Anthropology and the Analysis of IdeologyAuthor(s): Talal AsadSource: Man, New Series, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Dec., 1979), pp. 607-627Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2802150Accessed: 04/09/2010 13:00

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ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE ANALYSIS OF

IDEOLOGY*

TALAL ASAD

University of Hull

This lecture discusses some of the conceptual problems involved in anthropological treatments of ideology, and argues that most of the difficulties arise from a theoretical preoccupation with essential human meanings-as embodied in the authentic social categories, actions and discourses of given cultures. This preoccupation, it is maintained, is shared by anthropologists who are often thought of as being radically different from each other, and it accounts for the difficulties they have encountered in conceptualising social change. The first and longer part of the lecture explores these difficulties in some writings by Bloch, Bourdillon, Leach and Mary Douglas. The tendency to reduce anthropological problems about the nature and consequence of particular public discourses to the philosophical problem of the origin of essential human concepts is noted. The tendency to see authoritative meanings as the a priori totality which defines and reproduces the essential integrity of a given social order is also criticised, on the grounds that it leaves an important question unasked: namely, how particular political and economic conditions maintain or undermine given forms of authoritative discourse as systems. The final part of the lecture is devoted to a general critique of the vulgar Marxist theory of the social function of ideology, with particular reference to the kinds of reductionism which that theory undertakes in its attempt to determine essential meanings, and the kinds of question which it fails to consider adequately.

I In the early seventies when the question of anthropology and colonialism

was first being publicly argued out in this country, there was an understandable reaction on the part of many British anthropologists against the exaggerated role attributed, in some of the cruder criticisms, to anthropology as colonial ideology. In the excitement of indignant response it was often forgotten that the really interesting questions concerned the ideological conditions of anthropology, and the implications of these conditions for its discourse, and not the very occasionally direct but on the whole insignificant practical role that British anthropologists had played in support of British imperial structures. Instead ofenquiring into the effects of ideological conditions on anthropological discourse the argument often degenerated into assertions about the personal motives or politics of its producers. However, I do not want to address this problem directly here, but instead to begin with a general puzzle: the modesty of anthropologists regarding the ideological role of their discourses in the determination of colonial structures does not seem to be matched by a corresponding scepticism regarding the role of ideology generally in the determination of social structures which are the objects of their discourse. * Malinowski Lecture for 1979, given at the London School of Economics on 6 March.

Man (N.S.) 14, 607-27.

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Their science as discourse, so it is said, is not determined by social reality. And yet the social reality of which that science speaks is typically nothing but discourse. It is this apparent paradox I should like to explore in what follows.

But first a word of warning. What I say about anthropology here is not intended as an empirical generalisation of the work of all self-styled anthropologists-or even of that of the majority. For a long time now anthropology has ceased to constitute a coherent field of intellectual enquiry, and its present unity is institutional and not theoretical. My comments relate therefore to particular strands within social anthropology which seem to me to hang together in significant ways, forming a recognisable pattern that has become an obstacle to further development, and one which it would be worth examining more closely. I repeat, this pattern does not define the unity of anthropology because it relates to a number of assumptions and tendencies that are neither exclusive to it, nor for that matter shared by all texts which would be called anthropological.

II Questions concerning concepts and society, classification and social structure,

rules and social behaviour have always been of central concern to social anthropology. In recent years a fresh impetus has been given to such questions deriving from the study of language. This new impetus has occasionally been represented as a radical break, a New Anthropology, and lines of battle have been drawn on what are alleged to be matters of profound importance for the theory and method of social anthropology. However, it is very doubtful whether the fresh developments represent a totally new departure, or whether the lines of battle define positions which are as different as they have sometimes been claimed to be.

In fact, many of the basic assumptions and concerns of more recent writers influenced by the study of language can be traced back to Malinowski, not only of those writers who have been happy to acknowledge the connexion, but also of many who have not. Malinowski's critics, ranging from linguists such as J. R. Firth (I957) and Langendoen (I968) to the publicists for a New Anthropology like Ardener (I97i), Henson (I974) and Crick (I976), have largely seen in Malinowski a failed language-theorist. One is often given to understand that despite his commendable emphasis on the importance of learning native languages for fieldwork, Malinowski had no real understanding of advanced language theory. He is dismissed by anthropologists like Sahlins (I976) for his crass utilitarianism, or noted briefly by linguists like Lyons (I968) as someone who contributed that quaint but not entirely valueless notion, 'phatic communion', to semantic theory. That Malinowski's texts on language also contain an anthropological theory of culture (which is not, by the way, to be confused with his theory of basic and derived needs), has gone generally unnoticed. Not only in his explicitly linguistic texts, such as 'The problem of meaning in primitive languages' and Volume 2 of Coral gardens, but also in some of his other writings such as his famous essay on myth, there is present a notion of culture as an a priori totality of authentic meanings to

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which action and discourse must be related if they are to be properly understood and their integrity explained. ' It is this notion, as it finds expression in the writings of more recent anthropologists, that I shall be questioning.

But I do not want to give the impression-especially on this occasion-that I am adding one more critical voice to the long procession of Malinowski's detractors. Malinowski was not just a splendid fieldworker, and an amusing polemicist rather than a good theorist, as the received version in social anthropology has it. His untidy but extremely interesting writings on language do not only reveal a problematical conception of culture, they also show signs of attempts to break away from that conception and to search for new ways of representing and understanding discourse within the context of social life.2 My concern here however is not with Malinowski's texts-but with those of anthropologists who are still very much alive.

An emphasis on 'meaning' is to be found, whether implicit or explicit, in much recent anthropological writing. A preoccupation with identifying and constituting a priori structures of human meaning is shared by a range of writings that are otherwise very different-those dealing with cultural categories, symbolic representations, codes and communication, image management, rational transactions, etc. And the preoccupation is present both in the rationalist perspectives of those concerned to assert the universality and priority of cultural classification systems, and in the empiricist perspectives of those concerned with what they take to be the ultimate datum of flesh-and- bone individuals, interacting intelligently within the real world. This interest in meaning is not itself new, although there is perhaps a new self-consciousness about that interest. Anthropological texts with titles like Implicit meanings, Rules and meanings, Transaction and meaning, Explorations in language and meaning, 'The management of meaning', 'Form and meaning of magical acts', 'The politics of meaning', seem to be somewhat more evident today than they were a generation ago-and from authors who might be described as empiricists or as rationalists, and sometimes even as rationalist and empiricist at one and the same time. It is worth noting that Leach (1976) has recently written about the complementary character of two major perspectives in social anthropology, the rationalist and the empiricist, which he regards not as opposed but as eminently compatible.3 However it is not my intention to suggest reassuringly, as Leach appears to want to do, that rationalist and empiricist anthropologists are together producing a sum of understanding in which what is lacking on the one side is made up by the achievement of the other. On the contrary, I want to try and indicate some things they have in common, and to suggest why and to what extent these things are a source of present theoretical weakness.

