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Title: Doing without power
Author: Robert C Marshall, Department of Anthropology, Western Washington University,
USA
Corresponding Author:
Robert C Marshall, Department of Anthropology, Western Washington University, 516 High St,
Bellingham, WA 98226 USA
Email: [email protected]
Abstract
While the “essentially contested concept” power is used widely and uniformly to identify an
observable, naturally occurring social phenomenon for social science explanations, the present
article shows that power does not refer to any observable or inferable experience at all but is
rather is a post hoc explanatory device that assigns occult abilities to individuals following
collective actions. An alternative approach understands power as a symbol, a public pattern for
action based on structured local knowledge, to bridge contradiction and lead to plausible action.
It urges a methodological shift to understand the results of social interaction by taking strategic
relationships rather than individuals as the basic unit of observation and concludes with an
application to Japanese gender relations.
Key words
Power, agency, symbolism, strategic relationships, Japan, gender
At the same time, however, their position as Mothers puts them in a position of advantage over
the male artisans and serves to make them important, though formally marginal, members of the
company. In Japan, Kondo carefully records, the position of care-giver or the one who indulges
the selfish whims of another (the amayakasu position) is actually a superordinate one, often
associated with parents or bosses. By asking favors of the part-timer women or by acting
childish, the young artisans are placing themselves in the amaeru position of a child or a
subordinate seeking indulgence (Kondo 1990: 295-296).
Look into this issue of amayaksu as superordinate, vis wife over husband at home.
“Physicists can now explain energy as the ‘go’ of the
universe, as what makes things happen…. Energy was
not simply waiting to be discovered, it had to be forged,
and out of ingredients both physical and metaphysical.”
Coopersmith, J (2010:350).
“If you meet the Buddha in the road, cut him down.”
Zen koan
Doing without power
All social science research I have ever read treats power as an observable, naturally
occurring social phenomenon that can be either an independent variable – “Far from being
brainwashed, the peasants of Sedaka are aware of the limitations of their power, which is
precisely why they resort to routine resistance rather than revolution” (Lewellen, 1992:174) – or
a dependent variable -- “Far from simply propping up the status quo, ritual provides an
important weapon in political struggle, a weapon used both by contestants for power within
stable political systems and by those who seek to protect or to overthrow unstable systems”
(Kertzer, 1988:104).
Social science founds this conventional understanding of power on the definition Max
Weber developed through verstehen, an interpretive method with great appeal to anthropologists
in particular because it makes available the understanding of the social actor. With this method,
Weber captured an important part of the European understanding of power, that power was or
gave individuals the ability to accomplish their social aims despite resistance. Even Michel
Foucault’s sophisticated diffusion of power within social systems sticks close to this European
understanding, that power is what makes life lively, makes static systems dynamic: ““Power,”
says Michel Foucault (1980:93), “is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain
strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical
relationship in a particular society”” (Lansing, 1991:130). And from the left, the work of
Antonio Gramsci has allowed anthropologists to locate this social phenomenon outside Western
tradition as well, in this case Bali, as Weiner works thru the Comaroffs back to Gramsci as well:
Both Foucault and Gramsci suggest that power at its most effective operates less through
obedience to the wishes of others than through internalized constraint and the domination
of social convention. Comaroff and Comaroff have provided a particularly interesting
reading of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as “forms of everyday life that direct
perceptions and practices in conventional ways” (1992:28). It operates, they add, through
“all signs and practices taken for granted as natural, universal and true.” Thus much of
what is commonly understood as culture involves hegemony, including aesthetic, ethical
and moral standards, not to mention the standards by which people judge things to be
desirable, reasonable, and possible. In short, hegemony involves the power to define
what people take as real (Weiner, 1995:151).
A different Weiner (1988:103) helps us understand the evident widespread applicability of this
concept: “Power is the ability to act upon someone directly by carrying out one’s will. A person
may have the legitimacy of a chieftaincy, but he may not have the power to make other do what
he wants them to do.” Weiner does not use a Trobriand word here to gloss ‘power’, and she is
not clear that the definition she gives here is Trobriand or her own. It does not seem to matter.
The English word ‘power’ says all there is to say, and I would be very surprised if Anglophone
Trobrianders did not find it entirely satisfactory for their discuss Trobriand culture.
