Anthropological Sensibility and Secular Numbness: Preliminary Analysis of Wolf on Power

The year 1986 signals a turning point in the history of anthropology. Then George Marcus and James Clifford published their edited Poetics and Politics of Ethnographic Writing, a collection of contributions mainly by anthropologists who convened earlier in Santa Fe to deliberate on how anthropologists produce their ethnographic accounts. A transformation in anthropological vocabulary followed this publication. It became acutely difficult to overlook the working of power within cultural differences anthropologists observe and in the very making of accounts about these differences. The “pure” knowledge pursued by earlier anthropologists in the exploration of evolution, nature, culture, civilization, structure, function, ideology or meaning seemed startlingly disinfected after anthropologists by mid Eighties had to confront with the help of various intellectual sources the inheritance that Europe’s colonial and Enlightenment projects deposited in their modern form of knowledge (e.g. Foucault 1974; Said 1979; Asad 1973; Hymes 1972).

For the past three decades, anthropologists have been writing profusely about power as such, being an explicit category in their accounts, not simply assumed or altogether neglected as was variously done. In their writings, they often turn to Marxist, Weberian, and especially Foucauldian formulations of power. In this essay, I examine the work of the late eminent American Anthropologist Eric Wolf on power. When much of American anthropology was still preoccupied with “cultural meanings” under the sway of Clifford Geertz’s interpretive anthropology, itself a reformulation of Dilthy’s philosophy, Wolf was renovating Marxist approaches that would legitimate and value the study of peasantry. I will pursue here a close reading of Wolf’s unabashedly Marxist analysis, namely, his Envisioning Power (1999), which encourages anthropologists, we are told, to see the working of structural power in culture.

After presenting Wolf’s argument and my working notion of the secular, I explore through preliminary notes the secular sensibility of his text¹ and argue that such a sensibility affects the content and the form of his argument about the workings of power on cultural reality. The secular, I propose, numbs his sense of “the ordinary” and “the rational” in what he observes, it animates his analytical prose, and it preempts his attention to conceptions of power largely outside secular reason. I conclude by presenting one such tragic conception, which finds its articulation in the Islamic tradition of self-cultivation and in the modern language of Palestinian life under occupation.

Envisioning Power is admirable for the clarity of its prose and the analysis of complexities. It can be of immense use to any writer who takes the normalization of dominance seriously. Specifically for anthropologists, it provides an illuminating review of a foundational concept (culture) and its potential for analysis of domination. Wolf invites us to equate power with domination as it works culturally on the minds, and this is an important point to which I will later return, of other people living in “extra-ordinary” conditions, in distinction from people like “us” who live in putatively “ordinary” circumstances. Refusing a relapse to mental and economic determinism in accounts of domination, Wolf seeks to explain the d d d omination through what he calls a relational approach to culture and power.

Insisting on the relation between culture and structural power (the power to manage and mobilize populations in different social structures) he analyzes domination in three cultures, the Kwakiutl, the Aztecs, and National Socialist Germany. In those settings, Wolf tells us, power works through the coalescence of cultural ideas with political-economic forces. This coalescence entails the production of an ideology necessary for legitimatizing a world of societal differentiations whose falsehood and contradictions it also works to conceal (Wolf would actually say “naturalize”). And it does so, according to him, by furnishing metaphysical, which to Wolf means supernatural grounds that bestow on the social world its “natural” appearance, its self-evident character.

This compact presentation of Wolf’s overall argument about the relation between power and culture is explicated in Wolf’s book with established Marxist notions in order to account for three ethnographic cases Wolf regards as “extreme expression.” In this essay I focus on his argument about National Socialism (NS). Taking...