Anthropology Of Colonialism Research Paper

Anthropological self-consciousness of colonialism, that is, of colonialism as a distinctive problem for an-thropological knowledge and anthropological practice, begins roughly in the 1970s. In the early years of that decade two edited volumes appeared dealing with anthropology’s relation to the social and political world of which it was a part. One came out of the tradition of US cultural anthropology, Reinventing Anthropology edited by Hymes (1972); and the other out of the tradition of British social anthropology, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter edited by Asad (1973). Both collections perceived the discipline to be in serious crisis; and both were radical in the sense that they were explicitly concerned to subject that crisis to a fundamental self-scrutiny.

Hymes’s volume urged that the social and political conditions in which anthropology had emerged as a professional academic discipline in the US at the turn of the twentieth century had, by the late 1960s, significantly altered. First, there was the overwhelming fact that with political decolonization there was a fundamental change in the conditions in which field-work could be conceived and undertaken. At the same time, the relation between the US government and the Third World (as the colonized or recently decolonized part of humanity came to be called from the 1950s) had given rise to troubling moral-political questions about the state of the anthropological enterprise. In particular, US involvement in attempted counter-insurgency in Latin America, and the role of anthropologists as cultural experts in the war in Indochina, served to pose the question of the relationship between ‘objectivity’ of ethnographic data and political interest in a very acute way (see Stocking 1991). What place would anthropology have in raising fundamental questions about injustice and inequality in the world it inhabited, and what was its role in trying to transform that world? Was anthropology to be employed as an instrument of Western domination or as a means of liberation? Moreover, the publication of Malinowski’s field diaries in 1967 and the revelation of his barely veiled racism further focussed attention on the ethics of the relation between ethnographer and informant.

In this context, the challenge Reinventing Anthropology sought to pose was whether the discipline would be able to transform—to reinvent—itself in a way that reflected the demands for political account-ability, ethical concern, and critical social commitment on the part of anthropologists. Two strains in US anthropology inspired the volume’s contributions: one—reflected especially in the articles by Hymes and Stanley Diamond—was the radical Boasian tradition in the work of people like Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Paul Radin, who thought of anthropology as a reflexive critique of civilization. The other strain—reflected in Eric Wolf’s contribution—was a post-World War II Marxism (much influenced by the cultural-evolutionary materialism of Julian Steward) which was concerned to highlight the plight of peasant societies caught in the juggernaut of capitalist imperialism.

The intellectual tradition of British social anthropology has of course a very different historical context than US cultural anthropology, one far more intimately interconnected with the subordination, management and rule of colonial subjects. Not surprisingly, then, the concerns of Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter were somewhat differently inflected than those of Hymes’s volume. To be sure, they shared a concern that since World War II fundamental changes had occurred in the world inhabited by social anthropology. The emergence of new nations, especially in Africa where much British social anthropological fieldwork was carried out— Sudan (1956), Ghana (1957), Nigeria (1960)—made it increasingly difficult to avoid the pertinence of a more historical approach that brought the larger political and economic system of colonialism into view. And in consequence it was increasingly difficult not to be critical (as indeed Edmund Leach was in a limited way) of the ahistorical functionalism and empiricism that characterized British anthropological theorizing.

In the middle 1960s, New Left critics had in fact launched an attack on British social anthropology. And part of the project of Asad’s volume was to respond to these and other radical claims, not simply to affirm or deny them, but to more adequately specify and formulate them. There was a sense that perhaps, while undeniable, the relation between colonialism and social anthropology was more complicated than was allowed by the polemical tone of accusation and disavowal. In her contribution, for example, Wendy James argued that the very existence of social anthropology in the colonial period constituted a source of potential radical criticism of the colonial order, and she sought to provide a more nuanced account of Malinowski’s own active social reformism during the interwar years. Stephan Feuchtwang, in his contribution, discussed the relation between the social and institutional conditions of British anthropology and the knowledges it produced. In an allied way, Asad examined ‘objectifications’ of colonial power produced in two authoritative domains of systematic knowledge—the functionalist anthropology of Africa and Islamic orientalism. Asad was concerned to understand the connections between these different images of rule (one largely of ‘consent,’ the other largely of ‘repression’), their ideological roots, and conceptual consequences.

In subsequent decades, the anthropological pre-occupation with colonialism has tended to be largely (if not solely) a phenomenon of the US academy. At any rate, in the 1980s there was a gradual shift away from the concern with the role of the discipline in the colonial imperial enterprise and the politics of its practitioners, toward a concern with colonial forms of knowledge about non-European worlds. The register in which the problem of colonialism for anthropology was conceived was now less a political than an epistemological one. Or rather, linking power and knowledge, colonialism was now conceived as a problem of (in the language of the day) the politics of representation. This shift has many interconnected sources. I shall only be able to touch on a few of the more salient ones.

