Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis, and: Reading the Holocaust (review)

Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. By Eric R. Wolf. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xi + 339 pp., preface, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.)

Reading the Holocaust. By Inga Clendinnen. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. x + 227 pp., map, photographs, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.)

In this book, published shortly before his death, noted anthropologist Eric Wolf explores the relationship between ideas and power, mentalities and material forces. He does this first by reviewing the various theoretical positions on the subject and then by presenting three historical case studies. Building on his earlier work (especially Wolf 1982), in this volume he continues to refine the concept of culture, away from older notions of a bounded, unitary, integrated whole toward something related more to a process, something flexible, open, and operational. He makes a strong case for the continuing usefulness of the concept, with culture seen as the locus wherein ideas and power intersect, wherein power is operationalized through symbolic expression. Relations of “structural power” “implicate ideas” and “are played out in social arrangements and cultural configurations” (2). Culture reproduces itself not through the persuasive force of “custom” but through the very real force of “social agents who instill and defend institutions and who organize coherence” and who set and defend cultural borders (67).

Wolf chose the three cases based on his personal interest and research experience and because they represent “unusually evocative and elaborate repertoires of ideas and practices based upon these repertoires” (16), each of which is very different from the others and formulated by “societies under increasing stress” (274). These are extreme cases, where the relationship between symbols and power is thrown into high relief; Wolf hopes that an understanding of such examples might enlighten the more mundane operations of less-striking social and cultural arrangements. The chosen examples are: the Tsaxis or Fort Rupert Kwakiutl during the period of intensifying external trade relations, depopulation, and competitive and destructive potlatching; the Tenochca Aztecs during their rapid imperial expansion, which was accompanied by large-scale ritual sacrifice of captured people; and Nazi Germany, which disrupted Wolf’s own central European childhood. In each chapter Wolf examines the role of ideology in consolidating power and in defining characteristic (and historically controversial) cultural practices. Based on extensive reading of secondary literature and some published original sources, these case studies will offer little to respective specialists.

Indeed, specialists may note some errors, omissions, and weaknesses of interpretation. For example, in the Aztec study, apart from the fact that the Tenochca practiced human sacrifice with “unparalleled intensity” (190), Wolf offers little explanation for their ability to dominate other, culturally very similar, Nahua groups, and he neglects the role that Tepanec and Acolhua allies played in the Tenochca’s initial rise to power. A discussion of Aztec class structure (178–88)—an important matter for a Marxian scholar—omits the serflike laborers called mayehqueh. Some Nahuatl words are incorrectly analyzed. And oddly, Conrad and Demarest’s Religion and Empire (1984), focused specifically on the interaction between ideas and power in the Aztec and Inca states, is not cited.

Nonetheless these chapters are lucidly written and soundly argued and can serve as effective summaries of the scholarship for readers who are not familiar with all three cultures (that is, nearly everyone). Thus the book should be well suited for teaching, since it presents empirical material that can be compared or brought to bear on Wolf’s theoretical formulations. Though likely to contribute further to the dissolution of the old “idealist-materialist” divide in anthropological thought, the book is unlikely to provoke any major paradigm shifts. It follows a trend that Wolf himself helped to set and provides a useful accounting of how he arrived at his own positions.

Wolf is not the only Mesoamerican specialist to publish a study of Nazi Germany in 1999. Historian Inga Clendinnen’s book...