One aspect of this weakness can be seen in what is often admitted to be the repeated failure of social anthropologists to produce a viable theory of social change. The reason for this may not be, as it is sometimes proposed, that 'real' factors of social change are many and complex, which is a practical difficulty, but rather that the way the object of change is itself conceptualised makes the possibility of such a theory difficult if not impossible.

In the writings of both empiricist and rationalist anthropologists, then,

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human meanings are seen almost everywhere. More precisely, the basic social object (called society, social structure or social order) which is presented in the discourse of such anthropologists is constructed out of essential human meanings. Society as the realm of convention is generally opposed to nature as the realm of necessity. In extreme cases, as in Sahlins's most recent dialogue with Marxism, there is a tendency for even nature to be represented as the product of human action and cognition, as inert raw matter ordered by constitutive human meanings. In a striking passage, which must surely stand as one of the most lyrical expressions of the humanist project in modern anthropology, Sahlins in the conclusion to Culture and practical reason writes:

... nature as it exists in itself is only the raw material provided by the hand of God, waiting to be given meaningful shape and content by the mind of man. It is as the block of marble to the finished statue; and of course the genius of the sculptor-in the same way as the technical development of culture-consists of exploiting the lines of defraction within the material to his own ends. That marble is refractory; there are certain things one cannot do with it-such are the facts of nature and the action of selection. But it is the sculptor who decides whether the statue is to be an equestrian knight contemplating his victories [.. .] or a seated Moses contemplating the sins of his people. And if it be objected that it is the composition of the marble which compels the form of the statue, it should not be forgotten that this block of marble was chosen from among all possible ones because the sculptor saw within it the latent image of his own project (I 976: 2 I0).

This bold celebration of man's creative powers, with God complacently occupying the rank of unskilled labourer, may not be to the taste of all anthropologists. However that may be, this passage from Sahlins does raise sharply the question of how the basic social object presented in anthropological texts is constituted in those texts, and the question of what some of the theoretical consequences might be of the fact that the essential defining elements of that object are human meanings and human projects.

My concern is not with the question of whether or not the anthropologist should accept uncritically and reproduce directly in his model the explanations produced by the people he studies. The arguments between so-called symbolists and literalists (sometimes represented as a confrontation between soft, nostalgic liberals on the one hand, and clear-sighted, unsentimental modernists on the other) are still, after all, arguments about the criteria to be used for determining the sense of what people in other societies say and do. On this question one may note in passing that the attempt to make a rigid distinction between symbolic and literal meanings is coming to be seen as a distinction that raises more problems than it solves.4 Recently, Sperber (I975) and Skorupski (I976) have in their different ways discussed the confusions created by the anthropological addiction to notions of the symbolic. That their own treatments are not free of further difficulties is something I cannot consider now. In any case, my point here has to do not with the proper interpretation of words, gestures, and things in their capacity as signifiers, but with the preoccupation that different kinds of anthropologists have with human meanings as such.

My concern in the first place is with the nature of the basic social object constituted within anthropological texts themselves. And I want to argue that in anthropological texts this object is typically constituted with reference to a

TALAL ASAD 6i i

notion of ideology whose social significance derives from its being the expression of an a priori system of essential meanings-an 'authentic culture'. I shall try to explore briefly this conceptual object constituted of human meanings and to criticise it as I proceed-not by pointing to a brute reality which every sensible person must immediately recognise, but by interrogating the texts. In the course of this interrogation I shall try to take note of the very different models that structure the sense of 'meaning'-the aim of a speaker/actor, the rules of linguistic (and stylistic) conventions, the content of an experiencing, construing mind, and the process of conceptual unpacking and re-presentation that occurs through objective discourse-because part of my criticism will focus on the troubles that arise from the combination of what are often incompatible models in the anthropological attempt to define authentic cultures.

III That the central object of anthropological discourse is primarily constituted

in terms of human meanings has very recently been reaffirmed by Maurice Bloch in his I977 paper 'The past and the present in the present'.

In this paper Bloch is concerned to specify reasons for the perennial difficulty that anthropologists have had in formulating an adequate theory of social change. Bloch points out that the concept of social structure in anthropology refers essentially to an integrated totality of social classifications and meanings, a system of social rules and roles which can, in one widely accepted anthropological sense of the term, be called ritual. Now if this concept of social structure is linked to the doctrine of the social origin of concepts (the social determination of cognition) it becomes impossible to specify how social change can occur. This is because, so Bloch argues, a system of meaningful categories, of shared concepts that makes communication possible (a system which is none other than social structure) cannot explain the creation of new concepts.5

Bloch believes that the Marxist theory of determining infrastructure and determined superstructure is no answer to the problem either, because:

the infrastructure is seen as external to the concepts of the actors. [And] for it to be a source of criticism of the social order it means that people must apprehend it in terms available to them and which are different from and incompatible with those of the dominant social theory. This means terms not determined by it. Otherwise the infrastructure, however contradictory to the dominant social theory, is never transformed into action and just carries on in its own sweet way, totally irrelevant to the processes of history (I977: 28 i).

Bloch's own solution is to propose that the different conceptions and perceptions required for an effective criticism of the existing social order must be determined by that which is other than society-in other words by nature.6

Now Bloch's emphasis on the importance of ideological argument (which has its roots in some fertile suggestions made by Leach in Political systems of highland Burma) is certainly a move in the right direction-and I will come back to it later. But even in such a discourse 'social structure' is presented as a total integrated system of shared subjective meanings and conventions. Even the Marxist notion of infrastructure is declared to be 'irrelevant to the processes

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of history' unless it can be reduced to the experiences and aims of individual actors. The problem of social change is thus presented as being a problem of a change of concepts, the concepts available to 'real flesh-and-blood individuals' that can at once define and transform the essence of society.

The main difficulty with Bloch's argument is this: the proposition that universally valid concepts (or new and better forms of understanding) are essentially generated by man's encounter with nature (which is to be thought of as being a kind of 'undeceiving' object) and not by his encounter with society (which is to be thought of as being a kind of 'mystifying' object) may or may not be acceptable. I would maintain that it is not. But even if it were, it would not explain how people, who are presumably all in direct contact with the same nature, come to have very different concepts within the same society, and how they are able to engage in ideological arguments about the basic transformation of social conditions in which they all live.

In other words, epistemological questions about the ultimate origin or the final guarantee of social concepts and forms of knowledge (so beloved of many anthropologists) are really quite irrelevant to this kind of problem. They cannot tell us anything about the reasons why different kinds of ideological position come to be held in social life, or about the ideological force or effectiveness of particular political arguments. (That is not to say as some social theorists both here and in France have recently done, that epistemological problems are in themselves completely valueless, but that it is unnecessary, and worse than unnecessary, to drag in epistemological questions when discussing problems regarding the constitution of what anthropologists want to call social structure, or society, and the part that systematic ideologies can play in the reproduction or transformation of that object.) In this respect, Bloch's mistake consists in making the assumption, which is by no means unique to him, that society-and so too social change-is essentially a matter of structures of meaning, structures which are at once the collective forms of experience, and the social pre-conditions of communication (culture as language); and that therefore, social criticism is not merely sometimes a necessary but always a sufficient pre-condition for social change.

