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Some Histories are More Possible than Others: Structural Power, Big Pictures and the Goal of Explanation in the Anthropology of Eric Wolf
John Gledhill Critique of Anthropology 2005 25: 37 DOI: 10.1177/0308275X05048612 The online version of this article can be found at: http://coa.sagepub.com/content/25/1/37

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Article

Some Histories are More Possible than Others

Structural Power, Big Pictures and the Goal of Explanation in the Anthropology of Eric Wolf
John Gledhill
University of Manchester and El Colegio de Michoacn
Abstract While there are elements of postmodernist and post-structuralist thought that Wolf either anticipated or incorporated happily into his own thinking, his realist epistemology remained radically opposed to the fashions that became dominant after the publication of Europe and the People without Histor y. He insisted that the goal of a humanistic science was to explain rather than simply to interpret experience-near phenomena, and that explanation was a viable goal provided anthropologists adopted agreed canons for formulating concepts and undertaking comparisons. He also saw the quest for explanation as a cumulative process, in which new developments incorporated insights from the past. This article argues that Wolf s particular way of marr ying historical and ethnographic research enabled him to produce an understanding of the development of the modern world that is quite different from the grand narratives that postmodernists reject but still enables us to grasp the bigger picture of global histor y as movement and the force of structural power in local scenarios. Postmodernist and postcolonial theorizing has, in contrast, failed to grasp the historical conditions of its own production and the way our world has changed, offering social and political critiques readily defused or appropriated by todays more decentred hegemonic forces. Keywords epistemology ethnography modernity and postmodernity power Eric Wolf world systems

The more we read and re-read Eric Wolf, the more ahead of his time he seems at ever y stage of his career, as one of the most erudite and cosmopolitan intellectuals the discipline has ever produced. Yet, while there are some elements of postmodernist and post-structuralist thought that Wolf either anticipated or incorporated happily into his own thinking, his realist epistemological position remained radically opposed to most of the fashions that became dominant after the publication of Europe and the People without Histor y (hereafter EPWH). In the collection of essays that Wolf selected as a final reflection on the ideas that he developed over his career, Pathways of Power (Wolf, 2001), we find several statements on what he saw as positive, if not exactly novel, in the
Vol 25(1) 3757 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X05048612] Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com

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38 Critique of Anthropology 25(1)

fashions that dominated the discipline after the publication of EPWH. For example:
If anything, good anthropology was always characterized by a postmodern skepticism about the certainty and xity of things. Things are rarely what they seem, and they are only rarely how they are presented to you by the locals. (Wolf, 2001: 53)

At rst sight all this passage seems to suggest is that good ethnography requires us to examine the differences between what people do in practice, what they say they do and why they say they do it. But Wolf s approach to scepticism about the xity of things went much deeper theoretically, because it took off from a basic scepticism that dates back to his earliest writings against the totalizing concepts at the core of both British and US anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s. His rejection of the culture concept deployed by the majority of Boass students, with its anchors in Kantian romanticism, did not bring him any closer to the perspectives of British social anthropology because he was always equally critical of the notion of society as an integrated totality. Insistent that we could not start analysis of anything by taking any kind of determinate social group as a given, from rst to last Wolf argued that we could and should be able to explain the constitution of social groups in terms of processes and relationships. What changed and developed over his career was the conceptual framework he brought to bear on realizing this objective, not the objective as such. In the rst part of this article, I briey outline what I see as the enduring strengths of Wolf s project in and for anthropology, noting, en passant, its generosity to the achievements of past generations and scholars with whom Wolf ultimately disagreed quite strongly on fundamental issues. In the second part, I argue that whether or not anthropology as we have known it survives the 21st century, Wolf s vision of what anthropologists could and should be doing still offers better prospects for understanding a changing world than many of the critical perspectives that have since sought, if not to dismiss it entirely, at least to relegate it to a list of positions transcended by their own deconstructions of modernist thinking.

Explanation as the goal of humanistic science

As I have already stressed, the core of Wolf s epistemological position is his realism and insistence that our goal is to explain social and cultural forms. The following quotation from his AAA Distinguished Lecture Facing Power (1990, reprinted in Wolf, 2001) offers a particularly clear statement of where Wolf parted company from other tendencies in the anthropology of the 1980s. But it also takes off from the concept of structural power, a concept that offered a bridge between intellectual worlds, namely the ideas

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39 Gledhill: The Goal of Explanation

of Marx that had inspired the previous phase of Wolf s work and the poststructuralism of Michel Foucault (Wolf, 1999: 56).1
Structural power shapes the social eld of action in such a way as to render some kinds of behavior possible, while making others less possible or impossible. . . . As anthropologists we can follow the ows of capital and labor through ups and downs, advances and retreats, and investigate the ways in which social and cultural arrangements in space and time are drawn into and implicated in the workings of this double whammy. . . . Some have said that these questions have very little relevance to anthropology, in that they do not have enough to say about real people doing real things, as Sherry Ortner put it; but . . . I think that it is the task of anthropology or at least the task of some anthropologists to attempt explanation, not merely description, descriptive integration or interpretation. . . . Writing culture may require literary skill and genre, but a search for explanation requires more: it cannot do without naming and comparing things, without formulating concepts for naming and comparison. I think we must move beyond Clifford Geertzs experience-near understandings to analytical concepts that allow us to set what we know about X against what we know about Y, in pursuit of explanation. This means that I subscribe to a basically realist position: I think that the world is real, that these realities affect what humans do and that what humans do affects the world, and that we can come to understand the whys and wherefores of this relationship. We need to be professionally suspicious of our categories and models; we should be aware of their historical and cultural contingencies; we can understand a quest for explanation as approximations to truth rather than as truth itself. But I also believe that the search for explanation in anthropology can be cumulative; that knowledge and insights gained in the past can generate new questions, and that new departures can incorporate the accomplishments of the past. (Wolf, 2001: 386)

