“Physicists can now explain energy as the ‘go’ of the universe, as what makes things happen…. Energy was not simply waiting to be discovered, it had to be forged, and out of ingredients both physical and metaphysical.” Coopersmith, J (2010:350).
“If you meet the Buddha in the road, cut him down.”
Zen koan
Doing Without Power
All social science research I have ever read treats power as an observable, naturally occurring social phenomenon that can be either an independent variable – “Far from being brainwashed, the peasants of Sedaka are aware of the limitations of their power, which is precisely why they resort to routine resistance rather than revolution” (Lewellen 1992:174) – or a dependent variable -- “Far from simply propping up the status quo, ritual provides an important weapon in political struggle, a weapon used both by contestants for power within stable political systems and by those who seek to protect or to overthrow unstable systems” (Kertzer 1988:104).
Social science founds this conventional understanding of power on the definition Max Weber developed through verstehen, an interpretive method with great appeal to anthropologists in particular because it makes available the understanding of the social actor. With this method, Weber captured an important part of the European understanding of power, that power was or gave individuals the ability to accomplish their social aims despite resistance. Even Michel Foucault’s sophisticated diffusion of power within social systems sticks close to this European understanding, that power is what makes life lively, makes static systems dynamic: ““Power,” says Michel Foucault, “is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical relationship in a particular society”.” (Foucault 1980:93, quoted in Lansing 1991:130). And from a bit farther left, the work of Antonio Gramsci has allowed anthropologists to locate this social phenomenon outside Western tradition as well:
Both Foucault and Gramsci suggest that power at its most effective operates less through obedience to the wishes of others than through internalized constraint and the domination of social convention. Comaroff and Comaroff have provided a particularly interesting reading of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as “forms of everyday life that direct perceptions and practices in conventional ways” (1992: 28). It operates, they add, through “all signs and practices taken for granted as natural, universal and true.” Thus much of what is commonly understood as culture involves hegemony, including aesthetic, ethical and moral standards, not to mention the standards by which people judge things to be desirable, reasonable, and possible. In short, hegemony involves the power to define what people take as real (Weiner 1995:151).
At this point power begins to seem a great deal like culture itself, to which Clifford Geertz (1973:90) attaches sufficient existential importance to include it within his definition of religion, that system of symbols, values and motivations that we take for granted as uniquely real. Sulkunen (2010:498) brings the hegemony of this discourse up to the present:
The power of the powerful extends across issues and contexts, bearing unintended as well as intended consequences, even without active intervention (Lukes, 2005[1974]). In this way, power is coextensive with the social body. It depersonalizes both those who possess it and those who are dominated by it. In the Foucauldian sense, Lukes’s third dimension [of power is] exercised unconsciously without any apparent action by the weight of institutions, by loosely defined groups rather than individuals and organizations. The function of this third dimension of power is to produce consent by
de-identifing the acts themselves in which this domination occurs as acts of power.
Anthropology is favorably situated among the social sciences to examine the concept of power afresh. First, we have a deep commitment to extirpating ethnocentrism from our work. In this regard, power has a place in our discipline similar to, and so can be analyzed in the way Schneider (1984) and Sahlins (2014) treat, the concept ‘kinship’, by recognizing that its origin lies within our own culture where its reality is taken as nature, our human social nature, itself. Witchcraft, another assertion about human nature, was once part of our culture and no longer is. We are historically placed to see now that power has exactly the same epistemological standing in our discipline that witchcraft has: while witchcraft has effects in the lives of those who acknowledge its reality, our task is not to explain how witchcraft works in the world, but to understand how and why people find it as they do in their lives thru effects they assign to it.
Second, we do not require our discipline to disparage what is not rational in the human world as irrational or to demean behaviors arising from local knowledge. On the contrary, we assert fundamentally the symbolic quality of culture, even to the extent that we are prepared to value symbolism, as with Geertz above, beyond what is conventionally “real:” we do not have to, and we do not willingly, describe symbolism as “mere,” in so far as it points to, but is not itself somehow taken as, a more substantial and knowable reality. “Symbolic” is not simply another word for irrationality; we do not mistakenly suppose we increase our knowledge by calling not-A, B. Anthropology uniquely theorizes the symbolic as structured systems of local knowledge that need not be either logically consistent or open to revision with further experience because it operates on the basis of analogy, figurative language and imagery to connect and reinforce the categories of lived experience.
The present paper offers an alternative understanding of power, that power is not a naturally occurring social phenomenon; and that power does not refer to any natural social phenomenon that can be observed, experienced or inferred. Rather, power is a symbol, a cultural phenomenon, but a part of our own culture which we continue to use in our research in much the same way we and everyone else in our culture uses this concept in daily life. Sulkunen (2010:497) writes that
Steven Lukes (2005[1974]) characterized power as an example of ‘essentially contested concepts’, using the famous expression by the philosopher W.B. Gallie. [Such concepts] matter politically, and they are subject to ardent disputes because they involve an evaluative element. They imply values, ideals, moral stands and points of view, and therefore lead to different diagnoses of social reality. Still, we need these concepts and believe that we mean something when we use them, in social science and even more so in everyday life.
