Dialect Anthropol (2011) 35:13–31 DOI 10.1007/s10624-010-9198-2

Why accept submission? Rethinking asymmetrical ideology and power Paul van der Grijp

Published online: 7 September 2010  Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

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. Keywords

Anthropology  Ideology  Power  Inequality  Polynesia

In all societies, individuals and groups produce a discourse of legitimization or contestation of the place of everyone within the whole. Such discourse consists in elements, which are more or less intelligible and acceptable for most people P. van der Grijp (&) Universite´ Lumie`re Lyon, Lyon, France e-mail: [email protected]

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concerned. The evaluation of one’s own place in society and that of others in terms of legitimization or contestation is related to interests and relations of force and, as Maurice Godelier (2007, 2009) expresses it, forms an ‘existential truth’. The existential truths which the members of a society advance and defend are selective and leave an important number of crucial aspects concerning the functioning of their society unpronounced and even unthought. They keep these aspects consciously or unconsciously in the margin of their interpretation of social reality, those things which Auge´ (1976) once coined ‘les blancs du discours’, the unspoken or blank areas of power discourse. These unspoken or hidden parts, often indicated as ideology, are not the same for all individuals or groups in society. One role of anthropology and other social sciences is to bring them to the fore and analyze what is at stake in the production of social forms of existence, including power. This task has a long history, several milestones of which I will highlight below.

Unspoken dimensions of societal discourse The term ‘ide´ologie’ seems to have been used for the first time in 1796, 7 years after the French Revolution, and was immediately adopted as ‘ideology’ in the English language. At the time, the scholar Antoine Destutt de Tracy, a member of the Institut National, was charged with a research project on the origin, evolution, and laws of ideas. His patrons in the French government expected that such an investigation could stimulate a further spread of what they considered as the revolutionary spirit. Destutt de Tracy belonged to the ide´ologues, i.e., scholars such as Cabanis, Constant, Daunou and Volney developing an early social science for the benefit of mankind focused on the analysis of ideas (Clauzade 1998; Gusdorf 1978; Hayward 1991). In line with the sensualist empiricism of the encyclope´distes, the ide´ologues shared the hypothesis that ideas are the result of physical senseperceptions. Between 1803 and 1818, Destutt de Tracy published his books on ‘elements of ideology’ (Destutt de Tracy 1970). Since then, the notion of ideology has acquired many overtones, varying according to the historical, political, social, and scientific context. Because the ide´ologues were reluctant to become servile members of the nobility under Napoleon, by 1813 Napoleon had begun to use ‘ide´ologie’ in a pejorative sense, as abstract speculation. Often, ideology refers to a discourse in which people give meaning to—or: signify— the different dimensions of their existence. Human beings experience their lives through such discourses which ‘make sense’. Ideology, as I see it, is a dialectical process in which people signify and are signified. Most members of a social group or society are very much aware that they are signified by other members of their society, in other words that they are integrated into a discourse, in what others think and possibly say about them.1 This awareness, however, is not necessarily a correct representation of what

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The number of persons who completely lack this awareness is sociologically, though not psychologically, insignificant.

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others think about them, to say the least.2 Based on a criterion of objectivity, ideology may also be conceived as distortion and illusion—a point of view which, indeed, presupposes that objectivity itself is not illusory (Mannheim [1934] 1966). Critical markers in the history of the ideology debate were Marx’ and Engels’ theses on history as the product of class conflicts in which ruling classes produce the dominant ideology, thus masking and inverting forms of social existence and inequality; Luka´cs’ interpretation of bourgeois ideology as ‘false consciousness’ as opposed to the ‘true consciousness’ of dominated groups; Gramsci’s view on class-based ‘organic’ worldviews and the production of ‘spontaneous’ consent to the ideas of the ruling classes (hegemony); and Alhusser’s opposition of science and ideology, in which ideology stands for an ‘imaginary’ relation to social reality.3 From an anthropological perspective, however, we have to be aware of the epistemological problem that these authors limited their analyses to Western—industrial, capitalist and class—societies. The more recent debate on ideology, which had its peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s, often refers to the idea of ‘false consciousness’.4 Jorge Larrain (1979), for example, distinguished between positive and negative approaches in the ideology debate. Within the positive approach (1), there is no contradiction between ideology and science: ideology encompasses systems of meanings, values and knowledge, including science. Ideologies are not necessarily incorrect representations of reality; their cognitive value in terms of truth or falseness is variable. However, their linkage to class and other group interests is characteristic. Within the negative approach (2), on the other hand, there is a contradiction between ideology and science, although this contradiction is not absolute in all cases. Ideologies give incorrect representations of reality (distortion or ‘false consciousness’); they remain at the level of manifestations. Hence, in this approach, only science is capable of penetrating beneath this surface level and, in so doing, revealing fundamental patterns. Only science can provide ‘real knowledge’.5 2

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).