This passage hardly sounds like an elder of the discipline taking a defensive posture. The same kind of critique of where anthropology was heading emerges in a lecture On Fieldwork and Theory that Wolf gave to a group of historians ve years afterwards, a talk that was very much a reection on the problematic of EPWH. How do we relate what anthropologists can learn through eldwork about micro-populations observed ethnographically to broader theoretical perspectives? What can anthropologists contribute to knowledge of humankind in general that could not have been known otherwise? In discussing the value of ethnography, Wolf follows a line of argument that would, I assume, be relatively uncontroversial. He emphasizes that the results of ethnographic research reect prior frameworks of understanding that might be better described as discovery procedures than theories. Methodological innovations such as those associated with Malinowskian functionalism advanced our cumulative understanding relative to previous discovery procedures in ways that transcended the paradigm that gave rise to them, the positivism of Ernst Mach in this particular case, and what Lvi-Strauss (1968: 1215) so neatly exposed as the tautologies that Malinowski himself offered as generalizations about the human condition. The point of doing eldwork, with all its blind spots and inevitable

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40 Critique of Anthropology 25(1)

limitations, is to enlarge our vision of what human groups have thought possible or doable (Wolf, 2001: 50). Ethnography can deliver us surprises, unexpected information about the (real) world that forces us towards a fundamental review of categories and theoretical models. This is not, of course, something that is unique to ethnography, since dusty texts in archives are equally capable of delivering shocks to received wisdoms in historical research. But it is a point on which Wolf s position is perfectly consistent with other contemporary efforts to insist on the continuing centrality of ethnography in the anthropological project, as we will see shortly. Yet there is a considerable sting in the tail of Wolf s account of how the raw data of eld notebooks gets transformed into a model of a form of life. In considering this issue, Wolf somewhat ironically moves from a citation of Derrida to the sociological perspective on the reproduction of scientic paradigms offered by Thomas Kuhn:
The logic and history of science suggest that all paradigms are mortal and likely to be superseded. It is, however, also true that the continuation of the quest requires a social compact that denes minimal criteria for what will count as evidence within a publicly accessible forum. Once such a compact is in place, it is possible to construct an epistemology that offers reasons for selecting certain research problems, decides what answers are good enough to carry conviction, and directs further observations and explanations. (Wolf, 2001: 53)

Perhaps because he was not addressing an anthropological audience, Wolf did not offer any further observations on how such social pacts are established in specic historical conjunctures. Nor did he touch on the question of the way paradigmatic shifts and conicts within the discipline of anthropology might be related to historical shifts in the broader social and political environments of the disciplines institutionalization, questions which he had, of course, addressed in very wide-ranging terms on other occasions.2 Instead, what he stresses here is that it is necessary to defend at least minimal canons of acceptable analysis and evidence in order to achieve a cumulative process of development in a humanistic science, and that part of that minimum necessary package is enough agreement about concepts to make comparison meaningful and explanation possible. While some anthropologists might criticize Wolf s interests and writings for not having enough to say about real people doing real things, Wolf does not leave us with the same kind of judgement of the debate about ethnographic representation here as he does on some other occasions: This is ne but do we all have to do it? Here he rejects as a potentially damaging delusion the idea that the challenge in ethnographic writing is to be evocative of an experiential totality, much less to give voice to the voiceless. Instead, he insists that the principal goal of a text that reports the results of an ethnographic study is:
. . . to provide a densely substantiated model of how material social relations and signifying practices are mediated through the cultural forms of a specied

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41 Gledhill: The Goal of Explanation population. The point is to write so that others can make use of the model, to analyze, contrast, and compare one such combination of elements with another and to extend the analysis and comparison to other instances not yet studied and understood. This task is professional in that it is based on certain theoretical presuppositions, responds to requirements of evidence and answers to canons of what constitutes analysis. (Wolf, 2001: 54)

These prescriptions clearly correspond to the idea that the search for explanations can be cumulative, with knowledge and understandings achieved in the past generating new research questions, and new points of departure consciously incorporating past insights (so as not to reinvent the wheel, as has arguably happened frequently enough in the history of anthropology). But what Wolf insists on here is that such a positive trajectory of deepening critical understanding depends on a particular kind of professional commitment, a commitment which, by implication, he sees as having been eroded by many of the developments in anthropology in the second half of the 1980s and rst half of the 1990s. As Wolf makes clear in his discussion of Malinowski and Steward, this commitment must be based, in the rst instance, on the adoption of discovery procedures that do not logically or empirically foreclose the use of other methodologies to discover different kinds of links (Wolf, 2001: 55). Given that initial condition, a process of cumulative critical reection can sustain a process of advance in terms of both widening and deepening understanding that will never reach a denitive conclusion. For example, Steward criticized the conceptual framework of the Boasians for tackling the problem of comparing Kwakiutl culture with Japanese culture through a process of total abstraction from their differences in multiple dimensions in terms of organizational complexity. Yet Stewards own model of complexity did not lead to the inclusion of forces beyond local and regional ecology in the shaping of puertorriqueo society. The rst step in Wolf s own intellectual separation from Steward as mentor was his rejection of the assumption that the constitutive elements of societies households, localities, regions, nations were bounded and limited, generating their own social relations. Whether or not a community was characterized by conictive or harmonious relations was an empirical matter, but in all cases it was essential to understand any kind of unit as the product of the differentiated social positions and interests of the people who constituted them. Clearly, such differentiation of positions and interests could be related to translocal relations with actors beyond the ethnographic context in which observation took place. Up to a point, translocal relations of various kinds can be identified from traditional ethnographic studies, but not all lend themselves to a simple extension of traditional ethnographic methods, especially if we are dealing with long-term historical processes and the kinds of experiences that people wish to forget or reinterpret (consciously or unconsciously) at the time of fieldwork. During the 1990s, widespread discussions of the

