Anti-Heroic Politics

So far I have been talking largely about history, and particularly the authoritative version of the ancestral past in a place like Betafo. At first glance, this ancestral past seems a pretty dull place; having been carefully scrubbed of any element of conflict, the stories lack any possibility of drama. However, this is the thinnest of veneers, and particularly in a community like Betafo, all it takes is one or two pointed questions for the stories of rivalry and oppression to begin rolling out. In this chapter I want to proceed in the opposite direction, and talk about the mechanisms of day-to-day politics: which, in a place like Betafo, is ultimately about how such struggles and rivalry and forms of oppression are ultimately transformed into ancestral authority.

Let me set out from a point that I made in the introduction, that in the parts of rural Imerina I knew, there was next to nothing that could obviously be called a “public sphere” or “political arena.”

I’m not the first to have observed this. In one of his more famous essays, Maurice Bloch describes how he arrived in Madagascar in the late 1960s, trained in political anthropology, only to discover that the objects he was trained to look for were not there.

As the result of a long period of direct rule by both the French Colonial Government and, following them, the Malagasy Government, there was no local political hierarchy of office holders which could claim any independence from a national hierarchy. As a result, problems of succession and the formulation of laws did not arise since most disputes were settled according to legal criteria which were totally independent and even alien to the people studied. Secondly, because of the particular nature of the Malagasy culture, the kind of disputes and dispute settlement which has been the concern of much political anthropology occurred only relatively rarely. I could therefore neither do a traditional political anthropological analysis, looking for a local political structure made up of office-holders and institutions, nor could I observe power conflicts when these emerged into the open; since they did not. My conclusion was that I had nothing to say about politics. (Bloch 1975:3)

At the same time, he continues, it was clear that people were constantly, in one way or another, telling each other what to do, and it was hard not to think of this as a political phenomenon.

In the end, the conundrum led Bloch to study the problem of political oratory and formal genres of speech. His central argument, in fact, became that in Imerina, the formal political sphere has become a sphere where nothing is supposed to happen. At formal meetings of “the fokon’olona,” by then an essentially colonial institution, elders deliver speeches with practically nothing in the way of propositional content, full of proverbial wisdom, sentiments which no sane person would possibly disagree with. Nothing is openly debated, nothing decided; all real decisions have been made beforehand, behind the scenes. Once the public event begins, the result is predetermined.

All this rather recalls Claude Levi-Strauss’ famous distinction between games and rituals (1966:32–33), inspired by the fact that many Algonkian ceremonies feature competitive games which must always end in a tie. In real games, he says, the point is to take two things that start out the same (say, two football teams) and create a difference (winners and losers). Rituals, however, aim to create a higher unity out of different things, so the result is foreordained. His ultimate conclusion is notorious: that societies based on ritual reject history altogether because they do not allow the arbitrary differences produced by events to have permanent effects; instead, they simply reproduce the same fixed structure over and over again.

Nowadays there is next to no one left who actually believes that there are societies without history. Certainly Bloch is not trying to say anything of the kind. He was trying to make a point about the nature of authority. The core of his argument is that all political speech tends to resemble ritual in so far as both place radical limits on what it is possible to say. In Imerina, he argues, authority comes down to repeating the words and sentiments of the ancestors in proverbial language, or in carrying out rituals that are also statements of their ultimate rightness and authority. In either case, it is basically impossible to criticize the established order, to argue, suggest alternatives, to enter a debate.

I don’t see much point here in entering into the debate which Bloch’s arguments inspired—suffice it to say they were meant to be provocative, and succeeded. But I do think it’s worthwhile to point out that it was much easier for Bloch to make these arguments because the Merina political events he observed were, indeed, much more like rituals than like games: they are not supposed to produce outcomes that make a difference. This is not the way politics is usually expected to work. One need only recall the phenomena of wars. Elections. Duels. Debates. Strikes. Trials. Legislative votes. Most of what we are used to thinking of as political phenomena, in fact, consist of game-like contests of one sort or another. No doubt this is one reason Levi-Strauss could connect games to history: if the political sphere, in so many societies, consists largely of a series of little arenas in which important people (usually posing as representatives of larger groups) fight out contests that will have broader effects on society as a whole, then history has consisted largely of accounts of the most significant of these contests, of their winners and losers, and of what effects their winning or losing had.