Thus anthropologists have presented the basic social objects in their texts ('social structure') in such a way that they inevitably propose for ideology an essential and determinate function-so that ideology is not only written in as the basic organising principle of social life, the integrated totality of shared meanings which gives that society its unique identity (its culture), but also changing ideologies are said to be essential to basic transformations.

In a recent issue of Man (December I978), there appears a perceptive comment on Bloch's paper by Bourdillon. In it he observes quite rightly that the equation Bloch makes between ritual concepts (or religious languages) on the one hand, and hierarchy and exploitation (or social structure) on the other is far too simple and therefore unacceptable.7 However, Bourdillon has no quarrel with the essentially ideological constitution of that anthropological object called social structure. On the contrary, he insists that social structure 'is a way of thinking about society which enables us to bring together a diverse set of relations into a manageable system, and which expresses the continuity

TALAL ASAD 6I3

in any process of social events' (I978: 595). As against Bloch, Bourdillon maintains that this integrated system of roles, rules and rituals is essential for any form of orderly social life, and not just a source of mystification which can and should be done away with. Bourdillon is here of course echoing the argument by Douglas (1970) that the dissolution of structure, far from being the rational aim of revolutions is merely the empirical cause of rebellions. But he does not ask himself, as he might well have done: is the system which is supposed to be necessary for thinking and speaking (whether speculatively, or with authoritative force) about social life to be identified with what is necessary for living in it?

The ambiguity here is between what is supposed to be the way the anthropologist actually thinks and speaks about social life and the way the people the anthropologist is studying are supposed actually to think and speak in their social life. In other words, the ambiguity is between the anthropologist's discourse, and the discourse of the society (the discourse that is its lived culture) which is supposed to be reproduced in the anthropologist's definitive text (an interpretative, reflective discourse). This ambiguity is not concerned merely with the question mentioned previously of the degree to which the anthropologist may or must draw on the explanations provided by the people studied-sometimes referred to in the anthropological literature as the problem of the informant's model versus the anthropologist's model. The question being raised here is really concerned with the relationship the other way around. And the form which that question might take is this: to what extent do anthropological texts construct an essential system of meanings in their attempt to present the 'authentic' structure of social life and of discourse of the people studied?

Let me first illustrate this point with a familiar example.

IV Some years after Political systems of highland Burma was first published,

Gellner (i958) wrote a paper drawing attention to the book as:

perhaps the most lucid statement of a certain kind of Idealism that I know, and teachers of philosophy could profitably use a selection of his statements as a means of explaining to their students what such Idealism is about (I958: 202).

Leach in effect sees other Functionalists as holding a kind of Platonism. Only the static is properly knowable, it is merely approximated by the empirically real. [...] Leach's own variant to this is a kind of Hegelianism: reality changes because it is in conflict, the conflict is a conflict of embodied ideas, and the change and conflict are knowable by means of concepts that are themselves in conflict in a parallel way (I958: I93).

Gellner's paper contained some useful points of criticism, but I believe he was mistaken in his philosophical reading of Leach's text. Besides, the proposition that Political systems of highland Burma represents a view that is appropriately described as Hegelian cannot be sustained by a careful analysis of that text. But that is all by the way. The interesting thing was Leach's response

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in his Introductory Note to the I964 reprint. There, you may remember, Leach wrote as follows:

Incidentally, in a friendly comment, Professor Gellner has written off my whole argument as one of 'idealist error'. Truth and error are complicated matters but it seems to me that in suggesting indirectly that the Kachins have a rather simple minded philosophy which presumes a relationship between 'idea' and 'reality' not very different from that postulated by Plato, I am not arguing that Plato was correct. The errors of Platonism are very common errors which are shared not only by anthropologists but also by the people whom anthropologists study.

This attribution by Leach of the Platonic doctrine of forms to the Kachins is quite astonishing-not because the Kachins are too simple-minded to hold it, but because the doctrine is essentially a metaphysical one, and there is no evidence in the text of Kachin metaphysics in this sense. Whatever the 'errors of Platonism' may be, they are not the errors of everyday political and economic life (which is what the book deals with) but the errors of systematic philosophical speculation.

Such is the awe in which philosophy is held by anthropologists, that Leach felt constrained to reply to a philosophical charge in philosophical terms. And yet there was no need for this whatever. Gellner had attributed a particular philosophical theory of meaning to Leach,8 and it was in this context that he criticised him for assuming that one needed changing concepts to know changing reality. But Leach's text is not based on a specific philosophical theory of meaning at all:9 a basic argument of Political systems of highland Burma (like that of Bloch's paper) is that there must be changing social concepts for such a thing as social change to occur. Now such an argument could have been countered-by pointing, not to a faulty philosophical theory about the relation between 'ideas' and 'reality' (as Gellner did), but to an ideological conception of social change. More precisely, it could have been countered by drawing attention to a very questionable theory of culture-the theory which gives logical priority to the system of authentic meaning supposedly shared by an ideologically-defined community, and independent of the political activity and economic conditions of its members.

Political systems of highlandBurma is rightly regarded by many anthropologists as a most important text-although its remarkable originality and its failure have rarely been adequately appreciated. But note how arguments about systematic concepts within anthropological discourse can be easily shifted into another key-and thus stopped, by an appeal to the discourse of the natives 'out there' which the anthropologist has witnessed and recorded. Since Gellner did not respond, we can perhaps assume that he accepted Leach's authority in this argument. However that may be, on this occasion, as on others in which anthropological discourse seeks to re-present an authentic system of human meanings (the enduring categories which define, from one historical moment to another, who 'the Kachin' are), no native was available to contest the system being imputed-if not to him or her individually, then at least to the 'society' which was supposed to be authentically his or hers.

Here is one example, then, of the way in which the anthropologist's discursive object comes to be presented as a reproduction of the essential

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discourse of a whole society. (Although, be it noted, it is not the Kachin but the anthropologist who actually writes.) The example may be unusual in substance but perhaps because of that it serves all the better to raise the question of how anthropological texts construct for a whole society, or even for a group within it, a total, integrated semantic system, which defines for that society what its essential identity is.

Let me pursue this question with further reference to Leach's Political systems of highland Burma.

The significance of Leach's text derives not from the fact that it illustrates a simple philosophical error (idealism) which should be replaced by a sounder epistemology but from the fact that it is a rich and complex statement of a particular anthropological problem and its proposed solution. The text is not simply the reflection of an essential philosophy. It is the production of an anthropological object. I cannot here discuss this work in the detail that it deserves, but will draw on an aspect of it which is relevant to my theme.

The starting point of Leach's study, of course, was the question of Kachin identity. The problem was that the so-called hill peoples of the north-eastern Burma frontier region were rather diverse in their culture, lived in contrasting ecological settings, spoke a number of quite distinct (often mutually unintelligible) dialects, and were organised in local communities which apparently held to very different political principles-varying from the comparatively rich, autocratic Shan princedoms to the often rather poor, and relatively egalitarian Kachin gumlao village domains. Leach's answer to this basic problem was that Kachin identity was based on a common 'ritual language', an ideological system whose primary organising categories were political.