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42 Critique of Anthropology 25(1)

implications for anthropology of the current phase of capitalist globalization and the transnational networks that had made erstwhile colonial others increasingly visible within North Atlantic metropoles produced a series of proclamations on the need for shifts in method as well as theor y, exemplified by the contributions of Gupta and Ferguson (1997) and Marcus (1998). The methodological emphasis was on the idea of multisited ethnography and paying attention to different social levels within translocal relationships, including elites, while the theoretical critique focused on the past dominance of closed systems thinking in anthropology, to a point that many of the seniors of the profession found somewhat exaggerated and exasperating. Nevertheless, as Wolf frequently noted, one of the most obvious weaknesses of the programme of research that Julian Steward directed on Puerto Rico was its failure to consider the impacts of puertorriqueo migration to the United States and the emergence of ongoing transnational ties. Yet it remains by no means obvious that doing fieldwork in multiple localities offers a complete solution to the problem of understanding translocal processes and relations in more general terms. In some cases, the evidence that can be provided by ethnographic work3 cannot resolve all the questions we wish to ask and, in other cases, concepts of face-to-face social interaction and the formation of concrete networks simply do not offer a theoretical starting point that is suitable for posing more ambitious questions of explanation. This observation takes us to the second stage of Wolf s own argument about building a humanistic but scientific anthropology in his lecture to the historians. Addressing the limits of studies of translocal patterns of interaction during the 1970s, Wolf comments that the basic problem was that such studies focused on the forms of social and political relations without asking questions about the deeper forces that drove changes in the social elds observed, and about how social changes inuenced cultural changes. This problematic is what led Wolf to Marxism, but not to a Marxism that could simply encapsulate the anthropological project. On the contrary, he begins the discussion with a sharp contrast between Marxs project and the anthropological project:
Marxs purpose was to expose the workings of capitalism by means of a model based on xed and internally supportive categories. Anthropology, in contrast, is not a science of xed categories but an ongoing process of discovery, which may seek family resemblances among diverse human arrangements, but also entertains the possibility of arrangements never previously envisaged. (Wolf, 2001: 58)

The Marx that Wolf recommends to us is the Marx who remained mindful of historical variability and relativity, the Marx who, in his nal years, devoted himself to exploring possible alternative trajectories of development in Russia (2001: 61, see also Shanin, 1983), not the Marx of closed systems. As an entry point into this vision of what Marxism can mean, Wolf

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43 Gledhill: The Goal of Explanation

reviewed his work with John Cole in the southern Tyrol during the 1970s, a case he had mentioned earlier in the lecture as an example of the surprises produced by eldwork. At rst sight, the unexpected but interesting social and political differences discovered between two communities located in essentially similar ecological conditions might appear explicable in terms of ethnic and linguistic differences, that is, primordial differences between the national cultures of Italy and Germany. Yet Wolf did not nd that simple and essentialist explanation satisfying, since it could not readily explain specic details of the differences in social property relations, inheritance systems and other aspects of social organization and differentiation. In the lecture to the historians, Wolf contented himself with some reections on the imperial policies of the Habsburgs as a key element in the reconstruction of a more penetrating social history. But in another of the less well-known essays republished in Pathways of Power, on Peasant Nationalism, Wolf offers a much more complex and nuanced analysis of the historical contingencies that shaped the differential development of his two study communities, at the same time stressing the way the apparent contingencies of local history were the echoes of much wider-ranging forces and processes, only reconstructable with hindsight after the fact:
The centralization of the Tyrol, an almost classic case of the pass-state envisaged by the Geopoliticians, might never have taken place if trade routes in the Mediterranean had operated along different vectors; if, for instance, the Muslim world had maintained the commercial and intellectual dynamic of its rst ve hundred years. The success of the Counter-Reformation in the European South was due to the ability of the Hapsburgs to develop a nancial and military machine independent of townsmen and nobles, and it might have had a different outcome if, say, the Tyrolese rebels had received effective backing by the Venetian Republic, if Corts and Pizarro had suffered defeat at the hands of the Aztecs or Incas, if the comuneros in Spain had been successful in their revolt against Charles V, if the Austrian nobility had entered into a viable alliance with the Turks. (Wolf, 2001: 298)

At rst sight, it appears that history enjoys a position of privilege in the explanation of ethnographic eldwork data in this case. But, Wolf insists, history in itself can explain nothing. The type of explanation to which we aspire depends on theoretical models, and the type of history that preoccupied Wolf was a history focused on the processes which shape any conguration of social and political forces and relations between groups emphasizing once again that groups are always the product of (historically evolved and changing) relations. Marx therefore served as a theoretical starting point for Wolf in the sense that he considered the forms of mobilizing social labor a key element in understanding social formations, but, at the end of the day, as we have seen, Wolf s principal interest in EPWH was the study of the variability that was produced within translocal relations rather than the abstract unity of the capitalist mode of production.

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44 Critique of Anthropology 25(1)

This was how anthropology could contribute something valuable and distinctive to the history of modern capitalism. Without labouring the point unduly, it is worth reecting on the wellknown criticism that was made of Wolf s project by Michael Taussig (1989) in the light of these observations.4 Among other sins, Taussig accused Wolf of failing to transcend a fetishized and Eurocentric vision of capitalist modernity, employing a steamroller called the capitalist mode of production to explain the world in terms of the movement of commodities endowed with phantasmal powers. Yet to me it appears that it was Taussig who was the more Eurocentric, in understanding capitalism and its logic as something born in the West that extended itself, through resistances, to the periphery, where events could be interpreted in a satisfying way by applying the lessons of critical readings of European thinking about modernity. For me, Wolf s approach decentres the world system in a much more radical way. The connections that EPWH explored are not obvious5 and certainly do not depend solely on the logic of an abstract capitalism as distinct from contextualized encounters between certain specic agents of capitalist expansion6 and specic constellations of local actors responding to the changes in the elds of force inuencing their mutual relations. As Wolf himself put it: political and historical processes must do their work in local contexts, where they often produce unforeseen results (2001: 62). As empirical disciplines, both anthropology and history contribute to the development of general theory by presenting us with new and unexpected problems of explanation. In many senses, Wolf s intellectual vision appears extremely undogmatic and he expressed his respect for many styles of analysis and theoretical positions that he personally found unsatisfying or even misguided. Nevertheless, his tolerance and open-mindedness did have limits, which gravitated around the two basic points discussed in this section:
the need to formulate concepts capable of sustaining the processes of comparison and explanation integral to a humanistic science; the need to maintain basic professional canons of analysis and evidence, as a condition for the cumulative development of knowledge.

