable of enforcing those agreements because they were essentially forms of crystallized violence. Most of them were personifications of diseases or other afflictions, which could be called on to destroy those who betrayed their obligations.[162] Where wampum represented the exact opposite of the cataclysmic terror introduced through the fur trade, here it was as if the power and abstraction of money itself were turned back against itself as a form of imaginary violence that could prevent its own worst implications.
Looking at mechanisms for creating collective agreements, then, is a fairly dependable way to find social forms that are not completely naturalized. This is not to say that in all of these societies there are not also social forms that were indeed viewed as given in the very nature of the universe or created long ago by creatures profoundly different from human beings (or at least different from any human beings one might actually know). Most seemed to have divided up different aspects of the social universe in this respect: both the Iroquois and Kwakiutl, for example, saw aspects of personal identity as given in this way but larger social arenas as having to be endlessly created; the Maori seem to have imagined matters quite the other way around. But even this is simplifying things somewhat. The really striking thing is how often people can see certain institutions—or even society as a whole—both as a human product and also as given in the nature of the cosmos, both as something they have themselves created and something they could not possibly have created. One might well argue that the Iroquoian “Holder of the Earth,” the creator who seems unable to fully grasp his own powers of creativity, is one way of trying to come to terms with this paradox. But I think some of the most striking examples can be found in the literature on African “fetishes,” which could be extended to include my own material of Malagasy ody and sampy, covered rather perfunctorily at the end of chapter 4 and more generally in the anthropological literature on magic— ideas about magic being veritably rife with paradoxes at every turn. If one reads Merina rituals of state with all this in mind, I think it will make it easier to understand both just how little mystified by their own political institutions people in “traditional” societies can often be; how much they can, in fact, see those institutions as human creations, in what we might consider strikingly realistic terms; but at the same time, why it might sometimes not make a whole lot of difference that they do.
Outside of Madagascar, Merina ritual is mainly known through the work of Maurice Bloch, who has written a series of very famous articles about mortuary ritual (1971, 1981, 1982), circumcision ceremonies (1986), and ritual language (1975). He has also written two equally famous essays on Merina royal ritual (1977, 1989), focusing particularly on the Royal Bath ceremony. Bloch’s conclusions, however, are very different from the ones I outlined in chapter 4: in fact, his conclusions about what the ceremonies were effectively saying about the nature and origins of royal power are almost exactly the opposite of my own.
Let me start then with Bloch’s essay “The Disconnection Between Power and Rank as a Process: An Outline of the Development of Kingdoms in Central Madagascar,” written in 1977. He starts the piece by talking about Louis Dumont’s famous observations on the Indian caste system (1966), particularly Dumont’s insistence that one must make a strict distinction between caste, which Dumont says is basically a religious institution, and the actual organization of kingdoms, with all the often tawdry and brutal realities of political power they entailed. Bloch observes that much the same distinction can be made in Imerina. The first kingdoms in highland Madagascar were little more than bandit fiefdoms, their “royalty” basically just gangs of thugs who ensconced themselves in hilltop forts and started shaking down surrounding farmers. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Imerina was divided among a number of such petty kingdoms, while at the same time the countryside was continually ravaged by slaveraiders from the coast, who would carry villagers off to feed the rising demand for plantation labor on the European-held islands of Mauritius and Reunion. Most of the local lords soon came into collusion with the slave trade as well.
The official ideology of these kingdoms[163] stood in striking contrast to all this. It too represented society as a vast graded hierarchy, in which about a third of the population were considered “noble” (andriana), and in which every group was ranked according to the degree to which they possessed hasina—which Bloch defines as a kind of ineffable grace, or intrinsic superiority: “power, vigor, fertility, efficacy or even sainthood” (1977:61). Hasina was something humans had simply by virtue of their being, or at any rate because they had received it from their noble ancestors, not because of anything anyone had done. What’s more, royal rituals were coordinated to the natural cycle, and people who were particularly masina (who had much hasina) were seen as being able to bless crops, so that “power [came to be] represented as an unchanging essence closely linked to nature and only transmitted to legitimate holders” (op cit.).
Hasina then was a sort of inherent grace, given by the very nature of the cosmos. Humans could not create it; in fact, it existed in a domain largely beyond the effects of human action of any sort. At most people could display hasina or pass it on to their descendants—and this was what royal ritual was principally about. One could hardly imagine a more extreme contrast between this ideological representation of timeless hierarchy and the sordid details of actual politics, full of constant murder, extortion, and kidnapping.
But Bloch also notes that the word hasina could be used another way: to refer to certain large silver coins (most often, Maria Theresa thalers, later Spanish or Mexican dollars) given as ceremonial tribute to the king. Just about any event at which the monarch appeared before his subjects would begin by their “giving hasina” to him. It seems reasonable to assume there was some connection between these two usages. Bloch suggests an analogy with the English term “honor.” Certain people are said to “have” honor, to be intrinsically honorable. But the word can also be a verb: you can “honor” people by treating them as if they were that sort of person. In theory, by honoring them you are simply recognizing something they already have; in reality, of course, they have it only because people treat them that way. Just so with hasina. Having hasina—in the sense of intrinsic superiority (which Bloch labels “hasina mark 1”)—is like having honor; giving the coins (“hasina mark 2”) is like honoring people.
He then takes the argument a bit further. In most royal rituals, he says, there is a pretense of exchange. On certain occasions, when subjects give the king hasina in the form of coins, he responds by sprinkling them with water, a gesture of blessing that conveys fertility, prosperity, good health, and that only the king’s mysterious sanctity (his hasina mark 1) allows him to do. The most important instance of this was the annual Royal Bath ceremony, the great national festival that stood at the head of the Merina ritual year. Here, the same logic is extended to the entire kingdom. In the first stages of the festival, children have to present hasina (or similar tokens of deference) to their parents, and people in general offer it to their immediate hierarchical superiors; it culminates in a ceremony in which representatives of each of the major orders and groupings of the kingdom present silver coins to the king. After receiving the coins, he hides behind a screen, bathes himself in warm water, calling out as he does so, “May I be masina,” and then emerges to sprinkle the bath water on the representatives. Later, parents will also bathe and sprinkle the water on their children, thus in effect conveying the blessings down through the kingdom, and of course further naturalizing the king’s authority by making it seem continuous with descent.
For Bloch, the critical thing is the way all such rituals serve to mystify the real source of royal power, which is precisely the monarch’s ability to make other people pay tribute and otherwise treat him like a monarch by claiming that power comes from a domain beyond human action. It is all about disguising the connection between hasina mark 1 and hasina mark 2. But from the first time I read the essay as a graduate student, I found something very odd about this argument. If the whole point is to disguise the connection between the two forms of hasina, well, why call them by the same name to begin with? Isn’t that a bit of a giveaway?
After I had actually begun living in Madagascar and developing a firsthand knowledge of contemporary Merina ritual language, it seemed increasingly difficult to believe that the use of the term hasina could have been mystifying much. Granted, I did my fieldwork almost a hundred years after the abolition of the monarchy, but still, I’m not sure I ever heard hasina used to convey a notion of intrinsic hierarchical superiority. Hasina still means the power to act through invisible, or imperceptible means; the verb manasina (“to give hasina, to make something masina”), used in the nineteenth century for giving coins to a king, is as close as there was to a term for “to conduct a ritual.” I heard the verb used all the time. Mostly it was used for what might be called acts of consecration: for instance, one might make offerings to a certain tree, or at a watery place where a forgotten ghost was thought to dwell, or the tomb of an ancient king, in order to add to the places’ hasina and also to appeal to the very power one was thus creating or enhancing to do something: say, to cure one of sickness, cause one to conceive if one had been infertile, to become wealthy, or pass an exam.
The people I knew made it quite clear that hasina was always created by human action. It also had to be constantly maintained. Often, for example, when asking about, say, a certain stone once used as a place for carrying out ordeals, or a tree said to protect a village’s crops against hail, people would remark that the tree or stone in question was once very masina, since it had been given hasina in rituals long ago, but the rituals hadn’t been carried out for a long time, so there was no way to be sure whether it still had any left. On the other hand, such objects usually had taboos, and even the act of observing those taboos could be referred to as “giving them hasina” in the most diffuse of senses, so the mere recognition of such things as powerful was perhaps enough to keep them powerful.
