Materialism and Idealism

The analysis presented above accords primacy neither to ideology nor to economics. The insistence on considering equally both religious belief and social structure springs from the conviction that both the ideal and the material have irreducible roles in human history. Few benefits are to be gained from jumping on either side of this hoary divide, a leap that recent social theory shows an increasing reluctance to make. For Marcus and Fischer (1986:85), "any materialist-idealist distinction between political economy and interpretive approaches is simply not supportable"; for Mann (1986: 19), the long-standing debate between the two has become a "ritual without hope and an end" (see also Errington 1989:296). As Stephen Toulmin (1990) so brilliantly shows, the current task is

precisely to rejoin such dichotomized oppositions sundered by Descartes and maintained in separation by over three hundred years of stultifying, modernist thought.

At present, most scholars interested in economic transformations on the margins of the world economy still rally to the banner of materialism. Here, at least, the heirs of Marx and Comte stand together. Even those who most insightfully probe the interactions of structures and ideas usually vow fidelity to the materialist cause, as no charge appears to be more deadly than that of idealism.^[4]

But I would argue that we would be better off not merely suspending this debate, but rejecting the notion that the two terms can be separated at all. Even when confining oneself strictly to economics one must confront the ineffable and purely ideal premises and trust upon which the entire modern financial edifice rests.

So too in Buguias: ideology and economy, faith and work, discourse and production—these are terms that cannot be disentangled and assigned relative priority. To expend our energies on such futile gestures is indeed to perpetuate a ritual without hope or an end.