To these explicit principles, we should perhaps add a third, implicit condition that was perhaps even more demanding. Wolf was a cosmopolitan intellectual who read widely outside the discipline, had a profound knowledge of philosophical questions and saw the anthropological project as a way of making a contribution to understanding human possibilities in the widest sense. His work represented the strongest kind of opposition to the tendencies towards specialization that accelerated during the 1980s and 1990s. Wolf shared with others the idea that anthropologists should practise critical self-reection, yet not as a form of introspection but, on the contrary, through a constant openness to new ways of thinking through the movement of (universal)7 history and global changes.

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45 Gledhill: The Goal of Explanation

In the second half of this article, I argue that anthropology might be in better health as a critical discipline if it had not strayed so frequently from the paths that Wolf recommended and practised. To make my argument I will compare the views that I have outlined in my discussion of Wolf s own writings on ethnography and theory with those expressed in a recent exchange between some inuential scholars of a later generation whose own commitment to the practice of a critical anthropology is beyond question. What I seek to show here is that Wolf s realist epistemology still has much to recommend it when we contrast its results and possibilities with the work of scholars who have settled for deconstruction and strive to evade the kind of objectication associated with science while, ironically, sometimes reintroducing what might be considered examples of phantom objectivities by the back door precisely by eschewing the kinds of standards for analysis advocated by Wolf. For the result of the latter epistemological choice to a great extent a retreat towards always provisional representations of the singularities of human experience has been that much of the critique of the newer critical anthropology now seems out of step with the historical transformations that our world has experienced in recent decades and, in consequence, of increasingly limited relevance to the political battles that now confront us.

High modernism really is over isnt it? Fighting the battles of the 21st century
The rst year of the new millennium saw the launch of a new international journal with the title Ethnography, edited by Loc Wacquant and Paul Willis. The rst issue presented a manifesto, penned by Willis and Mats Trondman, to which responses were invited. One of the aims of this text was to take stock of where the main tendencies of the critical anthropology of the previous decade had taken the discipline (along with cultural studies and ethnographically orientated sociology). It is interesting to compare the issues and positions that emerged in debate around this provocative piece with the ideas that Wolf reasserted in his nal statements. Willis and Trondheim appear more receptive than Wolf to the issues raised by the writing ethnography debate:
Ethnography . . . is a family of methods involving direct and sustained social contact with agents, and of richly writing up the encounter, respecting, recording, representing at least partly in its own terms, the irreducibility of human experience. (Willis and Trondman, 2000: 5, emphasis in original)

Their receptivity to these arguments is clearly related to a concern with the positioning of the observer and his/her relationship to the world. Willis and Trondman roundly denounce what they see as tendencies towards over-theorization and any perspective that seeks to explain what

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46 Critique of Anthropology 25(1)

happens in the world as a simple effect of external structures and tendencies. Nevertheless, they begin to sound more like Wolf when they insist that:
. . . the best ethnography also recognizes and records how experience is entrained in the ow of contemporary history, large and small, partly caught up in its movement, partly itself creatively helping to maintain it, enacting the uncertainty of the eddies and gathering ows dryly recorded from the outside as structures and trends. To borrow the formulation of E.P. Thompson, we see human beings as part subjects, part objects, the voluntary agents of our involuntary determination (1978: 119). Ethnography and theory should be conjoined to produce a concrete sense of the social as internally sprung and dialectically produced. (2000: 6, emphasis in original)

And the convergence seems even closer when they begin a critique of postmodernist thought:
. . . the postmodern fallacy lies, not in its recognition of diversication and individualization at the cultural level, but in the cutting of the latters social moorings. Only because it effectively declares the end of the social can postmodern thinking and analysis establish culture as a oating signier . . . a more panoramic and extended view shows an ever-increasing importance of the cultural to the social. Consent must increasingly be secured for the exercise of power and the whole eld of culture, as the play of symbolic powers, has come to offer the most sophisticated arena for understanding how this is organized and achieved. (2000: 9)

Their concept of a theoretically informed methodology for ethnography (TIME) also recapitulates some of the points made by Wolf in his lecture to the historians, emphasizing the way ethnography delivers surprises from the point of view of theorization, while new approaches to conceptualization and new theoretical starting-points (such as a class8 or gender perspective) lead to new ways of understanding the data:
Engagement with the real world can bring surprise to theoretical formulations for instance, as Garnkel pointed out long ago, concrete living subjects arent the cultural dopes of much structuralist theory and theoretical resources can bring surprise to how empirical data is understood bringing a class or feminist perspective to understanding the raw experience of unemployment for instance. TIME recognizes and promotes a dialectic of surprise. This is a two-way stretch, a continuous process of shifting back and forth, if you like, between induction and deduction. (2000: 11)

But the same passage and the further discussion that follows it also mark some points of difference from Wolf. The greater emphasis on the positioning of the observer in this account does not restrict itself to the need to be conscious of possible biases. Willis and Trondman argue that the observers positioning becomes a resource for enriching understanding of human experience and move on from that observation to propose the need for dialogue between scientic knowledge (dened as knowledge produced by specialist institutions) and other forms of knowledge, in

