Pathways of Power Pathways of Power Building an Anthropology of the Modern World Eric R. Wolf with Sydel Silverman foreword by Aram A. Yengoyan UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley . Los Angeles . London University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England q 2001 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wolf, Eric R., 1923±1999. Pathways of power : building an anthropology of the modern world / Eric W. Wolf with Sydel Silverman ; foreword by Aram A. Yengoyan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-22333-0 (cloth : alk. paper).Ð ISBN 0-520-22334-9 (pbk. : alk paper) 1. EthnologyÐPhilosophy. 2. EthnologyÐ Comparative method. 3. Political anthropology. 4. Power (Social sciences) 5. Group identity. I. Silverman, Sydel. II. Title. GN345 .W643 2001 306Ðdc21 00-055969 Manufactured in the United States of America 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 10987654321 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39 0.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). Contents Foreword: Culture and Power in the Writings of Eric R. Wolf, by Aram A. Yengoyan vii Preface xix Introduction: An Intellectual Autobiography 1 part i. anthropology 11 1. American Anthropologists and American Society 13 2. Kroeber Revisited 23 3. Remarks on The People of Puerto Rico 38 4. On Fieldwork and Theory 49 5. Anthropology among the Powers 63 part ii. connections 81 6. Building the Nation 83 7. The Social Organization of Mecca and the Origins of Islam 100 8. Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society: Mexico 124 vi Contents 9. The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol 139 10. Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java 147 11. The Vicissitudes of the Closed Corporate Peasant Community 160 12. Kinship, Friendship, and Patron-Client Relations in Complex Societies 166 13. Ethnicity and Nationhood 184 part iii. peasants 191 14. Types of Latin American Peasantry: A Preliminary Discussion 193 15. Speci®c Aspects of Plantation Systems in the New World: Community Subcultures and Social Classes 215 16. Peasants and Revolution 230 17. Phases of Rural Protest in Latin America 241 18. Is the ªPeasantryº a Class? 252 19. On Peasant Rent 260 20. The Second Serfdom in Eastern Europe and Latin America 272 21. Peasant Nationalism in an Alpine Valley 289 part iv. concepts 305 22. Culture: Panacea or Problem? 307 23. Inventing Society 320 24. The Mills of Inequality: A Marxian Approach 335 25. Incorporation and Identity in the Making of the Modern World 353 26. Ideas and Power 370 27. Facing PowerÐOld Insights, New Questions 383 28. Perilous Ideas: Race, Culture, People 398 References 413 Index 447 Foreword Culture and Power in the Writings of Eric R. Wolf Aram A. Yengoyan With the death of Eric Wolf, anthropology lost one of its early advocates for cultural anthropology as a link between the humanities and the social sciences. From the 1950s on, Wolf approached anthropology as a form of humanistic understanding that combined theory and interpretation within a historical and comparative perspective markedly in¯uenced by his rethinking of various works by Marx and Marxist writers. In devel- oping this bridge, Wolf saw the problem of culture as a historical and processual emergent in which class and power relations are critical for understanding what culture means as a local expression and as a concept paramount to American anthropology. On the personal side, I want to note my relationship with Wolf. In 1959 he joined the faculty in the anthropology department at the Uni- versity of Chicago, where I was a second-year graduate student. During the next year I took one or two classes from him. In 1960 he went to the Tyrol region in northern Italy for ®eldwork, and I went to eastern Mindanao in the southern Philippines for my initial ®eld experience. On his return to this country in 1961, Wolf moved to the University of Michigan. In 1963 I was hired as an assistant professor at Michigan, and we were colleagues there until he left for the City University of New York in 1971. Since that period, we remained in communication. It was the Michigan and Vietnam War years that I feel were pivotal to his writings, though some of the themes, such as his focus on history, had been critical for him since the beginning of his professional life. vii viii Foreword This essay provides an overview of various issues central to Wolf's work throughout the last four or ®ve decades. Each of the chapters in this anthology expresses conceptual concerns developed in his extensive writings. I deal only with some of his major books; the papers in this volume stand on their own because Wolf himself wrote an introduction to each of them and drew the various connections of each phase of his intellectual efforts to the