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See here in particular Marx and Engels ([1846] 1958); Luka´cs ([1923] 1971); Gramsci ([1910–1926] 1977, 1978); and Althusser (1976).

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See, for example, Auge´ (1975); Baechler (1976); Barnett and Silverman (1979); Donham (1990); and Vade´e (1973).

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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

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Within Larrain’s distinction in the relation between ideology and science, I position my own perspective in the positive approach. Ideology conceived simply as ‘false consciousness’ has in my thinking no analytical value, first because ideologies may encompass true or correct representations of reality (and are thus not necessarily false) and secondly because ideologies for the most part also operate unconsciously and can thus not be qualified as (false) consciousness. Although Larrain mentions the unconscious functioning of ideologies, he does not pay much attention to it. An important function of ideology is the consent of dominated individuals and groups to their subjected position. Usually, this consent operates against the background of a permanent threat of physical or mental or (in monetary economies) financial violence by the dominant group. I will illustrate this thesis with two Polynesian examples based on classic anthropological literature that imply the notion of mana. The first example concerns the Maori of New Zealand for whom the Raukawa Sea (the Cook Strait between the two main islands) used to be an extremely taboo (tapu) place. People could cross this strait by boat but, during their first crossing, were not allowed to look around, neither left nor right, nor behind. If they did so, the vessel would become motionless, and only mana possessing specialists (i.e., with much spiritual energy) from the Kahungunu tribe were able, by means of a certain ritual, to allow those persons to continue their voyage. Actually, the people in the boat would veil their eyes with leaves of the Karaka tree to prevent them from looking around. This tapu was in force during the first time that a person crossed the sea; only on subsequent voyages was one allowed to look around (Best 1982: 542–543).6 Thus, people had to consent to the rules, if not they would be punished by getting stuck in the middle of the sea and had to remain there for 24 h or longer. The violence in this example is not of an extreme sort: no one was killed, but only annoyed for awhile to give them a lesson in obedience to a tapu imposed by mana possessing specialists from a particular chiefly tribe. Tapu is linked with mana, which ultimately derives from the gods—the divine inspiration of chiefly power. My second example comes from Raymond Firth’s research on the ‘Work of the Gods’ in Tikopia, a Polynesian outlier in the Solomon Islands (at the time of Firth’s fieldwork still a British protectorate). The Work-of-the-Gods is the literal translation Footnote 5 continued 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. 6

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.

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of the Tikopian indication for a ritual cycle. Firth said this to be ‘the most spectacular of my discoveries in this isolated community’ (1967a: 1), and which may be compared with the Hawaiian makahiki (see Sahlins 1985) and the Tongan ‘inasi rites or ceremonial first fruit offerings to the paramount Tu’i Tonga (DouaireMarsaudon 1998). The Tikopian population, about 1,300 people at the time (Firth 1936: 489), consisted of four politically autonomous clans, each with its own chief. There was a ritual order among these four chiefs, respectively entitled Kafika, Tafua, Taumako and Fangarere. The Kafika was the primus inter pares without being the controlling authority. Firth’s central research question was ‘how do the clans and the chiefs maintain effective cooperation [during the rituals] when any of them is theoretically free to break away from the system?’ (1967a: 39). A first answer might have been that the god associated with Kafika (atua i Kafika) was supreme among the Tikopian gods. According to Firth, however, this answer was insufficient. The real answer was that non-cooperation at any point in the ritual cycle would have divine repercussions for the entire cycle. The cycle was conceived as a coherent system of activities including a resacralization of canoes, a re-consecration of temples, a series of harvest and planting rites for the yam, a sacred dance festival, several memorial rites on the sites of vanished temples and, finally, the ritual manufacture of turmeric dye. Moreover, the four chiefs and several ritual elders of important clan groups played individual roles at various stages in the cycle, thus expressing their self-esteem in public and gaining prestige and eventually power. The cycle as a whole was considered to be of crucial importance for the fertility of crops, success in fishing expeditions, and the general welfare of the island. As a consequence, non-cooperation in the cycle would have resulted in crop and fishing failures, and other misfortunes for the entire island population. Here too, disobedience to the unwritten rules would result in supernatural punishment. The ritual cycle was—although Firth himself did not use this concept here—a matter of channeling mana.7

Accepting, or not, one’s own dominated position My own anthropological perspective on the ideological dimensions of power is informed to a great extent by theories of Therborn and Godelier—with the spirit of Gramsci in the background—highlighted in this and following sections. Human subjectivity, according to Therborn (1980), is constituted through ideology in the sense that every process of socialization includes both a component of qualification and one of submission. In socialization processes—via interpellation and recognition—people (children and adults alike) become aware of (1) what exists and what does not, (2) what is good or bad in moral (esthetic, erotic, etc.) respects, and (3) what is possible—or impossible—to change (ibid. 18). Ideology may consist of daily experiences as well as elaborate and institutionalized systems of ideas, 7

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.

