Abstract
People not always do what they say that they do, nor do they always say what they really do, an opaqueness that seems to be a necessary condition for the production and reproduction of their mutual relations in society. This lesson about the discrepancy between people’s words and their deeds, between verbally expressing social norms for the well-being of everybody while simultaneously striving for individual or group interests, was already taught by Malinowski (Argonauts of the western Pacific: an account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Routledge, London, 1922). He may have learned it himself during his own lengthy fieldwork in New Guinea, but it may also have been an anthropological operationalization of the dictum of Freud, with whom Malinowski was struggling intellectually (at least from his side), that people are not always conscious of the motives of their own words and behavior. It also happens, however, that politicians, business, and church people alike consciously create stories or myths in which they hide their own personal our group intentions. These stories or myths are not only works of art of the human mind, but when they are successfully told within the context of, or directly concern power relationships, the narrator may be attributed mana. At least, this is what many Polynesians would do. In this paper, I will give several ethnographic examples from Polynesia, where I have been working for the last 28 years, in order to defend my theoretical stance concerning asymmetrical ideology and power.
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Notes
The number of persons who completely lack this awareness is sociologically, though not psychologically, insignificant.
When someone falls in love with somebody else, for example, the first person may imagine that the second has all kinds of representations about him or her, whereas this is not necessarily the case. The particular other may even not have noticed the first person at all! Projections also occur in the religious realm, for example, in the Christian consciousness. The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) was one of the first scholars to analyze beliefs in a supernatural being as forms of human projection (cf. Sierksma 1977).
Within the negative approach, one point of view can be distinguished (2a) in which science and ideology are each other’s absolute opposites, in other words in which science is related to ideology as truth to error, and in which ideology can only be defeated through science. In another perspective within the negative approach (2b), science and ideology are not each other’s opposites, although they do differ. Here, ideology is a result of social contradictions and can finally not be defeated by science. Science may be able to provide the insights necessary for such dissolution, insights into both the character of ideologies and the character of the underlying social contradictions (Larrain 1979: 172–173). The latter position would have been Marx’s, although Marx never actually used a univocal concept of ideology. Merquior (1979), for example, analyzed in the work of Marx two kinds of false consciousness, in other words, two different types of ideology which he (i.e., Merquior) respectively indicated with the metaphors of mask and veil. In the Communist Manifesto, a political pamphlet published in 1848, Marx (and Engels) wrote that the dominant class deceives the dominated class. Thus, Merquior concluded the dominant class masks social reality and takes advantage of this at the expense of the dominated classes. Here, ideology is seen as a kind of mask put up by the dominant class in order to conceal its own intentions. In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, an historical analysis Marx published in 1852, however, ideology is not represented as a lie of the ruling class, as a kind of complot theory, but as an unconscious belief which is shared by both the dominant and dominated classes. Here, ideology is a kind of veil lying on top of social reality but which is not laid over it intentionally. Merquior (1979: 32) rightly emphasized that a good understanding of ideology presupposes (1) that one links ideological forms with power relations between classes or other social groups and (2) that one also analyzes those classes or other groups in terms of the social system in its totality. An important part of the confusion of tongues within the ideology debate of the 1970s and 1980s could perhaps have been prevented if one would have taken into account Merquior’s distinction between Marx’ polemic or political and his more analytical and scientific concepts of ideology represented by Merquior’s metaphors for the hidden dimensions of power of respectively the mask and the veil.
The text I refer to here (Best 1982) was written around 1929 but only published more than half a century after the author’s death.
Firth specified that the full ritual program, of which he listed 85 successive stages (1967a: 34–37), was only carried out until about 1918, i.e., a decade before his own arrival and several years previous to the conversion of the chief Tafua to Christianity, after which the latter abandoned his participation in the ritual.
A good example from outside the Pacific may be the elite in Sierra Leone, the ethnic minority of Creoles analyzed by Cohen (1981). This elite could obtain and maintain its power position by presenting the particular interests of its own group as universal interests. The communication between elite members, crucial for the continuation of their power position, mainly occurs at an informal level. In order to belong to the elite, individuals have to be socialized within elite culture. Usually, power processes are not planned. To reduce processes of collective power exertion to the intentionality of the participants, as Cohen correctly observes, ‘is to attribute superhuman traits to ordinary men and women and… to miss the whole point about the nature of ideology’ (ibid. 229).