It was also through manasina that one created ody, the Malagasy equivalent of “fetishes” or “charms,” which I have already discussed in chapter 4. Charms also have hasina, but here too it is only because people put it there, by bringing together a series of specific ingredients (bits of wood, beads, silver ornaments, etc.) and a nameless, invisible spirit. I’ve already argued that it’s this very lack of definition that makes spirits pure, abstract embodiments of power. In the end, though, it is always human actions that make ody powerful. In the nineteenth century, this could, as noted, be carried out through vows: dedicating some kind of small material token that represented the action one wished the invisible powers to take, then preserving and hiding it as the embodiment of the power to carry that action out on a regular basis. This might not have been the most common way of creating an ody, but was a common one, and it is significant because it exactly parallels the ritual of giving hasina to the king: where at the height of the Royal Bath ceremony, after everyone has presented coins to the king, he hides himself behind a screen, says “May I be masina,” and then emerges to sprinkle the bath water on the assembled multitude. Whenever these whole coins appear as ingredients in charms—which they occasionally did—they always represented an unbroken totality. As offerings, they represent the desire to maintain the integrity of something that could otherwise be broken up, dissolve away into a multitude of tiny little pieces; as elements in charms, they represent the power to maintain it. By this logic, presenting a whole coin represents the people’s desire to unify the kingdom, to make a totality out of the various individuals and groups that made it up—it betokens the very desire of the assembled subjects to become subjects, to be unified by the power of the king. Afterwards the king hides himself and, newly charged with hasina, sprinkles everyone with water, which also parallels pretty precisely what one does with the most important charms, called sampy—one “bathes” them in water and then sprinkles it over the people they are supposed to protect. So the king in effect becomes a charm, an object with the power to maintain the unity of the kingdom.
These sampy, incidentally, were extraordinarily important ody that had their own names and personalities and provided a kind of generalized protection over whole social groups. The Merina kingdom, for instance, was protected by a kind of pantheon of royal sampy, sometimes called “royal palladia” (Domenichini 1977; Delivre 1974), each with a kind of priesthood of guardians. They too were brought out before the people on ritual occasions, received hasina, were bathed out of sight, whereon their keepers—or sometimes the king himself—would emerge to sprinkle people with the water. So in the Royal Bath ceremony the king really was playing the role of a magical charm in the most literal way.
At this point, there might not seem to be much left of Bloch’s argument. Hasina does not, in fact, refer to intrinsic superiority. It is simply one form of power.[164] Hasina is not, in fact, inherent in the nature of the world. Human beings create it. By giving unbroken coins, representatives of the kingdom are effectively creating the power that unifies them as a kingdom, thus engaging in a form of collective action that, in effect creates them (as subjects) at the same time as it creates the king (as king). Not only was this implicit in the logic of the ritual; at least in some contexts, nineteenth century Merina seem to have been perfectly capable of stating it explicitly: there was, for example, a proverb that stated that it is really the giving of coins that makes a king a king (Méritens and de Veyrières 1967).
We are back again to social contracts. The message seems to be: kingship emerges from popular consensus. This consensus has to be constantly reaffirmed; the ceremony of creating the king has to be performed over and over again. Here too there’s a suggestive parallel with charms. According to at least one missionary source, important ody—presumably he’s thinking of those that protected families or larger groups—had to be consecrated by a “pledge of allegiance” before they were thought to have any power. “Until the consecration service has been held, and the pledge of allegiance given, the charm, although finished as regards its construction and general characteristics, was only a piece of wood to them” (Edmunds 1897:63). So its power to act too depended on a kind of popular consensus, at least among the people it protected. And as I already mentioned, this consensus also had to be maintained by constantly “giving hasina,” which in the case of a charm might mean anything from rubbing it with honey and caster oil to sacrificing a sheep or cow or simply observing certain taboos. At the very least, there always seems to be some sort of notion of agreement and always too a sense that this agreement was established primarily through the power of words— two facts brought together by the fact that persuasive words themselves could themselves be referred to as masina.
The Malagasy term one would use in discussing such issues is fanekena, which can actually mean either “an agreement,” as in a contract or understanding reached between two or more parties, or a more diffuse state of communal consensus; but in either case the implication is of creating or maintaining mutual responsibilities similar to those that would normally obtain between kin, among people who are not. Usually, at least implicitly, creating such an agreement also involves creating some invisible force of violence that has the power to enforce it (much as ancestors punish their descendants who do not respect their mutual obligations). The king was seen in these terms as well: much of his power was a power to mete out spectacular punishment. Neither was the connection between giving hasina to the king, and ordinary contracts, merely an effect of language. It was quite explicit. In fact, during the nineteenth century, every time anyone in the Merina kingdom agreed to a contract of any kind, whether it was a local community agreeing to irrigation rules or two people settling an inheritance dispute, the way of making it official was always by presenting hasina to the sovereign.[165] If one examines nineteenth century archival records, it quickly becomes clear that this was by far the most common way in which the monarch’s power really entered into people’s everyday affairs: in effect, by gestures meant to constantly re-create the king’s power to enforce agreement, in both senses of the term.
So as I say, at this point it might seem that Bloch was simply wrong and that’s all there is to say about it. Certainly that was my initial conclusion. Then I went back and examined the nineteenth century sources Bloch was using as his main source material (e.g., Callet 1908, Cousins 1968) and discovered that there are in fact statements which do represent hasina as a quasi-natural force, tied to fertility, passed down from royal ancestors, held by certain groups more than others, and doing pretty much everything else he claims about it. This is especially true of statements made in official histories and, above all, over the course of the royal rituals themselves.
This is where things became really puzzling. It suggests that royal rituals were saying two completely contradictory things. On an explicit level, they declared that royal power is given in the nature of the universe; but at the same time, the whole logic of the ritual seems to say kings only have power only because people want them to.
How to think about this? If the purpose of royal ritual is to naturalize power relations, why undercut the message? Even stranger: why does undercutting it not seem to make any difference? Obviously, if we want to think of the hidden message as some sort of subtle internal critique of the monarchy—as some would no doubt do—it was a remarkably ineffective one, since these rituals played a crucial role in constituting the very object they would presumably be critiquing. Alternately, if the idea that kings are embodiments of popular will does not really undercut their authority, why not just state that outright? Because it was never quite stated outright in the ceremony. Nor would one need a proverb saying, “Really it’s the coin that makes the king a king” if this were entirely self-evident. Instead, we have a ritual that seems to assert one thing and then immediately take it back; as if one first declared that kings were divine creatures that had descended from the sky, and then added, “but, of course, not really—actually what makes them kings is the fact that they can get us to go along with such nonsense.” (I chose this example because there’s another Malagasy proverb that says, “Kings didn’t really descend from the sky.”).
If someone were designing such a ritual out of whole cloth, all this would be utterly bizarre. But of course, no one did. Merina royal ceremonial was, as Bloch himself emphasizes, largely a patchwork of elements borrowed from elsewhere; it was stitched together out of bits of ritual practice that already encoded their own conceptions of power. This also accounts for much of the difference between Bloch’s analysis and my own. Bloch, in his ethnographic work, has focused overwhelmingly on rituals tied to kinship and descent: circumcision ceremonies, speeches paying respect to ancestors, observances surrounding tombs. In fact, these are the only rituals not referred to as manasina. He is specifically interested in the way such rituals produce a certain image of timeless, immutable authority; in fact, he defines kinship itself as “a way of viewing relationships between people in terms of the links established by sex and parenthood so that the social ties which are represented in this way appear as natural, inevitable, and unchangeable to those who operate them.” (1986a:121). Many would no doubt add that kinship is about other things as well, but it is true that if one looks for analogies in royal ritual, this is precisely where one finds hasina being represented as immutable, natural, and so on. I on the other hand was looking at what might broadly be described as “magical practice,” which is all about humans creating hasina and seems in some ways explicitly opposed to kinship. So it’s hardly surprising that when royal ritual draws on this tradition, it seems to be saying something very different.
One might of course object that this doesn’t really resolve anything, because the real question is why royal ritual should have drawn on two so contradictory traditions to begin with. This is true enough. But I think the distinction between these two types of ritual practice is a useful point of departure.