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including scientific paradigms, philosophies, and religions. The distinction between ideology and science is not an essential one (they do not have different ‘essences’ or ‘substances’), but a distinction in function. Science is subjected to particular knowledge criteria in order to be able to function as science (verification or falsification, refinement of debate, etc.). In spite of claims of universality and as so many other social scientists, however, Therborn (1978) appears to limit his analysis to Western (class) societies. One of the most important functions of ideology is the constitution of consent with one’s own position within a set of social relationships (configuration). This implies not necessarily full consent, but may also consist in an ambivalent attitude—as long as one finally accepts the situation. Social relations are in my view characterized by inequality (asymmetry) in many respects: not only concerning age, sex, (other) physical features, mental capacities, and the like, but also in political, religious, economic, and legal respects. Asymmetrical relationships can be translated in terms of power. I define power as the ability of a person or group to influence and change the decisions and conduct of other persons or groups. The person or group at the power side of the social relationship has this ability due to control over material and/or mental (i.e., ‘ideational’) resources in the environment of the other(s), despite possible resistance by the (or those) other(s). Power is certainly not the only aspect of social life; however, it is an aspect that accompanies and penetrates all social relationships.8 Godelier (1977, 1978 and 1984) made an important anthropological contribution to the further development of an analytical concept of ideology, within which he resisted, among other things, a vulgar materialist approach. Thinking, in Godelier’s eyes, does not just represent social relationships, nor is it only an interpretive activity. Thinking also organizes social relationships and contributes to the production of social realities. The construction of inequality between groups in the same society, such as an aristocracy that claims divine origin and a ‘common people’ who owe respect, services and labor to the aristocracy, presupposes the existence of a—social and spiritual—ideology in which the common people are indebted to the aristocratic lineages. This legitimates the extraction of labor and services of some by others. This ideological universe cannot simply be explained as the legitimization of a power relationship, of an original social violence, but the ruling group is also able to oppress the dominated group through physical means. In the latter case, appropriation is enforced through physical violence or threats of physical violence. In the long run, however, an asymmetrical social relationship can only continue its existence if both parties not only tolerate the social inequality, but they also have to accept it, that is: the asymmetry has to be legitimized. Then, the 8

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).

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social inequality is represented and experienced as evident, natural, and inevitable. The consent we imply here is not necessarily voluntary, nor complete. It can be accompanied by contradictions, which may not be recognized as such by the participants. This consent is also maintained via a permanent threat of— legitimized—violence. Of the two constituting parts of every ruling power (violence and consent), consent is ultimately of more importance for the continuation of social inequality than pure violence. Concerning this rough outline of Godelier’s theory of ideology, we must make some necessary differentiations. Godelier explains, for example, that this consent is not always without reservations. The history of every society is indeed characterized by conflicts of interest and other contradictions. These contradictions also occur in the ideas, the ideology, of the dominated individuals and groups. Their consent may vary from a deep conviction of the justice of their system to moderate adhesion; resigned acceptance; latent opposition; up to and including outspoken hostility. The force of ideologies is not so much related to their contents, their ‘truth’, as to the degree in which they are shared by the dominated. Thus, I observe, the ideas concerned are not necessarily false. How then, did these ideas come into being? Here, Godelier underlines a paradox: classes could only come into being within classless societies in a culturally legitimate way. This happened through a long-term process of transformations. On the one hand, there was a play of treason, violation of justice, violence, and so forth, and on the other hand, there was a legitimization of class formation. Remarkably—although not by accident—the latter, the legitimization, mostly won in the long run. Consent is most often accompanied by some form of violence, but this usually functions as a threat in the background.9 Ultimately, a ruling power can never rely only on violence, nor only on consent. For an effective dominance and accompanying exploitation (appropriation of the surplus produced by others), it is necessary that the dominant group as it were provides ‘proofs’ that the lives of members of the dominated group would become impossible without the mediation of the dominators. The ‘legitimate’ character of the dependence of the dominated group needs to be demonstrated. Often, this occurs in a subtle way.10 Relations of domination, as well as exploitation and oppression—including relations of orders, castes and classes—are, according to Godelier, legitimized in the 9

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. 10

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.

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long run by representing them (consciously or unconsciously) as if they were relations of equal exchange, namely an exchange of goods and services. The paradox, however, goes even further. In the end, the dominated seem to gain even more advantages from the exchange than the rulers. Godelier’s reasoning remains rather general. Of course, one ideology does not equal another, certainly not when dealing with different societies separated in time and space. In this regard, we should remember his early remark that every mode of production produces its own particular form of ideology, ‘a specific form of illusion by the historical agents about their own conditions of existence’ (Godelier 1977: 53; author’s translation). This illusion or mystification is part of the ‘spontaneous conscience’ the participants have of their mutual relationships. According to Godelier, one of the major tasks of anthropology is de-masking such ideology. In his inaugural address to the European Society of Oceanists in Marseilles in 2005, Godelier apparently leaves the concept of ideology behind and now focuses on the distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic within the various forms of social life.11 These symbols are forms of language that cannot be reduced to words and speech, since they also include non-verbal communication. Their aim is to act upon the world in line with the mental realities which they embody and which, as we saw above, also imply directives for the organization of human life. The imaginary should thus be distinguished from the symbolic and it can only be effective when the imaginary is embodied in symbolic forms.12 The symbolic realm transforms mental realities into social and material realities and, by making mental/ invisible realities visible, also supplies a ‘proof’ of their veracity: it provides ‘legitimacy’ to the social order in which these realities are expressed, at least for the participants of the society concerned. Outsiders, i.e., those who do not share the same cultural and social universe, may see this particular ‘truth’ as purely imaginary.13 The consequences of imaginary representations and symbolic practices are not imaginary themselves and cannot be reduced to symbolic practices. This is 11 ‘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. 12 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. 13

