Hierarchy

Persistence and Transformation in Social Formations

Knut M. Rio, Olaf H. Smedal, Knut M. Rio, Olaf H. Smedal

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781845458836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Louis Dumont's concept of hierarchy continues to inspire social scientists. Using it as their starting point, the contributors to this volume introduce both fresh empirical material and new theoretical considerations. On the basis of diverse ethnographic contexts in Oceania, Asia, and the Middle East they challenge some current conceptions of hierarchical formations and reassess former debates - of post-colonial and neo-colonial agendas, ideas of "democratization" and "globalization, " and expanding market economies - both with regard to new theoretical issues and the new world situation.

CHAPTER 1

Hierarchy and Its Alternatives

An Introduction to Movements of Totalization and Detotalization

Knut M. Rio and Olaf H. Smedal

You know who I am,
you've stared at the sun,
well I am the one who loves
changing from nothing to one.

Leonard Cohen, from “You Know Who I Am,” on
Songs from a Room, 1969

The aim of this volume is to convey in ethnographical terms what is characteristic of what we will call hierarchical societies. The contributors to the collection have taken on the task of describing unique hierarchical social formations in their respective areas, in order for anthropology to rethink not only variation in social forms, but also what it is that unites different social movements and how they can be compared. This task has been carried out without an initial coherent theoretical framework, but, unavoidably, most contributions engage with Dumont's concept of hierarchy, critically or otherwise. Regionally, we have chosen to avoid Dumont's areas of expertise, India and Europe, and all contributions deal with what we might call the rim of Dumont's regional interests and influence—the Ottoman Empire, Mongolia, Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Oceania.

In this chapter we intend to clear the way for these contributions by engaging critically with Dumont's conceptual pair of hierarchy and individualism. We do this, not in order to get entangled in the highly charged field populated by the allies and enemies of this controversial figure, but because we see reasons for again giving a place to the concepts of hierarchy, value and totalization in our understanding of ethnographic realities.

The various contributions demonstrate in different ways both the constitution of hierarchical social forms in terms of values and the degree of persistence in these social forms in the face of individualist concepts. Importantly, Dumont set up his concept of hierarchy in India in order to unravel an alternative to individualist society, but also because he aimed to establish a standard for laying bare the fundamental structural premises in individualism as an extreme version of a system of values (Dumont 1970). Individualism was an expanding system of values, not only denying and resisting its own character as a system, but also denying any value at all apart from the singular supremacy of the individual. Historically and regionally this could be seen as the outcome of a highly specific development in the Western world.

But whereas Dumont could maintain that he had described hierarchy in India in its pure historical form and individualism as an emergent form in Europe, we must take into account that Western concepts and regimes—such as democratization, free market, human rights and individual freedom—are now spreading, emerging in various guises across the globe at an epidemic pace. We note, too, that in social science it is becoming increasingly difficult to even think hierarchical relationships and holism in Dumont's terms—and even more so to make our audiences believe in them—to even think and write beyond personal initiative, narration and construction of identities, beyond aspects of power relations, beyond economic motives, beyond the immediately perceived agencies and life-worlds of individuals. Therefore we must question not only our empirical material but also our analytical tools for conceiving of agency and social forms. However, as pointed out by Sahlins in his most recent book (2004) we should not rest content in critiquing radical individualism with its centering of individuals and its oblivion to social relations and structures on the macro level. We should also call into question what he calls “leviathanology”—the tendency to conceive of social or cultural structures as supra-individual mechanisms, such as Adam Smith's “Invisible Hand,” Althusser's “interpellation,” or Foucault's “discourse”—and its spread into anthropology as an “anthropology of subjects without agency” (Sahlins 2004: 144). Out of this leviathanology comes what is conceived of as a natural fact in social systems—power. Take Foucault's framework and its manifold uses in anthropology in recent years: “Here is power as irresistible as it is ubiquitous, power emanating from everywhere and invading everyone, saturating the everyday things, relations, and institutions of human existence, and transmitting thence into people's bodies, perceptions, knowledges, and dispositions” (Sahlins 2004: 147). The problem with all this insistence on power is that it strips away the specificity of all kinds of social structures (family, state, religion, and so on) and reduces them to their “functional-instrumental effects of discipline and control” (2004: 147). Sahlins's point is that both the radical individualism of the right and the leviathanology of the left have been emerging dialectically in the historical development of Western thinking. Both directions follow the mythmaking of popular and academic Western orientations alike, and we realize the full potency of the combination of individualism and leviathanology in the topic of hierarchy as it has been debated since Dumont.