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47 Gledhill: The Goal of Explanation

particular, the practical common sense and self-reexivity of common culture (2000: 14). Yet this latter proposal has a somewhat populist ring to it. The idea that there should be two-way communication between academics and people and organizations outside academia is hard to reject a priori. In this manifesto, professional canons and academic social and politico-institutional processes related to the reproduction and shifts in paradigms are not the sole arbiters of the development of knowledge about the human condition. But the problem is that institutional academic life is not really insulated from either everyday social realities9 or power structures with an interest in inuencing knowledge-production, while different public spheres embrace a wide range of actors and positions. Anthropologists have enough difculties managing a dialogue with some of the organized groups most receptive to enlisting their support, such as indigenous peoples, thanks to the seeming practical advantages of strategic essentialisms and the limited ability of anthropologists to produce concrete advances in their material welfare. In many other cases, dialogue is hardly on the agenda. While recognizing practical common sense may be important for understanding why most poor people do not spend most of their days militating in social movements pursuing utopias, a good deal of anthropological labour seems of necessity directed, however impotently, to denying the claims of common sense and trying to instil alternative forms of self-reexivity into common culture. Yet it is interesting that some of those who responded to the Willis and Trondman manifesto actually found it wanting in terms of its attention to the question of positioning. Such was the response of Lila Abu-Lughod, for example. Abu-Lughod (2000) begins her discussion by recounting her own struggle, as a feminist and half Arab, with the connection between an abstract theoretical language and situations of power. Writing Womens Worlds, a work intentionally devoid of analytical and theoretical discourse, aimed to avoid the representation of the people she studied as participants in a coherent totality or system distinct and different from that inhabited by the Western us. The raison detre of this feminist critique of objectivity and project of writing against [the concept of] culture was that:
We need to nd ways to write that work against the typications of communities that made them distinct and alien cultures because of the way such distinctions are inevitably hierarchical and tied to larger geopolitical structures of power. (Abu-Lughod, 2000: 262)

For Abu-Lughod, the aim of her second book was not to show that all human beings are identical, but to highlight the individuality of all who inhabit any local world and the existence of their practices of internal contestation, free of totalizing constructions of cultural frameworks of the kind associated with the honour and shame literature. This brings us to an apparent paradox. Eric Wolf offered his own,

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48 Critique of Anthropology 25(1)

trenchant, critiques of cultures as total systems (making the same points as Abu-Lughod seeks to emphasize about internal heterogeneity and contestation). But he insisted that we have to look for concepts that, rst, help us understand how local forms of life articulate to broader networks of geopolitical power and, second, help us to transcend the pure singularity of any given local form of life. The gesture towards individuality that Abu-Lughod makes offers us a representation of the women that undoubtedly helps us to appreciate their humanity better (as real people doing real things), reducing the othering and distancing effect of Western images that ultimately respond to a project of domination. Yet, in rejecting the hierarchization of the world produced by the representations of otherness that she strives to negate through her own writing, she ironically afrms their objectivity at another level, implying that they are necessarily central to contemporary hegemonic processes. This could become problematic as a critical strategy if the objectivity taken for granted as the necessary object of critique, in this case occidental modernity, ceased to be so central to understanding the reproduction of global inequalities. In her more recent work on soap operas and cultural debates within nation-states, described in the next stage of her presentation of criticisms of Willis and Trondman, Abu-Lughod has followed the widely recommended discovery procedure of multiple site ethnography and work with actors from different social classes, drawing particular inspiration from George Marcuss proposals for an ethnography of and in the world system (Marcus, 1998). The connections that she wishes to trace through her ethnography are transnational, national, local and personal. It is a matter of tracking cultural forms within peoples lives, on the one hand, and exploring social relations of inequality and political power across regions and classes within a nation that is itself part of a larger regional structure and a world system, on the other (Abu-Lughod, 2000: 265). This sounds like the right thing to do, but what do we discover through this process of tracing connections in a world in which, so we are told, we live in a condition of postmodernity under which the distinctions between local and global and micro and macro (not to mention high and low culture) have supposedly collapsed? What key research questions does all this supposed innovation lead us to pose?
What has emerged as most crucial in my ethnography of television is what it means to be a nation at the crossroads of Arab socialism and transnational capitalism with an intelligentsia promoting modernist and developmentalist programs and ideals through a state controlled medium to a varied population, large segments of whom remain uneducated and marginal to many developments. (2000: 265)

On the basis of this quotation, it appears that the battle continues to be one against the grain of high modernity, understood here in remarkably conventional terms and through key words that are somewhat debatable. One aim, for example, is to bring something critical to discussions of

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49 Gledhill: The Goal of Explanation

development and write against the rule of expertise (2000: 266). But what if the enemy has changed its tactics (as one might well suspect by reviewing the evolving rhetoric of the World Bank, for example)? If contemporary techniques of rule (as represented by advanced liberal states and the multilateral agencies acting to extend the global hegemonic projects of such states) have themselves become more decentred and postmodern, these kinds of postcolonial critiques are ghting against forms of structural power that are no longer central to the movement of history, using arguments that can readily be disarmed or even appropriated by the very forces that the critics seek to contest. This is precisely the argument that Hardt and Negri (2000) have made about the limitations of postmodernist and postcolonial critique positions. At rst sight, it may appear peculiarly eccentric to invoke the work of Hardt and Negri in a discussion of Eric Wolf, given that they offer an unashamedly utopian position based on a high level of philosophical abstraction. Anthropologists have been quick to criticize both their analysis and conclusions precisely for their lack of empirical grounding, marshalling the practical lessons so visible in ethnographic contexts to point to alternative readings of the developments on which their comparative optimism is based (see, for example, Kapferer, 2002). It is also somewhat ironic that Hardt and Negri published their argument that classical-style capitalist imperialism is a historically superseded form just before its apparent recrudescence in current US global strategies. But careful readers of their book Empire will note that the analysis offered does allow for a continuation of older forms of militaristic geopolitics and imperialist competition for control of resources10 on the part of the United States and rival blocs (not to mention corruption at the heart of government). Hardt and Negris point is that these established forms of imperialist behaviour now take place within a new framework for global sovereignty, a new framework that aims (with inevitably patchy success) to produce global governmentality. An emphasis on transformation in this respect is also central to some recent anthropological analyses inuenced by Foucauldian ideas, notably Aihwa Ongs work (1999). What Hardt and Negri argue is that classical imperialism belonged to a world in which sovereignty still rested on the nation-state and nationstates extended their power within a territorial framework. Modernist sovereignty and modernity itself belonged to the era before the formation of a truly global capitalist market, an epoch in which capitalism was still incorporating a periphery in two senses: part of the world was not totally transformed by capitalist relations, and capitalist relations had not conquered all aspects of the production of social life. In this respect, the arguments of Hardt and Negri take the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg as their point of departure and their analysis also follows the lead of other analyses of the objectivity of a condition of postmodernity from the vantage-point of political economy. For present purposes, I merely wish to consider the

