The term ‘ideology’ has a history going back to the late eighteenth century. In politics and sociology it has been used in a great variety of meanings, but as far as anthropology is concerned only two senses of the term are important.
The first use of the term refers to the system of social and moral ideas of a group of people; in this sense ideology is contrasted with "practice. In this usage, ideology is close to ‘culture’, except that it suggests a necessary coherence which means that an ideology, in this sense, can be formulated as a set of interlinked propositions. The best example of such a use in anthropology is to be found in the work of "Louis Dumont. In his topic on caste, Homo Hierarchicus (1970 [1966]) he talks of the governing ideology of Indian social systems as focused on the concepts of pollution and purity. In a later topic, Homo Aequalis, which bears the subtitle ‘Genesis and development of the economic ideology’ he contrasts Hindu ideology to modern Western ideology, centred as it is on the irredu-cibility of the individual. C. Geertz, in an article entitled ‘Ideology as a Cultural System’, defines ideology as ‘maps of problematic social realities and matrices for the creation of social conscience’ (1973: 220). For him, ideology is a part of culture concerned with a representation of the social and a commitment to central values. He is particularly interested in those social conditions under which coherent ideologies are formulated.
The other use of the term ‘ideology’ in anthropology is inspired by Marxism, although Marx’s own use of the word was somewhat inconsistent (Bloch 1983). The best example of the concept in this tradition can be drawn from Capital. The aim of the topic is to show how the capitalist system is exploitative in that it transfers the fruit of the work of the majority, the workers, to a minority, the capitalists. If this is so the question of why the workers put up with this state of affairs then arises. One answer could be physical coercion, but although that is certainly present, it is not a sufficient explanation since the workers are not menaced by soldiers at all times. Marx’s answer to this puzzle is ideology. A representation of the economy is present, no doubt favoured by those who benefit from it but partly accepted by all, which makes the whole system appear fair. It works in the following way. The basis of the system is the fact that the means of production are unequally divided so that some people, the capitalists, control them and others, the workers, do not. This unequal distribution is seen as beyond question, natural, the God-given right to private property (as it says in the American Constitution). This unequal distribution having been taken for granted, attention, by contrast, is focused on the market, especially the market for wages, where workers can exchange their labour ‘freely’ for the right to receive a part of the product which is obtained through the coming together of capital and labour. The rate of exchange is the wage which is determined, apparently, by the quasi-mechanical, therefore natural, operation of supply and demand. Rather as a conjuror is able to perform tricks by making the audience pay attention to the non-essential, the image of a relation of capitalists and workers as non-exploitative and simply inevitable is created by diverting attention away from the allocation of the means of production to the market. Such a representation is ideological.
A number of anthropologists have attempted to carry over this type of analysis onto more familiar anthropological terrain. Thus Terray (1975) explains how a small group of people, the Abron, who ruled over a much larger subject population in nineteenth- and twentieth-century West Africa, maintained their power without disposing of overwhelming physical force. Terray shows how the Abron, at the time of their initial conquest, systematically destroyed all the traditional legal and peacemaking institutions of the conquered people and then established a system of courts manned only by Abrons which settled disputes among their subjects. The Abron were therefore able to appear as ideologically necessary and indeed beneficial by shifting attention from their destructive activities to their peacemaking. Consequently it could seem only right that they should receive tribute in labour and produce. In this analysis we have all the traditional elements of a Marxist analysis of ideology. The ideological representation serves to legitimate the exploitative position of a ruling class. It does that by hiding, but not falsifying, the real situation by an ideology which is powerful because it appears natural and inevitable.
There are a number of objections to such a theory. The first is that it makes ideology a kind of plot thought up by the ruling class to mystify the subjects – but this is unlikely. First of all, in these examples, the rulers seem just as taken in by ideology as their subjects, so they can hardly be consciously misleading others. Second, it is not clear how such ideas are propagated so that they become generally accepted. An attempt to answer these questions was made by the philosopher L. Althusser (1977) who argued that ideology is created as part of the historical process in a way which makes its construction, at least in part, beyond anybody’s intentionality. He also argued that it is propagated by what he called ‘ideological state apparatuses’ such as the family, the church, the school and various forms of ritual. In modern societies, the school and the family are most important, in others it is religion. An attempt to translate some of Althusser’s ideas into anthropology is found in Bloch’s From Blessing to Violence (1986).
The other problem with the Marxist notion of ideology is that ideology’s place in relation to other forms of knowledge is unclear; indeed, what would be the source of alternative theories of society? A number of anthropologists and historians have stressed that studies should pay attention to understanding the situation from the point of view of the oppressed, emphasizing subaltern perspectives rather than merely examining ideology (Guha 1982). Others have looked more theoretically at the issue, and have discussed the sources of non-ideological consciousness which would make it possible for ideology to be resisted in the right circumstances (Godelier 1984).