Bloch also makes an important argument about gender. Many argue that all societies distinguish between a public sphere identified especially with men, and domestic sphere, identified especially with women; and that one way that women are suppressed is by being denied full access to the public arena. Bloch argues Imerina is no exception. But one extension of the ritualized nature of public discourse in Imerina is that—as I have already pointed out at some length—authoritative men tend to avoid displays or references to conflict, so that it is especially women who voice it, just as it is especially women who are publicly critical of established verities. Though Bloch never quite phrased the matter this way, it’s as if the silencing of women’s voices, and the silencing of colloquial criticism of the established ritual order, here become much the same thing.

Part 1: Political Action; or, The Structure of Stories

When I did my fieldwork, some twenty years after Bloch, I didn’t find things to be very different. Even the collapse of state authority had not led to the emergence of new political offices or institutions to take its place. On the other hand, this made the situation even more mysterious. In the ’50s and ’60s, people in rural villages were under the control of a fairly effective police state; they were not in a position to make many decisions for themselves. In the 1980s, the police were gone; one could no longer say that all the really important decisions were being made elsewhere. Somehow or other, the people who lived here were managing their own affairs. But how? Where does one look, if the public sphere is a place where nothing is supposed to happen? How does one describe politics under such conditions?

The nice thing about anomalous cases is that they force one to rethink one’s definitions. It seems to me in this context at least, instead of starting from the question “What is politics?”—since that immediately evokes the idea of a political sphere—it would be more useful to ask “What is political action?” What is it about an act that enables one to say it is political?

The most obvious response would be that actions are political in so far as they are intended to influence the actions of others (or, perhaps, just in so far as they do, because something can be unintentionally political). The problem with this is that it would mean that, with the possible exception of certain purely technical actions, all actions have some political component. This may not be a bad way of looking at things—but even when one says “Everything is political,” one normally means something more. One implies that one’s actions have a broader significance, that they relate to more general issues. So let me suggest a refinement. As a minimal definition, political action is action meant to influence others who are not physically present when the action is being done. This is not to say it can’t be intended to influence people who are physically present; it is to say its effects are not limited to that. It is action that is meant to be recounted, narrated, or in some other way represented to other people afterward; or anyway, it is political in so far as it is.

Saying this is not a denial of the importance of a public sphere. Rather, one might say that this is what a “public sphere” actually is, that space in which everyone acts with the understanding that anything they do is likely to be more widely represented and remembered. If no such space is circled off, or, more realistically, if the legitimate ways of acting within it are radically circumscribed, the process will just become more diffuse and scattered, and, perhaps, a little more covert. Gossip and reputation, for instance, will probably take on a far more important role in the allocation of authority.

The greatest advantage this definition has is that it makes it impossible to think about politics without also thinking about the issue of representation. Politics is the process by which people act in the knowledge that their actions will be reported, talked about, narrated, discussed, praised, or criticized by other people. This, in turn, allows us to look at all sorts of familiar issues of representation in a very different light. For example, we normally tend to assume that true power is the power to establish definitive texts or authoritative versions of events—and by extension, that the person who gets to tell the story of what happened is in ultimate control. But kings are rarely storytellers. They don’t need to be. The truly powerful usually find other people to do the work of representing for them.

Adventures in Narrative Theory

While I was living in Antananarivo I still had a lot of time to myself, much of which I spent jotting down theoretical reflections in my journals. One of my great ambitions at the time was to develop a theory of narrative—and just before I left for the field, I had put together the outlines of one that would seem to have been tailor-made to complement this approach to politics.

The initial question I had started off on was: what is it that makes a story seem worth telling? What are the most common ways of framing daily events that would make them interesting enough to hold the attention of someone who had no prior interest in finding out about the matter? This struck me as a much better—or certainly, more anthropological—way to go about thinking about narratives than most existing theories on the subject, which tend to always concentrate on formal genres—fairy tales or novels, but rarely ordinary talk.

My first thinking about the matter set off from a remark by Frederick Jameson (1972:67–68): that in Russian folk tales the protagonists are always represented, at first, as people who are clearly not up to the task in front of them. Often the hero is a simple peasant boy, perhaps a simpleton or cripple, anyway, certainly no match for the ogre or sorcerer or king who’s the antagonist; it is only the intervention of a magical helper which allows him to succeed. But it is just this lack of adequacy, he suggested, which makes the thing a story. It provides an element of suspense.

It struck me that this would have important implications for any theory of social power.