When I was first working out my own analysis, for instance, one of the things that really puzzled me was the fact that Bloch has almost nothing to say in any of his work about charms and medicine—what would loosely be called “magic.” Perhaps this is not too shocking, since no other anthropologist who’s worked in Madagascar has had very much to say about the subject either (the literature on Malagasy magic is almost entirely the work of missionaries and colonial officials). But in Bloch’s case, this is just about the only aspect of Merina ritual he doesn’t talk about. I finally came to the conclusion it was because Bloch is writing very much in the Marxist tradition. Marxist anthropologists have always found it somewhat difficult to figure out what to do with magic. Not religion: Marxist theory, starting with Marx’s own work, have always had a great deal to say about religion.
It strikes me this is an interesting phenomena in itself. Why is this? And what might a Marxist theory of magic be like?
Much of Marx’s early work—notably his responses to other Young Hegelians like Feuerbach and Stirner—was concerned with the analysis of religion. One might even say that his work on ideology was largely a matter of applying concepts developed for the critique of religion to the economic sphere. Fetishism itself is only one of the more famous of such concepts.
The logic behind Marx’s critique of religion was fundamental to his way of thinking about the human condition in general. To repeat a familiar argument: human beings are creators. The social (even, to a large extent, the natural) world we live in is something we have made and are continually remaking. Our problem is that we never seem to see it fully that way and therefore can never take control over the process; everywhere, instead, people see their own creations as controlling them. Religion thus becomes the prototype for all forms of alienation, since it involves projecting our creative capacities outward onto creatures of pure imagination and then falling down before them asking them for favors. And so on.
All this must by now be painfully familiar; but it makes it easier to understand why magic is such a problem. Consider some of the ways early anthropology (Tylor, Frazer, etc.) defined the difference between magic and religion. Tylor defined religion as a matter of belief (“the belief in supernatural beings”), but magic as a set of techniques. It was a matter of doing something meant to have direct effects on the world, which did not necessarily involve appeals to some intermediary power. In other words, magic need not involve any fetishized projections at all. Frazer is even more explicit on this account, insisting that magic achieves effects “automatically”; even if a magician does, say, invoke a god or demon, she normally imprisons him in a pentagram and orders him around rather than begging him for favors. Magic, then, is about realizing one’s intentions (whatever those may be) by acting on the world. It is not a matter of people’s intentions and creative capacities being projected out into it and appearing to those people in strange, alienated forms. If anything, it’s just the opposite. To phrase the matter in appropriately nineteenth century terms: if religion is the way people project (imaginary) human personalities and purposes onto (real) natural forces, then magic would have to be a matter of taking real human personalities and purposes and arming them with imaginary natural powers.
This is simply not fetishistic in the classic sense. It is about humans actively shaping the world, conscious of what they are doing as they do so. The usual Marxist critique would not apply. On the other hand, magicians also tend to make all sorts of claims that seem pretty obviously untrue and at least in some contexts do act to reinforce exploitative systems of one sort or another. So it’s not as if Marxists could actually endorse this sort of thing, either. Hence perhaps the tendency to avoid the subject altogether.[166]
But the Malagasy example—and I am sure there are others like it— suggests this is the very reason magic is important. Because it is precisely this unfetishized quality, the fact that magic locates the source of social creativity in human action rather than outside it, that makes it possible to yield such an apparently realistic understanding of kingship—in fact, one remarkably close to what a social scientist might have.
Of course, this doesn’t explain the apparent dual message. Here I think it might be useful to look at more recent anthropological theories of magic.
Most twentieth-century anthropologists have not seen themselves as engaging in an essentially critical project; until a few decades ago, almost none did. Since the early part of the century, mainstream anthropology has tended to be persistently relativistic. So where Marxists tend to find magic problematic because of what it doesn’t misrepresent, most other anthropologists find it difficult because of what it apparently does. Magic has proved notoriously difficult to relativize. For evolutionists magic had simply been a collection of mistakes. For Edward Tylor or Sir James Frazer, that was essentially what magic was: the category “magic” included all those techniques that the observer thought couldn’t possibly work. The obvious task for the relativist, then, is to demonstrate some sense in which magical statements are true. But this has proved extremely difficult; for one thing, it has led analysts to downplay endlessly what would probably otherwise seem to be one of magic’s key defining features: the way it’s almost always surrounded by an air of trickery, showmanship, and skepticism.
The anthropological literature on “magic” is not itself very large. It mainly consists of two substantial monographs, by Evans-Pritchard (1937) and by Malinowski (1935), both written when anthropologists still felt old evolutionist issues were at least worth engaging with; there have been very few since. Much of the debate on the subject—for instance, a large part of the so-called “rationality debate” that came out of Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande—was conducted by philosophers and other non-anthropologists. In the 1960s there was a spurt of essays inspired by new linguistic models, of which the most important was the work of Stanley Tambiah (1968, 1973), especially his suggested analogy between magical spells and performative speech acts, which are statements (i.e., “I apologize”) that accomplish something just by being uttered. Just about every anthropological work on magic since has been, in one sense or another, an elaboration on Tambiah. Not that there are very many of them. In fact, most anthropologists have long since abandoned the term “magic” entirely, preferring to organize data that might have once been labeled magic under rubrics like witchcraft and sorcery, shamanism, curing, cosmology and so on, each of which implies different questions and different problematics. Now, let me say right away that I think there is good reason for this. As a tool of ethnographic description, the term “magic” is, largely, useless. I didn’t use it either in my own Malagasy ethnography (1995, 1996b, 1997b). I mostly used the term “medicine,” since that was the simplest English translation of the word a Malagasy speaker would be most likely to use when referring to such things. Still, the theoretical debate about magic is itself illuminating.
For a relativist, then, the problem is how to show that magical statements are not simply false. Now, insofar as magicians claim their magic has social effects, one can certainly say they are in some sense right. Generally, it does. Insofar as their claims seem to go beyond that, one runs into some real problems. To take an obvious example, if someone tells you he has the power to direct lightning on the heads of his enemies, it is very difficult for the outside observer to avoid the conclusion that he is not in fact able to do this. The statement is wrong. Therefore the speaker is either mistaken, or he is lying. (Most evolutionists, including missionaries, favored a heady mix of both these possibilities.) The only way to avoid the horns of this dilemma completely would be challenge the very notion of “truth”: magical statements, one could argue, are not meant to be “true,” at least not in the scientific, empirically verifiable sense the word has to a Western audience. They are poetic or rhetorical, expressive rather than instrumental, illocutionary, performative, etc. Probably the main reason for Tambiah’s fame is that at least in his earlier essays (1968. 1973), he takes the most extreme position in this regard.
Tambiah’s most famous example is a Trobriand gardening spell called vilamalia, recorded by Malinowski (1935), which ostensibly purports to anchor yam storehouses by making them fat, bulging and weighty, and making both the storehouses and the yams inside them heavy and durable. Tambiah notes that when Malinowski asked magicians about how the spell worked, most were careful to explain that it doesn’t really operate directly on the yams or storehouses. Really, they said, the spell affected human bellies—bellies being considered the seat of the intellect as well as the seat of magical power. It does so especially by convincing people to keep their hunger under control so they won’t fill their bellies with yams so the storehouses will be full instead. The conclusion of course is that magic is a public performance meant to sway people or, as he puts it to “restructure and reintegrate the minds and emotions of the actors” (1985:118), not a mistaken technique for swaying things.
The problem, though, is that this is a fairly unusual spell. Trobrianders also made use of spells meant to control the wind or make canoes sail quickly, and there seems little reason to believe that their effects were seen as purely rhetorical. But note the analogy to Merina royal ritual. Here, too, we have statements of apparently extraordinary, naturalized powers in the ritual itself (that kings’ power is rooted in nature, that magicians’ words can affect the physical world), which then seem to be almost immediately undercut by statements, implicit in the ritual and stated more explicitly just offstage, that really this is not so, that in reality all this is just a matter of swaying people’s intentions.
It’s also significant that Trobriand magic is itself largely a matter of public performance. Claims that magic is never really thought to affect the material world, but only other people are much harder to take seriously when dealing with, say, Evans-Pritchard’s Zande material or for that matter, ceremonial magic practiced in the ancient world (Faraone and Obbink 1991, Graf 1997), where most ritual performance took place in secret.[167] This does depend somewhat on how formally one wants to define “performance.” Let me go back to the example of casting lightning. Once, while living in the small town of Arivonimamo, I was visiting the apartment of a certain mediumistic curer named Erné, and flipping through a notebook full of recipes for ody that he had left somewhat ostentatiously on the table. Erné noticed this and immediately pointed out a page that, he said, contained instructions for how to make a lightning charm. “Bear in mind, I would never use such a thing myself,” he said “They’re intrinsically immoral. Or, well, actually, once I did. Years ago. But that was to take revenge on the man who killed my father. Which I know I shouldn’t have, but ...” He paused, gave a slightly distressed shrug. “Well, it was my father!”