Leach's notion of a common ritual language enabled him to rationalise apparent local divergencies in the Hills Area into conceptual moments of the 'same' social structure, and apparent historical changes into elements of the transformational logic of that structure. This rationalist solution to an empirical problem was thus in effect the construction of a system of human meanings (a 'grammar of ritual action' Leach called it) which was then identified as the essential language that defined the political economic integrity ofthe Kachins- and in terms of which the Kachins must speak if they are to remain authentically Kachin. In this way Leach's text defines what can and what cannot be 'correctly' said in the political discourse of the Kachins.

Of course Leach allows for and refers in his text to ideological argument among the Kachins. But the arguments described revolve in general around the abstract principles of hierarchy versus equality, and Leach relates the way in which the authoritative Kachin ritual language is used to claim one or other of these two abstract principles, which are at once the principles of prevailing social conditions and the principles of meaningful discourse. The resulting account of social change, as many critics have observed, is thus an account of an eternal cycle-better described as a process of ideological self-reproduction.

The difficulty here is not that there cannot be argument and criticism of social arrangements if there is only one language which is 'determined by society'. The difficulty is not that Leach should have looked more to 'economics

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and politics' (where allegedly Man is in direct contact with Nature) and less to ritual and religion in order to identify the origins of Kachin concepts of Reality. The difficulty resides in the very notion of a 'grammar' which is at once the principle that defines the anthropologist's object of discourse and also the system of concepts which is held to integrate and define Kachin political and economic life as a whole. This ideological definition of the Kachin system misses the question of whether there are not specific political economic conditions which make certain rhetorical forms objectively possible, and authoritative. For when Kachins become Shan, for example, the process involved is not merely a matter of the mental or behavioural change of subjects, but of the partial undermining of a given form of discourse, and of the production and re-affirmation of another form, within the very different material conditions which Shan political economy articulates. The question that we might ask, therefore, is whether there is a 'grammar' that always defines for the population of the entire Hills area what are the politically correct utterances (or actions), and what are necessarily meaningless ones.

The unsatisfactory state of such anthropological theorising comes, I am arguing, from the fact that the basic social object it presents is constructed out of an integrated system of 'shared meaningful ideas', and so from the fact that a closed, definitive status is given to that system (otherwise it would not be 'integrated' or 'shared' from one generation to the next), and all this in the attempt to reproduce an authentic culture. What makes that system of meanings 'authentic' is this very re-presentability from the past'0 (from an original generation to its authorised successors; and from the moment of grasping it in the field to the moment of embodying it in the text). Thus the political discourse of particular societies (as opposed to their knowledge of Reality) is assumed to be self-defining and self-reproducing. Because of this assumption, recent commentators like Bloch cannot see any way out of the Leachean impasse other than by reducing the problem of the authority of political discourse (which defines certain meanings as essential) to the very different problem of the epistemological foundation and growth of objective knowledge ('Man's experience of Nature, direct/indirect'). And in this way an anthropological question is answered in philosophical terms. Neither Leach nor his later critics make any attempt to explore the systematic social connexions between historical forces and relations on the one hand, and the characteristic forms of discourse sustained or undermined by them on the other.

In case it should still be thought that I am merely concerned to criticise structuralist authors for their idealism, let me remind you that Leach's Political systems of highland Burma is in its own way as materialist and as actor-oriented as are the more recent texts by self-proclaimed materialists or transactionalists.

V But perhaps this argument can be made more strongly if we turn to Douglas

in her most recent, transactionalist mood-I refer of course to the booklet entitled Cultural bias.

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Praising Cicourel for his attack on sociology and ethno-science, Douglas comments:

Everything he writes about our colleagues strikes this anthropologist as good clean fun, but it is a pity that he never writes anything about English social anthropology at all. For we are his natural allies. We also believe that our work is to understand how meanings are generated, caught and transformed. We also assume that meanings are deeply embedded and context- bound. We are also stuck at the same fence that he has baulked. Like him we cannot proceed very far without incorporating real live cultures into our analysis. For the cognitive activity of the real live individual is largely devoted to building the culture, patching it here and trimming it there, according to the exigencies of the day. In his very negotiating activity, each is forcing culture down the throats of his fellow men. When individuals transact, their medium of exchange is in units of culture (I978: 5-6).

I think we should not be distracted by these vivid images of threatened authority-of horses that will not take the fence, and of prisoners who are forcibly fed. What Douglas wants to know is whether culture is capable of being radically altered, and her conclusion is that it is not. In order to establish this, she attempts a specification of the range of constraints on individual choice and exchange, and this she does by the application of what she calls grid-group analysis-an anthropological offspring of Bernstein's well-known distinction between elaborated and restricted codes. The resulting morphology of four basic types of social context, and their supporting types of cosmology, form the settings within which the 'real live individual' makes decisions, experiences his or her environment, and transacts values with others.

Douglas produces ethnographic examples from a wide variety of anthropological studies of non-capitalist societies for each of the four main cultural types. But illustrations for all the types are also provided from industrial capitalist society, such that 'individualism', for example, can be inscribed as a basic defining component of 'middle class industrial culture', as well as that of highland New Guinea culture. And this is not without significance, for she claims that one of the merits of her approach lies in its ability to 'cut across the class structure'.

Douglas is quite clear about the futility of what she describes as class analysis. Ever since [the eighteenth century] Europe's self-knowledge has considered social change

in terms that are based upon stratification, economic and political, and upon occupational categories. For the anthropologist's project, the stratified hierarchical perspective has not lent itself to saying anything very useful about the relation between culture and ideology on the one hand or between culture and forms of social organisation on the other. The present exercise in understanding cosmologies is intended to cut a different kind of slice into social reality (I978: 54).

For Douglas, culture is represented as a structured field of authentic meanings on which individual experience, social interaction, and collective discourse are all in different ways parasitic. The total culture, which mediates between ideology and social organisation, is at once the collective precondition and the long-term residue of meaningful choice and experience. And because social facts are represented in terms of the shape and content of subjective experience, rationalism and empiricism become, in her text, complementary modes of accounting for the origin of those facts-a typical piece of reductionist reasoning. Furthermore, since the particular pattern of meaningful individual

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interaction, and the pattern of collective cosmologies, together define the ultimate formation of social conditions in their four contextual variants, the experiencing, transacting individual has really only one of two options: either to adjust to a given integrated context (like learning to use a language correctly)-or to leave it altogether for a more congenial social context (or language). And this is so because, in her own words, 'Each position on the [typological] chart is presented as an integral unit incorporating cosmology and social experience as a single close-meshed structure' (p. 4I).