Consider the differences between what in different societies is considered men’s and women’s work. This varies endlessly across the world, but there are also some surprisingly consistent patterns. The main one is that short and relatively intense tasks, particularly those involving moments of danger, are almost always relegated to men; the most repetitive and monotonous sorts of work, to women. A good example is swidden agriculture, which requires burning away the existing foliage on a piece of land before planting it. In some societies that practice swidden agriculture, planting, weeding, and harvesting is done exclusively by men, in others, almost exclusively by women. But even where women do everything else, it is always men who actually torch the fields. This is the one moment of the greatest drama, because when a fire is set, there’s always the danger it might run out of control and wreak immense havoc. This moment of drama is always, everywhere, presided over by men.

One way to state the matter would be this: men tend to monopolize the sorts of work framed in terms of an implicit dramatic structure. Men, one might say, tend to get the sorts of work one can tell stories about afterward, women, the sort one tells stories during, to pass the time.

Why though should this bear out so consistently across cultures? Here, I think, one has to bring in politics and power. In any society, gender marks the most elementary division of power. What such a division of labor does, one might say, is to attribute to men the sorts of activity defined as memorable, narratable action; to define men as actors, and women as non-actors. It is constantly placing men on little stages, while ensuring that most of the work of actually producing and maintaining these stages, and making it possible for the men to appear there, is relegated to their mothers, daughters, and wives. The pattern is not limited to gender. It continues, to a lesser or greater extent, through every social hierarchy: the more exalted a group or status, the more their typical activities will tend to take dramatic form, one which lends itself to being told as stories afterward. The political domain is usually the most dramatic one of all.

Another way to say this is that the more powerful a person or group, the more their archetypical activities are likely to resemble games. Many years ago, Johan Huizinga (1940) suggested that any number of common human activities tend to be organized like games. Games, he pointed out, are always characterized by certain basic features. There is always (a) a field of action, which is arbitrarily marked off from the rest of the world in space and time,

(b) arbitrary rules, which apply within that field, and (c) a series of players, whose actions are motivated by (d) some goal they are not certain to attain.

What I find especially interesting about this formulation is that its basic features precisely parallel a certain tradition of thinking about the relation of narrative and human action, one which goes back to Aristotle, reappears in Bakhtin, and whose most notable recent exemplar is probably Paul Ricouer (1984; cf. Danto 1965, Mink 1966, 1978, Gallie 1964, Rosaldo 1989). A story, according to this tradition, begins by posing some problem and ends with its resolution. Stories too are always characterized by certain features. There is always (a) a world, or field of action, marked off in space and time, (b)   certain arbitrary rules which define the sorts of action possible in them. There are also, necessarily, (c) a set of actors, and (d) some goal, which motivates them, but which they are not guaranteed of being able to attain. The two models have exactly the same form.

This not only makes it easier to understand what it means to say that certain types of action are intrinsically “narrativizable”; it also provides a clue as to why such narratives can serve as such powerful instruments of ideology— that is, why they not only determine who is an actor and who is not, but make it easier for those who are not to accept this situation.

Aristotle stressed that a story is an “imitation of action,” which comes to an end when that action is resolved. It is not set in motion by characters; in fact, the characters in a story are themselves defined through what they do and what they suffer. Gallie, however, points out that while this might be true enough in the abstract, it is not at all true from the point of view of the story’s audience. For the audience, the characters always come first: because if you don’t identify with the characters, then you don’t care whether or not they achieve their goals; and if you don’t care about that, then you have no reason to follow the story in the first place. Gallie is content to leave the matter at that, but it seems to me this is exactly why narratives operate so well ideologically to naturalize arbitrary structures of power. If you care about the characters and whether they get what they’re after, you just automatically accept the field and the arbitrary rules of the game as they are handed to you. If you care whether the prince rescues the princess, you do not wonder whether there are really dragons; if you care whether one middle-aged lawyer prevails over another in a legislative contest, you do not question why legislators are always middle-aged lawyers; if you identify with the heroic goals of your leader on the stage, you do not wonder too much about who is setting up the stage, or sweeping it up afterward—even if it is you.

There is, perhaps, a second ideological effect as well, rather a subtler one. If narrative and representation really are the medium of politics, why is it almost never seen that way? I suspect that one reason has to do with the role of violence. The dramatic, suspenseful sorts of activity which I’ve said are normally marked off as male spheres of action are often violent ones as well: hunting and war are only the most obvious examples. In so far as these become the models for all action, violence comes to be seen as the exemplary form of human action. In so far as these sort of stories are cast into a larger political stage, they are usually called “heroic narrative,” which are really little more than statements of the political significance of violence and violent men.