How to analyze this event? It was certainly a performance of a sort. But it was carried out in ordinary conversational speech that was indeed meant to be judged by true/false criteria. You can’t say it is “inappropriate” to ask whether Erné had really blasted someone with lightning or not. So one is indeed stuck with the choice between mistaken and lying. But the main point I want to make is that just about every Malagasy person I mentioned the incident to had no hesitation about their conclusion. Obviously he was lying. (If you really do have such awesome powers you don’t go bragging to strangers.) Of course, most probably felt there was the small possibility that he might really know how to cast lightning, just enough to make one think twice before doing anything that would really annoy him, and that was pretty obviously the real “social effect” his performance was meant to have; but this almost means that the degree to which people thought his speech was meant only to have social effects was the degree to which they didn’t believe him.
Anthropologists usually acknowledge this sort of skepticism—the aura of at least potential disbelief that always seems to surround the sort of phenomena that gets labeled “magic”—but almost always, only to immediately dismiss it as unimportant. Evans-Pritchard, for instance, noted that most of Zande he knew insisted that the majority of witchdoctors were frauds and that there were only a handful of “reliable practitioners.” “Hence in the case of any particular witchdoctor they are never quite certain whether reliance can be placed on his statements or not” (1937:276). Similar things have been reported about curers almost everywhere. But the conclusion is always the same: since everyone, or most everyone, agrees there are some legitimate practitioners, the skepticism is unimportant. Similarly with the tricks, illusions, and sleights of hand used by magical performers like shamans or mediums (pretending to suck objects out of people’s bodies, throwing voices, eating glass). The classic text here being of course Levi-Strauss’ “The Sorcerer and his Magic” (1967), about a young Kwakiutl man who learned shamanic techniques in order to expose their practitioners as frauds, but who ended up becoming a successful curer anyway. The point is always that while curers (for instance) can hardly help but know that much of what they are doing is stage illusion, they also think that since it does cure people, on some level it must be true. So again, the tricks are of no significance. Now there are good historical reasons why anthropologists have tended to take this attitude—the existence of missionaries being only the most obvious—but what if we were to turn things around and consider this skepticism as interesting in itself? Take attitudes toward curers. Evans-Pritchard says that at Zande seances, no one in the audience “was quite certain” whether or not the curer they were watching was a charlatan; I found this to be equally true in Madagascar. People tended to change their minds about particular curers all the time. But consider what this means. Curers, genuine or not, are clearly powerful and influential people. It means anyone watching a performance was aware that the person in front of them might be one whose power was based only on their ability to convince others that they had it. And that, it seems to me, opens the way for some possibly profound insights into the nature of social power.
Of course this doesn’t mean such possibilities were necessarily realized in any way. But I think one can make a very good case that in many times and places, they are. Trickster stories, for example, often seem to be fairly explicit meditations on the relation between fraud, trickery, and social creativity. In Madagascar, this genre tends to focus either on wandering con men (who often pose as magicians) or political figures like usurping kings. Or on a much more mundane level: most people I knew in Madagascar considered it a matter of common sense that if a person really didn’t believe in medicine, it wouldn’t work on them. Very early on, for instance, I heard a story about an Italian priest sent there to take up a parish who, on his first day in the country, was invited to dinner by a wealthy Malagasy family. In the middle of the meal, everyone suddenly passed out. A few minutes later two burglars strolled in through the front door, and then, realizing someone was still awake, ran out again in fear. It turned out they had planted an ody in the house timed to make everyone in it fall asleep at six P.M. but since the priest was a foreigner who didn’t believe in that kind of nonsense, it had no effect on him.
That much was common knowledge. Several people went even further and insisted that even if someone was using medicine to attack you, it wouldn’t work unless you knew they were doing it.
Now, the first time I heard this it was from fairly well-educated people and I strongly suspected they were just telling me what they thought I wanted to hear. After all, it almost precisely describes the attitude of most people in America: that if magic does work, it is purely by power of suggestion. But as time went on, I met a number of astrologers and curers, people who had next to no formal schooling and clearly would have had no idea what Americans were supposed to think (one of them was actually convinced I was African), who told me exactly the same thing. And just about anybody would agree with this if you asked them in the abstract. Usually they would then immediately begin to offer all sorts of qualifications—yes, it was true, unless, of course, it was something they’d put in your food. Or unless it was one of those really powerful love charms. Or unless...
The bizarre thing is that this principle was utterly, completely, contradicted by practice. Everyone would agree to it, but no one ever acted as if it were true. If you got sick, you went to a curer. The curer would usually tell you that your illness was caused by someone using medicine of some kind and then, reveal who it was and how they’d done it. Obviously, if medicine can harm you only if you know someone is using it on you, the whole procedure would make no sense. In fact, the theory contradicts practice on almost every level. But if no one ever acts as if it were true, why did the theory even exist?
In a way, though, this is pretty much the same contradiction we’ve already seen in royal ritual and Tambiah’s yam spell, except this time we’re seeing it in reverse. People begin with an interpretation in which magical action has purely social effects, then immediately start qualifying and undercutting it. Nonetheless you have the same uncomfortable relation between two premises that are pretty clearly contradictory, yet in practice seem to depend on one another. After all, what would Malagasy society be like if everyone really did act as if medicine only worked if you believed in it, or if you wanted it to? Harmful magic—which is most magic—would simply cease to exist. But harmful magic obviously did exist: as one woman rather wistfully remarked to me, “I guess I must believe in it, because ever since I moved here to the countryside, I keep getting sick all the time.” Perhaps one could say something similar about the nature of political power, or at the very least, of obviously coercive forms like the organization of a state. To a large extent, power is just the ability to convince other people that you have it (to the extent that it’s not, it largely consists of the ability to convince them you should have it).[168] Now, even aside from the question of whether this means that the very nature of power is somewhat paradoxically circular, could there really be a society in which people acted as if they were perfectly well aware that this was the case? Would this not mean that power itself—at least in its nastier, most obviously harmful manifestations—would cease to exist, in much the same way as harmful magic would? One can almost imagine an earlier Malagasy farmer coming to the same conclusion about one of Bloch’s bandit kings that my friend did about medicine: Well, I guess I must believe in them; or, in this case: they must really be emanations of my desire for a unifying power that will make us all members of the same unbroken kingdom, since after all, I do keep giving them unbroken coins.
One reason why anthropologists don’t really like the word “magic” is that it is so closely allied to self-conscious illusions and tricks. It is no coincidence that when most people in America think of “magic” nowadays they think of men in tuxedos pulling rabbits out of hats. I am suggesting though that this is precisely what’s interesting about it. It seems to me that insofar as the term “magic” is still of any use to anthropology, it would be best to define it around two features. First of all, that it is not inherently fetishistic, in that it recognizes that the power to transform the world ultimately goes back to human intentions. That is, even if alienated forces or invisible spirits of one sort or another are involved, the action always begins by some human intention and ends with some tangible result. Second of all, it always involves a certain degree of skepticism, a hesitation between stating that the power involved is something mysterious and extraordinary and that it is simply a matter of “social effects,” which in some cases means simply being aware that power is sort of a scam, but that this doesn’t make it any less real or significant.
One could easily reanalyze many of the examples in this chapter with this in mind. Boas’ turn-of-the-century Kwakiutl informants, whose word for “ritual” was the same as that for “fraud” or “illusion,” seemed to have some very magical tendencies in their way of thinking about social power. At the same time the ultimate origins of those powers were profoundly fetishized. The Maori sources on hidden mauri seem to hesitate between a magical and theological explanation: in some versions the power of the hidden talisman is that of the gods, in others (notably Ranapiri’s), that of the priests. In either case, it’s an estranged image of the human powers that are really responsible for generating social groups. And so forth.