Sulkunen (2010:498) brings the hegemony of this discourse up to the present:
The power of the powerful extends across issues and contexts, bearing unintended as
well as intended consequences, even without active intervention (Lukes, 2005[1974]). In
this way, power is coextensive with the social body. It depersonalizes both those who
possess it and those who are dominated by it. In the Foucauldian sense, Lukes’s third
dimension [of power is] exercised unconsciously without any apparent action by the
weight of institutions, by loosely defined groups rather than individuals and
organizations. The function of this third dimension of power is to produce consent by
de-identifing the acts themselves in which this domination occurs as acts of power.
In this hegemonic understanding from Weber through Gramsci to Foucault and Lukes, and on to
us, power is what makes a static structure dynamic, what allows us to assign cause to social
action even where we cannot find a person who has initiated acted. This conception is a symbol
which functions by analogy to the operation of physical systems by substituting the technical
manipulation of nature for the strategic interaction of humans.
Anthropology is favorably situated among the social sciences to examine the concept of
power afresh. First, we have a deep commitment to extirpating ethnocentrism from our work. In
this regard, power has a place in our discipline similar to, and so can be analyzed in the way
Schneider (1984) and Sahlins (2014) treat, the concept ‘kinship’, by recognizing that its origin
lies within our own culture where its reality is taken as nature, our human social nature, itself.
Witchcraft, another assertion about human nature, was once part of our culture and no longer is.
We are historically placed to see now that power has exactly the same epistemological standing
in our discipline that witchcraft has: while witchcraft has effects in the lives of those who
acknowledge its reality, our task is not to explain how witchcraft works in the world, but to
understand how and why people find it as they do in their lives thru effects they assign to it.
Anthropology’s recently revised understanding of the concept ‘race’ is an exact parallel
to the concept of power in everyday use in American culture and in our discipline. As a
discipline we now recognize that there is no experience possible which can be observed or
measured that corresponds to race among humans by any definition of race available to us. Our
cultural use is by analogy to biological race, observable morphological difference within a
species. As a concept in American and other cultures, the concept race is used to justify strategic
behaviors leading to inequality based on the assertion that superficial visible differences point to
deeper inherent differences that must be interpreted as deficiencies. Acting on this symbol is
racism, whose effects can be observed and measured.
Second, we do not require our discipline to disparage what is not rational in the human
world as irrational or to demean behaviors arising from local knowledge. On the contrary, we
assert fundamentally the symbolic quality of culture, even to the extent that we are prepared to
value symbolism beyond what is conventionally “real:” we do not have to, and we do not
willingly, describe symbolism as “mere,” in so far as it points to, but is not itself somehow taken
as, a more substantial and knowable reality. “Symbolic” is not simply another word for
irrationality; we do not mistakenly suppose we increase our knowledge by calling not-A, B.
Anthropology uniquely theorizes the symbolic as structured systems of local knowledge that
need not be either logically consistent or open to revision with further experience because it
operates on the basis of analogy, figurative language and imagery to connect and reinforce the
categories of lived experience.
The present paper offers an alternative understanding of power, that power is not a naturally
occurring social phenomenon; and that power does not refer to any natural social phenomenon
that can be observed, experienced or inferred. Rather, power is a symbol, a cultural
phenomenon, but a part of our own culture which we continue to use in anthropological research
in much the same way we and everyone else in our culture uses this concept in daily life.
Sulkunen (2010:497) writes that
Steven Lukes (2005[1974]) characterized power as an example of ‘essentially contested
concepts’, using the famous expression by the philosopher W.B. Gallie. [Such concepts]
matter politically, and they are subject to ardent disputes because they involve an
evaluative element. They imply values, ideals, moral stands and points of view, and
therefore lead to different diagnoses of social reality. Still, we need these concepts and
believe that we mean something when we use them, in social science and even more so in
everyday life.
Such concepts are symbols, the stuff of daily human life, our culture. But the location of
the contest here is not identified accurately: it is not that we disagree so much about what power
is; rather, we disagree over how it works, where we find its effects, its intended consequences
and its unintended consequences, how it is lost and acquired. So while we must finally conclude
that we cannot observe or measure or experience power because there is nothing there to observe
or experience, what remains for us to study is after all what we are really interested in: how and
why social action takes the course it does; how the regular patterns of behaviors we call society
emerge, remain, change; how people deploy the symbol power as they try to get things done; and
possibly even what might be the effects of having and using the concept power in a society the
way people do use it (Margolis, 1989:388). To do this, we ourselves must free our analyses from
the use of this concept as a variable in our own explanations.
