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 Michoacán
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 formu-
lating concepts and undertaking comparisons. He also saw the quest for
explanation as a cumulative process, in which new developments incorpor-
ated 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 theoriz-
ing has, in contrast, failed to grasp the historical conditions of its own produc-
tion and the way our world has changed, offering social and political critiques
readily defused or appropriated by today’s 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 cosmo-
politan 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 devel-
oped 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) 37–57 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X05048612]
Copyright 2005 © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com

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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 skep-
ticism about the certainty and fixity 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 first 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 fixity of things went much deeper theor-
etically, 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 Boas’s 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 first to last Wolf argued that we could and should be able to
explain the constitution of social groups in terms of processes and relation-
ships. What changed and developed over his career was the conceptual
framework he brought to bear on realizing this objective, not the objec-
tive as such.
In the first part of this article, I briefly 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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Gledhill: The Goal of Explanation

of Marx that had inspired the previous phase of Wolf ’s work and the post-
structuralism of Michel Foucault (Wolf, 1999: 5–6).1
Structural power shapes the social field 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 flows 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 interpre-
tation. . . . 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 Geertz’s ‘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 defen-
sive 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 five years afterwards, a talk that was very much a reflection on
the problematic of EPWH. How do we relate what anthropologists can learn
through fieldwork 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 reflect prior frameworks of understand-
ing that might be better described as ‘discovery procedures’ than
‘theories’. Methodological innovations such as those associated with Mali-
nowskian 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 Lévi-Strauss (1968: 12–15) so neatly exposed as the tautologies that
Malinowski himself offered as generalizations about the human condition.
The point of doing fieldwork, with all its blind spots and inevitable

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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 field 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 repro-
duction of scientific 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 defines 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 estab-
lished in specific historical conjunctures. Nor did he touch on the question
of the way paradigmatic shifts and conflicts within the discipline of anthro-
pology might be related to historical shifts in the broader social and
political environments of the discipline’s 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 fine 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 specified

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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 theor-
etical 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 expla-
nations can be cumulative, with knowledge and understandings achieved
in the past generating new research questions, and new points of depar-
ture 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 trajec-
tory 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 first half of the 1990s.
As Wolf makes clear in his discussion of Malinowski and Steward, this
commitment must be based, in the first 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
reflection can sustain a process of advance in terms of both widening and
deepening understanding that will never reach a definitive 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 Steward’s own
model of ‘complexity’ did not lead to the inclusion of forces beyond local
and regional ecology in the shaping of puertorriqueño society. The first step
in Wolf ’s own intellectual separation from Steward as mentor was his rejec-
tion of the assumption that the constitutive elements of ‘societies’ – house-
holds, localities, regions, nations – were bounded and limited, generating
their own social relations. Whether or not a community was characterized
by conflictive 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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Critique of Anthropology 25(1)

implications for anthropology of the current phase of capitalist globaliz-

ation 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 multi-
sited 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 anthro-
pology, 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 puertorriqueño 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 fields
observed, and about how social changes influenced 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 Marx’s project and the
anthropological project:
Marx’s purpose was to expose the workings of capitalism by means of a model
based on fixed and internally supportive categories. Anthropology, in contrast,
is not a science of fixed 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 final years,
devoted himself to exploring possible alternative trajectories of develop-
ment 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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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 fieldwork.
At first sight, the unexpected but interesting social and political differ-
ences 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 find that simple and essen-
tialist explanation satisfying, since it could not readily explain specific
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 reflections 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 contin-
gencies that shaped the differential development of his two study
communities, at the same time stressing the way the apparent contingen-
cies 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
first five hundred years. The success of the Counter-Reformation in the
European South was due to the ability of the Hapsburgs to develop a financial
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 Cortés 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 first sight, it appears that ‘history’ enjoys a position of privilege in the

explanation of ethnographic fieldwork 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 preoccu-
pied Wolf was a history focused on the processes which shape any configur-
ation 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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Critique of Anthropology 25(1)

This was how anthropology could contribute something valuable and distinc-
tive to the history of modern capitalism.
Without labouring the point unduly, it is worth reflecting on the well-
known 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 produc-
tion’ 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 specific agents
of capitalist expansion6 and specific constellations of local actors respond-
ing to the changes in the fields of force influencing 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 undog-
matic and he expressed his respect for many styles of analysis and theor-
etical 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 cosmo-
politan 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-reflection, 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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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 influential 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 ‘objectification’ 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’ represen-
tations 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 isn’t it? Fighting the battles of