At one level, of course, the shift is connected to the decline of anti-imperialism and anticolonialism as going politico-ideological concerns. On the one hand, beginning with the end of the Vietnam War and accelerating through the years of Ronald Reagan’s US Presidency there is a marked decline in the First World intelligentsia’s interest in revolutionary change in the Third World. On the other hand, in the Third World itself there is a decline (indeed a rapid unraveling) of the experiments with radical social transformation in many of the independent countries of South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. At another level this shift was connected to a number of in-tellectual transformations in the understanding and practice of the human sciences. Very broadly speaking, these may be characterized in terms of a general drift away from the determinism (Leslie White, Julian Steward) and functionalism (Radcliffe-Brown) of post-war anthropology and toward a social cultural constructionism. Principal among these transformations was the so-called ‘turn to meaning’ in social and cultural analysis. In many ways, of course, the work of Geertz (1973) embodied—indeed, helped to constitute—this constructionist moment. In his work, culture came to be understood as a web of semiotic processes or relations, and cultural analysis as a practice less of uncovering determinate causes, or of explaining functions, as of deciphering meanings. Two features of this anthropology are of special importance here: one is that its criticism of objectivism brought about a renewed sensitivity to ‘the native’s point of view’ and ‘local knowledges’; and the other is that the critique of positivist social science led to a greater openness to interdisciplinarity, to literature and his-tory in particular (Geertz’s famous ‘blurring of genres’).

This work, in turn, set the stage for the emergence in the 1980s of an interest in the textuality of eth-nographic description and analysis, in the senses in which these are artifacts of language—hence, in their way, literary—and therefore open to an investigation of their rhetorical and poetic structures (Clifford and Marcus 1986). How is ethnographic authority constructed? What are the linguistic devices that enable anthropological representations to produce their distinctive ‘realistic’ effects? Some of this work sought explicitly to reconceive the task of a critical anthropology (Marcus and Fischer 1986).

This preoccupation with modes of representation in social and cultural analysis was, in part at least, the context for the rise of what would come to be called colonial studies. An interdisciplinary field (drawing largely on literary critics, anthropologists, and historians), colonial studies would help to institutionalize the renewed scholarly focus on colonialism. The central inspiring text here was Said’s Orientalism (1978). Borrowing in some measure from the middle work of Foucault (1979), this book thematized the idea of colonialism as a discursive formation. Said set out to demonstrate the ways in which, in the (especially French and British) colonial discourse of orientalism, the Orient was invented. The Orient, therefore, was less a geo-political location than a figure in the cultural-political imagination of the West. Orientalism opened up a rich vein of research and a critical demand to interrogate the West’s authoritative discourses on the non-West—anthropology chief among them—and to unmask the ways in which they produced and reproduced their hegemonic knowledges. Interestingly Said himself (1988) would later express doubts about the value and future of a discipline so deeply implicated in the making of such hegemonic knowledge.

One anthropological work that drew together some of these themes—though in a way less pessimistic about the possibility of a revised anthropological enterprise—was Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983). The subtitle of the work was significant: How Anthropology Makes its Object. It focussed attention precisely on the ‘constructedness’ of anthropological discourse, specifically on the uses of Time in anthropology’s constitution of its object (the savage, the primitive, the native, the Other). Fabian sought to show how the existential copresence of the Other in the dialogical interaction of ethnographic fieldwork gets transformed into a temporal distancing—what he called a denial of coevalness or cotemporality—in the theoretical construction of authoritative anthropological knowledge. This ‘conjuring trick’ served perpetually to consign the native to a temporal zone outside of the Time of anthropology, which is to say the privileged Time of the West. It is easy to see that the lessons of Fabian’s book are wider than the issue of temporality alone. What it demonstrated was that unless anthropology subjects its own discourse to critical scrutiny, unless it pays attention to the conceptual assumptions that go into the making of its objects, it is liable to reproduce colonial knowledge. Other work would later seek to extend and develop this inquiry into the formation of anthropological objects (see Scott 1994).

Another set of anthropological concerns with colonialism in the 1980s was more closely connected to the antinomies of Marxism. The defeat of the communist project in Western Europe after 1920 had given rise to a strain of Marxism (soon to be called Western Marxism) focussed on what had hitherto been dis-missed as superstructural issues. Marginalized until the rise of the New Left in the 1960s, this strain became more prominent in the 1970s, especially in the North Atlantic academy. Antonio Gramsci’s theorization of hegemony, Louis Althusser’s reconceptualization of ideology as representation, and Raymond Williams’s displacement of the base superstructure model for the analysis of literature (and cultural production more generally) offered less reductionistic critical languages in which to situate social and cultural life in relation to capitalism. An interest in rethinking the problem of the articulation of modes of production, and of precapitalist (and precolonial) formations was one direction of Marxist work that had actually begun earlier. But in another direction, folded into the anthropological concern with local knowledges and finite histories, this cultural Marxism offered the prospect of an antiuniversalistic account of hitherto invisible idioms of resistance to dominant power (including, of course, globalizing capital), and of hitherto unacknowledged forms of (often informal) agency in the quotidian making of histories. In their very titles, James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak (1985), and Jean Comaroff’s Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance (1985), offer exemplification of this interest in the anthropology of anticolonial resistance.