Now the point of proposing this is not so that people can have a new excuse to enter into scholastic debates over whether a given practice is “magical” or “religious/theological.” It would be much better to think of these things as attitudes, so that among those participating in a rite, different people might be thinking of it in diametrically different ways. The main point is that such an attitude at least opens the possibility for what can only be called a strikingly realistic way of thinking about the phenomena of social power. I have already shown how this takes form in Merina royal ritual, almost precisely to the degree that it draws on magical practice. Nor was this sort of attitude towards power limited to ritual. A famous example is King Radama I, who reigned in the first decades of the nineteenth century and was the first Merina ruler to have any real dealings with Europeans. According to most accounts Radama was an almost complete cynic. One of his favorite pastimes was trying to figure out and expose the tricks used by his own royal magicians. He never seems to have been especially comfortable in his dealings with missionaries, but apparently, he hit it off immediately with free-thinkers like his French portrait-painter Copalle, with whom he found himself in agreement on most issues. He told Copalle, for instance, that he felt religion was merely a political institution, and he seems to have believed it, given his subsequent decision to abandon royal ritual as soon as he was in possession of a modern, standing army.
A lot of anthropological theories would find it difficult to account for the very existence of such a person. Actually, ironically enough this is especially true of a strain of anthropological theory that comes directly out of debates about magic: that strain that develops out of Evans-Pritchard’s suggestion that the Azande were not able to question the very foundations of their own mode of thought (1937:122), and that takes its most extreme form in some of the arguments by Robin Horton, that people who believe in magic live in a closed mental universe full of unfalsifiable propositions that can never be challenged by empirical reality (unlike Westerners, of course, who are scientific and open-minded). Now it seems to me to the contrary that someone like Radama is especially likely to come out of an environment dominated by magic—that is, full of stories of wonders and trickery and constant speculation about different forms of personal power and manipulation, an environment in which the mechanics of power, the trap doors and mirrors, are never completely out of sight.
One of the things I am trying to do here is to shatter some of the artificial distance that so many anthropological theories end up often unintentionally creating between observer and observed. I myself really doubt anyone, anywhere, is unable to question the foundations of their own thought; although it’s probably also true that the overwhelming majority of people in the world also don’t see any particular reason why they should. If there’s any way to answer the question of why Merina royal ritual seems to be saying two such contradictory things, it would have to lie here. One might say that statements like “Kings descended from the sky, except, not really” are about as far as one can go in defetishizing power without creating some sort of discourse, some way of talking and thinking about power, that is not itself entirely entangled in the practice of power—or that at least aspires to stand apart from it. In order to create these exterior spaces, however, one must want to do so. In practice, it implies some sort of conscious program of social change. In the absence of such a project, meditations on paradox or cynical remarks about the pretensions of the powerful are all one is likely to get.
To say, as I have, that Merina ritual comes very close to an unfetishized or social scientific understanding of the real nature of Merina kingship might be a tiny bit deceptive since it does rather imply that it is trying to achieve such an understanding, which of course it is not. Ritual is not trying to reach outside itself. For those involved, it’s not ultimately all that important whether or not kings really did descend from the sky; what’s important is that they might as well have.
When I speak of the limits of analysis, I don’t mean to imply that people in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Madagascar were incapable of imagining radically different political alternatives, and trying to bring them into being. Revolutions did happen, ruling elites were sometimes ousted in popular uprisings; there are groups on the West Coast, like the Vezo and Tsimihety, who not only managed to resist being incorporated into the kingdoms of the region, but that appear to have created social orders that were in a sense egalitarian experiments designed in conscious opposition to them; even rural Merina, whom nineteenth-century observers described as utterly unquestioning in their loyalty to the queen, seem to have changed their opinions on the subject of royal power almost instantly after the monarchy was overthrown in 1896 and now tend to describe it, or any kind of power which some people the right to give arbitrary orders to others, as fundamentally immoral (Graeber 1995). Insofar as people did remain mystified, it doesn’t seem to have made a great deal of practical difference. What I was referring to instead was the emergence of a fully self-conscious notion of social reality (a point I will return to shortly). But it does leave us with the rather surprising conclusion that if one is looking for unfetishized consciousness in non-Western societies, one of the most likely places to look is precisely around objects Westerners would be inclined to refer to as “fetishes.” I suspect one reason has to do with the nature of revolutionary action itself—that is, if one interprets the word “revolutionary” in the broadest possible sense.
Consider some of the curious ambiguities, for instance, within Marx’s thinking about revolutionary action. As I have noted in chapter 3, Marx assumes that human creativity and our critical faculties, are ultimately rooted in the same capacity for reflexive imagination. It is this that makes us human. Hence his famous example of the architect who, unlike the bee, raises her building in her own imagination before it is raised in reality. This is the ambiguity, though: while our ability to revolutionize emerges from this same critical faculty, the revolutionist, according to Marx, must never proceed in the same manner as the architect. It was not the task of the revolutionary to come up with blueprints for a future society and then try to bring them into being, or, indeed, to try to imagine details of the future society at all. That would be utopianism, and Marx has nothing but contempt for revolutionary theorists who proceeded along these lines.
Why the difference? Is it because the revolutionary break was to be so total, a leap into an entirely new stage of history? This is probably the simplest and most common explanation. One might say: that a revolutionist trying to design a new society would be like an architect trying to design a building to be constructed in a universe where the laws of physics would be entirely different. Or a medieval scholastic trying to imagine the workings of the New York Stock Exchange. Taking this approach leads to a series of familiar questions: How relativistic was Marx, really? How radical a break did he expect to come with socialism? Did he believe in the existence of any social or moral principles that transcended particular historical epochs? All this has been much debated. But there is another and, it seems to me, more interesting approach, which would be to forget the notion of a fundamental break and look at the question as one of scale. After all, any act of creativity is unprecedented and new to some degree. It’s just that usually that degree is very small. So with architects: while each new design is to some degree unique and thus can be considered an expression of the architects’ personal, creative vision(s)—and this is true to a limited extent even of, say, a traditional house in a traditional society built collectively—it is also obviously in another sense just a repetition of a familiar genre of activity. People design and build new buildings all the time.
What’s more, such a project is always caught up in a larger series of practical categories, which are also essentially patternings of action. An architect may be given a great deal of artistic freedom in matters of design; he may even have a dramatic vision of an entirely new style; but if he were to decide that he was bored with the tedious bourgeois distinctions between residences, garages, and department stores, he would soon find that the designs raised in his imagination remained in his imagination, or at any rate got no further than blueprints, or sketches in avant-garde magazines. Creative action, one might say, is at any level encompassed within a larger system of actions in which it becomes socially meaningful—that is, in which it takes on social value. All creative action is to some degree revolutionary; but to be revolutionary to any significant degree, it must change that larger structure in which it is embedded. At which point one can no longer imagine one is simply working on objects, but must recognize that one is also working on people. And that system of action and meaning is, of course, always encompassed by another. We are dealing with a continuum. This does not mean that revolutionary social change with something of the same creative, intentional quality as the architect’s is not possible; it does mean that it is a lot harder to get a handle on, because it proceeds through a far more subtle, collective media.
One could look at the same problem from the opposite perspective, too. If any act of creation is to some degree revolutionary (even if only to a very minor one: i.e., similar to that to which a fish is a unique individual), what does this revolutionary quality consist of? Presumably, it consists of the degree to which that act is unprecedented, and hence can be thought to belong particularly to its creator(s). But this also means that the creative or revolutionary aspect of action is also its historical aspect: at least if one accepts—as I do (Graeber 1995)—that an act can be considered historical to the degree to which it could not have been predicted before it happened. In every case we are talking about what seems, from the perspective of a system, to be “arbitrariness,” but from the perspective of the individual, “freedom.” Insofar as any system of actions is also historical, it is in a permanent condition of transformation, or, at the very least, potential transformation.
In chapter 3, I suggested that Marx’s fetishism could be seen as a species of Piagetian egocentrism, a matter of confusing one’s own particular perspective within a larger system with the nature of the system as a whole—of failing to coordinate the relevant points of view. To put it this way, however, would seem to imply, first of all, that the larger totality does in some sense exist and that it would be possible to know something about it. At the time I was careful to point out that this also need be true only to a limited extent: it is really quite impossible for anyone to be aware of all the perspectives one might have on a situation, or usually even those of everyone concerned with some particular situation (every member of a family, or a bowling club, let alone a marketplace). In most contexts, though, this doesn’t matter, because in most contexts, one is dealing with things that happen over and over in pretty much the same way. Even if one cannot know how every actor in the marketplace actually sees things, if one understands the logic of the system, one can understand enough to know why, say, a given product has the value that it does. If so, it also follows that the more historical creativity is involved in a situation, the less this is the case. In a moment of profound historical change, no one involved could possibly know what the total system in question actually consists of. One is caught in what a Hegelian would call a moment of dialectical unfolding. Knowledge is necessarily fragmentary; totalities that the actors are working with are necessarily imaginary, or prospective, or numerous and contradictory.
