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20 _ chapter one Symbols, Ideology, Ritual, and Power People exist within webs of meaning; meaning exists within webs of people. —Anonymous To a great extent, political power is founded on ceremony,1 a dictum that is as true for societies today as it was for the Inkas five centuries ago. After conquering the inhabitants of southern Peru, northwestern Argentina, and the northern half of Chile—especially the Pica and Pecunche—the Cuzqueños had to find a way to exercise authority over them. I hypothesize that they relied heavily on rites involving human sacrifice and mountain worship. But how are the concepts of power and ceremony related? To answer this question, I must explain that ritual involves the manipulation of ideology, and that ideology consists of clusters of signs. Hence, I begin my discussion of authority by talking about signs. A symbol is defined as any object, idea, or act that has a principal or literal meaning and a secondary or figurative sense.2 According to Clifford Geertz, human consciousness is based on the creation of sets of signs and on their application to the real world.3 Edmund Leach, in his examination of the theories of Lévi-Strauss, shows how a person comes to devise and to use symbols, which is to say, how he learns to think. At birth, he is confronted with the physical universe, consisting of a continuum of phenomena; since he has no way to interpret his perceptions of the world, everything is meaningless. As he is acculturated, though, he learns to divide the continuum into segments and to give order to these segments by sorting them into categories, thereby reducing their number. The organization that he imposes on the universe is part of the symbol system of his culture.4 For the individual, each thought is an “act of recognition”: a process whereby he identifies something in the world by comparing and Symbols, Ideology, Ritual, and Power 21 contrasting it with an appropriate sign.5 Thus, through symbols he is not only able to order the jumble of stimuli that bombards his senses, but to interpret the universe that surrounds him and to imbue it with significance . Signs also enable him to distinguish between the natural and social realms—a distinction that is arbitrary and that is based on his socially derived symbol system—and to contemplate his relationship with these realms. Just because an individual creates the signs by which he perceives the world, however, does not mean that he is free to invent any symbol system . First, the process of building such a system is partially unconscious, so he may not be aware of what he is doing. Second, a symbol system is imbedded in its own historic and social contexts: both the raw materials from which he constructs it and the model behind it are provided by his culture. And he is influenced by various social factors—including the distribution of resources in his culture and the power structures that exist in it—as well as is constrained by the physical nature of the universe. Given the constant interplay between a person’s set of signs and his physical and social environments, when incompatibilities develop between them, he may be forced to modify or to completely transform his symbol system.6 There are several kinds of symbols, among them iconic and verbal ones. The former consist of physical objects such as flags. Signs have various features, including “condensation of meaning,” “multivocality,” and “ambiguity.” Condensation has to do with the varied connotations of a symbol, which at the subconscious level interact with each other and become intimately associated in the mind. More importantly, the interactions produce a synthesis of meaning. Multivocality refers not only to the fact that a sign can elicit a number of ideas at the same time, but to the notion that individuals might understand it in different ways. Symbols are ambiguous in that they do not have one meaning that can be expressed in a precise way.7 Another property of signs is that they are quickly objectified , which is to say that people begin to think of them as real “things,” rather than as inventions of the mind.8 Every physical item in a society has significance and can serve as an iconic symbol;9 it is, after all, the product of purposeful and patterned human behavior.10 Martin Wobst tells us that material culture is well suited for transmitting symbolic messages that are short...

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