the 21st century

The first year of the new millennium saw the launch of a new international
journal with the title Ethnography, edited by Loïc Wacquant and Paul Willis.
The first 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 final 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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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 flow of contemporary history, large and small, partly caught up
in its movement, partly itself creatively helping to maintain it, enacting the uncer-
tainty of the eddies and gathering flows 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 invol-
untary 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 post-
modernist thought:
. . . the postmodern fallacy lies, not in its recognition of diversification and indi-
vidualization at the cultural level, but in the cutting of the latter’s social
moorings. Only because it effectively declares the end of the social can post-
modern thinking and analysis establish culture as a ‘floating signifier’ . . . 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 field 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 formu-
lations – for instance, as Garfinkel pointed out long ago, concrete living
subjects aren’t the ‘cultural dopes’ of much structuralist theory – and theor-
etical 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 observer’s positioning becomes a resource for enriching understand-
ing of human experience and move on from that observation to propose
the need for dialogue between ‘scientific knowledge’ (defined as knowl-
edge produced by specialist institutions) and other forms of knowledge, in

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Gledhill: The Goal of Explanation

particular, ‘the practical common sense and self-reflexivity 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 mani-
festo, 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 influencing knowledge-production, while ‘different public spheres’
embrace a wide range of actors and positions. Anthropologists have
enough difficulties 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 essen-
tialisms 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-reflexivity 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 Women’s Worlds, a work inten-
tionally 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 d’etre of this feminist critique of objectivity and project of
‘writing against [the concept of] culture’ was that:
We need to find ways to write that work against the typifications of communi-
ties that made them distinct and alien cultures because of the way such distinc-
tions 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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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, first,
help us understand how local forms of life articulate to broader networks
of geopolitical power and, second, help us to transcend the pure singular-
ity of any given local form of life. The gesture towards individuality that
Abu-Lughod makes offers us a representation of the women that undoubt-
edly 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 affirms
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 recom-
mended discovery procedure of multiple site ethnography and work with
actors from different social classes, drawing particular inspiration from
George Marcus’s 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 people’s 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 capi-
talism 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 develop-
ments. (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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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 post-
modern, these kinds of postcolonial critiques are fighting 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 first 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. Anthro-
pologists 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 Negri’s 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 influenced by Foucauldian ideas, notably Aihwa
Ong’s 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 nation-
states 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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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 influence 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 identification 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 Foucault’s 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 partici-
pated in an integral way in the development of modernist forms of sover-
eignty.
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 flows 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 totali-
ties 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-Lughod’s writing against the grain of ‘othering’,
and Hardt and Negri’s point is precisely that such tactics have become less
effective and possibly even irrelevant under postmodern forms of sover-
eignty.
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 terri-
torialized centres of power do continue to exist in postmodernity):
Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed
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, flexible hierarchies

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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: xii–xiii)
This perspective does not imply that nation-states cease to perform import-
ant 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 Negri’s sense is the most appropriate form of sover-
eignty 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 Negri’s 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 accumu-
lation and a readjustment of the relations between capital and labour
following the formation of truly global markets, these transformations
reflect the way capitalism has deepened to embrace the process of produc-
tion 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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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 reaction-
ary. 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 ‘post-
modern’ in its logic.
Globalization continues to produce heterogeneity rather than homo-
geneity for a variety of reasons, but one of the most important features of
postmodern sovereignty is the more positive value now placed on ‘differ-
ence’ 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 hijack-
ing 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 don’t 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 find 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 fluid, shifting and singular identities of a differ-
entiated 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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Gledhill: The Goal of Explanation

the radically dispossessed in the further flung 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 Negri’s 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 confined 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, inter-
dependent, routes to expanding anthropological knowledge.

The legacy of EPWH: a Latin Americanist’s 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 difficulties 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 capi-
talism 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 flows 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 some-
thing 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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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, co-
evolving 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 benefit 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 influ-
ential 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 oversimplified 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 definitive destination. EPWH
begins, after all, with a comprehensive theoretical assault on the way the
key concepts of social science and European historiography reflected a
distorted self-consciousness born within the framework of the industrializ-
ing nation-state that hampered understandings of complex and differenti-
ated global processes. Wolf ’s work always explored ‘family resemblances’
as well as causal relationships, but it never sought to reduce the complex-
ity 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 Michoacán in January 2002, where I was a
Visiting Professor for two years thanks to the generous support offered by a cátedra
patrimonial funded by the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology

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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 Anthropology’s
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 uncom-
promising 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 fields 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 neutral-
ity 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: 287–90).
6 Such as miners, loggers, merchants, storekeepers and muleteers, and particu-
lar 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 EPWH’s 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 significant 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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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 intensified NGO activity of recent decades seem precisely to
reflect 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 administration’s resort to Guantánamo 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.

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Gledhill: The Goal of Explanation

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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 Michoacán 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 Desafío en
Ostula: Cuatro Siglos de Autonomía Indígena en la Costa-Sierra Nahua de Michoacán
(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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