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50 Critique of Anthropology 25(1)

area in which their analysis converges with the focus of Wolf s work after EPWH, the marriage of political economy to an analysis of structural power. In the case of Hardt and Negri, the inuence of Foucault is extended through a reading of later post-structuralist work, notably that of Deleuze and Guattari. For Hardt and Negri, modernist sovereignty was a precarious solution to the crises repeatedly provoked by the transition to a bourgeois society and industrial capitalism, though their philosophical orientation leads them to trace its genealogy from the potential revolution promised by the Enlightenment. It is the form of sovereignty appropriate for an historically transient epoch in which nation-states became the dominant form of organization, and in fact explains the development and spread of modern nationalisms. It depends on a totalizing identication between the state and the nation and the construction of a people that corresponds in an organic way to this national unit. This framework gave rise to disciplinary power in Foucaults sense and the dualisms of racism and sexism at the heart of global power relations that anthropologists such as Abu-Lughod have dedicated themselves to deconstructing. The colonies thus participated in an integral way in the development of modernist forms of sovereignty. The postmodernist response to the hierarchization associated with high modernity is to celebrate the breaking down of boundaries. If global hierarchies are based on essentialized identities and binary oppositions, then we should celebrate hybridity and the collapse of boundaries arising from the ows of people, commodities and symbols that can disrupt the sovereignty of nation-states. From this perspective, rejecting any form of totalization is desirable not only as an intellectual posture, but as a tactic of struggle. Thus postcolonial critics such as Homi Bhabha argue that social identities and nations never corresponded to the coherent cultural totalities proclaimed by the ideologies of modernist sovereignty, and that emancipation consists in completing the subversion of the binary categories that underpin domination. This returns us again to the problem noted in discussing Abu-Lughods writing against the grain of othering, and Hardt and Negris point is precisely that such tactics have become less effective and possibly even irrelevant under postmodern forms of sovereignty. According to their analysis, postmodern sovereignty is based on networks that transcend the nation-state, vested in emergent supranational organizations, non-governmental organizations11 and transnational corporations. It does not require a territorial centre of power (though territorialized centres of power do continue to exist in postmodernity):
Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on xed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentralized and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, exible hierarchies

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51 Gledhill: The Goal of Explanation and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow. (Hardt and Negri, 2000: xiixiii)

This perspective does not imply that nation-states cease to perform important functions of regulation within the contemporary global order, nor does it imply that supranational institutions actually rule. The point is that Empire in Hardt and Negris sense is the most appropriate form of sovereignty for the world system as it now exists, though it is unlikely ever to be realized in such a coherent form because actors pursuing distinct political and social projects can construct their own, decentred networks. Empire in Hardt and Negris sense is the paradigmatic form of biopower. It aims to regulate not simply interactions between human beings in society but the whole of social life and human nature. We should note, in passing, that what seems new in neoliberalism is its elision of the distinction between a market economy and a market society, to the point where the latter seems to engulf life itself. More the product of processes that shift the axes around which realistic politics now gravitate (Peck and Tickell, 2002: 400) than the crystallization of a single, static ideology, and by no means restricted to political regimes of the Right, neoliberal systems of rule enjoin citizens including poor citizens and those subject to social discrimination to be active in seeking rights, on the one hand, and to organize their lives to maximize their advantages in market society, on the other, since they must also demonstrate a responsible attitude towards improving their own prospects. More than a response to a crisis of accumulation and a readjustment of the relations between capital and labour following the formation of truly global markets, these transformations reect the way capitalism has deepened to embrace the process of production of social life itself, seeking to commoditize the most intimate of human relations and the production of identity and personhood. Yet the consequences of Empire are complex. Proclaiming the End of History and universal peace and justice, the established capitalist metropoles reconstitute themselves as a global police force confronting disorders which are products of their own past and present strategies, bludgeoning into compliance less powerful states whose precarious survival often remains premised on the lowest-intensity variants of democratic governance, and striving to undermine any regime that threatens to embody a popular will to break with current models of development. Yet, Hardt and Negri emphasize, as a system of decentred power, Empire also manifests an ethico-political dynamic that directs itself into a space without limits, in contrast to nation-state forms, a development most notable in its embrace of human rights discourse.12 The fact that a multitude of actors begin to take these principles seriously (and increasingly encounter avenues for promoting them across national boundaries) leads Hardt and Negri to position themselves among those who see new possibilities for future human emancipation in the presently bleak scenarios of the

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52 Critique of Anthropology 25(1)