Thus for Douglas, the transformation of social structure is impossible, or impossible to understand, because there is no social object that is specified independently of a system of human meanings, and because such a system, like a given language, has the function of rendering the structure of cultural experience and of political action isomorphic. As in Natural symbols, the cultural and political pre-conditions for saying and doing things, as well as the meaningful statements and actions produced in those conditions, are neatly fused together. Nothing can be said or done with meaning if it does not fit into an a priori system, the 'authentic' culture which defines the essential social being of the people concerned. The process of radical transformation is described quite literally as 'an emptying of meaning'-and quite rightly so if the re-presentation of essential meanings is the mark of an authentic culture.

There is no space in Douglas's text for a concept of forms of social life which have their own material conditions of existence, their own relations and tendencies-that is to say, conditions, relations and tendencies which cannot be reduced to the origins of human meaning, whether collective cognitive categories or individual social activity. The concept of mode of production, and the related concept of class structure, are of course precisely such concepts. These concepts are not 'slices of social reality'. They are not the 'true objects' of human experience. And they are not the ultimate origin or guarantee of everyday categories or of languages or of ideologies. Such concepts are for theorising the systematic historical aspects of social forces and relations by which the material bases of collective life are produced-forces and relations whose existence is distinct from that of individual meanings, intentions and actions. I need not elaborate on this point here except to note in passing that concepts of forces and of relations must be historicised, otherwise theorisation in terms of modes of production is bound to become legalistic and/or idealistic.'2 What I want to emphasise is that social life is not simply a matter of systems of meaning (whether conventional or intentional), even if it is true that communication between human beings is necessarily present in every domain of social activity-that social life is not identical with communication, although communication is necessary to it. The logic of historical structures based on the forces and relations of production is quite different from the logic of specific human intentions, of specific human languages, and of specific forms of human understanding.'3

Not only is the logic of ideological structures different from the logic of modes of production, but the former is also, in complex ways, dependent on the latter.14 Put more concretely: the 'individualism' of highland New Guinea societies cannot be assimilated, as Douglas tries to assimilate it, to the bourgeois

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'individualism' of the middle classes in advanced capitalist society. The parameters of the bourgeois ego are defined by an authoritative discourse which is rooted in material conditions profoundly different from those that sustain the relevant discourses of highland New Guinea. For, to take a crucial aspect of authoritative discourse: it is only in particular kinds of social and material conditions that given forms of performative utterance can be effective.'5 But for these utterances to be effective it is necessary that they be understood and accepted in appropriate kinds of situation by appropriate kinds of person. That is to say, given forms of effective performatives presuppose certain types of ego, just as particular kinds of performative can be effective only in the right material and social conditions. The difference between the New Guinea Big Man and the bourgeois ego is therefore not merely one of degree.

What can be said, in short, about all these anthropological tendencies which accord a critical priority to systems of human meaning is that they leave unposed the question of how different forms of discourse come to be materially produced and maintained as authoritative systems. And, of course, once this question is seriously addressed, the theoretical status of such a system as a priori, and its latent function as the organising mode within anthropological discourse, are also called into question.

VI Perhaps this is the place to consider very briefly some popular misunder-

standings of Marx's famous formulation about the relation of ideology to the material conditions of existence. In this whole area too many different kinds of question are often confounded, by defenders and critics alike of that formulation in anthropology. Let me try, however sketchily, to sort some of them out.

Take first ideology as systematic forms of socially constituted knowledge. The Marxian proposition that there are specific material conditions for the

existence of specific ideologies in this sense does not necessarily imply that the ideologies are simply effects or reflections of those conditions. Thus if we say that the domains of systematic discourse within which specific knowledges are produced, tested and communicated, are dependent on specific institutional conditions and relations, this does not require any commitment to the view that the knowledges reflect those institutional conditions-that there is an isomorphic relation between the structure of knowledge and that of institutional conditions. If we say that given social conditions sustain, and at certain stages become obstacles to the development of scholarly understanding, this does not imply that the concept of objective knowledges is nothing but illusion. If we say that particular modes of systematic discourse can be and are used for furthering particular class interests, this does not imply that all such modes of discourse are essentially nothing but an 'expression' of the positions that are supposed to define those interests. So much may be familiar enough and acceptable to many of you.

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But where the notion of ideology relates to notions of politics and social function it becomes more problematical.

Discourse which seeks to reflect on the nature of social conditions in a systematic way can, in the process of being re-stated, contested, acted upon, have some critical consequences for given conditions of social life. But ideology as such cannot be said a priori to have a universal, determinate function, because what verbal discourses (as well as other modes of communication) signify or do can only be determined by analysing the concrete social conditions in which they are produced. It is no accident, for example, that attempts to specify a determinate set of rules for defining performatives in English-let alone in all languages-have not succeeded.'6 Because the developing material conditions of social life always determine the force, if not the occurrence, of discursive events. And these conditions are not merely those of the face-to-face encounter in which utterances occur (as many speech event theories tend to assume17) but those of the political economic structure of society as a whole.

My point is not that we will only have a viable theory of ideology when we can develop a proper science of the symbolic, as some anthropologists have argued.'8 It is that there cannot be a general theory of ideology, a theory which will specify the universal pre-conditions, significances and effects of discourse. This is, of course, in itself not a novel argument.'9 But it must be said that it is one that stands opposed to the position not only of many anthropologists but also of many Marxists on this question-although not that of Marx himself.20

It is all very well to say, as many Marxists and anthropologists do, that given forms of social organisation (or given relations of production) always require given ideological (or cultural) systems to maintain and reproduce them. But such a statement appears extremely problematical for many reasons. In the first place such a formula is either tautological-as when ideology is said to define relations of property so that what has to be maintained is identical with what is supposed to do the maintaining; or it is reductionist-as when particular utterances are said to have a predetermined impact on the 'interpreting minds' of those who uphold basic sets of social relationships, their sense being thereby equated with their effect. What we can deduce, incidentally, from these difficulties is that sometimes ideology is treated as social relation, and sometimes as systematic utterance, and that in both its guises it is sensed as being mediated and structured, in an obscure way, by authorising discourses.

When the question arises of specifying, in concrete cases, what the crucial ideological systems are, the anthropologist responds by postulating the presence of an authentic system of meanings as the key to the discourse noted in the field, and essentially reconstituted in the final text. It is this key that is used to identify particular utterances as mere repetitions of the same discourse, and to determine for them a mental effect as the crucial part of their meaning. In other words, in order to establish the determinate function of a given 'meaningful' discourse, the anthropologist isolates what was said from its rhetorical context, and separates tendencies which might support given conditions from those which might contribute to their undermining-taking his theoretical separations for reproductions of the original. In this way, the anthropologist's text suppresses the tensions and ambiguities (conscious as well

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as unconscious) that obtain within a given field of discourse in specific historical conditions, and thus suppresses also the process by which motives, rhetorical devices and forms of comprehension are constructed and reconstructed. It is of course precisely these ambiguities of discourse, and the elaboration which they call for, that make political argument possible. Yet even when the anthropologist's text presents two or more 'competing ideological systems' (official and unofficial, say), actual discourse is generally reduced to something else-something that has a determinate social role which can be definitively established in a neutral fashion by the analyst.