There are a few precursors in this effort, not least of which is the view of Foucault cited
above, that power is not an attribute of individuals but has something to do with strategical
relationships in societies. I will return to this view and the concept of strategical relationships
below. We can easily enough find here and there inklings of a vague sense of the inadequacy of
the concept for scientific explanations. Earle (1997:9), e.g., writes, “Information is a basis of
power. Ultimately followers always have the “power” to resist, but leaders manipulate
information to make it appear that the ruling elite have both the right and the might to hold onto
authority.” Then, why the quotation marks, which conventionally indicate words that are not to
be taken literally, in a scientific explanation? Yet if followers may be able to get their way
despite the resistance of their leaders, the phrase “make it appear that” likewise pushes us to
doubt that elites can make people uniformly do what they want them to do when followers might
prefer not to follow. How, in this quotation, does the word power at all advance our
understanding of the dynamic strategical relationship we conceive as leaders and followers in
any particular society?
My Cassandra Award for 20th Century Social Science goes, however, to James March
(1966) for his paper “The Power of Power,” recipient of the American Political Science
Association Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper presented at the Association’s annual
meetings in 1963. March starts with the observation, “Power is a major explanatory concept in
the study of social choice” (1966:39) and concludes following his detailed analysis of “six
different classes of models of social choice that are generally consistent with what at least one
substantial group of students means by social power“(1966:40), that, “On the whole, power is a
disappointing concept. It gives us surprisingly little purchase in reasonable models of complex
systems of social choice” (1966:69).
Yet forty years on, we find Richard Valelly able still to write in the Chronicle of Higher
Education as co-chair of the program committee for the 2006 annual meeting of the American
Political Science Association, under the title “Political Scientists’ Renewed Interest in the
Workings of Power,” that by the 1990s as research interest shifted from case studies to
mathematical analysis of big data sets “Because widely accepted direct measures of power do not
exist, “big-N” studies of power were hard to imagine, much less mount. Only in the subfields of
international security and international relations did power, as a concept, retain a central and
respected status” (Valelly, 2006:B7). After discussing several papers on the agenda for
presentation that use the concept power in central ways, he closes with the hope that this
reconsideration of power will be the first step in a renewal of interest in this concept which
remains a source of the discipline’s vitality. If direct measures of power could be created, power
could be to political science as money is to economics, in which discipline power is not a central
concept although money is obviously no less or completely a symbol than is power. Why then
are there no direct measures of power? How is it possible power could be an object of
observation that does not come in conventional mensurable or even countable units the way milk
and electricity do? That money is an historical human creation is known and understood; why do
we not have the same understanding of power, even as a pre-historical human creation?
Bruno Latour (1986:264) starts an answer to this question by taking it to the extreme
condition, beginning with the observation that “The problem with power may be encapsulated in
the following paradox: when you simply have power – in potentia – nothing happens and you are
powerless; when you exert power – in actu – others are performing the action and not you.” He
then anticipates Sulkunen’s thought cited above, that “Power is so useful as a stop gap solution
to cover our ignorance, to explain (away) hierarchy, obedience or hegemony, that it is, at first
sight, hard to see how to do without this pliable and empty term. It may be used as an effect, but
never as a cause” (Latour, 1986:266). Power does not make anything happen. We use it to
explain why anything happens in contests of will, after something has happened, to summarize
the consequence of a collective action. Dictators who find themselves obeyed then believe they
have done something. As a result of a contest, actors in our society may gain or lose power,
independently of whether that actor wins or loses the contest (March, 1963:64).
There is no point taxing Weber with a useless definition. What his definition captures is
the European concept in daily use; he did not define a concept de novo with which to label a
specific observable phenomenon his research had discovered. If we as anthropologists think that
verstehen or the emic method will help us, as outsiders, gain access to the understandings in use
among the people whose cultures we study, we must recognize that Weber was studying his own
society as a member of that society and was not asking his method to bridge the gap of cultural
difference. The task he set himself was to understand the knowledge and values individuals like
himself brought to social action. Power is not an ability or an experience, but a word, a part of
language. The following section develops a theory of symbolism capable of dealing with power
as a word without having to handle it as a variable or an explanation. The article concludes with
an the application of this conception of symbolism, focusing on the lack of recognition or
acknowledgment of the complex strategical relationship between a householder’s wife and his
brother in Japan, which allows the debate over gender there to use the concept power as a way of
talking about status and inequality without requiring identification of the foundation of women’s
status in Japanese culture.