But here is where one might say there is a kind of ideological trick going on. If words and representation are a necessary element of politics, then the emphasis on violence so typical of these stories is in its essence a way of denying this. After all, just about every other way one person has of influencing another’s actions must involve some form of symbolic mediation—whether by words or images or what-have-you. Violence is about the only way to influence another that does not require some sort of mediation. This has two effects. For one thing, it means that violence is one of the simplest forms of action to represent. Its representation requires the least psychological skill or subtlety. But more important, perhaps, by concentrating on violence as the ultimate form of politics, the narrators deny the very importance of what they are doing in telling these stories. It could even be taken as a way of disguising the actual mechanisms by which power is reproduced in the very act of its reproduction.

Second Thoughts

At this point the reader will no doubt have realized what’s going on in my own narrative. Armed with my new theory, I came to Arivonimamo, and then Betafo. But here my experience was similar to Bloch’s. The object I was prepared to study was not there. Nobody told these sorts of stories—or if they did, it was only very rarely.

This is perhaps surprising because angano, fairy tales (many almost identical in form to the Russian tales discussed by Jameson) were once quite popular (Haring 1982). They also featured a young man or woman faced with a seemingly impossible challenge, and prevailing through supernatural help, or trickery. Some even took on cosmological dimensions: obscure young men would challenge God, face him in trials and contests, steal away his daughter or win heavenly treasures such as rice to help mankind. Sometimes, when the heroes who marry daughters of God found ruling dynasties (e.g., Lombard 1976, Beaujard 1989, 1991), they became explicitly political. Stories like this are still popular in many other parts of Madagascar, but in Arivonimamo angano had come to be considered old-fashioned, childish, and rather boring, the kind of stories everyone is forced to learn in school.

Of course my theory was not primarily about formal genres. It was about informal talk, how speakers frame everyday experience to make it interesting. I spent a lot of time listening to ordinary conversations, at first, trying to make note of narrative forms. But here things were if anything even more striking. Daily narratives almost never took what might be called “intentional form.” They were never structured around some individual’s project of action, i.e., someone sets out to do something, it is not clear whether or not they will be able to, then you find out. When speaking of their own experience, narrators were much more likely to represent themselves as passive witnesses to others’ actions, implying as they did so that those others were not behaving quite as they should. Anecdotes were full of such phrases as “I didn’t do anything,” “We didn’t say a thing,” “We were just amazed.” Miadana, for instance, had a tendency to represent Betafo as a community full of madmen, with her family and perhaps a handful of other reasonable people watching in dismay and confusion, waiting for everyone else to finally calm down. But this was just an elaboration on the way most women represented men’s affairs. Men in such stories were inexplicable creatures that alternated between lazy inaction and apparently whimsical bouts of activity, driven by bizarre passions or starry-eyed projects. The one thing of which they were incapable, it was implied, was steady productive work. Since it is women who tended to make the freest recourse to narrative forms in conversation, the effect was to turn the very rhythms of action created by the division of labor between men and women—the kind which I had argued tended to define men as actors—into proof that men were silly and impractical.

The only genre of story that was organized around a protagonist and their intentional project of action were tales of transgression and retribution. My reaction at the time was to abandon the whole project; I didn’t have much time for theoretical reflection anyway in Arivonimamo, all my free time was occupied transcribing tapes. In retrospect, I think my starting point— that stories hold one’s interest through uncertainty—was reasonable enough; the problem was that I was working with far too simple a notion of where the locus of uncertainty can lie. The stories I took as my model were stories of suspense. Such stories are organized around their protagonists’ intentions: someone wants to do something; the main thing the audience doesn’t know is how (or whether) they are going to be able to pull it off. But there are many ways one can organize experience to make it interesting enough to warrant listening to. As a preliminary approximation, I might suggest three very common ones:

1. suspense: someone wants to do something: we don’t know how he or she will be able to do it.
2. mystery: something happened; we don’t know who did it, or why, or what it was.
3. reversals: someone wants to do something; we think we know what the outcome will be, but we are wrong.

No doubt a longer list of basic narrative forms could be made—but even among these three, one can detect some significant distinctions. In stories based on suspense, as I’ve remarked, the audience has to feel a certain empathy with the characters. In order for the story to hold their interest, they have to care about whether they attain their goals. In the other two they don’t. The audience identifies spontaneously because following the story places them in exactly the same situation as its characters: in mysteries, both are equally ignorant, in reversals, both are equally surprised. No leap of identification is required because, rather than turning on intentions and goals, such stories turn on knowledge. This is certainly true of Malagasy stories, which, as we shall see, tend to dwell especially on the issues of knowledge, evidence, and truth.