There is another (not unconnected) difficulty with the doctrine of the maintenance function of ideology. When ideology is presented as the culturally inherited lens of a given society by which external reality is filtered and internalised for its members, or as the system of symbols by which their direct experience is rendered uniquely communicable, a well-known paradox is created. For in doing so the anthropologist's text claims for itself the ability to represent that external reality directly, or to reproduce that inner experience through very different symbols which are nevertheless assumed to be appropriate-abilities which the exotic peoples studied necessarily lack. In such an anthropological exercise, historically specific discourses are typically reduced to the status of determinate parts of an integrated social mechanism, and an epistemological paradigm which purports to define the problem of objective knowledge is passed off as a sociological model for analysing ideology.

It may be suggested here that the possibility of such a reduction is located in the absence, in anthropology, of an adequate understanding of authoritative discourse-i.e. of materially founded discourse which seeks continually to pre- empt the space of radically opposed utterances and so to prevent them from being uttered.2' For authoritative discourse, we should be careful to note, authorises neither 'Reality' nor 'Experience' but other discourse-texts, speech, visual images, etc., which are being structured in terms of given (imposed) concepts, and reproduced in terms of essential meanings. Even when action is authorised, it is as discourse that such action establishes its authority. The action is read as being authorised, but the reading and the action are not identical- that is why it is always logically possible to have an alternative reading.

The problem of understanding ideology is therefore wrongly formulated when it is assumed to be a matter of predicting what 'real' or 'experiential' social forms are necessarily produced or reproduced by it. And this is so not because forms of utterance never have systematic consequences (performatives do, given that the relevant premisses are understood and accepted) but because the effectiveness of such utterances is dependent on conventions which are viable only within particular material conditions.

VII One consequence of what I have been saying of course is that the vulgar-

Marxist view of ideology as a coherent system of false beliefs which maintains

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a total structure of exploitation and domination cannot really be sustained. This is because, as I have already implied, such a view attributes at once too much to ideology and also too little: too much because the maintenance and continuity of a total social formation is supposed to depend on an integrated set of concepts, and too little because the discourse in which ideologies are articulated is identified as having an essential, univocal significance which establishes at once its status as false belief, and as social determinant. This view is not central to Marx's own analysis of capitalism, but it does have a certain currency among some Marxists.

It should not be imagined, however, that this view of ideology is peculiar to vulgar-Marxists. On the contrary, like the conception of the integrated social formation which many French Marxist anthropologists have been theorising (and which I have criticised for some years) this view of ideology is a central doctrine of functional anthropology.

Gellner's discussion of baraka among the Muslim Berbers of Morocco22- to take a well-known example-is very much in line with this particular view of ideology. His analysis is concerned, in his words, with showing that 'There is here a crucial divergence between concept and reality, a divergence which moreover is quite essential for the working of the social system' (1970: 142). Gellner describes how a distinctive minority of Berbers, called Saints, who act as mediators and arbitrators among the feuding tribes around them are believed to possess a divine quality, baraka, a quality which is thought to be the origin of their authority and influence. But although the Saints are believed to be selected by God for this office, so Gellner argues, the reality is quite otherwise, because it is the tribesmen themselves who, by resorting to these mediators, in effect select and accord them their authority-but without knowing that this is what they do. In Gellner's memorable phrase, 'What appears to be vox dei is in reality vox populi' (I970: 142). By which we learn that certain Islamic religious doctrines are essentially mystified appearances of political reality.

This whole style of anthropological analysis is based on what might be called the Wizard of Oz theory of ideology. Like Dorothy, the anthropologist tears aside the veil of a seeming discourse to disclose the essential reality-an ordinary-looking old man busily working a hand-machine. Even so, you will remember the Tin Man really gets his heart, the Lion his courage and the Straw Man his brain, so that belief, however absurd, is shown to have its social function. But perhaps more important, you will also remember that after all the whole episode is Dorothy's dream-that the essential reality which is revealed is itself a phase in the narrative of Dorothy's unconscious. By which, of course, I do not want to suggest that 'reality' is insubstantial, but only that the uncovering of 'essential meanings' is itself a production in discourse. In other words, I want to remind you that Gellner's text is the place where the essential meaning of baraka is revealed/constructed, and so to pose the question of the criteria by which that meaning is established. For the question that arises here is this: Why do the surfaces of Berber religious concepts not reflect their political meanings? Alternatively, why do the Berbers fail to see the commonsense reality (the essential meaning) to which Gellner so easily

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penetrates? It is not much help to answer that Gellner is trained in philosophy and in anthropology and that the Berbers are not, for that merely shifts the problem from Gellner as the writing subject to anthropology as the field of authoritative discourse reproducing other cultures, a discipline which defines certain texts as competent. And bear in mind that the mistake the Berbers are supposed to be continuously making is about the everyday commonsense political conditions in which they live, and not about some final philosophical Reality. Part of my point here is that there is an obvious difference between the epistemological notion of mystification (implying direct v. indirect experience of Reality) and the notion of mistakes or deception in everyday social and political life-and that it is not very clear which notion Gellner is deploying and why. But my main argument is that in either case, the authority of Berber religious ideology is left entirely unexplained. For baraka is not simply a concept with a constructed (or 'disclosed') meaning, but a part of authoritative Berber religious discourse, and it is no explanation of such discourse to say simply that people believe in it.23 And still less is it explained when we are told that in essence the concept represents a delusion.24

Of course we can and should enquire into the political and economic implications of religious discourse and argument for particular historical conditions, and into the material preconditions which make such discourse possible and authoritative. We can even attempt to establish particular instances of political deception and error, as and when the evidence allows. But we need not think that in doing this we are uncovering the true political or economic essence of religious ideologies. Thus we do not have good grounds for arguing, as many Western writers on modern Islamic reform movements have done, for example, that the 'real' meaning of reformist discourse is not religious but political, that authentic Islam is not reproduced in such discourse.25 I stress that this is not a plea for respecting the true meaning of religious discourse-for saying, as Evans-Pritchard said in Nuer religion, that the 'real' meaning of religious concepts lies not in the external world of commonsense objects but in the inner world of religious experience. It is not at all my intention to try to rescue the ultimate integrity of personal experience. On the contrary. What I am arguing here is merely that the whole business of looking for and reproducing the essential meanings of another society's discourse (its 'authentic culture') should be problematised far more drastically than it has been in social anthropology-just as, indeed, it has already begun to be problematised outside social anthropology.26 The search for essential meanings in anthropology invariably results in the treatment of ideology in a reductionist fashion (either by reducing ideology to economic political conditions, or by reducing economic political conditions to ideology) and in confounding it with philosophical issues. And it is this treatment of ideology that is so characteristic of functional anthropology in its desire to reproduce definitively the authentic cultures of other peoples. Instead of taking the production of 'essential meanings' (in the form of authoritative discourse) in given historical societies as the problem to be explained, anthropology takes the existence of essential meanings (in the form of'authentic discourse') as the basic concept for defining and explaining historical societies.