Symbolism, power and agency
There are many words in use which do not identify any phenomena available to
experience and which cannot be observed directly or indirectly. Power, a word meaning the
capacity of individuals to get their way despite resistance, the ability to make people do what you
want, is one of these. Schneider (1984) and Sahlins (2014) show how another, the concept
‘kinship’, by recognizing that its origin lies within our own culture where its reality is taken as
nature, our human social nature itself, fails as a concept adequate for comparative research.
Witchcraft, another assertion about human nature, was once part of our culture and no longer is,
although people in many cultures of the world continue to use this symbol to guide important
aspects of their lives. We do not have to accept that witchcraft works the way people tell us it
does to investigate the role witchcraft plays in peoples’ lives. Sometimes such concepts are
called imaginaries, but anthropology recognizes them as symbols. Anthropology along with
other social sciences is interested in explaining complex patterns of behavior in which some
people clearly get much more of what they aim for, and others very much less, thru their
interactions. To do so we can study how people interact and the enduring patterns their
continued interactions form. And we can study how people talk about and account for these
enduring patterns.
My primary analytic tool in this effort is a robust cognitive rather than semiotic
conception of symbolism suitable for use in analyses of complex strategical interactions, which
understands symbols as public patterns for action based on structured and interested local
knowledge, rather than as embodied loci of encoded, disinterested meanings (Marshall, 2003).
‘Symbol’ understood this way allows us to identify and measure the effects of important
interactions which fall below the horizon of analyses limited to institutions and informal
structures, even when attending to unintended consequences. The robustness of this conception
of symbolism arises from our knowing that and how symbols are always already strategical.
With this knowledge we can account, in particular, for the opacity for both actor and observer
between primary and secondary strategies, that is, respectively acting through the symbol, and
acting so as to be seen as acting or not acting through the symbol (Bourdieu, 1998:141).
Concern for how symbols construct culture dominated anthropology in the long post-war
period. Levi-Strauss’s (1955:105) hypothesis that “the purpose of a myth is to provide a logical
model capable of overcoming a contradiction” opened an immensely productive period in the
analysis of symbolism. Yet in time it became clear that if a symbol might mean both one thing
and its contradiction (Kertzer, 1988:69), a property of symbols commonly called ‘multivocality’,
the useful scientific work to which the concepts of meaning, symbol, and communication might
be put was significantly vitiated, lending more support to cognitive than semiotic theories of
symbolism (Lakoff, 1987). As early as Levi-Strauss’s invention of the structural analysis of
symbols, Goodenough (1957) urged us to consider culture as the knowledge one requires to
participate in society. In one wing of post-structuralist anthropology, Dan Sperber made the
compelling case that, as is true of sentences, “if symbols had a meaning, it would be obvious
enough”(1975:84), concluding that the Saussurian semiology project “established, all
unknowing, that symbols work without meaning” (1975:52). In this conception symbolism is
one kind of knowledge, distinguished from analytic knowledge – knowledge of words and
language ̶ by being incapable of paraphrase, and from synthetic knowledge – knowledge from
experience of the world ̶ by immunity to being dislodged by novel experience. What symbols
do, then, is establish relations among the categories of thought through the use of statements
about the world, to the end that people might still act in the face of paradox, contradiction and
dilemma. How symbols work is by linking figuratively rather than causally the domain in
which action is necessary but problematic to other domains of experience, knowledge of which
does provide a basis for confident action.
A second wing of post-structuralism arose from Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) recognition of
the inherently strategical aspect of symbols: the logic of symbols is a logic of relations; the
foundation of this logic is the act of making a difference; and distinguishing is always interested.
For Bourdieu, habitus, the system of lasting dispositions that “functions at every moment as a
matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions [italics in original]” (1977:82-83) to make
improvisation possible, is “an operator of rationality, but of a practical rationality immanent in a
historical system of social relations and therefore transcendent to the individual” (1992:19). This
is strategical rationality, the rationality of people who will get from any interaction not simply
the effects of what they do, but what others do in response. And whether self-aware or not, they
cannot determine (in either sense of the word, to know or to cause) what the other will do. Here
is the crux of Foucault’s “complex strategical relationship,” which he calls power.
