When Women Held the Dragonà Às Tongue
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WHEN WOMEN HELD THE DRAGON’S TONGUE and other essays in Historical Anthropology ©2007 Hermann Rebel Table of Contents Preface i 1. What People without History? A Case for Historical Anthropology as a Narrative-Critical Science 1 Part 1: Myths 2. Figurations in Historical Anthropology: Two Kinds of Narrative about the Long Duration Provenances of the Holocaust [from Kalb and Tak, eds., Critical Junctions, 2004] 94 3. Cultural Hegemony and Class Experience [American Ethnologist,1989] 117 4. Eric Wolf’s Historical Anthropology [ Focaal, 2001] 170 5. Reimagining the oikos: Austrian Cameralism in its Social Formation [from O’Brien and Roseberry, eds., Gold en Ages. Dark Ages, 1991] 176 Part 2: Fairy Tales 6. Hessian Peasant Women, their Families and the Draft: A Social-Historical Interpretation of Four Tales from the Grimm Collection [with Peter K. Taylor, Journal of Family History, 1981] 216 7. Why Not “Old Marie” . or Someone Very Much Like Her? A Reassessment of the Question about the Grimms’ Contributors [Social History, 1988] 264 8. When Women Held the Dragon’s Tongue 303 Part 3: Histories 9. Peasants Against the State in the Body of Anna Maria Wagner: An Austrian Infanticide in 1832 [Journal of Historical Sociology, 1993] 372 10. What do the Peasants Want Now? Realists and Fundamentalists in Swiss and South German Rural Politics, 1650-1750 [Central European History, 2003] 383 11. After the Next Genocide: Reactionary Modernism and the Postmodern Challenge to Analytical Ethics. In Recollection of Bill Roseberry 445 Preface One noteworthy feature of the ongoing dialogue between Anthropology and History has been an occasional practice of misrepresenting and even suppressing approaches that are threatening to or more promising than one’s own possibly shaky proposals. For example, in a recent collection of her essays Sherry Ortner engages in “tinkering” with something she wants to call “practice theory” which, she claims, has come along to offer an alternative to the perceived weaknesses of what she calls Geertzian meaning theory, Wolfian exploitation studies and French structuralism. “Practice theory,” in her perception, put forward “genuine resolutions of problems that had been plaguing the field [of Anthropology] . It ‘grounded’ cultural processes . in the social relations of people ‘on the ground’.” It is one thing for her to indulge in a logical circularity of “grounding” and to appear thereby to give content to an equally circular pseudo-profundity that “history makes people, but people make history.” (Anthropology and Social Theory, Duke, 2006, 2-3) It is another thing, however, when she takes particular aim at Eric Wolf, whom she writes off as a mere political economy “objectivist” (without explaining what that means to her) and as one of several engaged in alleged “cultural thinning,” i.e., in practicing a “Sixties style materialism . opposed to giving culture any sort of active role in the social and historical process.” (52-3) This is where the suppressing and misrepresenting come in. Her summary judgment on Wolf is that in his Europe and the People without History (California, 1982) he “devotes a scant five pages at the end of the book to the question of culture, largely in order to dismiss it.” (51) This can only be a calculated misrepresentation, a kind of spin-doctoring of Wolf’s postscript to the book by which he in fact re-gathers the social-cultural threads that have been running throughout his narrative about how people experienced the asymmetrical re-articulations of kin- ordered, tributary and capitalist modes of production in their actual and long-duration global histories. In addition, Wolf’s concluding pages seek to frame a new synthesis drawn from his several long-duration and conjunctural narratives to take us beyond any lingering base/superstructure, structure/agency and other unsatisfying dualisms by means of an experimental projection of specific figural (i.e., “cultural”) formations of i membership, justice and valuation that appear historically to quicken, permeate, and make possible, narratable, figurally livable, the various and historically articulating modes of the social reproduction of labor. Ortner’s misrepresenting and dismissive judgment also offends in a second sense in that she suppresses Wolf’s Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis (California, 1999), where the latter seeks to confront cultural-historical issues of violence and power well beyond the limited sense of contingencies one finds in the historicist, “template” approaches to cultural analysis re-initiated by Geertz, and followed by Rosaldo, Scheper-Hughes, and a stampede of others, including Ortner herself. She in effect denies the known and long trajectory by which Wolf’s culture concept evolved from his childhood experiences in Nazi Austria and Germany and his unique education in exile to find scholarly expression finally in publications dating back to the early 1950s (see his autobiographically annotated Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World, California, 2001 which also finds