totality of his contributions. I focus on three issues that are central to his work. The ®rst, which I treat only brie¯y, is his concern with the question of boundaries and borders; the second pertains to his ideas about the interactions between culture and power; the last, but most important, deals with the notion of culture in his writings. As for Wolf's ideas on boundaries and borders, The Hidden Frontier (Cole and Wolf 1974), based on his initial ®eldwork in the early 1960s and later on collaborative research with John Cole, deals with how the relationships of cultural identity between German-speaking and Ro- mance-speaking communities have been sustained through a long his- torical trajectory in the high alpine areas of northern Italy. The book demonstrates how historical eventsÐthe development of the Italian states, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the two world wars, and the post±World War II political events and nationalistic move- mentsÐhave had an impact on the ways in which differences at the microlevel are maintained between two populations that are in virtually constant, daily interaction. The analysis is framed in such 1960s con- cepts as ecology and ethnicity, but it is not dif®cult, from the vantage point of the present, to view it in terms of political economy, state in- tervention, and the intrinsic interplay between culture and class. Through the development of what Wolf has called a ªrelational ap- proach,º he and Cole empirically and theoretically show that no single set of variables can account for the kinds of differences that they noted in the microcosm of the two communities. Furthermore, it is apparent that the idea of boundaries and borders expressed on the local level may have little bearing on the macrocosm, and vice versa. Thus borders and boundaries can never be drawn stati- cally through time, because they have little meaning in capturing the kinds of differences that have persisted historically. Wolf, whose writ- ings always emphasized the fallacy of culture as bounded or homoge- neous, stresses that the frontier is not timeless but part of the total social formation. Foreword ix In retrospect, this approach to borders and boundaries anticipated recent anthropological and historical analysis of such areas and of what national and cultural delineations mean to the populations that straddle boundaries. In numerous ways, the questions that Peter Sahlins (1989) poses in his study of the border between France and Spain are set forth by Cole and Wolf, though their language differs from that of the 1990s. Furthermore, Cole and Wolf deal with other issues that are now of central importance in anthropology, such as the question of identity. For them identity, whether psychological or cultural, is in part the result of how differences are a playing out of events, actions, and institutions that have minimal opposition or contrastiveness (see Yengoyan 1989). What minimal contrastiveness means is that when similarities and dif- ferences are noted between communities, societies, or regions, it may be the case that the locales differ in only one or two features. The points of difference become the anchor in which a minimal contrast becomes the critical foundation on which differences are generated and enhanced. Thus in the two communities, which otherwise show common ecological adaptations to their environments, the contrast is expressed in their in- heritance patterns. Not only do villagers recognize this difference, they use and magnify it in establishing their own cultural identity and in contrasting their identity with that of their neighbors. Questions of difference based on contrastiveness and how it deter- mines internal identity and maximal opposition are a dominant factor in the way cultures and societies situate themselves in differing social milieus, whether in rural areas or in urban contexts. The insights pro- vided by Cole and Wolf (1974) and by Wolf (1962) are ethnographically founded as well as theoretically astute. The implications of how differ- ence is created at the minimal and maximal levels and how it relates to cultural identity result in a series of social and political fractures that may either be initiated at the community level or stem from larger po- litical processes, such as the reformulation of the nation-state. Throughout his writings, Wolf insists that the idea of boundedness as it is applied to cultures and communities must be abandoned and replaced by an understanding of interactional processes as they emerge from sources of power and hegemony that may be elusive to de®ne. His critical writings on such issues of borders and boundaries all predate the current postmodernist critiques, which basically argue the same message in a different language. The second theme of this essay is power and culture.