The practice that lets us understand why neither researcher nor actor can explicitly separate
primary and secondary strategies begins with that which Bourdieu (1991:77-81) identifies as
“self-censorship in anticipation of profits,” the practice which engenders the social dilemma
around which, e.g., the tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” develops, where to make any
remark at all, and also to not make a remark at all, must reflect badly on the speaker externally or
internally once contradictory premises are permitted “to make the market.”
Barnum’s Egress reliably leads us out of this dilemma. Everyone not speaking at all lets
everyone still seek strategic advantage even in situations characterized entirely by falsehood, as
they purposely fail to problematize the situation, deliberately but tacitly refusing to identify the
situation as one even permitting, far from requiring, explicit comment in the form of a question
such as “What is going on here?”
Taboo then takes the act of not saying to the third power, turning this Pareto-optimal
strategy into an explicit virtue of conservatism which preserves the social relationships
maintained by the system of distinctions in play. Both a system of classification and a system of
social relations are necessary for us to distinguish between the infinite number of things we don’t
say and do because they remain undifferentiated within the still merely possible, and those few
we don’t say and do because they are taboo, aside from whether we could or could not bring
ourselves to say them, even should we want to do so.
A great deal of the burden of the failure of social science to treat everyday words such as
‘family’ or ‘power’ as symbols must be borne by our method of turning daily cultural usage into
a sophisticated means of arranging data for analysis. We call this approach “methodological
individualism,” the point of view of everyday life put into the question “How does life look to
individual actors in this society?” In his 1971 Huxley Memorial Lecture “Anthropology’s
Mythology,” George Peter Murdock writes that anthropology must not use “mythological
concepts of culture and social system as operating or explanatory principles under any
circumstances” (1973:22), finding “the locus of the mechanism of behavior in the individual
human being rather than in such reified supra-individual abstractions as culture or social system”
(1973:21).
A shift in method may let us finally see why power, a mythological concept of culture,
cannot be either a dependent or independent variable in testable propositions. The alternative I
follow here is to take Foucault’s insight that power is a name we give to specific complex
strategical relations, as the basis for a method that will let us use relationships as our basic unit of
observation while preserving the individual as the basic unit of action. This will allow us
understand power in relation to agency within our understanding of strategical relationships,
finally to replace power with a reconfigured conception of agency. Marxian analysis, to notice
just one direction, already uses this method within the central concept of mode of production, in
which different modes of production are characterized by different fundamental characteristic
relationships of production, e.g., “the capitalist mode’s basic opposition between owners of
means of production and working hands” (Wolf, 1982:389), or among relatives in the kinordered mode, lord and peasant in the feudal mode, and so on. Recently public health research in
epidemiology has begun using this method in the search for “upstream” causes of disease in
inequality in wealthy nations (Marmot 2004; Wilkinson and Pickett 2009).
Within methodological individualism, power and agency are incompatible. Power is the
ability to get our way despite resistance, while “agency refers to the socioculturally mediated
capacity to act” on our own choices, and not simply as a robot or puppet (Ahern, 2001:112).
Observing that what they call “mesolevel” social contexts are frequently overlooked because of
“late modernity’s emphasis on individuals and their agency,” Hagestad and Dannefer (2001:14)
search for a method that will let them avoid the trap of “microfication,” that tempting mix of
psychological reductionism and methodological individualism to which Murdock falls prey.
The incompatibility of power and agency has not been noticed because these concepts
have not been brought into close proximity, but have been used separately to solve very different
problems. Power has been applied to relations between actors to understand why some people
get more of what they want than others do, or what they need in order to be able to turn the
tables, while agency was made popular by Anthony Giddens (1979), engaged in the same war
Murdock wages above, the attempt “to breathe life into social structures and bring social
structures into contact with human actions” (Ahearn, 2001:117).
But if power is what one needs to get one’s way despite resistance, and agency is the
irreducible capacity to act on one’s choices, one of these two concepts must give way. And it
must be power, like witchcraft an occult property of individuals, whether to harm people at a
distance or make them do your bidding. Agency can then be understood not as merely one more
occult faculty of individuals, but as a fundamental property of strategical relationships, that no
matter what A does, B always has alternative courses of action among which to choose and on
which to act, and which A cannot determine for B in either sense of the word, to know or effect,
before B acts. The Drosophila in the study of the effects of this irreducibility of agency as an
emergent property of strategical relationships in the latter half of the 20th century is the game
Prisoner’s Dilemma (Axelrod 1984).