By way of illustration, Godelier (1984) gives the example of the So in Uganda numbering some 5,000 people, analyzed by Charles and Elizabeth Laughlin. Among the So, the leaders of the tribe belonging to the kenisan, an initiation society who alone have the privilege of communicating with the ancestors. Through the ancestors, one may curry favor with the deity who has power over rain, health and prosperity. If non-initiated persons attempt to do this—which indeed they would like to do—they would become insane and, for example, start eating their own feces. The So do not have any police or similar institution, but via the ideology, with the inherent fear of becoming insane—we may here indeed speak of (implicit) intimidation—the dominated, i.e., the non-initiated, are forced to submit with consent to the dominant group, the kenisan. This example demonstrates the complementary character of the notions of violence and consent.
An extreme and clear example provided by Godelier is that, in the past, certain kings in Africa had to be killed when they became too old or ill. This behavior was thought to prevent the kings’ subjects from experiencing poor harvests, epidemics and other disasters. The life of the dominated is thus represented as completely dependent on that of the dominant group, as personified by the king.
‘Death of a Few Celebrated Truths and Others still Worth Re-stating: Inaugural Raymond Firth Memorial Lecture.’ (Original text). Sixth Conference of the European Society for Oceanists, Marseille, 8 July. (See also Godelier 2007 and 2009.) The imaginary is the sum of representations we have in our minds about the nature and origin of the universe and the consequent organization of human life. The imaginary, as Godelier (p. 14) emphasizes, is indeed a real world, but consisting of mental realities such as images, ideas, opinions, and reasoning. As far as these realities only exist within the mind of an individual, they remain unknown to others. The symbolic, on the other hand, is the embodiment of these mental realities in perceptible or ‘material’ forms such as words, gestures, postures, body decorations, and objects. The symbolic is a concentration of signs produced by human beings to enable communication and so to construct a shared reality.
Symbols, however, are not immutable. They may change over time, obtain different meanings, even disappear or be replaced by others, all this against the background of a changing world and the different ideas people develop under changing cultural circumstances.
With this reasoning, Godelier distances himself from Lévi-Strauss (1950) and the ‘symbolic school’ in anthropology, for whose adherents there is a primacy of the symbolic over the imaginary. Within this domain, however, for Godelier, the imaginary has primacy over the symbolic. He even argues that, finally, the real primacy is neither in the symbolic nor in the imaginary, but in the nature of what is at stake: access to the gods, control over land, and monopolization of power. Imaginary representations of the universe provide access to these fundamental assets as well as to the social institutions, which are created to regulate and organize this access.
Several anthropologists, however, have objected to these negative interpretations of the feminine in east Polynesia. Goldman (1970: 180), for example, remarked that aristocratic birth and primogenitural status often overrides the intrinsically low status of east-Polynesian women. Hanson (1987) observed that women attracted rather than repelled the gods, and he understood the female dimension as representing ‘a passageway between godly and human realms of existence’ (ibid. 430). Menstruation is not simply polluting but can be dangerous, according to Hanson and Hanson (1983: 93), because it represents an intervention of the female activity as a focus of transit between the divine and the human worlds. In other words, the vagina is a passageway through which mana can be channeled. Shore (1989: 148) tried to conclude this debate neatly by observing that tapu and noa are not simply opposites, but rather ‘alternative conditions of mana’. From this, it should be clear that this debate is far from settled (see for example, Douaire-Marsaudon 1998).
For an overview of early anthropological fieldwork in and monographs on Tonga see Van der Grijp (1993: 1–2).
The ethnographic material is based on my initial fieldwork in Tonga in 1982–1983, after which I conducted eleven other periods of fieldwork in western Polynesia (between 1984 and 2008) including Tonga. See on this topic also Van der Grijp (2004a) and, for the situation of Tonga and Polynesia in the Pacific area: Van der Grijp (2009a, b).
While Tonga was a British protectorate for many years (1900–1970), unlike all the other countries of the South Pacific it was never colonized. The domestic affairs of this microstate have always been run by the Tongans themselves, at least according to the official version of Tongan history (Campbell 1992; Latukefu 1974). For most Tongans their country still belongs to the Christian God.
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van der Grijp, P. Why accept submission? Rethinking asymmetrical ideology and power. Dialect Anthropol 35, 13–31 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-010-9198-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-010-9198-2