Hierarchy, Holism, and Value

In order to benefit from the Dumontian framework—taking into account its advantages and its problems, we begin by accounting for what we see as the direction in Dumont's work and his definition of hierarchy. (For in-depth studies of Dumont's concept of hierarchy, see Madan 1982; Raheja 1988; Parry 1998; Parkin 2003; Celtel 2005; also Iteanu in this volume and Tcherkézoff in this volume). Our effort here is to try to convey an understanding of Dumont's concept of hierarchy in order to extend it toward other regions and new horizons of conceptualization—once more using empirical evidence as witness to the diversities and complexities in social forms.

Dumont himself pointed out in his Radcliffe-Brown lecture in 1980 that, “I have been trying in recent years to sell the profession the idea of hierarchy, with little success, I might add” (Dumont 1986a: 235). So what was he trying to sell? It is difficult to answer this question in a few sentences and even more difficult to do so outside an evaluative framework: Dumont's corpus is nothing if not controversial. In this chapter, we will return repeatedly not only to what we think are his especially salient observations, but also to remaining problems that have become apparent in more recent ethnograhic contributions—availing ourselves of the rich literature bearing on both—and will attempt at least to provide a brief, impassioned answer in this section.

India, Dumont claims, is fundamentally and irreducibly religious—Hindu thought permeates it thoroughly. This religious ideology is premised on the notion that everything—including human beings—can be classified according to a hierarchical scheme consisting of an opposition of purity and impurity. The gradation of humans along the purity and impurity axis produces caste. But caste can only develop into its full form as a system—the system that is unique to India—when religious status is separated systematically and totally from politico-economic power.¹ The justification for such separation is found in the classical Hindu texts, where priesthood (the Brahmans or Brahmins) and royalty (the Kshatrias) are distinguished absolutely; and where the priests—on account of their purity—are superior to the kings: They are closer to God. This is the paradigmatic hierarchical relation: While priesthood and royalty are conceptually opposed, the nature of this opposition is hierarchical in that royalty is subsumed under—or encompassed by—priesthood. It is crucial to Dumont's theoretical edifice bearing on India that this relative, value-laden distinction between status and power—the supremacy of priesthood over royalty—is operative on the primary level, that of ideology, since this is the level of the totality. On the secondary, politico-economic level, the spiritual authority of the priests gives way to the temporal authority of the kings. In having kept (religious) status and (politico-economic) power separated in this way for millennia, Indian history differs fundamentally from that of the West. According to Dumont, the failure of most observers to recognize the full impact of this difference has led to much regrettable misunderstanding. One problem is to mistake political and economic developments for systemic change. While there has been much of the former there has been none of the latter: “Everything happens as though the system tolerated change only within one of its secondary spheres” (Dumont 1980: 228). We note that his insistence on this point is precisely what has provided Dumont's followers with what we might call “a sudden liberating thought” and, conversely, most irked the majority of his critics.