The study of socially specific strategical relationships of individuals - above individuals
and below the super-organic -, allow us to look at the results of frequent patterns of interaction
that do not have determined outcomes. Rather than wonder how culture causes us to act or
whether collectivities have agency, we can investigate self-censorship based on what people
think other people will do in response to self’s initiatives. Society is not a snowball rolling
downhill carrying all before it, but a collection of complex patterns of action which must be
constructed again and again with every individual act. And yet, what people get from their
interactions with each other depends not only on what they do, but on what others do in
response. People continuously chose to act in similar ways, but they make these choices within
their understanding of what might be possible to achieve their ends, under conditions not of their
own choosing (Gates 1996:3). Politics remains the art of the possible within the indeterminate.
Marvin and Ingle (1999) deploy Durkheimian taboo in their thesis that to realize the
concept “nation” in American civil religion, any but the greatest sacrifice is too little. The core
of their understanding requires that action be able to unify alternative and ostensibly
incompatible interpretations of symbols: “This book argues that violent blood sacrifice makes
enduring groups cohere, even though such a claim challenges our most deeply held notions of
civilized behavior” (1999:1). For Marvin and Ingle symbolic action creates this effect through
taboo, the strategical refusal to speak or have spoken, do or have done. In their fully reflexive
Durkheimian totemism, the flag is the ritual instrument of group cohesion where “The totem
secret, the collective group taboo, is the knowledge that society depends on the death of its own
members at the hand of the group” [italics in original] (Marvin and Ingle 1999:2).
They continue: “… bodily sacrifice is the totem core of American nationalism” [italics in
original] (Marvin and Ingle 1999:4). In this conception, symbol and strategy are indissolubly
linked. While “plausible deniability” rather than classic notions of taboo more accurately
characterizes actors’ strategical maneuvers in day-to-day contexts, nevertheless here too word
and deed form a gestalt: “Violence is an essential social resource, just as denying this constitutes
an important group-making tool” (Marvin and Ingle 1999:8). If the Japanese family is a locus of
structural violence (Farmer 2005), the target of this violence is not the household head’s wife,
but his brother. Godelier (1999:173) reminds us why we hide such matters from our social
selves: “…there is something in society which is part of the social being of its members and
which needs opacity in order to produce and reproduce itself.” Consequently, this “not being
able to talk about something,” that something necessary and important to group solidarity and
even group existence can only function as long as it is not talked about makes society work, even
as it keeps us from understanding our own collective creation.
Application: Japanese gender relations
Gender relations in Japan serve as an illuminating test of this approach. Both hierarchy
and division of labor reduce competition for resources and status between the sexes there, and
yet important and visible points of contention arise in these relations as well. And while gender
relations in Japan as elsewhere are frequently conceived as a matter of power relations, a power
struggle, a battle of the sexes, the battle lines as they are now drawn in Japan configure the
territory held by both sides in a way significantly different from other prominent Asian cultures,
as well as European and North American cultures. Yet, conceiving gender relations as a zerosum status competition hides much more about relations between men and women in Japanese
society than it reveals. The alternative explanation I offer here is based not on the perspective of
individuals striving for higher status at one another’s expense, but one which takes “a complex
strategical relationship in a particular society” (Foucault 1980:93), namely that of household
head’s wife and brother, as the basic unit of observation.
Why, then, do Japanese gender relations remain so deeply patriarchal and unequal, and
yet create such great personal autonomy for women, even to the extent of exclusive management
of family finances? Or, put concretely, when “Husbands still turn over their salaries intact to
their wives, and wives dispense them a monthly allowance” (Iwao 1993:85), why has the status
of women not continued to rise in ways that would lead to much fuller participation in public
life? Why is Japan’s glass ceiling at the height it is, and why have women never hammered on it
very hard? Ogasawara formulated the problem as one of getting at the facts: observing that “the
Japanese public often claims that once you look beyond the immediately observable, you see that
women have the real power over men” (1998:3), she asks, “Are Japanese women oppressed, or
not? Are they powerless, or powerful?” (Ogasawara 1998:2).
This perspective shapes comparative research as well: if earning and control of money
became the hallmark of a husband's household position in the rising middle class of the West that
maintained women in a position of dependence and subordination well into the 20th century, why
didn't this pattern come to characterize Japan's rising white collar class or, from the other
direction, why hasn't the pattern of women’s autonomous control of household finances given
women in Japan today a position more like that of women in Western Europe-derived societies?