Anti-heroic History

My core argument so far has been that politics consists of actions taken in the knowledge that they will affect others not present when one takes them; and that political power is the ability to stop people from acting in this way. To put it less epigramatically: political actions are actions which take place on stage, in the sense that they are meant to be more widely represented. The operation of political power in society is not to be confused with politics itself. Politics as I’ve defined it is an inevitable part of human life; power, the means of its partial repression. It is the system which regulates who is to be allowed access to these stages, and who denied it. It is a matter of preventing others from acting or speaking, or preventing what they say or do from influencing others. Its ultimate sanction is usually the threat of violence.

The language of political anthropology is full of terms like “fields,” “stages,” and “arenas.” In most societies, the pinnacles of power hierarchies are marked by game-like contests, marked off from ordinary society, with their own, arbitrary, rules: what happens in these spaces will be repeated, explained, and remembered. This is partly because the decisions made within them have repercussions on the society outside. Stories about the most important contests and decisions continue to be told, illustrated, even reenacted long afterward; and this is what history, in most societies, consists of.

But in this light, the Merina historical traditions I have been outlining in the last three chapters are quite unusual.

It’s not that game-like contests do not appear in these traditions. Sometimes they do. Often, too, they are said to have had enduring effects on society. What is missing is any suggestion that they should have. Instead, they are made to seem ridiculous. When ancestors stage fights between dogs or bulls, or engage in kicking contests, when several brothers come to blows because one of them was playing with toys when he was supposed to be working, contests that lead to major historical ruptures are being represented as little better than children’s games. If these people had been behaving like adults, it never would have happened; if they hadn’t been so childishly stubborn afterward, stomping off and refusing to have anything more to do with each other, it would never have had enduring effects. This way of looking at history can genuinely be labeled “anti-heroic,” because it takes the very sort of confrontations that would elsewhere be the main theme of heroic history, and presents them as an example of the way not to behave.

All of this is apiece with the great disapproval for public confrontation. But the rejection of heroic history goes further. In historical traditions, as in ordinary conversation, there was a tendency to avoid presenting protagonists as intentional actors who actively “make history”—in the sense of imposing their will upon the world. This had a powerful effect on basic assumptions about how politics was to be conducted, because people generally did not claim authority by identifying themselves with the desires or intentions of people of the past.

Let me explain something of what I mean by this. The phrase “heroic politics” normally brings to mind visions of Homeric Greece or the world of the Icelandic sagas, or, if one is an anthropologist, perhaps, of the eighteenthcentury Maori of New Zealand (Sahlins 1985; Johansen 1954). In such societies, history is the story not only of wars, duels, and other contests, but also of oaths, alliances, betrayals, marriages and infidelity, insults and murder; people still keep track of whose grandfather ambushed whose, who stole someone else’s bride or rescued them when they were most beleaguered. As a result, the living are saddled with all sorts debts and unsettled accounts, and the political world becomes a web of personalized obligations: favors to be repaid, insults or injuries that cry out for vengeance. This sense of debt is just what’s dramatically lacking in Imerina, where no one would admit to having traditional rivals or enemies, and situations of violence or conflict—when they are not considered foolish vanity—were represented as matters of systematic oppression which do not need to be avenged, because they will avenge themselves.

Toward the end of his life, the Merina king Andrianampoinimerina is said to have made a declaration that the sea was the only border for his kingdom. By saying so, he was expressing the intention to unify the entire island of Madagascar in one kingdom. At the time, this seemed a very distant goal, since he had only very tenuous control of the highlands, and none of the coast, but it was largely realized in the reign of his son Radama. For present purposes it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether Andrianampoinimerina ever really made this famous statement, or whether Radama just said he had. The important thing is that Radama was staking a claim to authority by making himself the vehicle for realizing the unfinished projects of people of the past. Most historical traditions are full of such unfinished projects and desires. Usually the projects are embodied in some sort of institution: a constitutional system intended to guarantee certain rights, an army built up with the mission of eventually reconquering occupied territory, a political party created with the intention of restoring the monarchy, or putting state power in the hands of the proletariat. Those who wish to claim political authority do so largely by identifying themselves with the purposes of the dead.

