Notes on Community, Hegemony, And the Uses of the Past

Notes on Community, Hegemony, and the Uses of the PastAuthor(s): James BrowSource: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 1, Tendentious Revisions of the Past in theConstruction of Community (Jan., 1990), pp. 1-6Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3317955 .

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NOTES ON COMMUNITY, HEGEMONY, AND THE USES OF THE PAST

JAMES BROW University of Texas at Austin

While it is plausible to maintain that, having al- ready happened, the past cannot be altered, it is equally evident that memory is less fixed. More- over, it is clearly not only in so-called traditional societies that culturally constructed versions of the past are authorized to shape a people's sense of identity. Representations of the past are an equally prominent feature of hegemonic struggle in modern industrial societies. The papers collected in this special issue of Anthropological Quarterly analyze the tendentious revision of history in four very different contemporary settings (Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Palestine, and Shetland), in each case focusing on representations of the past within the social context of local movements to create community. These in- troductory notes outline a conceptual apparatus that is intended to facilitate the task of grasping the mechanisms and significance of these complex processes.

Community

"Community" refers simply to "a sense of belonging together" (cf. Weber 1978: 40). Since the term is often very loosely applied either to a place or to a collection of people, it is necessary to insist that in the present essay community is defined by nothing more or less than this subjective state. The sense of belonging together typically combines both affec- tive and cognitive components, both a feeling of solidarity and an understanding of shared identity.

By extension, "communalization" is defined as any pattern of action that promotes a sense of belonging together. Communalization is a continuous process, for the analysis of which Weber provides us with more useful guidelines than does Durk- heim. Although Durkheim's insightful accounts of communalization are still suggestive, his rigid di- chotomy between the domains of the sacred and the profane (1965: 52), and his interpretation of the sacred rituals of the positive cult as functioning to revitalize a sense of solidarity that is dissipated in the mundane course of profane life (1965: 385- 392), excessively segregate the world of communal action from that in which people pursue their indi- vidual interests. The ubiquity of communalization

processes is more effectively captured in Weber's refashioning of the contrast between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Weber makes a fundamental distinction between communal relationships, in which "the orientation of social action . . . is based on a

subjective feeling of the parties . . . that they be-

long together" (1978: 40), and associative relationships, in which "the orientation of social action . . . rests on a rationally motivated adjustment of interests or a similarly motivated agreement" (1978: 40-41), but he insists that this is an ideal- typical contrast between opposing tendencies that may in practice occur together, and he recognizes that "the great majority of social relationships have this (communal) characteristic to some degree, while being at the same time to some degree determined by associative factors" (1978: 41; parentheses added). This formulation not only draws attention to "the constant interweaving of economic utility and social affinity" (Bendix 1962: 476) but also acknowledges that communalization is an ongoing and pervasive process in social life.

Communalization takes place on various bases. In his general discussion of Vergemeinschaftung Weber (1978: 41) mentions "a religious brother- hood, an erotic relationship, a relation of personal loyalty, a national community, the esprit de corps of a military unit (and) the family" to exemplify the range of possibilities. Marx, of course, empha- sized the creation of communal relations on the basis of common class position as a crucial aspect of the transformation of a class-in-itself into a class- for-itself. The case studies that follow are largely concerned with the interplay among processes of communalization that emerge from different bases situated between the levels of the family and the nation, as these are conditioned by changes in the distribution of power within the capitalist world economy.

Anderson's (1983: 15) much-cited definition of the nation as "an imagined political community" not only affirms that the sense of belonging together is an active process but also tacitly acknowledges that an ideal of community can be generated without a concomitant feeling of solidarity. The re- verse, however, is not possible. As he also writes,

1



2 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

"all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined" (1983: 15; parentheses in the original). The tentative qualification here is unwarranted: communalization always contains an imaginative aspect.

Anderson (1983: 16) claims that the nation is imagined as a community because it "is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship." "Deep comradeship" certainly exemplifies what is to be understood by "a sense of belonging together," but any implication that communal relations are always exclusively horizontal should be resisted. As one moves along a scale of communal intensity-a scale that reaches its extreme at the point designated by Turner (1969) as "com- munitas," where all separations are dis- solved-horizontal relations of equality may be- come more pronounced and vertical ties muted, but the latter are not incompatible with the experience of community, however uncongenial this may ap- pear to the purportedly egalitarian temper of our times. The popular British identification with its royal family, for example, bears ample testimony to the persistent power of vertical solidarity even in class-divided industrial societies. Communal relations may, in other words, possess both egalitarian and hierarchical dimensions.