With this reasoning, Godelier distances himself from Le´vi-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.

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what Godelier means by social and cultural reality: at stake are questions which go beyond the imaginary and the symbolic, such as ‘Who has the right to exercise power in society and why? Who has access to society’s wealth and why? Who is allowed to communicate with the gods and ancestors and why? Who is allowed to control the person, the labor and the labor product of others, and why?’ (ibid. 16). I think that these questions about the hidden parts of power concerning the material conditions of social existence are relevant indeed, and it is my hypothesis that the answer to these questions concerning Polynesian societies should be sought for in the notion of mana and its more concrete manifestations. Here, I will once again add a Polynesian example implying the notion of mana. There seems to be a remarkable difference between east and west Polynesia concerning the notion of mana related to women (Shore 1989). At first sight, indeed, mana devalues the feminine in east Polynesia in contrast to west Polynesia—although, as we will see later, they really have more in common than one might think based on such ethnographic first impressions. The New Zealand Maori belong culturally to east Polynesia despite their geographic position in the southwestern corner of Polynesia. In the Maori indication of the vagina as te whare o te aitu, i.e., the ‘house of calamity’, the female genitals were associated with death and destruction, particularly during menstruation (Best 1914: 132). Menstruation could be the cause of destruction of tapu (taboos) thus depleting gardens and forests. Johansen (1954) argued that Maori men were considered tapu and associated with ritual activity, while women were noa, i.e., common and associated with daily life. Goldman (1970) saw the Maori male element as associated with the sky, light, and the divine, and the female element with the earth, darkness, and the underworld: the masculine is ‘life triumphant’, whereas ‘the feminine ‘‘mix’’ is a compromise’ (ibid. 37). In the Marquesas, according to Handy (1923: 261), ‘a woman’s head was sacred (tapu), but her private parts and all [things] connected with them were defiling… particularly unclean was a woman at the time of her menstrual flow.’ Valeri (1985), in line with these ideas, felt the feminine in Hawaii was associated with the passive, the impure, and the sexual in contrast to the masculine association with the active, the pure and the cosmic (ibid. 113, 123–124). Sexuality may indeed imply a fusion of both sexes and thus the transgression of any limits between pure and impure. These appear to be clear examples of asymmetrical ideology.14

14 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).

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Privileged relations with invisible forces Maurice Godelier has been known as a pioneer of both economic anthropology and Marxist anthropology (e.g., Godelier 1966, 1973). Marxist anthropologists defended the thesis that social life was in the end determined by economic relationships. This thesis, by the way, was—and still is—shared by (liberal) classic economists, although in a different jargon and with other theoretical and practical consequences. Godelier, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, had already developed the stance that ‘mental realities’ (re´alite´s ide´elles) are part and parcel of the most material domains of the economic infrastructure (the social relations of production and the productive forces in Marxist language) and can thus not be considered a kind of ‘superstructure’ on top of it (e.g., Godelier 1984). Recently, Godelier (2007 and 2009) once more reviewed his thesis that, in the final analysis, societies are determined not by their economies, but by their political-religious relations. In these recent studies, he explicitly works with Polynesian examples. Godelier explains that, within the context of a society, religion is the set of relationships between the members of this society and the usually invisible forces, which intervene in daily life, such as the spirits of the ancestors, forces of nature, and various gods. Their existence and power is proven through manifestations. The relations between people and these spirits and gods also pre-suppose particular relations between the people. Those persons having privileged access to obtain favors from these spirits and gods are themselves distinguished positively and enjoy certain social privileges. Apart from a set of beliefs, rites, and social statuses of certain individuals and groups, religion also includes modes of thinking and rules of behavior, obligations and prohibitions to which the believers more or less acquiesce. The religious discourse in myths, legends, and the like, not only provides an explanation about the origin of the world and the natural elements but also about the ‘right’ place of individuals and groups in society. Myths provide (1) a cosmic basis for social order and (2) a confirmation of the existence of supernatural forces that are more powerful than human forces and upon which one can call for help, if needed. Thus, religion plays an important role in the exertion of sovereignty over a certain domain or territory. This is even more the case when the ruler is supposed to be a divinity living among the people, such as the Inca-Sun (Inca-Inti) or the emperors of China from 221 BC until mid-twentieth century AD. These persons incarnate both political and religious qualities and relations. Godelier refers in this respect also to the four clans of the Tikopia on the homonymous Polynesian island, Tikopia, studied by Firth (1967a: 15–30). At the time of Firth’s first fieldwork, as we saw previously, the Tikopia practiced a ritual cycle: the Work-of-the-Gods. The cycle aimed at stimulating the fertility of the natural resources (horticulture and fishing) and the people (reproduction, health) and also resulted in the Tikopia seeing their island and society as an integrated whole. The chief of one of the four clans, Te Ariki Kafika, had a leading role in the organization of the cycle. Some centuries before the arrival of Firth, the Tikopia society with its particular form of social and ritual organization did not yet exist. The clans had originated from different Polynesian islands, such as Pukapuka, Anuta and Rotuma, and had mutual wars before they united their forces in ritual