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VIII Let me try to state in a few words the general position which underlies

much of what I have been trying to say (a dangerous thing to do, but even so, probably necessary). It is an old position, but one which bears re-stating given the present self-consciousness about ideology and about meaning. However much we might, as professional talkers and writers, wish to affirm the profound importance of systematic discourse, it is difficult to avoid the obvious, but by no means trivial, conclusion that political and economic conditions have developed and changed in ways that are rarely in accord with systematic discourse. Or let me put it another way: it is surely neither the power of social criticism nor the relative strength of competing social ideologies within the societies studied by social anthropologists (in Asia, in Africa and in Latin America) which explains why and how they have become basically transformed, but the historical forces of world industrial capitalism and the way these have impinged upon particular political and economic conditions. Of course political arguments can be important (and especially if they help to mobilise powerful social movements) but perhaps never in the way, nor to the extent, that we flatter ourselves they are important. Given that this is so, the main trouble with much colonial anthropology-and with much contempo- rary anthropology too-has been not its ideological service in the cause of imperialism, but its ideological conception of social structure and of culture.

NOTES

'It is this totality to which Malinowski refers when he writes for example, that 'Since the whole world of "things-to-be expressed" changes with the level of culture, with geographical, social and economic conditions, the consequence is that the meaning of a word must be always gathered, not from a passive contemplation of this word, but from an analysis of its functions, with reference to the given culture. Each primitive or barbarous tribe, as well as each type of civilisation, has its world of meanings...' (I923: 309). According to Malinowski, the ethnographer's view of language is superior to that of the philologist's, because unlike the latter, he or she has direct access to this essential totality and can therefore correctly interpret the meanings which it imparts to people's acts and utterances. 'What "meanings" do exist in any given aspect of native culture? By "meaning" I understand a concept embodied in the behaviour of the natives, in their interests, or in their doctrines. Thus the concept of magical force, for instance, exists in the very way they handle their magic. [ ...] But the problem of ascertaining that, for instance, the concept of magical force is embodied in native behaviour and in their whole theoretical approach to magic; and then of ascertaining that they certainly have no term for this concept and can only vicariously express it-this, in spite of its negative quality, is the real problem of ethnographic linguistics' (I935, II: 68).

, Malinowski's explicit preoccupation with lexicography and grammar has diverted the attention of many of his anthropological critics (especially those who approach his writings from a Saussurian perspective) away from his attempts to deal with the rhetorical aspects of language. It has been left largely to the work of exceptional literary critics, like Burke (I950), to draw our attention, albeit very briefly, to this side of Malinowski.

3 Thus, 'the two anthropological viewpoints which I have here summarised as "empiricist" and "rationalist" are to be regarded as complementary rather than right or wrong' (Leach I976: 6).

4See the interesting paper by G. Lakoff and M. Johnson 'Toward an experientialist philosophy: the case from literal metaphor', (mimeographed), Linguistics Department, University of California, Berkeley, I979.

S 'This seems at first sight a strange problem because it is difficult to see why some of the actors at a certain point in the social process cannot say: this system is no good at all, let us take a fresh look at the situation and build up a new system. The reason why they cannot, within the theoretical framework discussed, lies in the unanalysed notion of the social determination of

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thought. Simply, if all concepts and categories are determined by the social system a fresh look is impossible since all cognition is already moulded to fit what is to be criticised' (Bloch I977: 28I).

6 'It is in contexts where man is in most direct contact with nature that we find universal concepts, [and so] it is something in the world beyond society which constrains at least some of our cognitive categories' (Bloch I977: 285).

7 Bourdillon is also surely right in criticising Bloch's views on 'formal' language-views which are developed at length in his Introduction to Political language and oratory in traditional society. But he could have gone much further in his criticism. (See below, my note 2 I.)

8 'Roughly speaking, Leach believes that language, systems of propositions [sic], describe a reality in virtue of reflecting it in some fairly literal sense, in other words he believes in what might be called the parallelism theory of meaning. This is what we need know of his philosophy. As a matter of anthropology, he believes that ritual reflects the society in which it occurs in a similar way' (Gellner I 9 5 8: I 89).

9 Gellner's assertion that Leach believes in a parallelist theory of meaning is clearly wrong for the following reasons. (i) In the first place Leach's own discourse claims to present a cultural grammar, not a system of propositions which reflects Reality 'in some fairly literal sense'. As we shall see later, this grammar is presented as authentic, in the sense that it is simply re-presented in his text. This cultural grammar is intended to help us understand the heterogeneous and changing social conditions of the Kachin Hills Area, in the way that a grammar book of a foreign language helps us understand the processes of speech and writing in that language. (2) As for Leach's analysis of the discourse of the Kachins themselves, he argues that their myths, for example, must be seen as 'a language in which to maintain controversy' (pp. 85-97), and since in his view the truth or untruth of what is uttered in this language 'is quite irrelevant' to an understanding of its meaning, it is difficult to see how such a conception of language can be said to be founded on a parallelist theory of meaning. (3) Furthermore, when Leach defines 'ritual' as that aspect of almost any behaviour which 'serves to express the individual's status as a social person in the structural system in which he finds himself for the time being' (pp. i o-i i), he is asserting not that ritual 'reflects society', but that its signifying function is constitutive of society. (4) Finally, there are places in the text where Leach seems at first sight to invoke parallelism in his elucidation of the meaning of ritual-as in his analysis of ceremonies of sacrifice (e.g; pp. I 72-82). Leach's argument here is that such ceremonies have a mnemonic function by virtue of the fact that they represent to the participants what their ideal social structure should be. However, note that what is said to be the meaning here is not 'society' or 'social reality in some fairly literal sense'-but ideas in the minds of the participants. In other words, what Leach is proposing is not that the meaning of ritual is to be found in the way the Idea it embodies reflects Reality (which would be rather like the philosophical theory Gellner alludes to) but in the way the ceremonial evokes certain ideas in the minds of the participants-and that is not a parallelist theory of meaning at all, nor is it necessarily linked to an idealist philosophy.

10 Cf. Walter Benjamin's seminal essay 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction' in Benjamin (I970).

1 1 Marvin Harris (I969) was not mistaken in his reading when he praised that book for its materialist method-Gellner's judgements about its idealism notwithstanding.

12 An a-historical approach to the concept of mode of production has been characteristic of the work of French anthropologists like Godelier, and of English sociologists who follow them. Anthropologists and sociologists who have been strongly influenced by this work are often quite unaware of the strong resemblances between their work and old-fashioned British functional anthropology.