What would all this mean for a theory of fetishism? Or value, for that matter?
When it comes to establishing value, one common response to such confusing situations is to circle off a space as a kind of minimal, defacto “society,” a kind of micrototality, as it were. The potlatches I described in the last chapter might serve as one example of this sort of thing. Another would be the Homeric games analyzed by Beidelman (1989): chariot races or other contests in which warriors vied for a variety different sorts of prizes, usually looted from their enemies: fine armor, cauldrons of precious metal, comely slaves. Turner (1989:263–64) notes that in a case like this, there is simply no way to establish a common ground of value, in labor or anything else, by which to treat such objects as different proportions. The endless—and otherwise apparently somewhat pointless—games and contests between leaders of the army besieging Troy served (doubtless among other things) as circling off a field, creating a kind of imaginary miniature of Homeric society in which they could be treated as proportions of each other in the course of being ranked as first prize, second prize, and so on. As in the case of the potlatch, the presence of an audience is what makes it possible.
One could extend this sort of analysis to all sorts of other classical anthropological cases. What I want to focus on here is the peculiar role of objects in situations of historical agency—in particular those which, like money, serve as the medium for bringing into being the very thing they represent. Recall again the analysis of money in chapter 3. Money, in a wage labor system, represents the value (importance) of one’s productive actions, at the same time as the desire to acquire it becomes the means by which those actions are actually brought into being. In the case of capitalism, this is only true only from the particular, subjective perspective of the wageearner; in reality—that is, social reality—the power of money is an effect of a gigantic system of coordination of human activity. But in a situation of radical change, a revolutionary moment in which the larger system itself is being transformed, or even, as in the case of West African fetishes or so many Malagasy charms, a moment in which new social arrangements between disparate actors are first being created, this is not the case. The larger social reality does not yet exist. All that is real, in effect, is the actor’s capacity to create it. In situations like this objects really do, in a sense, bring into being what they represent. They become pivots, as it were, between imagination and reality. Obviously, when a group of people takes an oath to create new rights and obligations among each other and call on an object to strike them dead if they fail to live up to those obligations, that object does not thereby acquire the power to do so. But in another sense, it—or the faith people place in it—really does have the power to bring a new social order into being. Here, perhaps Mauss was not entirely off the mark when he saw subject/object reversals as an integral part of the creation of social ties and obligation: the kind of social contracts whose subterranean history he was trying to bring to light.
I ended my discussion of Merina royal ritual by suggesting that while magical attitudes can sometimes provide something surprisingly close to a social scientific perspective on social power, it is unreasonable to expect anything like a social science, any systematic attempt to decipher the nature of social reality—that is, to create a discourse that aims to stand outside the practices of power—actually to emerge except as part of a very particular kind of social project. One might even say, “utopian project.” Historically, imagining there could be a discourse that would not partake of practices of power and inequality was closely related to imagining there could be a world that wouldn’t. It is only at the point in history—roughly around the Enlightenment, the years leading up to the French and American revolutions—when one has a notion that it would be possible (or, perhaps more accurately, legitimate) to imagine what a new social order might be like, and then bring it into being, that a notion of social “reality” seems to emerge as well; as the other side, one could say, of a belief that one can (in the words of the famous slogan from May 1968) give power to the imagination.
This is a point that often tends to be overlooked by those who see anthropology as basically a product of imperialism. The emergence of what we call “social science” (at this point rather for lack of a better term) came about in an intellectual milieu that was not only marked by imperialism on a world scale but also obsessed with the possibility of revolution, its own sudden and dramatic transformation into something different. Certainly, it was the creation of vast European empires, incorporating an endless variety of social systems, that made modern anthropology possible. But this is hardly an explanation in itself. There had been plenty of multicultural empires in human history, and none, as far as we know, had ever before produced a project for the systematic comparison of cultural difference. In fact, even if we confine ourselves to the Western tradition itself, what evidence there is points if anything in the opposite direction. In the ancient world, one could make a case for example that something like anthropology was emerging in fifth century Greece, for example in the works of geographers like Hecataeus and historians like Herodotus. Certainly, such writers were developing ideas about how customs and mores might be systematically compared (Hogden 1964:21–43). This was during a period in which the Greek world was not even politically unified, let alone the center of a vast multicultural empire. When such empires did arise shortly afterwards, this sort of literature disappeared: neither the Hellenistic empires nor Rome produced anything resembling anthropology. The reasonable explanation would seem to be that fifth century Greece was a period of political possibility: full of social experiments, revolutions, utopian schemes for the founding of ideal cities. Comparing social orders was one way to discuss the potential range for political (for Greeks the equivalent of saying “human”) society. This clearly was not the case during the centuries of Roman rule. In fact, it would seem it was the very political fragmentation of fifth-century Greece which encouraged this kind of thought. Since the basic political unit was the city state, a relatively small community, the space for political experiments was in fact wide open: new Greek colonies, and hence political units, were in fact being founded all the time, new constitutions being mulled and created, old regimes overthrown.
This is not the way the story is usually told, of course. Most scholars, I suspect, if they were to make any notice of the first glimmerings of ethnographic inquiry at all, would probably see it as just one aspect of the rise of scientific inquiry: the same spirit of systematic comparison that Greek thinkers were applying to physics or geometry at the same time. I don’t think this is necessarily wrong, but as so often, invoking the word “science” brings so many other issues to the table that it probably confuses more than it illuminates. More interesting, it seems to me, is to consider the possibility that the willingness to give power to the human imagination itself leads to a need to recognize a substratum of resistant “reality” of some sort (which must then be investigated). They are reverse sides, as it were, of the same process. It would at least make it easier to understand why so many of the most idealistic people in recent history have insisted on calling themselves “materialists,” or at least how a commitment to some sort of materialism has so often accompanied the most daring utopian projects.
It might even be possible to document at least a loose connection between ethnographic curiosity and sense of political possibility, over the last five hundred years of European history. One could start in the sixteenth century, which saw both the first statements of what was to become modern relativism in authors like Montaigne, and a sudden burst of utopian speculation and revolutionary movements. During the century that followed both the curiosity and the sense of possibility fell somewhat into retreat in most places; only to be suddenly revived together in the years leading up to the French revolution. This was followed by another retreat during the reactionary years following Napoleon’s defeat, and another, even stronger revival after the revolutions of 1848. It was the last period that saw the emergence of anthropology as a professional discipline. It is easy to forget how much the specter of revolution hung over European society of that time: even stodgy Victorians like Edward Tylor or Sir James Frazer were keenly aware of the possibility that their own society might be suddenly be transformed into something profoundly different. Most early anthropologists no doubt dreaded the prospect, a few might have even found it exhilarating,[169] but none could possibly have been oblivious to it. Rather than a perverse contemplation of some utterly alien and distant Other, then, early anthropology was inspired at least in part by the suspicion that someday one might wake up to discover that one had become the Other oneself.
We have, perhaps, a cluster of related elements: a sense of social possibility, a feeling that people should be able to translate imaginary schemes into some sort of reality; a concomitant interest in both understanding what the full range of human possibilities might be—as well as in the nature of “reality” itself. It hardly seems a coincidence that in the 1980s and ‘90s each of these three came under attack at exactly the same time. In some disciplines postmodernism came to mean abandoning dreams of mass action for revolutionary change, along with belief in any possible “foundationalism,” any grounding in a resistant reality; in anthropology, it came to mean questioning that very comparative project. This was what was widely taken as radicalism at the time—and insofar as “radical” means getting to the root of something, then certainly it was radical in a sense. But one question that I have been asking over the course of this book is whether this is really the cluster of roots we should be attempting to pull out. For my own part, I think there is clearly another set that would make a far more convincing set of intellectual villains: a convergence between Parmenidean fixed forms, a certain extreme individualism that has long dogged the Western tradition, and the assumption that human nature is founded on essentially infinite, unquenchable desires, and that therefore we are all in a state of fundamental competition with one another (the latter an assumption that Marshall Sahlins has dedicated much of his career to exposing: see Sahlins 2001). Certainly these have been my main intellectual antagonists in this book: and they seem to me far more challenging ones, because they are all far more deeply embedded in ordinary common sense.
