Materialism and Ideology

The phenomenon I am most interested in exploring is the ideology that produces and justifies the place of men’s and women’s work in Bangladeshi rural society. Here, Clifford Geertz serves as my main inspiration. Speaking of the significance of symbolism to explain ideology, Geertz proclaims, “believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning”[1] In the Bangladeshi context, I argue that there are competing cultures of work and competing ideologies associated with all these cultures, all seeking hegemony over the modern Bangladeshi rural subject. I would like to emphasize three main poles of interest in this regard: religion (Islam and to a lesser extent Hinduism), Bangladeshi nationalism (its variants and oppositions sparked by the War of Liberation), and the emergence of liberal capitalism (with its natural companion, the transnational NGO). What are the symbols that are produced by each of these phenomena and how are they interpreted by specific individuals? How do the following seek to mobilize the labor of men and women in the countryside and in doing so, produce ideologies about men’s and women’s work? These are the questions that I will use to define the subtleties interlinking the dialectical relationship between “cultural spaces” and “work roles” that I have defined in the introduction.

If, in a libratory move, Geertz himself allows the anthropologist to wield ethnographic data in a fashion much akin to a literary theorist, to examine meaning making, his legacy nevertheless (I do not argue Geertz himself directly endorses this; he is much more subtle than his followers) points to an aversion of tackling issues of power and ideology as stated in the Marxist traditions. It is true that vulgar materialism and determinism derived from Marx himself has not stood the test of time or the postmodern backlash. But recent developments suggest that it may be useful to resurrect a more subtle Marx, as issues of power and hegemony nevertheless still affect the material conditions of people, regardless of intellectual fashion. This “de-vulgarization” of Marx of course started with the Frankfurt school’s treatment of bourgeois ideology, and has continued to influence (very) current experiments to view Marx through Hegel (see Zizek’s new book Less than Nothing: Shadows of a Dialectical Materialism).

So, my own drawings on Marx will depend on two very simple axioms: that culture is produced due to material conditions, but however, culture can also become its own being to in turn influence material conditions. The notion that some of culture is shaped by people in power is also one few would contest. In this respect, I wish to use the base and superstructure in a more dialectical fashion, where the base itself has the power to effect the superstructure. People, even if indirectly, do speak to their leaders and the leaders sometimes listen. People also, however, often feel alienated when they are told what to do. Who frames the very preconditions of this exchange is one of the fundamental Marxist questions.  

Much of the criticism of Marx made by the legacies left by anthropologists like Geertz and Evans-Prichard draws from the fact that, paradoxically, Marxist thought does not leave enough room for the voices of the people that it is seeking to emancipate, and that often Marxist thought is debated in university departments without being sufficiently grounded in the realities of lived experiences. Hopefully, my modest endeavors will prove useful in bridging the gap between people’s articulations and interpretations of their own societies and Marxist theory, which, with all its detractors, has offered the some of the most robust tools to understand the lives of working people. I believe it has the potential to do so even in the realm of symbols and ideology, as the legacy of Gramsci demonstrates, even if it needs to draw on the power of interpretive anthropology to sufficiently localize and focus on the lived experiences of the people it seeks to study.

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[1] Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. 2000 ed. New York: Basic, 1973. Print. p. 5