capitalist form of globalization. They thus reject the idea that the local should be defended against the process of globalization, not simply on the grounds that it is a romantic delusion but also because it would be reactionary. But the main point that I wish to stress here is that they see the weakness of postmodernist theory and postcolonial criticism as lying in their failure to recognize that global capitalism itself has become postmodern in its logic. Globalization continues to produce heterogeneity rather than homogeneity for a variety of reasons, but one of the most important features of postmodern sovereignty is the more positive value now placed on difference in both the capitalist market and the public sphere. Racial and gender hierarchies are not, of course, transcended by these processes, but a critical theory focused on attacking the constructions of high modernism is not capable of exploring how a global multicultural politics and the commercialization of cultural difference as lifestyle can produce new, and potentially even more extreme, forms of inequality. The repeated hijacking of critical principles by the most powerful agents in the current global order is apparent not only in the current public positions of multilateral agencies such as the World Bank but even in the approach of a George W. Bush to the task of defusing domestic difference Hispanics or Latinos (to employ the category used in the 2000 US census) get a new political recognition (albeit of the divide-and-rule variety) even if undocumented migrants dont get an amnesty or respite from the constant erosion of their labour and civil rights. What Hardt and Negri succeed in doing rather well is putting the ball back in the court of those who argue that consciousness of the political and epistemological positioning of the observer is the key to tracing systems of power and structures of inequality:
In our present imperial world, the liberatory potential of the postmodernist and postcolonial discourses that we have described only resonates with the situation of an elite population that enjoys certain rights, a certain level of wealth, and a certain position in the global hierarchy. One should not take this recognition, however, as a complete refutation. It is not really a matter of either/or. Difference, hybridity, and mobility are not liberatory in themselves, but neither are truth, purity and stasis. The real revolutionary practice refers to the level of production. Truth will not make us free, but taking control of the production of truth will. Mobility and hybridity are not liberatory, but taking control of the production of mobility and stasis, purities and mixtures, is. (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 156)

It is certainly possible to nd much wanting in the way Hardt and Negri themselves celebrate the emancipatory potential of the liberation of the Multitude from the categorical identities of the high modernist epoch and in their adoption of the uid, shifting and singular identities of a differentiated post-industrial mass. As Kapferer notes, the evidence provided by ethnography throws serious doubt on the idea that:
. . . the new network society of a global Empire will operate so effectively for

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53 Gledhill: The Goal of Explanation the radically dispossessed in the further ung and poorer regions at the horizons of Empire. The Third World has not become the First in the way that Hardt and Negri suggest. (Although there is a Third Worldization of fractions of the First.) (2002: 172)

Nevertheless, there do seem to be virtues in Hardt and Negris approach that lie precisely in those areas where they pose questions that lie on the same terrain as Wolf s questions about structural power. For Wolf, theory should be constructed on a broad base, not conned to the discipline of anthropology itself, and should advance in a way that could open up new horizons in ethnographic (or historical) research, at the same time as the surprises produced by ethnography force rethinking of general models. Few scholars have achieved as virtuous a dialectic between these two, interdependent, routes to expanding anthropological knowledge.

The legacy of EPWH: a Latin Americanists conclusion

EPWH was a landmark work for many reasons, but the one that I would like to stress in conclusion is the way it transcended one of the abstractions on which I have been dwelling extensively in the second half of this article, given its centrality in anthropological debate over the last two decades, namely that of modernity. Valuable though this shorthand may indeed be in some types of debates, it has proved more of a hindrance than a help in the erstwhile peripheries of European expansion and colonization, not least because it became part of local discourse in framing a wide variety of political projects. Latin America presents particular difculties in this respect because it was colonized by Iberian states whose elites tended to move against the grain of the Enlightenment, before the development of industrial capitalism and archetypically modern nation-state forms in Europe, and with particularly devastating effects from the point of view of the indigenous societies of the region (however resilient indigenous people proved in the longer term). The criollo elites of the newly independent Latin American countries generally embarked on projects that were consciously portrayed as ones of catching up with the North Atlantic metropoles, so as to be able to participate more fully in global ows of commerce, technology and ideas, projects in which Indians now appeared to constitute a problem of a kind that had not existed before, so that the search for national identity in Latin America led to the import of European racial science as well as more progressive political models (Larson, 1999: 563). In terms of these bald generalizations, modernity appears as something born in a European (or North Atlantic) elsewhere, inexorably imposing its mark on world history, albeit with further differentiating effects. Some would read Eric Wolf s work in this way, but that is not my reading of the message of EPWH, and the later work that I have already

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54 Critique of Anthropology 25(1)

cited is very much about making it clear that this was not how he wished to leave the matter. The connections of EPWH are between coeval, coevolving social and political spaces, and, even if some of the forces at work are particularly powerful, to the point of foreclosing on certain historical possibilities, the invitation is always to look again, and ever more closely, at the variety and complexity of real historical change. To return to some of the common ground between Wolf and Willis and Trondman, we continue to benet from fruitful surprises if we take that tack and, in doing so, advance understanding in more radical and deeper ways. Eric always liked surprises and his was no grand narrative view of history. He was quite happy to judge one of his most powerful and inuential early models that of the closed corporate peasant community as excessively schematic, and, in the light of subsequent research, even a little naive (Wolf, 1986: 326). But many of his critics seem, on closer inspection of the original texts, to have offered an oversimplied reading of what he originally wrote that failed to recognize the enormous paradigm shift his ideas offered when originally published. By offering a vision of indigenous people as actors in a rich and complex postcolonial history that needed detailed exploration, Wolf launched us on a journey of exploration that remains far from completed (Gledhill, 1999: 204). From his perspective, both modernity and its antinomies dissolve into abstractions that fail to capture worlds in movement that may always be becoming modern in various ways but never reach a common or denitive destination. EPWH begins, after all, with a comprehensive theoretical assault on the way the key concepts of social science and European historiography reected a distorted self-consciousness born within the framework of the industrializing nation-state that hampered understandings of complex and differentiated global processes. Wolf s work always explored family resemblances as well as causal relationships, but it never sought to reduce the complexity of concrete situations to abstractions. On the contrary, it invited us to see every idiosyncrasy and every paradoxical combination (especially important for societies such as those of Latin America that seem destined to perpetual crisis) as something we could and should explain. Taking nothing as given in Wolf s sense seems like sound advice, and I think it is still to be preferred to other perspectives that put a different meaning on that maxim, avoiding the risks of explanation by settling for critique and deconstruction alone.