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cooperation in the form of the Work-of-the-Gods ritual cycle. Godelier (2007: 211) criticizes Firth on this point, arguing that the ‘work of the gods’ may well be the literal translation of the Tikopian expression, but that the Tikopia are, also within their own system of representations, actually working with the gods. The ritual cycle is their ‘work with the gods’, according to Godelier, and not the work of the gods. I from my part observe that, within the Tikopian hierarchical system and worldview, one might perhaps more accurately translate their expression as work for the gods, but not with the gods, since it seems ‘logical’ that gods do not ‘work’. One myth relates how one of the ancestors of the clan of the Kafika organized the peaceful society of the Tikopia by instituting a set of rules. A jealous rival, however, killed this Kafika ancestor. The highest of the gods in heaven then breathed mana into him and he became an atua or god himself, with power over all other gods of the island. His descendants, the Kafika chiefs, henceforth had authority over all the other chiefs. Godelier concludes from this that the political–religious relations united the originally very divergent groups with mutually hostile relations into one whole which, following the mythical events referred previously, reproduced itself as a society. In the heart of these relations, we find a set of (for us) imaginary representations, an origin myth that legitimates the relations of power and the place of individuals and groups within the whole. In so doing, this set of representations forms the very reason for the existence of the real social relations in the form of the annual ritual cycle. Taboos surrounded the Tikopia chiefs. Although the chiefs participated in horticulture, they were spared the most onerous tasks. Moreover, they were the only ones who had rights to the land associated with their title, rights which they could allocate to others. The success of the chiefs as chiefs did not depend so much on their own labor but on their cooperation with the gods, a privileged cooperation made possible by their descent from the gods. The difference between the four Tikopia chiefs and thus their respective clans is not so much economic in character, but political-religious, and reflect their relative distance from the deified ancestors and the gods. Here, in my own terms, we deal with asymmetrical ideology resulting in social (and political) inequality of which the source is not to be found in the economic relations, but in the political–religious discourse, particularly the myth explaining and legitimating the origin of the inequality. Godelier observes a comparable phenomenon in the Polynesian society of Tonga, with the difference that the Tongan aristocrats in contrast with the common members of their society are the only ones provided with mana because of their genealogical closeness to the gods. Godelier (2007: 213) speaks here about mana in the blood of the nobles (‘posse´der dans leur sang le mana’). However, in ancient Tongan cosmology, mana is not properly situated in the blood but rather in the head and secondarily in the genitals of the (chiefly) human body. In Tikopia, the chiefs participate in horticulture, in Tonga, with its yearly ‘inasi ritual (first fruit offerings), the ‘eiki (noble men and women) do not work. They engage in warfare at the side of the paramount chief, the Tu’i Tonga, as well as in complex rituals directed toward the gods, and exercise a political–religious power over the commoners, which unites all Tongans as one whole under the sovereignty of the Tu’i Tonga. Thus, in Tonga, there is not only a sexual division of labor, as among

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the Baruya in New Guinea (Godelier 1982), but also a division of labor according to social rank in which the largest part of the population is charged with the production of the material means of existence not only for themselves but also for the aristocracy, while this aristocracy focuses on ritual activities, warfare, and leisure. A fundamental problem with the Tongan example in Godelier’s analysis, and in contrast to his other ethnographic examples (Baruya, Tikopia, etc.), is the total absence of a temporal dimension. In his analysis of the Tu’i Tonga, Godelier transits almost unnoticed from the past tense to the present tense (‘in Tonga, the ‘eiki, noble men and women, do not work’; 2007: 213, author’s translation and emphasis), the so-called—and, in other contexts, much criticized—ethnographic present. The Tongans would work or not work according to their social rank under the sovereignty of the Tu’i Tonga. In this case, however, such an ethnographic present is much less evident than, for example, among the Baruya, where Godelier conducted fieldwork in the recent past, or in Tikopia, where Firth was able to observe firsthand ‘the Work of the Gods’ during his fieldwork in 1928–1929 (Firth 1940). In the Tongan case, no anthropologist was able to observe the Tu’i Tonga, nor his activities and relations with the rest of the population, for the simple reason that Laufilitonga, the last Tu’i Tonga, died before the start of professional anthropology, long before the fieldwork of the first anthropologist in Tonga, Gifford (1929), who conducted fieldwork in the 1920s.15 The incidental testimonies of the European voyagers of discovery and the first missionaries date from a period in which the sovereignty of the Tu’i Tonga had already been declining for a long time (Van der Grijp 2004b and 2007). In spite of this want of ethnographic precision, Godelier’s theoretical point remains of interest: due to their political–religious position (descent from divinized ancestors or from gods), certain parts of the population in Tikopia and Tonga could shirk participation in production either partially (Tikopia) or completely (Tonga) while they were able to determine for others access to the material conditions of the same production (horticultural land; fishing grounds; labor force) as well as the distribution of the labor product.