Nowadays, though, stories like Andrianampoinimerina’s vow have been relegated to textbooks. If kings appear in oral history, they are figures like Andriantsihanika or Lailoza: either noble men who abandoned their power, or oppressors who misused it. Rarely are they seen as the founders of political institutions; more often, they are seen as having put an end to them. Certainly they do not embody purposes which others seek to realize.

Descent group founders are a partial exception. Descent groups are enduring institutions of a sort—and many people claim communal authority by identifying themselves with ancestral purposes, at least, in the so far as ancestors want their names be remembered, and the groups they founded to endure. The stories told about them are the closest one is likely to find to heroic narrative. At least they do act intentionally: they set out to migrate to a different part of the country, then they do so. Granted, there is very little drama in these stories (when there is, it’s usually covered up); but still, their actions are remembered, and those memories are seen as an active force which gives shape to contemporary society.

Earlier I argued that the emphasis on violence in heroic narratives has an ideological effect, in that it obscures up the role of representation—including narrative itself—in political affairs. While stories about the foundation of demes contain little violence, they do something similar by denying the existence of a wider society in which deeds can be reported. The protagonists move through an apparently uninhabited landscape; while they are often said to have brought along a family or entourage, the latter usually play no role in the action, most of the time, it’s as if they don’t exist. This is true even in stories about cursing, where the use of passive voice often makes it hard to figure out who is actually pronouncing the curse: the founder dies of overeating, the story says, and then “his descendants were cursed never to eat peanuts.” By whom? His wife? His children? We’re never told. In so far as these ancestral figures exist in relation to a larger society, in so far as they say and do things that have affects on other people, it is not contemporaries, but people not yet born.

Consider too stories about how the founders of a community gathered together to raise a “stone of imprecations” at which to conduct ordeals. These are indeed stories about social interaction, even political action, and they concern the creation of enduring political institutions. But they contain a different sort of ideological trick. When people talk about these stones nowadays, they do not like to dwell on the ongoing institutional aspects. In fact, most do their best to avoid the entire subject of ordeals. Instead, they usually talk as if ancestral intentions—to maintain a moral community free of evil-doers—had become a power inherent in the stone itself. Why are thieves unable to live here? They are driven off by the power of the stone. Ancestral desires have become a form of invisible hasina. This too is a very common pattern.

I have already described how nineteenth-century medicine could be thought of as the intentions or desires of their creators, externalized and translated into concrete form. These were often political desires. Royal sampy, for example, preserved the desire to unify a kingdom, to protect it against its enemies. This logic has by no means disappeared. In fact it is crucial to understand contemporary politics, because in rural Imerina, a great deal of the most significant political action is carried out through the medium of medicine, and talk about it. The same is true of history. When past intentions are seen as having an effect on the present-day inhabitants of Betafo, it is largely in the form of objects that were given hasina long ago.

Part 2: Lost Intentions; or, Stories about Trees ana Objects

It is interesting to reconsider my analysis of ody and sampy in chapter 2, in the light of what I’ve had to say about political action and its mystification. Hasina, I argued, did not arise of its own accord, it had to be created by intentional human action. Often, like “stones of imprecation” it must be dedicated by an oath, which is both a public declaration of intent, and an act of collective agreement. “Until the pledge of allegiance is given” an ody was “nothing but a piece of wood to them.” Coins were given as an act of agreement to royal rule. Always, there was some agreement or consensus; always too, an emphasis on the power of words. Persuasive words were themselves a form of hasina. Even the powers of the elements of which an ody is composed are derived not from their forms so much as from their names.

All of this implies a kind of social theory. One way to phrase this would be to say that hasina is an intention or desire that can only be realized by being, first, agreed to—socially recognized—and then, embodied in an exterior object (a piece of wood, a silver ornament . . .) that represents it in some way. By carrying out the ritual and objectifying one’s intentions through these means, one attains the power to produce effects which extend far beyond the context of the ritual. This would seem then to be a perfect case of what I’ve been calling political action.

From one perspective, magical action might seem one of the purest forms of political action, because it can only have effects on others in so far as someone hears about it, or otherwise learns that it has happened. Unless you happen to believe that, say, secretly rubbing bits of wood on a man’s picture really can cause him to fall madly in love with you, it is clear that such actions can only have effects in so far as word gets around that you have done so. In fact, except perhaps for certain acts of representation themselves (speaking, writing, illustrating . . .) magical action is the only kind that might be said to consist of a null set; it does nothing in the physical context of its enactment, but only in so far as it enters a broader, more political context of narration, discussion, and report.

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