13 Semioticians in France, who have addressed themselves to the task of formulating a Marxist theory of ideology, have sometimes taken up what seems to be a contrary position. Thus Veron writes: 'One must understand that semiotic activity is inevitably embodied in every form of social organisation-regardless of whether the order concerned is described as the, "economic", the "political", the "cultural", the "ritual", etc., i.e. when it is treated independently of its signifying aspect. Without this semiotic activity, no form of social organisation is conceivable' (I978: I4). Veron is of course quite right to stress the serious difficulties which the Marxist model of economic base and ideological superstructure engenders for an adequate understanding of ideology, but it is not at all certain that his insistence on the ubiquity of semiotic activity constitutes a resolution of these difficulties-even though he goes on to warn the reader that 'This is not to say that this semiotic activity running through society is capable of being described in its entirety in terms of a simple principle of internal coherence-quite the contrary'. For in place of the distinction between the discursive and the non-discursive aspects of social life, which the notion of basis/superstructure was intended, however unsatisfactorily,

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to articulate, he proposes a heterogeneity of discursive principles (distinctive 'grammars'), i.e. contradictory principles of discourse which in industrial capitalist societies are situated on the level of class conflict. There is always a danger in tendencies represented by this article (interesting and ingenious though it is) that in the end even Marxists will be left with nothing but 'real discourse', and 'real people' who produce that discourse, while historical political economies are bracketed on one side as being no more than 'abstractions' or 'theoretical concepts'.

14 Voloshinov's Marxism and the philosophy of language, first published fifty years ago, is still one of the most fruitful discussions of this problem, and although it leaves many difficult questions unanswered, it reveals a sensitivity to the complex social foundations of discourse which surpasses much of what is written on this subject today.

15 See Austin (I962), who first coined the term 'performative' and then abandoned the concept. In his interesting recent study of Austin, Graham (I977) has forcefully argued that the concept of performative, properly defined, should be retained, and for the very reason that led to the latter's giving it up-namely, the impossibility of establishing, through it, a sharp separation between acting in the world and merely conceiving of it in a particular way.

16 I refer to the attempt that began-with Searle 'What is a speech act?' (I965)-reprinted in Giglioli (1972). See Coulthard (977), chapter 2, for some of the problems involved in identifying and classifying performatives (or illocutionary acts) in English. As for other languages, M. K. Foster writes (in Bauman and Sherzer [I974: 468]) that Philip Ravenhill who, more than anyone else, has explored the strengths and weaknesses of this notion for cross- cultural comparison, has 'effectively argued against an uncritical application of performative analysis, based on English, to other languages (and cultures).' The work of Ravenhill which is cited by Foster is a mimeographed paper which I have, unfortunately, not been able to secure.

17 Such an assumption is perhaps evident in the following remarks by the editors of that valuable collection, Explorations in the ethnography of speaking: '. . . the ethnography of speaking fills the gap in the anthropological record created by the neglect by anthropological linguists of the social use of language and by the lack of interest of ethnographers in patterns and functions of speaking. The importance of the ethnography of speaking to anthropology cuts far deeper than this, however, for a careful focus on speaking as an instrument for the conduct of social life brings to the fore the emergent nature of social structures, not rigidly determined by the institutional structure of the society, but rather largely created in performance by the strategic and goal-directed manipulation of resourcesfor speaking' (Bauman & Sherzer I974: 8, my emphasis). This notion that it is the level of individual transaction and communication which generates the historical structure of societies is also proposed by Kapferer (1976: I 5-I6)-and it is one of the things against which I am arguing. In this context, it may be worth stressing that the distinction between the conditions of the political economy and those of discourse does not parallel but cuts across the anthropological distinction between jural and statistical norms.

18 For example Geertz (1973: 208-9). 19 Thus in his more recent work, Roland Barthes has abandoned his early attempts at

establishing a universal science of semiotics. Compare Barthes (I967) with Barthes (I974). 20 It is no accident that Marx did not put forward a general theory of ideology. Contrary to

the assumption that he did not find the time to develop such a theory before he died, it can be argued that there is no place for it in his analysis of the capitalist mode of production, and in his commitment to the class struggle.

21 Authoritative discourse should not be confused with 'formalised language', which M. Bloch has written about in his Introduction to Political language and oratory in traditional society. Bloch (I975: I2) sees formalised speech as 'a kind of power' which is employed by traditional leaders to coerce followers ('the extreme formalisation of language with its accompanying exercise of power is characteristic of traditional authority situations as defined by Weber'), and contrasts it with everyday speech which, being flexible, allows for disagreement and opposition. It is not very clear whether Bloch's argument is logical or psychological, and in either case it seems untenable. Is it that certain crucial things cannot be said in 'formalised speech acts' even if one wants to say them? In that case, what prevents the speaker from resorting to another style? Or is it perhaps that speakers are lulled into accepting things as they are when they employ 'formalised language'? In that case, what gives the initiator an immunity which the respondent lacks? The difficulty with this kind of argument resides in the very vague notion of 'formalised language' which might include anything from symbolic logic through legal disputation to authoritative discourse. Strictly speaking, authoritative discourse is not a kind of social power, of one will over another, but a discourse which binds every ego who recognises himself or herself in it-regardless of which is the initiator and which the respondent. (See Arendt [I958], for a provocative discussion of the concept of authority in classical Greek and Roman society.)

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22 I refer here to the influential paper entitled 'Concepts and society', as printed in Emmet and Maclntyre (I970).

23 Would it make any difference to Gellner's argument if we substituted 'luck' or 'social and political skills' for baraka? In other words, is the allegedly delusory character of the concept baraka really 'essential for the working of the social system'?

24 In a slightly different context, but one still apposite to the present problem, Foucault observes:'. . . religious delusion is a function of the secularization of culture: religion may be the object of delusional belief insofar as the culture of a group no longer permits the assimilation of religious or mystical beliefs in the present content of experience' (Foucault I976: 8 i).

2 See for example Kedourie (I966). 26 See for example Hacking (I975).

REFERENCES

Ardener, E. I97I. Introductory essay. In Social anthropology and language (ed.) E. Ardener. London: Tavistock.

Arendt, H. I958. What was authority? In Authority (Nomos I) (ed.) C.J. Friedrich. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Austin, J. L. I962. How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barthes, R. I967. Elements of semiology. London: Jonathan Cape.

I974. S/Z. New York: Hill & Wang. Bauman, R. & J. Sherzer (eds) I974. Explorations in the ethnography of speaking. New York:

Cambridge Univ. Press. Benjamin, W. I970. Illuminations. London: Jonathan Cape. Bloch, M. I975. Political language and oratory in traditional society. London: Academic Press.

I977. The past and the present in the present. Man (N.S.) 12, 5 5-8 I. Bourdillon, M. F. C. I978. Knowing the world or hiding it: a response to Maurice Bloch. Man

(N.S.) 13, 59I-9. Burke, K. I950. A rhetoric of motives. New York: Prentice-Hall. Coulthard, M. I977. An introduction to discourse analysis. London: Longman. Crick, M. I976. Explorations in language and meaning. London: Malaby Press. Douglas, M. I970. Natural symbols. London: Cresset Press.

I978. Cultural bias (Occ. Pap. R. anthrop. Inst. 34). London: Royal Anthropological Institute.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. I956. Nuer religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Firth, J. R. I957. Ethnographic analysis and language with reference to Malinowski's views. In

Man and culture (ed.) R. Firth. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Foucault, M. I976. Mental illness and psychology. New York: Harper & Row. Geertz, C. I973. The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gellner, E. I958.. Time and theory in social anthropology. Mind 67, I82-202.

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