no mention by Ortner). Trivializing and reading out of the record in an offhand and intellectually insulting manner this diverse array of treatments of “culture,” as Ortner does, is to reveal, with all due respect, a deep ignorance and is on its face scientifically unacceptable, notably despite its appearance in a peer-reviewed academic press publication. It is worth to bring, briefly, the differences between Ortner’s and Wolf’s culture concepts to a critical point around the issue of “culture’s” connections to “power,” a featured relationship in both their works. In her effort to restore analytical balance between “agency” and “structure” Ortner follows, among others, Anthony Giddens’ reasoning whereby power is agents’ “transformative capacity” that can also operate as “domination.” To which one can say immediately that this is yet another circularity because synonyms are neither an explanation, nor a clarification, nor a deepening conceptualization. From a perception of power as residing in “dualities of structure mediated by resources” she then opts for Bill Sewell’s neo-Leibnizian view that “agency is access to resources and nobody is without such access however unequally.” In this optimistic view of power we are all “empowered subjects” in a world where, in Ortner’s words, “agency is a kind of property of social subjects” that is “culturally shaped by way of the characteristics that are foregrounded as ‘agentic’.” (2006: 137-8, 151-2) It is to go ii around in circles to argue that agents have (or are given, by means of “foregrounding”) “agentic” characteristics that then “empower” them. By contrast, and in an anticipatory reply to this mounting pile of scholasticisms about the world of the culturally agentic, Wolf developed the following alternative approach to how analyses of power can be distilled from analyses of culture: What comes to be called ‘culture’ covers a vast stock of material inventories, behavioral repertoires, and mental representations, put in motion by many kinds of social actors, who are diversified into genders, generations, occupations and ritual memberships. Not only do these actors differ in the positions from which they act and speak, but the positions they occupy are likely themselves to be fraught with ambiguity and contradictions . Given this differentiation, neither a language-using community nor a body of culture bearers can share all of their language or culture . Any coherence that [culture] may possess must be the outcome of social processes through which people are organized into convergent action or into which they organize themselves . The processes of organization cannot be understood apart from considerations of power . To think of power as an all- embracing, unitary entelchy would merely reproduce the reified view of society and culture as apriori totalities. It will be more productive to think of power relationally . Power is brought into play differently in the relational worlds of families, communities, regions, activity systems, institutions, nations and across national boundaries . (Envisioning Power, 66-7) For Wolf, power is not an entelechy realizing itself as a “transformative capacity” or a “property” of the “agentic” but is instead brought into very existence in interactive, social-relational moments of greater or lesser complexity and is guided by a manifold of often ineffably duplicitous, allegedly “empowering” scripts that trap people in relations that can on occasion end for one or another party in a given relations-complex in death or other lesser forms of “elimination” by hidden transcripts disclosed only in that relationship’s dialectical unfolding. This is to say that the model of cultural power as some kind of “property” that some “have” and others do not offers very little toward understanding the place of possibly concealed or deniable force and violence in social relations that are couched in terms of the “normal practice” of culture. Wolf’s case studies in Envisioning Power demonstrate that one of the underlying modalities of cultural power is in those relational complexes that authorize and execute the murderous sacrifices that can emerge to become the overriding imperatives of specific iii historical-cultural articulations. Ortner remains in effect speechless before the violences that take place inside certain repressive and metonymic spaces of ostensibly necessary cultural, and therefore empowered, social relational “practice.” She is required to content her readers with the formula that “death happens” – see the concluding essay in the present volume– whereas for Wolf what matters is “how death happens” and how it is (and can be) culturally, that is to say tropologically, figured in historical- anthropological narratives that disclose the processes that empower. Possibly a third oversight in Ortner’s giving of short shrift to the wide range of Wolf’s contributions to the study of culture is that Wolf’s initiatives have not been without fruition. It is not surprising, for example, that those who explore the implications of Wolf’s experimental formulations for their own areas of research tend to come to “cultural-historical” conclusions.