Perhaps the most difficult challenge of all is to look at the world in what I’ve called Heracleitian or, if you prefer, dialectical terms. Over the course of this book I’ve argued that systems of categories, or knowledge, are really just one side of a system of action; that society is therefore in a sense always an active project or set of projects; that value is the way actions become meaningful to the actors by being placed in some larger social whole, real or imaginary. To adopt a dialectical approach means to define things not in terms of what one imagines them to be in a certain abstract moment, outside time, but partly by what they have the potential to become. It is extremely difficult to think this way consistently. But when one is able to, any number of seemingly impossible quandaries dissolve away. Let me take just one example before trying to tie things together more generally.
Levi-Strauss (1958) long ago pointed out one such profound quandary in the very notion of anthropological relativism: that while we reject the notion that some people are barbarians and insist that the perspectives of different groups are all equally valid, it almost invariably turns out that one of the first tenets of faith in most of those groups is that this is not the case. Hence the famous fact that most indigenous societies in North and South America referred to themselves by some term meaning “human beings” and to their neighbors by some term (cannibals, murderers, eaters of raw fish, etc.) that implied they were less than human. Levi-Strauss’ own conclusion, that the only real barbarians are people who think others are barbarians, is so obviously circular that one has to assume it was meant as a kind of joke.
It was on the basis of this same kind of structuralism that Michel Foucault (1972) could then go on to argue that the very notion of “man” or humanity on which the human sciences are based is not really a universal category but a peculiar Enlightenment doctrine that will someday pass away. He attracted a lot of attention by doing so. But few have pointed out that the whole argument rests on an extremely Parmenidean, even positivistic way of thinking about conceptual categories. After all, the American societies that Levi-Strauss was originally discussing might have called themselves “human beings” and made it clear they felt other societies fell short, but most also prided themselves on their ability (like the Iroquois) to adopt children, or even adults, from other societies and turn them into proper human beings. There is no evidence that most thought they could do the same with fish or slugs. A universal category of humanity was in fact present then, but as a set of potentials, just as universalistic religions such as Christianity or Zoroastrianism or Islam—long before the Enlightenment—did indeed recognize a universal category of humanity in beings who had the potential to convert to Christianity or Zoroastrianism or Islam. One can apply the same logic to any number of other notorious problems. Universal ideas are not ideas that everyone in the world has, that’s just false positivism; universal ideas are ones that everyone in the world would be capable of understanding; universal moral standards are not ones on which everyone in the world currently agrees—there is obviously nothing on which everyone agrees—but ones that, through a capacity for moral reasoning and experience of forms of moral practice that we already do share, we would be able to work out together and agree to (and probably will have to on some level if we are all to survive in the world), and so on.
It is because I think that anthropology is necessarily part of a moral project—in the past often not a very good one, but always potentially very good—that I have framed so much of this book around the dichotomy between Marx and Mauss, two men who were both fascinated by cultural difference and dedicated to the revolutionary transformation of their own societies. In most other ways they were diametrically opposed. Mauss was interested in finding a universal moral ground for a criticism of capitalism and looked to other societies for clues to the shape of institutions that might take its place; Marx dismissed any such critiques as inevitably partaking of the “petty bourgeois” morality of artisans and peasants and insisted that the role of knowledge in the revolutionary process was almost exclusively critical: a matter of understanding the internal contradictions and laws of motion of capitalism itself. His approach was in fact so relentlessly critical that he insisted it was impossible to find anything in the existing social order that could provide the basis for an alternative, except for the revolutionary practice of the proletariat itself, whose historical role, however, stemmed from the fact that as the one class that had absolutely no stake in the existing capitalist order, it could liberate itself only by that order’s absolute negation.[170] Writing three quarters of a century later, Mauss had had the opportunity to observe how easily dismissals of petty bourgeois morality could degenerate into condemnations of “bourgeois sentimentality”—a phrase the Bolshevik leadership employed to dismiss anyone who objected on principle to murdering others in cold blood. He apparently ended up concluding it was precisely Marx’s refusal to take popular, moral critiques of capitalism seriously that allowed so many of his followers to fall into a coldhearted, cynical utilitarianism that was itself a slightly different version of the morals of the capitalist market. On the other hand, Mauss himself moved so far in the opposite direction that he ended up with conclusions that could be at times startlingly naive: for example, that aristocratic societies really did work the way aristocrats liked to pretend they did, or that capitalists could, given sufficient encouragement, end up being driven by their own competitive instincts to give their capital away.
The interesting thing about this dichotomy is that it never seems to go away. I have already had a bit to say, for example, about the fate of critical theory in the 1970s—what happens if one seriously tries to complete Marx’s project of developing, as he put it in an early essay, a “ruthless critique of everything that exists.” The likely result is a picture of the world so relentlessly bleak that in the end, criticism itself comes to seem pointless. On the other hand, as the debates over the exploitation of female labor in Melanesia, for instance, reveal, it’s not clear that neo-Maussians such as Marilyn Strathern or Annette Weiner have been able to do much better on this account.[171] Where the Marxian approach would incline one to see the ultimate significance of any apparent instance of female autonomy or power to lie in the degree to which it contributes to the reproduction of a larger system in which women are subordinated, Maussians often end up denying the meaningful existence of any larger system at all. While feminist anthropologists are of course quite right to point out that male anthropologists have always tended to ignore female concerns and areas of female autonomy, if you take this approach to its logical conclusion, rather than seeing the problems as insoluble it becomes very difficult to demonstrate that a problem even exists.[172]
Obviously, the question is not whether it is necessary to come up with a compromise between these extreme positions; the question is how. Or perhaps even more, the question should be: What it is that drives otherwise sensible social theorists to take such oddly maximal positions in the first place? After all, most of us don’t find it all that difficult to steer a path between cynicism and naiveté in our ordinary lives. Why should social theory, which can open our eyes to so many phenomena to which common sense is blind, also make us so blind to problems that actually do have common-sense solutions? I hope that if I have accomplished anything over the course of this book, it’s to suggest where one might at least look for a solution: that much of the problem lies in the Parmenidean logic behind the very notions of “society” or “culture,” which lead to irresolvable paradoxes between individual motivation and social form, and that an approach that begins instead from questions of value, creativity, and an open-ended layering of real and imaginary social totalities, might do much to help resolve them.[173]
The appeal of market-based ideologies is not that difficult to understand. They draw on a picture of human nature and human motivation that lies deeply rooted in the religious tradition of the West, and that in our marketbased society seems endlessly confirmed by everyday experience. It also has the advantage of presenting us with an extremely simple set of propositions. We are unique individuals who have unlimited desires; since there is no natural cutoff point at which anyone will have enough power, or money, or pleasure, or material possessions, and since resources are scarce, this means we will always be in at least tacit competition. What we call “society” is, if not pure obstruction, then a set of tools to facilitate the pursuit of happiness, to regulate the process, perhaps clean up after its mess.
Market principles can then be balanced, as need be, by their opposite: family values, altruistic charity, selfless devotion to a faith or cause—all principles that are, as it were, brought into being as complements to the pure psychology of “rational, self-interested calculation.” These are as Mauss reminds us really just two sides of the same false coin. The key move, one might say, the most important ideological work in all this is done by extracting all the most fundamental questions of desire from society, so that it is possible to conceive of happiness largely as one’s relations with objects (or at best, people one treats like objects): the moment it is necessary to have Rousseau to remind us that in fact, there would be no point in killing everyone else to attain their wealth because then there would be no one to know we had it, we have already long since lost the ideological game. And it is of course exactly this extraction that allows promoters of the market to claim to be acting in the name of human freedom, as simply opening the way for individuals to make up their own minds about what they want from life without anyone noticing that most of the individuals in question spend the vast majority of their waking hours running around at someone else’s beck and call. It’s a pretty neat trick if you think about it.