Social asymmetry in sacred gift exchange In the nineteenth century, the Tu’i Tonga has disappeared from the political scene and been replaced by a king crowned after the western (Westminster) model. Via a matrimonial strategy during the previous royal generations, this king and his royal descendents still claim to descent from the Tu’i Tonga and thus implicitly also from the ancient Polynesian pantheon. Moreover, the Tongan population has been Christianized one and a half century ago by British, Wesleyan Methodist missionaries and, slightly later, by French, Roman Catholic missionaries. At present, the Free Wesleyan Church is the largest religious denomination and also the state church of Tonga. The ‘inasi tradition of first fruit offerings still exists but is now directed at the king, who makes a ritual tour along the largest islands or 15 For an overview of early anthropological fieldwork in and monographs on Tonga see Van der Grijp (1993: 1–2).

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archipelagos every year: the Royal Agricultural Show. He then inspects the best and largest agricultural products and simultaneously receives massive gifts of ‘first fruits’ (Van der Grijp 1993: 211–214). Lower ranking chiefs too receive first fruit offerings (the polopolo ritual) and we can also observe similar rituals vis-a`-vis the authorities of the various Christian churches. During my own fieldwork in Tongan and in other parts of western Polynesia, I was able to conduct participant observation in a number of such rituals. The following example concerns the conference of the Free Wesleyan Church in 1983 during which the president of the church was elected and where topics of importance to the church came up for discussion.16 This conference, which lasted 8 days, was held in Neiafu, the capital of Vava’u, the northern group of the Tongan islands. Half of the 400 participants were ministers (faifekau), while the rest were lay preachers (malanga). It was an almost entirely male gathering, and the vast majority of those present were Tongan by birth. There were some women present as representatives of women’s groups, or as part of overseas delegations. The presidents of the Methodist churches of Fiji and Samoa and representatives of the Methodist churches of Australia, New Zealand, and the Cook Islands were present as observers. The late King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, who was head of the Free Wesleyan Church by virtue of his position as head of state of Tonga, attended the meetings during the first days. By the end of the conference, the number of participants had dropped to 350. During the conference, the participants were offered massive gifts of food four times a day. The meals were prepared, delivered, and offered by members of the church from Neiafu, the villages on ‘Uta Vava’u and the neighboring islands. Each district of a town or village assumed responsibility for a light meal (of sandwiches, cake, and the like) and a heavy meal (roast pork, yam roots and other heavy fare). If there were not enough church members in a village, it collaborated with another village. In addition, a number of women from the villages gave the president of the church manufactured art products, such as painted bark cloth (tapa) and fine mats, which were then distributed among the conference participants. Other occasions on which this church and its representatives are offered gifts are as follows: (1) the annual donations of money on the last Sunday in October, called misinale after the English ‘missionary’; (2) the quarterly donations (faka kuata) on the first Sundays of March, June, September, and December; (3) the collections taken during the last Sunday service each month. Besides cash donations, the church and its representatives also receive gifts in the form of unpaid labor. Thus, repairs of the church and its grounds are carried out in turns by the members of the church. Furthermore, a group of fifteen unmarried men and women aged between 18 and 30 years carries out unpaid work in the minister’s fields. The church not only benefits from labor in the strict sense of the word, but considerable time and energy are also devoted to what could be called symbolic labor. First, there is the church attendance, which is very intensive among the Methodists (varying from several 16

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).