Gender relations during Japan’s modernization took a third path they have not yet left. Lebra
thinks men are somehow different at large than at home, where “the wife’s complete control of
the domestic realm apart from structural content might lead one to conclude that women are
more powerful than men in Japan, or that Japanese women enjoy more power than American
women” (Lebra 1984:302).
The explanation I develop here understands Japanese gender relations as a result of
historical processes rather than a continuous ahistorical status competition. The Japanese ie is a
corporate extended bilateral patrilocal stem family. While ancient, reports of its death or
fundamental transformation are greatly exaggerated. In this family, inheritance is unitary and
household heads retire in their prime to secure the transmission of the estate to their heir and
successor free of claims by second sons. “All [the successor’s] siblings eventually leave the
household and ultimately lose their membership in its stem family” (Brown 1968:114). The
prosperity and continuity of the ie is such a fundamental value that a capable successor and heir
might be secured by marriage to a daughter of the family and adopted, even in preference to a
natural son (Mehrotra et al 2013). Finding a single successor and eliminating competitors to that
successor are equally important for the continued prosperity of the ie.
The effects of these practices on gender relations are substantial but remain largely tacit
in Japanese discourse. Because the importance of a competent wife is recognized and even
insisted upon, wives have long been given sufficient autonomy to meet their great
responsibilities within this narrow family, but that a wife was and continues to be more important
to the prosperity of the ie than a husband’s brother is never mentioned. At no point does the
socio-logic of the ie acknowledge how the retirement of the household head in favor of his heir
and successor creates a seamless and conflict-free succession at the retired household head’s
death. And consequently, there is no mention of a relationship between household heads’ wives
and brothers at all, that a good wife is more important to the success of the ie than a brother,
because it just never comes up. That this makes some women more important than some men to
a fundamentally important institution in Japanese life remains unacknowledged and
unrecognized. Hints are available that could be followed up to deconstruct this cloak of
invisibility. For example, new wives who cannot adjust to the ways of the groom’s house are
sent back to their parents. Young men are warned not to become an adopted son-in-law
(mukoyoshi) while they still have a cup of rice bran to their names. Families are said to prefer a
girl before a boy. Kinship terminology differs from Eskimo by recognizing birth order and boys
are frequently given personal names that reflect birth order.
The pre-modernization social hierarchy held samurai > farmers > artisans >merchants.
Merchants were understood to make their money by taking advantage of others’ distress, buying
cheap and selling dear. The economy of this period was based on rice, which farmers produced
and samurai taxed. With modernization, however, the samurai status was abolished and
industrialization became the primary source of national wealth. The economy shifted from rice
to money and a new urban salaried middle class arose, as well as a waged industrial working
class.
While samurai displayed their status superiority over wealthier merchants by showing
disdain for money, the transformation of the political economy in the Meiji era (1868-1912) cast
money in a new light. The modern role of housewife becomes recognizable with the emergence
of a white collar class in the late 19th century. Kathleen Uno (1991:19) suggests that the modern
conception of womanhood emerged with a division of labor that "can be traced to the turn of the
[19th] century, ... in the households of public officials, professors, teachers, journalists, engineers
and white-collar workers, members of an elite who shaped public culture through their roles in
policymaking, education, and the media."
Arguments that require a close competition between husband and wife or men and
women widely, do not seem to hold up well in such a context. When earning a salary came to be
the hallmark of a husband's household position in the rising middle class of the Japan that
maintained women in a position of dependence and subordination, why didn’t the pattern of
women’s autonomous control of household finances give women a position in Japan more like
that of women in western Europe-derived societies? According to Lebra, men are different at
large than at home, where the Japanese husband’s “childlike dependence gives the wife leverage
to exercise power by making her services absolutely necessary” (Ogasawara 1998:4). Iwao’s
explanation, that “Women tended to be thrifty while men could not be counted on not to spend
money extravagantly on food, sake, women and other temptations,” does not explain why men
would ever hand their salaries to their wives, or must agree that women are capable of handling
household finances better than men are, even if all this is true, which it is of course not. Why
would such men, capable of transforming Japan from an isolated feudal society into a modern
industrial nation, agree to be reined in by women, their own wives of all people? Explanations
for this complex state of affairs based on status competition are sometimes equally complex and
methodologically intractable. Ogasawara finds that
the extent to which these [male bankers] feel constrained in their relations to women
[employees] and take care not to arouse their displeasure is extraordinary. I therefore
argue that macro-level power relations are not necessarily reproduced in micro-level
interactions, and may even be reversed…. Men must therefore accede to women’s use of
manipulative strategies if they are to exercise their power (1998:910).