All communal relations are socially constructed. Even if sociobiologists were to find sup- port for their claim that certain kinds of communal relations are genetically based, it would still be evident that the specific form of those relations is always culturally and historically determined. This applies to so-called "primordial" relations as much as to any others. Geertz (1973: 259) recognizes this when he defines a primordial attachment as "one that stems from the 'givens'--or, more precisely, as culture is inevitably involved in such matters, the assumed 'givens'--of social existence."

Nevertheless, provided it is not simply used as an excuse to terminate sociological analysis prema- turely, the identification of certain kinds of communal relations as primordial is important and re- vealing. It draws attention to the fact that some communal relations are felt to be more deeply binding than others, to the point where they "seem to flow more from a sense of natural . . . affinity than from social interaction" and come to possess "an ineffable, and at times overpowering, coercive- ness in and of themselves" (Geertz 1973: 259-260; cf. Anderson 1983: 131-132). As the term implies,

the inevitability of primordial relations is associ- ated with the belief that they have existed from the very beginning. The studies that follow are particularly concerned with the political aspects of "primordialization," using this term to describe the process whereby certain kinds of communal relations are promoted and experienced as if they pos- sessed an original and natural inevitability.

The primordial experience of community cor- responds to a social order of what Bourdieu (1977: 164-171) calls "doxa," where the culturally constructed world is "seen as a self-evident and natural order" (1977: 166) that is "taken for granted" (1977: 165). Doxa prevails in the absence of contending opinions, where "what is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying" (1977: 167). A doxic order, which of course is never fully achieved, is one that has successfully accomplished "the naturalization of its own arbitrariness" (1977: 164). One aspect of this is the primordialization of communal relations, which are experienced as ineluctable precisely because, as Anderson (1983: 131) puts it, "in everything 'natural' there is always something unchosen."

Throughout the world, however, the field of doxa coexists with a field of opinion, which Bourdieu also describes as a universe of discourse or argument (cf. Giddens' [1979, 1984] distinction between practical and discursive consciousness). Where competing opinions confront one another the primordiality of communal relations is pre- served only by their incarceration in the doxic prison of innocence. Elsewhere, in the universe of discourse, the basis of community is always vulner- able to challenge. Moreover, rapid and profound changes in the objective conditions of contemporary life constantly threaten to subvert the boundaries of doxa. But if, on the one hand, the primordiality of established communities seems everywhere to be under attack, on the other hand vigorous new projects of primordialization are scarcely less ap- parent. Perhaps the most pervasive and forcefully propagated forms of contemporary primordialization are nationalism and ethnicism, the various components of which (kinship, language, religion, locality, etc.) interact both with one another and with communalization on other bases, especially class, in extremely complex and varied ways.

The Past

Almost everywhere, it seems, the sense of belong-



NOTES ON COMMUNITY 3

ing together is nourished by being cultivated in the fertile soil of the past. Even newly established collectivities quickly compose histories for themselves that enhance their members' sense of shared identity, while solidarity is fortified by a people's knowledge that their communal relations enjoy an historical provenance.

Communalization is further strengthened by the conviction that what ties a group of people together is not just a shared past but a common origin. Anthropologists hardly need to be reminded that claims of descent from a common ancestor are among the most effective and commonplace means by which human groups forge bonds of community. But what gives kinship its special potency as a basis of community is that it can draw upon the pst not simply to posit a common origin but also to claim substantial identity in the present. Kinship thus provides a standard idiom of community for collectivities ranging from the family, the lineage and the clan to the nation and the race, and is ex- tended also to include religious brotherhoods, femi- nist sisterhoods, fraternal orders of all kinds, and even the whole family of nations.

Despite the rhetoric of kinship ("blood is thicker than water"), the power of the past to shape communal relations in the present is more a matter of culture than of nature. What is at stake is not genetic affinity or the inertia of habitual be- havior but the moral authority of tradition, the maintenance of which requires continuous cultural work. Various means are available to bolster the authority of tradition, of which one of the most widely adopted is its sacralization, as Weber (1978: 215) noted when he described the ideal-type of traditional authority as "resting on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions."

Construction of an authoritative tradition that identifies all who accept it as members of the same political community is particularly prominent in the creation of nations and sub-nations. Tradition typically composes a version of the past that not only binds the members of the nation to one another, by proclaiming their shared descent and/or common experience, but also associates the nation as a whole with a particular territory that-maintaining the domestic imagery of the family-is its homeland. Such renditions of the past establish the enduring character of the national community despite all the ruptures and vicis- situdes of history. The essential continuity of the nation is often also represented in the figure of the

countryman or peasant, doubtless because his way of life seems endlessly to reproduce that of ances- tral generations, while his (less often, her) intimate connection with the land epitomizes the nation's in- violable attachment to its territory.