Much of the power of market theory stems from its very simplicity. It does contain within it a theory of human nature, a theory of desire, pleasure, freedom, and even, in its own way, a theory of society. The fact that in all these areas the argument is so simplistic as to be full of holes is, for ideological purposes, of almost no significance, particularly if no one is proposing a more coherent alternative. In fact, it often seems that all the other side has to offer (aside from all sorts of ingenious critiques) is a collection of scattered insights that, however brilliant, are drawn from such different theoretical traditions that it is impossible to make a coherent argument out of them. One problem I found myself running into fairly often while writing this book, for instance, was the lack of a theoretical language with which to talk about desire. Unless one is able to convince oneself that there really is a compelling reason to believe that language itself has a special affinity to one’s father’s penis, and is therefore willing to adopt the ideas of Jacques Lacan, or unless one is willing to adopt the Nietzschean approach adopted by authors like Deleuze or Foucault, which makes desire, or the desire for power, the fundamental constituent of all reality—a position that if carried at all far invariably seems to lead to truly bizarre conclusions, such as left-wing academics singing the praises of the Marquis de Sade—one is pretty much stuck. It’s still possible, of course, to try to mine such theories for insights without endorsing the whole, as I did at the end of chapter 4 when I, effectively, tried to come up with a non-Freudian version of Lacan. But it must be admitted this was a pretty desperate maneuver. Surely there must be some alternatives.
That argument incidentally was distantly inspired by an early essay on fetishism by Jean Baudrillard, one which might be said to have taken Lacan’s notion of “specular desire” to its logical conclusion. What is the reason, Baudrillard asked, for the profound sexual allure created by certain forms of complex personal adornment, say (as Levi-Strauss claims) by the intricate tattooing of Caduveo women, which leaves their faces covered with a complex maze of lines and symbols? Is it not because what really evokes desire, as with all fetish objects, is the existence of a kind of perfection, a self-enclosing systems of signs?
What fascinates us is always that which radically excludes us in the name of its internal logic or perfection: a mathematical formula, a paranoiac system, a concrete jungle, a useless object, or, again, a smooth body, without orifices, doubled and redoubled by a mirror, devoted to perverse autosatisfaction. It is by caressing herself, by the autoerotic maneuver, that the striptease artist best evokes desire. (1981:96)
This is not perhaps a theory of desire so much as a theory of frustrated desire. It was largely in reaction to this sort of autoerotic model that Gilles Deleuze proposed we look instead to the polymorphous perversity of the infant; for him, desire becomes a kind of universal primordial force of production flowing in all directions between bodies and between bodies and the world (e.g., 1983:26–27). What we call “reality” is really its side effect. But even aside from the Nietzschean problems mentioned above, this isn’t really a theory of desire at all—it’s more a declaration of why one isn’t necessary.[174]
At the beginning of this book I suggested that a theory of value might itself be able to produce an alternative. I think that such a theory at least points in some promising directions.
One of the key arguments of this book has been that what we call “structure” is not a set of static forms or principles but way in which changes—or in the case of social structure, action—is patterned; it consists, as Piaget (or Turner) would put it, of the invariable principles that regulate a system of transformations.[175] As such, it is a notoriously elusive thing. It is not elusive just because everyone tends to lose track of the way their own actions contribute to reproducing and reshaping themselves and their social context. It is also elusive because social performance is usually considered truly artful and accomplished—or even, competent—largely to the extent that it can make those structures—the templates, or schemata, or whatever you wish to call them—that lie behind it disappear. But even as they do so, those templates or schemata tend to reappear in the dislocated spectral form of imaginary totalities, and these totalities tend to end up inscribed in a series of objects that, insofar as they become media of value, also become objects of desire—largely, by representing the value of an actor’s own actions to herself. The object in question might be almost anything: a ritual performance, an heirloom treasure, a game, a title with its associated regalia. The critical thing is that whatever it is, it can on some level be said to contain everything. Such objects imply within their own structure all those principles of motion that shape the field in which they take on meaning—in much the same way as, say, a household contains all the elementary forms of relation at play within a larger kinship system, even if at times in strange inverted forms. In any case, they become frozen images of those patterns of actions that in practice are called into being by the very fact that people value them; they are, as I said, mirrors of our own manipulated intentions.
Normally, these microcosmic tokens have a strange duality about them. On the one hand, they embody a closed perfection that tends to be, much as Baudrillard suggests, appealing in itself, and besides which the actor can only seem a lack, a wound, an absence, an abstract content to be completed by this concrete form. But hidden behind that glimmering image of perfection is almost always the awareness of something imperceptible, a looming absence of its own (this is, I suggested, why idioms of vision so often seem appropriate—a visual surface always implies something invisible beyond). This absence tends to be perceived not as a lack but as a kind of power. But the ultimate illusion, the ultimate trick behind this whole play of mirrors, is that this power is not, in fact, power at all, but a ghostly reflection of one’s own potential for action; one’s “creative energies,” as I’ve somewhat elusively called them.
However elusive, creative potential is everything. One could even argue that it is in a sense the ultimate social reality. For me, this is what is really compelling about Bhaskar’s “critical realism.” Bhaskar suggests that most philosophers have been unable to come up with an adequate theory of physical reality because they see it as composed simply of objects but not what he calls “powers”—potentials, capacities, things that are of themselves fundamentally unrepresentable, and in most real-life, “open system” situations, unpredictable as well.[176] It seems to me it is quite the same with powers of social creativity. What makes creativity so confusing, to both actor and analyst, is the fact that these powers are—precisely—so fundamentally social. They are social both because they are the result of an ongoing process whereby structures of relation with others come to be internalized into the very fabric of our being, and even more, because this potential cannot realize itself—at least, not in any particularly significant way—except in coordination with others. It is only thus that powers turn into value. Many of the more striking rituals described in this book, from Iroquois dreamguessing to the mechanics of Malagasy sorona and faditra, could be seen as meditations on this notoriously difficult reality.
I would suggest that it is precisely this social aspect which that opens the way to what is missing in so much theory. It becomes even clearer if one moves from theories of desire to those of pleasure. Mauss and Marx both provide tantalizing hints (if only hints) of what a social theory of pleasure might be like: Marx, in the idea of unalienated labor, essentially a suggestion that the difference between taking pleasure in creativity rather than experiencing it as pain lies in the nature of the social relations in which it is embedded; Mauss, in his emphasis on “the delight in generous artistic expenditure, the pleasure of hospitality in the public or private feast” (1925 [1965:67]). One need only try to imagine a theory of pleasure that started from either of these in order to see how much the kind of pleasures market theorists seem to have in mind when they create their models of human behavior are fundamentally solitary ones. When market theorists think about a pleasurable, rewarding experience, the root image they have in mind seems to be eating food (“consumption”)—and not in the context of a public or private feast, either, but apparently, food eaten by oneself. The idea seems to be of an almost furtive appropriation, in which objects what had been parts of the outside world are completely incorporated into the consumer’s self. In fact, one doesn’t even really need to start from Marx or Mauss: one need only imagine how different the theory might look like if it set off from almost any other kind of enjoyable experience: say, from making love, or from being at a concert, or even from playing a game.
It is a commonplace that pleasure involves a certain loss of self. Some (e.g., Scarry 1986) have gone so far as to argue that since pain is a phenomenon that tends to make everything but the hurting self vanish, pleasure should best be conceived as its opposite: if one’s hand touches another person’s skin, insofar as one feels that other skin, one is experiencing pleasure; insofar as one is feeling one’s own hand, that’s pain. This is perhaps an extreme formulation but in its broadest outlines, one suspects it would have made perfect sense to a seventeenth-century Iroquois, since in Iroquoian cultures, beauty and pleasure were seen above all as a matter of overcoming those obstructions that prevent the self from opening itself and expanding into the surrounding world and entering into communication with others. What strikes me as especially significant in the Iroquois formulation, though, is the presence of a principle of creation. In thanksgiving speeches, one does not merely list the features of the cosmos one by one, one describes their coming into being, the fact of their creation. I think one might even go so far as to say that in all the most sophisticated formulations, pleasure ends up involving not just the effacement of self, but the degree to which that effacement partakes of a direct experience of that most elusive aspect of reality, of pure creative potential (whether biological, social, or esthetic—though the best sorts I suppose partake somewhat of all three)— that very phenomenon which, as the Holder of the Earth discovered, can, if one is entirely unaware of the larger social context in which it takes place, also produce unparalleled misery.
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