The use of the symbol power in this sort of strategical relationship can only lead to
confusion as a variable in social scientific analysis. Ogasawara (1998:156) writes in the context
of her bank, that “It is costly for a man to actually use his power” over the young women
assigned to support his work activity because “In the final analysis, it is women’s willingness to
cooperate that determines how much help men will receive.” The answer that a manager’s occult
capacity of “personal charm (jintoku)” determines “women’s willingness to cooperate”
(Ogasawara 1998:156) is unlikely to satisfy analysts for long, but even while it does, what must
still be said about managers’ personal charm: its components, sources, limits, liabilities,
substitutes, counterfeits, the terms and general conditions of its tactical deployment, techniques
of resistance? And so on. Max Weber knew this sort of personal charm as “charisma,” the
ability to get people to want to do what you want them to do.
An historical structural explanation for an historical structural problem holds more
attraction at every level. Imamura (1987:83) offers the possibility, for example, that “The
freedom of the housewife should be judged less in terms of money, therefore and more in the
light of her greater responsibility to manage the household, including finances, by herself and her
husband’s expectations that she will be able to manage with what he can provide.” A husbands’
childlike dependence on his wife’s homemaking skills is widely observed in the active verb
amaeru, to have another indulge one, and so might be used as ammunition in the battle of the
sexes. But in most marriages a husband’s willingness to rely implicitly on his wife, and her
willingness to be relied upon to the best of her ability, establish a close, if not loving, conjugal
bond, rather than an explanation for the direction gender history has taken in Japan.
At this point we must recall clearly that women’s relatively high status in terms of
personal autonomy in Japan, and their relatively low level of gender equality compared to
women of other wealthy nations, does not in any event rest on a status competition between
husbands and wives. Goldstein-Godni (2012:196-97) identifies with surgical precision the points
of intersection between the conservative policies of the State and the use of status competition to
drive mass circulation magazines for women, to show that “the advanced policies for gender
equality since the 1990s have been in fact pronatal policies more than a product of a genuine
attempt to produce a gender-equal society.” She continues, “Women’s reluctance to cooperate
may well be related to this same weak understanding of gender relations and more specifically to
a profound aversion of the State—in its broad meaning including other influential agents and
agencies—to create a real change in the basic structure of gender relations” (Goldstein-Godni
2012:197). It seems clear at this point that there is No effective agent or process in Japan is
working to dissolve the ie, but on the other hand, the logic of ie requires only, and will function
most smoothly with only, one child. Thus contradictions play out in society and symbols help
people act.
As much as anthropologists find it interesting to explore the ways in which inequality is
maintained below the horizon of awareness in the cultures we study, debates at any level of “who
has the power” cannot lead to testable questions. “This research illustrates how and why
dominant groups may be reluctant to use their power…. Moreover, it shows that this reluctance
is not the result of factors outside the power relations. Rather, it is integral to them” (Ogasawara
1998:156). These are not testable propositions. Sometimes it seems that social science
researchers continue to use the concept power not because it gives reliable explanations but
because it leads to paradox, attracting us like moths to the flame. But paradox is a property of
analysis, not reality. In Japan at least this discourse of status competition in discussions of
gender as a function of the distribution of power gives people a chance to explore gender
relations without ever revealing or recognizing the actual source of women’s status, their
relations to their husband’s brother. In this discourse, it always goes without saying that the
household head’s wife is more important to the success of the ie than the husband’s brother, but
what is the relative importance of husband vs wife? And how should women who are more
important than some men and less important than others, act to become equal to all men? Or
should they? And then what would they do?
The terms of this debate take shape as a function of the various kinds of power that can
be brought into the discussion. There are at least two types, bifurcated dimensions and
institutional. Bifurcated dimensions are private-public, formal-informal, personal-official,
macro-micro, symbolic-real and so on, while institutional are economic, legal, ritual, military,
political, knowledge-based and so on. Symbols establish relations among the categories of
thought, and these terms are such categories. As a method, the local discourse on power of all
these different kinds, assembled and analyzed, will let us understand local views of how power
works in that society and how social action takes place. Our task is to understand why people
have these views and to explain them without using the concept power.
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