The next stage of Dumont's scholarship took place closer to his home in Paris: until his death in 1998 he immersed himself in the study of European, and more generally Western ideology (or “culture”), much in the manner of a historian of ideas. It is sometimes assumed that Dumont's work on individualism and egalitarianism came about simply through a reversal of the gaze, a methodological innovation: by applying, as it were, Indian categories on the West. There is much truth in this, but as Jean-Claude Galey (2000: 327) has pointed out, already in his early work on South Indian kinship Dumont had become aware of a cognitive scheme of two countervailing forces, hierarchy and egalitarianism. Suspecting that the accommodation of these forces might be a universal concern, and that any valorization of the one would willy-nilly entail a corresponding disapproval of the other, he set about investigating the emergence of egalitarianism in Western ideology. His conclusions were that if in the Indian case hierarchy is fundamental to the notion of (the whole) society, in the Western case egalitarianism is coupled with the unassailable notion of the individual. And whereas hierarchy is integral to the preeminence of religion over the politico-economic spheres, individualism is essentially tied up with the emergent precedence of economy and power over religion. Yet, given the putative universality of the countervailing forces, one must expect the suppressed force always to exist and—even if from submerged, unacknowledged recesses of the social—provide the grounds for unpredictable, sometimes violent, social movements, prompting equally violent reactions. If individualism has no place in the Indian scheme of things, except by exception, hierarchy is also inimical to the West. Precisely because hierarchy is so revolting, so unthought, to Westerners—how can there be a place for it in societies that have affirmed the value of the individual in their constitutions?—Western analysts, victims to their knee-jerk reflexes, have refused to recognize it not only in its full bloom in India, but also in the eclipsed position it occupies in the West itself, where the hierarchical impulse—negated as such—can only express itself as discrimination. The best way to understand the obscured nature and appalling effects of hierarchy in the West is by applying what can readily be known about it from societies, such as India, where hierarchy is, as Dumont puts it, “clear and distinct” (1980: 262). Dumont's comparativism consists of such an approach. So much for our brief summary.

It goes without saying that Dumont's complaint about his lack of success with the concept of hierarchy was meant primarily for a British audience. He was addressing the British with certain ideas that—if unfamiliar to them—were deeply founded in the French tradition. Here we see a conflict over how anthropology should confront the fundamental issues of society and the individual, and it is with reference to Dumont's concept of totality that we want to explore in this chapter how we can conceive of social formations.

In an essay on Marcel Mauss, Dumont takes care to point out especially two important elements in the legacy of Mauss (Dumont 1986a, chapter 7). One is the role of comparative work—and as he points out “it was with Mauss that concrete knowledge began to react upon the theoretical framework” (1986a: 184), so that the science of anthropology could emerge in the encounter between (Durkheim's) philosophy and ethnographical material from around the world. The other point is the primacy in the analysis of a social whole: “the aim of research was to study not bits and pieces but a whole, a total, something with an internal consistency one can be sure of” (Dumont 1986a: 193-194). But unlike his British colleague Radcliffe-Brown, who would assume and take for granted the status of the totality of society as an organism (Radcliffe-Brown 1957), Mauss would prefer to look empirically for “the total social fact”—that is, specific social phenomena that could more realistically be said to make manifest social wholes. There is a difference here that should be spelled out. In a comment on the concept of “the total social fact,” Alexander Gofman points out how “the ambiguity of this concept does not derive from theoretical construction, but from theoretical nonconstruction; in other words, from Mauss's refusal to theorise.…Doubtless, this pursuit of the ‘total’ resulted from Mauss's dissatisfaction with the traditional intra- and interdisciplinary divisions which partitioned reality in an artificial way” (Gofman 1998: 65). And, more importantly, the concept of totality in Mauss's usage addresses—although ambiguously—how social phenomena (acts, persons, institutions) manage to totalize—to take in, draw together, social wholes. The concept marks a process from within and not from without—such that for instance in the potlatch, the act of destruction or sacrifice, “the killing of wealth,” is a totalizing act that brings about the social whole of fame, nurture, juridical aspects, and politics through the act itself. This is also why anthropology had to be a “science of the concrete” for Mauss, since the scale and implications of social totality were always open and undecided until accounted for. As Gofman points out, for Mauss total social facts were “specific ontological entities” (Gofman 1998: 67) that could be understood in their manifestation as “the constitutive elements, the generators and motors of the system.” Of course, Mauss operated within an evolutionary social framework, and he would point out these totalizing societies as “archaic” societies. In advanced societies total social facts, such as the gift, would be transformed and reduced to fragmented institutions. Totalization as a social process would have lost its force. In Dumont's framework we see the same qualitative evolutionary evaluation, as individualism and egalitarianism are found to be a historical development of holistic or hierarchical systems (see also Kapferer 1988: 8-11). We shall come back to this later in this chapter.