Notes
A preliminary version of this paper written in Spanish was presented to a seminar of doctoral students at El Colegio de Michoacn in January 2002, where I was a Visiting Professor for two years thanks to the generous support offered by a ctedra patrimonial funded by the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology

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55 Gledhill: The Goal of Explanation (CONACYT). I am grateful to the participants in that session for their lively and useful feedback as well as for the helpful suggestions of Critique of Anthropologys referees. 1 Wolf expressly hoped that the concept of structural power could address some of the weaknesses of the framework of modes of production that he had used as the point of departure of EPWH. 2 Thanks, in part, to the facility with which he could integrate and transcend US and European perspectives on thought and history, as well as to the uncompromising ethical commitment that motivated his public denunciation of the work performed by anthropologists for the National Security State. See Wolf and Jorgensen (1970). 3 In particular, evidence based on local knowledge or the actors own models or constructions of translocal relations and distant powers is both extremely interesting (from the point of view of understanding the logic of social action) and potentially very misleading (from the point of view of understanding the complex dynamics of the wider elds and relations of force in which such local actors are situated). 4 Although Taussig originally expressed his position elsewhere, the version that appeared in Critique of Anthropology with responses by Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz remains fresh in my memory as the editor responsible for organizing what diplomats would no doubt dub a full and frank exchange of views. I hope no one will be offended by my abandonment of a position of editorial neutrality at this historical distance from the publication. 5 One especially relevant example would be the discussion Wolf offers of the history of the modern textile industry in India, which differs greatly from the orthodox Marxist account (Wolf, 1982: 28790). 6 Such as miners, loggers, merchants, storekeepers and muleteers, and particular combinations of such actors in regional settings with differing relations to larger networks offering credit and investment capital, controlling access to wider markets, and so forth. 7 EPWHs global perspective was nothing new for a scholar who never shrank from looking at areas outside his primary ethnographic specialism such as China or the Middle East. Anthropologists are not alone in sometimes excusing themselves from wider debates on grounds of regional specialization, and there are obvious risks in venturing beyond the (narrowing) segment of scholarly knowledge of which it seems possible to have a strong command by dint of personal research and reading. Anyone who ventures outside their specialism to make comparisons or venture broader generalizations takes an intellectual risk, but the fact that this risk falls on individuals illustrates the central dilemmas of the way knowledge production and career progression are currently institutionalized. 8 Paul Willis has remained consistent through his career in seeking to enlarge our understanding of class and refusing to join a generalized retreat from mention of the word, and it is refreshing to read someone asserting that focusing on class may yet provide new perspectives on signicant issues. 9 This is why academics have proved rather weak defenders even of their own immediate interests as workers in a knowledge industry under substantial reconstruction. 10 In addition to oil and other long established strategic resources, the list now includes the genetic resources required by the emergent biotechnology

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56 Critique of Anthropology 25(1) industries, although the ways in which hegemony is maintained in other sectors of the so-called new economy seem less straightforward and the kind of crises this economy is provoking in the established centers of global accumulation have characteristics that suggest change as well as continuity. If corporate corruption might be seen as a return to the roots of North American capitalism, the diffusion of share ownership and receptivity of large sections of the public to the hyping of the new economy is another matter. 11 NGOs are often seen as a development that limits the power of global hegemons to act in the world, or, in the World Bank formulation, as key actors in a transition to good governance, a less patrimonial state, and transparency and accountability. Yet the limits of the transformations brought about in practice by the intensied NGO activity of recent decades seem precisely to reect the way they participate in a transformation of global power relations, state forms and modes of governmentality driven by changes within capitalism and what Peck and Tickell (2002) term the deep neoliberalization of social and political action. 12 An example of how this logic imposes itself on even the most powerful actors is provided by the Bush administrations resort to Guantnamo as the place in which Al Qaeda suspects could be subject to inhuman and degrading treatment in the interests of domestic politics without unmanageable legal consequences.

References
Abu-Lughod, Lila (2000) Locating Ethnography, Ethnography 1(2): 2617. Gledhill, John (1999) Eric R. Wolf: An Appreciation, Critique of Anthropology 19(2): 2028. Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson (1997) Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Kapferer, Bruce (2002) Foundation and Empire (with apologies to Isaac Asimov): A Consideration of Hardt and Negris Empire, Social Analysis 46(1): 16779. Larson, Brooke (1999) Andean Highland Peasants and the Trials of Nation-making During the Nineteenth Century, in Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz (eds) The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas: Vol. 3, South America, Part 2, pp. 558703. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lvi-Strauss, Claude (1968) Structural Anthropology. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marcus, George (1998) Ethnography Through Thick and Thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ong, Aihwa (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Peck, Jamie and Adam Tickell (2002) Neoliberalizing Space, Antipode 34(3): 380404. Shanin, Teodor (1983) Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Taussig, Michael (1989) History and Commodity, Critique of Anthropology 9(1): 731. Thompson, E.P. (1978) The Poverty of Theory. London: Merlin Press.

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57 Gledhill: The Goal of Explanation Willis, Paul and Mats Trondman (2000) Manifesto for Ethnography, Ethnography 1(1): 516. Wolf, Eric R. (1982) Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wolf, Eric R. (1986) The Vicissitudes of the Closed Corporate Peasant Community, American Ethnologist 13(2): 3259. Wolf, Eric R. (1999) Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wolf, Eric R. (2001) Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World. Berkeley, Los Angles and London: University of California Press. Wolf, Eric R. and Joseph G. Jorgensen (1970) Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand, New York Review of Books 19 Nov. Available online at: http:// www.nybooks.com/articles/10763.

John Gledhill is Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His most recent research has focused on comparative analysis of the social consequences of neoliberalism and state transformation in Latin America, and the ethnography and history of the Nahua communities of the coastal sierras of Michoacn state in Mexico. His publications include Casi Nada: Agrarian Reform in the Homeland of Cardenismo (1991, also published in Spanish), Neoliberalism, Transnationalization and Rural Poverty (1995), Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics (2000, also published in Spanish) and Cultura y Desafo en Ostula: Cuatro Siglos de Autonoma Indgena en la Costa-Sierra Nahua de Michoacn (2004). Address: Department of Social Anthropology, Roscoe Building, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. [email: john. gledhill@manchester.ac.uk, website: http://les1.man.ac.uk/sa/jg/index.html]

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