Where norms of traditionalism prevail, behav- ior is legitimated by appeals to precedent. But memory is less stable than the events it recollects, and knowledge of what happened in the past is always subject to selective retention, innocent amne- sia, and tendentious re-interpretation. Traditions are also invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). In other words, appeals to the authority of tradition do not preclude innovation. Discussing traditional domination, Weber (1956: 101; quoted in Bendix 1962: 331) writes that "as a matter of principle it is out of the question to create new laws which de- viate from the historical norms. However, new rights are created in fact, but only by way of 'rec- ognizing' them as having been valid 'from time immemorial'." Innovation can thus evade the stric- tures even of a rigid traditionalism by appearing in the guise of preservation, recovery, or purification.

Hegemony

Since knowledge of what happened in the past can never be definitively fixed, prevailing understandings are always at risk. And, given the intimate and intricate ctnnections between knowledge and power (Foucault 1980), at any moment socially or- ganized knowledge of the past both reflects and af- fects the distribution and exercise of power. Mem- ory is thus an important site of political conflict, and contending versions of the past figure prominently in what it is useful to describe, in the sense opened up by Gramsci, as the struggle for hegemony.

The attainment of hegemony, in the sense of a "state of 'total social authority' which, at certain specific conjunctures, a specific class alliance wins, but a combination of 'coercion' and 'consent', over the whole social formation" (Hall 1980: 331), is very rare. But the struggle for hegemony, understood as the process whereby the interests of other groups are coordinated with those of a dominant or potentially dominant group, through the creation of "not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity" (Gramsci 1971: 181), is continuous. From this latter perspec- tive communalization is an indispensable compo- nent of any hegemonic process.




Hegemony cannot adequately be understood simply by reference to the thesis of a more or less coherent and articulate "dominant ideology" (Ab- ercrombie et al. 1980) that people either consciously accept or consciously reject. As Laclau and Mouffe (1982: 100) argue, hegemony is not "an external relation between preconstituted social agents, but the very process of the discursive constitution of those agents." It can therefore only be grasped as a process, one that is typically uneven, heterogeneous and incomplete, and that operates at other levels of consciousness besides that of "mere opinion or mere manipulation" (Williams 1980: 38). Its internal structures are normally fractured by contradictions, and although it may absorb some oppositional currents, it simultaneously gen- erates others. Analysis must therefore attend to the complex movements and formations through which, as Williams (1977: 112) puts it, hegemony is continually "renewed, recreated, defended and modified ... [but] also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not all its own."

These movements traverse all levels of consciousness. For Williams (1977: 109-110), one of the conceptual advantages of hegemony lies in

its refusal to equate consciousness with the articulate formal system which can be and ordinarily is abstracted as 'ideology.' It of course does not exclude the articulate and formal meanings, values and beliefs which a dominant class develops and propagates. But it does not equate these with consciousness, or rather it does not reduce consciousness to them. Instead it sees the relations of dominance and subordination, in their forms as practical consciousness, as in effect a saturation of the whole process of living ... to such a depth that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense.

This formulation recalls Gramsci's (1971: 331) assertion that "the relation between common sense and the upper level of philosophy is assured by 'politics'." For Gramsci (1971: 323-331), "common sense" refers to the general conception of the world that informs the practical, everyday consciousness of ordinary people in a particular society. Following Gramsci, Hall (1986: 20) points out that common sense is "the terrain of conceptions and categories on which the practical consciousness of the masses of the people is actually formed .. [and] . . . on which more coherent ideologies and philosophies must contend for mastery."

These treatments of hegemony as encompass- ing both "the articulate upper level of 'ideology' "

(Williams 1977: 110) and the normally taken-for- granted understandings of practical consciousness and common sense, also connect with Bourdieu's discussion of the relationship between a field of doxa, in which "the established cosmological and political order . . . goes without saying and therefore goes unquestioned" (1977: 166), and a field of opinion defined by the confrontation of orthodox and heterodox arguments that "recognize the possi- bility of different and antagonistic beliefs" (p. 164). Bourdieu argues that the boundary between the field of opinion and the field of doxa is a crucial site of hegemonic struggle:

the dominated classes have an interest in pushing back the limits of doxa and exposing the arbitrariness of the taken for granted; the dominant classes have an interest in defending the integrity of doxa or, short of this, of es- tablishing in its place-the necessarily imperfect substitute, orthodoxy (p. 169).