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times a week up to daily attendance). Secondly, volunteer members of the laity give compulsory Sunday school lessons every Sunday. Thirdly, there is the church choir. Depending on the religious calendar, the rehearsals can take up as much as 4 h a day, 6 days a week. After a detailed ethnographic analysis of massive amounts of food, painted bark cloth (tapa), fine mats and other gifts distributed during the conference in Neiafu (Van der Grijp 1993: 200–206), I posed the following research question directly related to the topic of asymmetrical ideology: What motives drive the members of this Polynesian society to devote so much time, energy, material produce and money to their church? This question was also put to a number of residents of the village of Taoa who were occupied preparing the food gifts (pola) for this church conference on their island. It concerned mainly poor peasants, who complement their subsistence agriculture with some fishing and commercial agriculture of vanilla (exported to France and the USA). A farmer–fisherman expected good crops on his land as well as drafts of fishes by taking part in the ceremonial gifting activities. His wife expressed her hope for a good education and health for her growing children and a long life for herself. A young unmarried woman expected to get a suitable husband. A schoolboy hoped for success in his final exam, and so on. Ultimately, these people see the food gifts as presents to the invisible, the Christian God, and not so much to the church or its ministers and other incumbents. However, God does not eat earthly food, although the ministers and their acolytes do. The ministers pass the gifts on to God in a symbolic way, through ritual (church masses) and prayer, in which they ask him to bless and reward the faithful. People have the idea that the Christian God witnesses these acts of giving and notes this in their favor. They say, ‘We are eager for God to make our lives easier, to give us crops on our land, to give us many healthy children and a long life’. This set of religious ideas is thus a discourse of reciprocity: a question of giving and receiving. And gifts are given precisely in order to receive a counter gift, from God in this case. However, there is no question of immediate reciprocity. The donors do not receive from the same individuals, groups or bodies to which they make their gifts (ministers and church), but those to whom they make their gifts are the necessary condition for being able to receive in return. If we follow this chain of reasoning, we can describe the course of the transaction in terms of what Le´viStrauss (1949) called ‘e´change ge´ne´ralise´’, generalized exchange. The faithful people (P) give food, tapa, and fine mats to the ministers (M), who translate the earthly gifts of the people through prayer and pass them on ritually to God (G), who responds by blessing his faithful and generous followers (P) with health and prosperity: P!M!G!P The people of Tonga may make free use of the land (a gift from God), but they must give something in return: material and other gifts which are translated into spiritual terms by the priests and transferred to God. There are, however, Tongans who reason differently. They refer to the following historical event—at least, it has become history. At the end of the nineteenth century, during the division of the South Pacific by the European colonial powers, the king of Tonga, Siaosi

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Taufa’ahau Tupou I, held a meeting with all his subordinate chiefs from the various islands and archipelagos (Tongatapu, ‘Eua, Ha’apai, Vava’u, Niuafo’ou and Niuatoputapu), of which he had centralized power during the previous decades (Van der Grijp 2006). The chiefs discussed the pressing problem of which of the expanding colonial powers on the surrounding Pacific islands (Samoa, Fiji, New Zeeland, Hawaii, etc.) the Tongans should trust. At a critical moment, the king stood up, picked up some soil in his hand and addressed the chiefs as he gestured with it: ‘We will not give Tonga to France, nor to England, nor to Germany, nor to the United States of America. We will give Tonga to God’ (source: several informants from Taoa).17 This story attributes crucial agency to and makes a culture hero of the first king of Tonga. Apart from the ‘fact’—a fact for the faithful indeed—that God created all life, according to the ideology of the faithful, he is the lawful proprietor of the main means of production in this agricultural society: the land. In this discourse, the chain of giving and receiving is just as closed as it was in the previous case, but its logical starting point now lies elsewhere. The people begin with a debt to God and give, in keeping with Mauss’ (1923–1924) theoretical logic, because they have already received: G!P!M!G In both accounts, the relation between the three parties involved—God, the faithful, and the ministers—is represented as an exchange of goods and services. Suppose that a resident of the village of Taoa does not share in the discourse of the faithful and thus does not assume the existence of God nor his direct impact on earthly events. This would mean the elimination of a link in the chain, which would no longer be closed. In this case, we are no longer dealing with generalized exchange, but with giving without return, from the people to the ministers: P!M One might then wonder why gifts should be made at all and what motives they might have. A partial answer to this question can be found in the passage later, which is a summary of elements of the discourse of the faithful. All the participants in my case study of gifts to the church replied that they were ‘very pleased’ to be able to give. They often explained this by adding: ‘The more we give, the more we get from God.’ It was striking to note that they expected to receive primarily during this life and not just in the next world, a hereafter, although they did not rule out the latter. Another factor of importance was the fact that other members of the village could see how much one gave: ‘We want to show other people in Taoa that we give a great deal of food, tapa and mats, because God has given us very many gifts.’ The relationship with God in the latter account is not only mediated by the ministers but also by the attention of other people (OP), a form of exchange which may be expressed in the following formula:

17

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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ðG ! P ! M ! GÞ þ ðP ! M ! OP ! PÞ By giving a lot to the ministers, which is seen by other people (OP), the people who give acquire prestige in the village and possibly power too. The generous faithful are thus repaid twice: by God and by their fellow villagers (G ? P) ? (OP ? P). Moreover, what people receive from God through the mediation of the ministers’ ritual and prayers (namely health, prosperity, prestige, and the like) has a much higher value within this asymmetrical ideology than their own material gifts (to the ministers). However, if the prestige acquired by the gifts is to be transformed into power, it is necessary to occupy a favorable social position beforehand; in other words, it is necessary to have both the capacities and the ambition to aim at becoming a sort of Great Man. In the gifting team, for example, a man named Sione Moala is the one who, as head of his own household and as leader of his team, gains the most in terms of power and prestige from the fact that his household has raised slightly more food, tapa, and fine mats than the other two households in his group and that the food gift of his group was one of the largest from the village of Taoa. Compared with the common people, the church ministers get a raw deal in this exchange of gifts. The participants claim that the spiritual services of the ministers yield a very high benefit for the people, while all that the ministers get out of it are material benefit and prestige. In this collective consciousness—and in the collective unconscious—this is by no means comparable with the great advantages, which are reaped by the donors of the food and other gifts. Nevertheless, ministers are also seen as superior to both commoners (tu’a) and even the chiefs (‘eiki) because they have greater spiritual capital (mana), such as esoteric knowledge and closeness to God.

Processes of signification and asymmetrical ideology Previously, I outlined a spectrum of meanings for the concept of ideology and related notions in a selection from the anthropological and social scientific literature and added examples from Polynesian ethnography by other anthropologists as well as my own. Moreover, the latter example demonstrates how we can translate a concrete cultural—here: religious cum political—context of massive gifting and accompanying asymmetrical ideology into an analytical model. The most neutral interpretation of the concept of ideology is the one of providing meaning or, in short, signification. At the other end of the conceptual spectrum, we find a critical conception of ideology: ideology as veiling, masking or falsifying ‘true’ reality, in other words distortion. The starting point in both cases is that people give meaning to the world around them and their own place within it. They do this not only afterward, for example, as a justification of their own behavior, but they also do so prior to and during their own acts. Human beings live and experience their reality by continuously giving meaning to it. This signification is time- and place-bound and is to a certain extent a cultural and historical product. We might call this ideology but also cosmology, world-view, system of representations, social philosophy, collective beliefs and attitudes, collective consciousness, culture, etc. With this series of

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equivalents (including the et cetera), I simultaneously indicate the problem with such a neutral concept of ideology within an anthropological analysis: it is not specific because it might as well be replaced by countless synonyms. This is not the case when we use ideology in its critical function: ideology as the distorted aspect of signification. Ideology as distortion indeed implies a certain link with social processes: social reality is represented in a distorted way and is thus able to take the form which it has. A similar problem occurs when we define ideology simply as distortion. The qualification ‘distortion’, in other words the falseness or incorrectness of certain representations of social reality, is almost always given from the outside, by an outsider. For those who share these representations, who thus believe in or accept their truth, the same representations are by definition correct. But this is not so, or at least not necessarily so for the critical outsider. Such an outsider reasons from different representations of (social) reality which in their turn may also be seen as incorrect/false, at least from the perspective of yet another critical outsider, and so forth. Here, we navigate without much success between the Scylla of relativism and the Charybdis of ethnocentrism. In short, reducing ideology to distortion seems inappropriate to me within an anthropological perspective. A typical variant of ideology-as-distortion is the conceptual interpretation of ‘false consciousness’. This concept may have a certain charm within a polemical context—at least on the side of the users and their adherents. I think, however, that this conceptual interpretation is ultimately untenable. Previously, I already argued against ideology as a false representation of reality but I also disagree with the idea that ideology would only concern consciousness, the second term in ‘false consciousness’. When we speak about false representations of social reality, we also deal with processes of signification, namely with the distorted aspect of signification. Processes of signification operate partly consciously and also to an important degree unconsciously. How, then, could we speak about a consciousness, either true or false? Unconscious and partly conscious representations too may generate and maintain social inequality. In my view, ideology often deals with situations within the social reality, which are experienced by the participants as selfevident, with forms of social reality about which one does not discuss because they are conceived as natural, about social relations which ‘just happen to be like that’. The heart of the matter is not that the members of a society are conscious of those representations, but that they share them. In this sense, participants of a society simultaneously partake—to a greater or lesser degree—in certain collective representations. I define ideology in terms of the representation of social reality as something obvious, or as a situation which has been intended to be so by God or the gods (divine representations), or as a situation which is ‘naturally’ so, which, within this perspective, amounts to the same thing: one accepts the situation as it is here and now. Thus, it is incorrect to speak of a false consciousness. In this context, I prefer to speak of asymmetrical ideology in order to avoid a worn-out and polyinterpretable general concept of ideology. My notion of asymmetrical ideology is a contraction of—and a sharper conceptual way of expressing—ideology legitimizing particular asymmetrical social relationships consciously or unconsciously. In my

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idea of—asymmetrical—ideology, we are not necessarily, nor only dealing with false or incorrect representations. Correct ideas may just as well serve as asymmetrical ideology. Representations about the biological capacity of women to procreate human life which are factually correct may for example be used—or misused—to generate or maintain inequality between the sexes. The point is that ideas that constitute asymmetrical ideology generate or maintain forms of social inequality within certain cultural and historical contexts.

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