In his review of Mauss's framework, Dumont seems to be struggling with the concept of totality. He questions the concept of the “whole” and suggests that Mauss was not really after discrete wholes or bounded totalities as such—but social realities or, as he says, “less extended complexes, where the ‘whole’ can be more easily kept within view” (Dumont 1986a: 194). From the point of view of lived sociality this “keeping within view” is quite different from postulating society as an organism, or taking society for granted as a bounded system. Mauss's almost mystical sense of totality then emerges as a perspective on social interaction, where society as a whole is always already present in the acts themselves. Acts are inbuilt with a totalizing perspective in these particular societies.

In his Introduction to the Work of Mauss, Lévi-Strauss had claimed the birth of a methodology in Mauss's work, but under his influence and rewriting of Mauss's project, the idea of the “whole” was more systematically turned into an abstract notion (Lévi-Strauss 1987). As pointed out by Dumont, Mauss's search for a “privileged phenomenon” was “to transcend the categories through which he approaches it” (Dumont 1986a: 194), that is, to benefit from the encounters with alternative social realities in order to deepen the understanding of the categories themselves. But Lévi-Strauss opposed this—dismissing it as immature—and argued that a mature science would always start out with the whole system of communication. With reference to Mauss's theory of the gift, he claimed that the Maori hau, for instance, as well as the religious concept of mana, were imagined signs in the universal tendency of man to try to “supply an unperceived totality” to ongoing life (Lévi-Strauss 1987: 58). They could not explain the gift as a universal system of reciprocity.

In his insistence on taking the system of exchange as his point of departure, and not some singular indigenous notion of a “spirit of the gift” as he claimed that Mauss had done, Lévi-Strauss also takes the “whole” of society away from “total” social facts and transfers it over to a “sign system” consisting in reciprocity as communication. Although Dumont would never protest against this development of Mauss, in his work on the Indian caste system the Maussian perspective on totality remains. Just as Mauss had departed from the idea of the Maroi hau, or “spirit of the gift,” in his understanding of the gift as a human condition, Dumont departed from Indian “encompassement of the contrary” in his comparative understanding of hierarchy. As a scientist of the concrete, Dumont built his anthropology of India not on a predetermined idea that Indian society was an undifferentiated whole or a universe of signs, but on the emerging tendency in practices of totalization to be working toward a unifying principle on the ideological level. This can easily be misunderstood in Homo Hierarchicus (hereafter HH), since he begins by addressing totality before addressing the material. We can perceive this as a way of hypothesizing on the basis of material already digested in a Maussian fashion.²

With this legacy of Mauss³ and conceptions of a “science of the concrete,” Dumont brought with him a certain view of totality to his Indian material. What he was trying to sell was a newly designed concept of hierarchy that was adapted to the ethnographical setting of Indian caste society.

The Awkwardness of a Concept

This concept of hierarchy was in many ways hard to grasp, and in fact Dumont points out in his preface to the second English edition of HH that very few had been able to even think hierarchy the way he had proposed it. It was “at the heart of the ‘unthought’ (l'impensé) of modern ideology”—and both its critics and its supporters had misunderstood it (1980: xvi). The whole intention of HH had been to try to understand Indian caste on its own premises; to demonstrate the logic of a society that could not be explained within the framework of existing theories found in Western systems. In earlier accounts of the caste system, one had tried to explain the division of castes from reasons lying within a logic of political domination. Dumont would require that one bracket one's own preconception of sociopolitical relations and open up to another orientation of social organization. The concept ran counter to a materialist idea of hierarchy as stratification or a system of unequal distribution of resources. It ran counter to the idea that social systems—even their narrowly “political” aspects—by necessity were based on power. In the study of the Indian caste system, a focus on religious values and status overtook the Eurocentric focus on economy and power that could itself be verified genealogically through the history of Western thought (see Dumont 1977). Of course, the concept of hierarchy was associated in its etymology—hierarchia in medieval French was used for the ranked division of angels—with religious values and a specific mythological ordering of the universe. Dumont wanted to overturn the modernist preoccupation with inequality and return to the vision of a religiously and cosmologically founded hierarchy. Thus the concept of hierarchy for the Indian caste society revolved around the axis of purity and impurity as a privileged opposition that would govern values and practices of all kinds in Indian society. As religious values were primary in this hierarchy, purity wo...