“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, “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”.” (Foucault 1980:93, quoted in Lansing 1991:130). And from a bit farther left, the work of Antonio Gramsci has allowed anthropologists to locate this social phenomenon outside Western tradition 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).
At this point power begins to seem a great deal like culture itself, to which Clifford
Geertz (1973:90) attaches sufficient existential importance to include it within his definition of religion, that system of symbols, values and motivations that we take for granted as uniquely real. 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.
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.
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, as with Geertz above, 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 our 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. 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 the way people do use it in their own society (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 20 th 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. I will conclude the article with an the application of this idea, 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), 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). In one wing of poststructuralist 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 faithfully 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 know the difference between the infinite number of things we don’t say and do because they remain undistinguished 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 rather than individuals 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 one direction, has already done a lot with this method using the central concept of mode of production, in which different modes of production are characterized by different fundamental characteristic relationships, 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 kin-ordered mode, lord and peasant in the feudal mode, and so on.
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 20 th 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, 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). 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 20 th
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 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 (1868-1914) cast money in a new light. The modern role of housewife becomes recognizable with the emergence of a white collar class in the late 19 th
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
[19 th
] 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 mishandled. 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.”
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 rest in any event 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 in Japan 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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Abstract:
While the “essentially contested concept” power is used uniformly to identify an observable, naturally occurring social phenomenon for social science explanations, the present article demonstrates 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 as the basic unit of observation and concludes with an application to Japanese gender relations.
Robert C Marshall
Department of Anthropology
Western Washington University
USA