Thus, to bring into question and discussion what was previously unquestioned and therefore undis- cussed is an act of political consciousness-raising. Conversely, primordialization, as an instance of what Bourdieu (p. 164) claims is the tendency of "every established order . . to produce . . . the naturalization of its own arbitrariness" is an act of political consciousness-reduction.

The particular sector of common sense on which struggles for the past are fought out is that of popular memory which, according to the Popular Memory Group (1982: 211), is structured by two sets of relations--on the one hand, "the relation between dominant memory and oppositional forms" and, on the other, the relation between "public discourses" and "the more privatised sense of the past that is generated within a lived culture." Images and sentiments of community that are produced, contested, diffused, and modified on this terrain feature prominently in projects to promote or resist the intellectual and moral unity that defines an effective hegemony.

Recent studies (for example, Alonso 1988a, 1988b; Bommes and Wright 1982; Brow 1988; Comaroff 1985; Comaroff and Comaroff 1987; Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Popular Memory Group 1982; Turton 1984; Wright 1985) show that naturalization of the arbitrary is only one of several rhetorical strategies that are recurrently discernible in hegemonic constructions of history and community. Besides "naturalization," Alonso (1988a: 44- 45) also identifies "departicularization" (or univer- salization) and "idealization" among the "multi-



NOTES ON COMMUNITY 5

plicity of techniques" by means of which "hegemonic ideologies appropriate and transform popular histories." Departicularization is the process whereby historical discourses and practices are emptied of their local, concrete meanings and uni- versalized, made the property of all who are incorporated within the hegemony. Idealization is the process through which the past is cleaned up and made the palatable embodiment of dominant values.

Anderson's (1983: 15) remark that the nation is imagined as "inherently limited" applies also to other kinds of community. Just as "no nation imagines itself as coterminous with mankind" (p. 16), so every community is defined in opposition to others. Communalization is, then, a process both of inclusion and of exclusion. At the same time differ- ences among those who are incorporated within a community are often muted or obscured, while dif- ferences between insiders and outsiders are loudly affirmed. This pattern of polarization between communities and homogenization within them (Tambiah 1986: 120) can then be fortified by appeals to the past that represent a cultural distinction as an original and essential difference.

None of these processes, however, is either uniform or unassailable. The contradictions and distortions within any hegemonic discourse, as well as the discrepancies between it and the popular understandings of common sense, leave it ever vulner- able to penetration, criticism, and refusal (Scott 1985; Willis 1981). The struggle for hegemony is always an open-ended process of contestation as well as incorporation, of negotiation and resistance as much as of accommodation and consent.

The political connection that Gramsci discerns "between common sense and the upper level of philosophy" should be understood in the broadest possible sense. State officials and political parties are

certainly among the major agencies that determine this relationship, but cultural, educational, and religious institutions, as well as the family and all kinds of voluntary organizations, are also funda- mentally involved (Hall 1986: 21). As Williams (1977: 110) stresses in the passage quoted earlier, the concept of hegemony looks at

relations of domination and subordination . . as in effect a saturation of the whole process of living-not only of political and economic activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole substance of lived identi- ties and relationships.

In short, hegemonic struggle is ubiquitous in social life.

The papers in this collection examine a varied range of sites, vehicles, and processes of hegemonic activity. Their unity lies in their shared focus on practices that foster a sense of belonging together by constructing and disseminating persuasive visions of the past. This crucial theme of hegemonic struggle is perhaps most obvious in officially organ- ized projects and productions such as state rituals, school textbooks, religious ceremonies, and the mass media, but it is also evident in the unofficial practices of ordinary life, where it saturates the terrain of common sense on which ideologies contend for mastery. The studies draw on ethnographic and historical research to analyze the plays that are made with this theme not only in authoritative rituals of heritage and development (Brow, Church), but also in the shaping of the landscape (Crain, Swedenburg), in local pageants and cele- brations of folklore (Church, Crain), in poetry, painting, and dress style (Swedenburg), and elsewhere. They demonstrate that, in the struggle for community, re-visions of history are as pervasive as they are endlessly contested.

NOTES Acknowledgments I am grateful to Ana Maria Alonso, Amy Burce, Daniel Nugent, Ted Swedenburg, Carol Trosset, and Mike Woost, all of whom read and commented on an earlier

draft of this paper. None of them is responsible for whatever errors or shortcomings remain.




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Notes on Community, Hegemony, And the Uses of the Past