Such concepts are symbols, the stuff of daily human life. But the location of the contest here is not identified accurately: it is not that we disagree so much about what power is; rather, we disagree over how it works, where we find its effects, its intended consequences and its unintended consequences, how it is lost and acquired. So while we must finally conclude that we cannot observe or measure or experience power because there is nothing there to observe or experience, what remains for us to study is after all what we are really interested in: how and why social action takes the course it does; how the regular patterns of behaviors we call society emerge, remain, change; how people deploy the symbol power as they try to get things done; and possibly even what might be the effects of having and using the concept power the way people do use it in their own society (Margolis 1989:388). To do this, we ourselves must free our analyses from the use of this concept as a variable in our own explanations.
There are a few precursors in this effort, not least of which is the view of Foucault cited above, that power is not an attribute of individuals but has something to do with strategical relationships in societies. I will return to this view and the concept of strategical relationships below. We can easily enough find here and there inklings of a vague sense of the inadequacy of the concept for scientific explanations. Earle (1997:9), e.g., writes, “Information is a basis of power. Ultimately followers always have the “power” to resist, but leaders manipulate information to make it appear that the ruling elite have both the right and the might to hold onto authority.” Then, why the quotation marks, which conventionally indicate words that are not to be taken literally, in a scientific explanation? Yet if followers may be able to get their way despite the resistance of their leaders, the phrase “make it appear that” likewise pushes us to doubt that elites can make people uniformly do what they want them to do when followers might prefer not to follow. How, in this quotation, does the word power at all advance our understanding of the dynamic strategical relationship we conceive as leaders and followers in any particular society?
My Cassandra Award for 20th Century Social Science goes, however, to James March (1966) for his paper “The Power of Power,” recipient of the American Political Science Association Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper presented at the Association’s annual meetings in 1963. March starts with the observation, “Power is a major explanatory concept in the study of social choice” (1966:39) and concludes following his detailed analysis of “six different classes of models of social choice that are generally consistent with what at least one substantial group of students means by social power“(1966:40), that, “On the whole, power is a disappointing concept. It gives us surprisingly little purchase in reasonable models of complex systems of social choice” (1966:69).
Yet forty years on, we find Richard Valelly able still to write in the Chronicle of Higher Education as co-chair of the program committee for the 2006 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, under the title “Political Scientists’ Renewed Interest in the Workings of Power,” that by the 1990s as research interest shifted from case studies to mathematical analysis of big data sets “Because widely accepted direct measures of power do not exist, “big-N” studies of power were hard to imagine, much less mount. Only in the subfields of international security and international relations did power, as a concept, retain a central and respected status” (Valelly 2006:B7). After discussing several papers on the agenda for presentation that use the concept power in central ways, he closes with the hope that this reconsideration of power will be the first step in a renewal of interest in this concept which remains a source of the discipline’s vitality. If direct measures of power could be created, power could be to political science as money is to economics, in which discipline power is not a central concept although money is obviously no less or completely a symbol than is power. Why then are there no direct measures of power? How is it possible power could be an object of observation that does not come in conventional mensurable or even countable units the way milk and electricity do? That money is an historical human creation is known and understood; why do we not have the same understanding of power, even as a pre-historical human creation?
Bruno Latour (1986:264) starts an answer to this question by taking it to the extreme condition, beginning with the observation that “The problem with power may be encapsulated in the following paradox: when you simply have power – in potentia – nothing happens and you are powerless; when you exert power – in actu – others are performing the action and not you.” He then anticipates Sulkunen’s thought cited above, that “Power is so useful as a stop gap solution to cover our ignorance, to explain (away) hierarchy, obedience or hegemony, that it is, at first sight, hard to see how to do without this pliable and empty term. It may be used as an effect, but never as a cause” (Latour 1986:266). Power does not make anything happen. We use it to explain why anything happens in contests of will, after something has happened, to summarize the consequence of a collective action. Dictators who find themselves obeyed then believe they have done something. As a result of a contest, actors in our society may gain or lose power, independently of whether that actor wins or loses the contest (March 1963:64).
There is no point taxing Weber with a useless definition. What his definition captures is the European concept in daily use; he did not define a concept de novo with which to label a specific observable phenomenon his research had discovered. If we as anthropologists think that verstehen or the emic method will help us, as outsiders, gain access to the understandings in use among the people whose cultures we study, we must recognize that Weber was studying his own society as a member of that society and was not asking his method to bridge the gap of cultural difference. The task he set himself was to understand the knowledge and values individuals like himself brought to social action. Power is not an ability or an experience, but a word, a part of language. The following section develops a theory of symbolism capable of dealing with power as a word without having to handle it as a variable or an explanation. I will conclude the article with an the application of this idea, focusing on the lack of recognition or acknowledgment of the complex strategical relationship between a householder’s wife and his brother in Japan, which allows the debate over gender there to use the concept power as a way of talking about status and inequality without requiring identification of the foundation of women’s status in Japanese culture.
Symbolism, Power and Agency