Throughout the 1980s history was becoming a site of profound scholarly preoccupation. Indeed within the discipline of history itself there was already a growing interest in the intersection of modes of cultural and historical representation. Work in feminist history, in particular, helped to reformulate relations between power, difference, and representation. But perhaps the most significant contribution to the argument for more than a nodding relationship between anthropology and history—and this too on the terrain of colonialism—has been the pioneering work of Cohn (1987). Cohn’s essays were only brought together in 1987, under the title, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays, but from the early 1960s he had been urging the theorization of the intersection of history and anthropology. In a number of wide-ranging essays on British India—from concerns with the formation of historical, legal, and statistical modes of colonial knowledge, to an interest in ritualized representations of political authority— Cohn demonstrated that historical analysis of colonial rule was indispensable for anthropological under-standing. This work inspired a number of innovative studies in the historical anthropology of colonial India (among them Dirks 1987). Significantly too, India was the conceptual and intellectual-political site of another important contribution to the debate about history for an anthropology of colonialism—the Subaltern Studies Collective’s re-interrogation of liberal and nationalist accounts of colonial rule in India and the anti-colonial struggle against it (Guha 1984). Trans-disciplinary in perspective, the work of the Collective resonated with the anthropological discontent with universalism and Eurocentrism and its interest in the agency of non-dominant idioms, knowledges, and practices.

In the 1990s one can discern another shift in the questions driving the anthropology of colonialism. These new questions turn less on the textuality of colonial representation or the agency of resistance than on the problematization of the relationship between colonialism and modernity, and the implications of this relationship for understanding the postcolonial present (Asad 1991, 1992, Scott 1997). The profoundly epochal sense attending the fin de siecle, the sense of a crisis of modernity (and for some, an emerging postmodernity), has made for a growing preoccupation with a re-examination of the formation of the modern world and its moral, epistemic and political modes of legitimization. Much of this re-historicizing work has sought to criticize the progressivist story of modernization.

There are several dimensions to this anthropological preoccupation with colonialism and modernity. One of the earliest has been the concern with the problem of nation and nationalism. There had of course been an older multidisciplinary interest in nations and nationalisms, namely, the ‘new nations’ projects of the early 1960s. These studies were primarily concerned with inquiring into the modernizing and democratizing challenges facing the newly independent nation-states. However, two books more than any others reopened and significantly reshaped the debate about the nation: Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983), and Ander-son’s Imagined Communities (1983). Each was focussed differently, but they were both inspired by the problem of the relation between nation nationalism and modernity. If the ‘new nations’ work tended teleologically to take nationhood as a normal developmental threshold, what Gellner and Anderson foregrounded was the idea that nations were not natural entities nor nationalisms primordial sentiments or ideologies. Both, they argued, were profoundly historical, and that historical character, moreover, owed most to the making of the modern world.

Gellner and Anderson would both be criticized for their emphasis on the modernity of nations and nationalisms, but it was precisely this connection that those interested in colonialism were concerned to explore. Anticolonial nationalisms and the making of postcolonial sovereignties clearly had a very complex—and as yet, perhaps, unresolved—relation to the modernizing project of late colonialism. In this regard the decisive work was Chatterjee’s seminal book, Nationalism and the Colonial World, originally published in 1986 but becoming influential in debates from the early 1990s. A noticeable feature of this work was its interdisciplinarity, and especially the place of anthropology (as the authoritative discourse on Europe’s Others) within it. While indebted to Said’s Orientalism for its opening deconstructive move, Chatterjee undertook a sustained examination of anthropological assumptions (e.g., about rationality) undergirding the distinction between Western and non-Western nationalisms.

Connected to this focus on rethinking the relations between modernity and nation, has been the renewed attention given to the problem of modern colonial power generally, and the colonial state in particular. Especially important here has been the later work of Foucault on governmentality (1991) that raised the question of the place of the state in a larger and much transformed understanding of power. Questioning a deeply influential tradition of social and political analysis owing much to both Marx and Weber, Foucault’s concept of governmentality sought to think (conceptually) about a field of power in which the state was not the central analytical domain; and (historically) about a concrete moment in European history when political power becomes more dispersed, less dependent upon the institutions of coercion. This concept opened up the possibility of reconceiving the questions through which the problem of colonial power was formulated. Where modernization narratives (liberal or Marxist) had plotted a story of the progressive rationalization of the state (the more or less of power; the counter-positioning of power and freedom), what now emerged was the possibility of a story of colonial power told in terms of the political rationalities by which it was organized. The point here was to urge an historicization in which the emergence of a colonial rationality of government (i.e., a form of colonial power directed at transforming conditions so as to produce effects on colonial conduct) could come more sharply into view. And the significance of this is that this rationality is central to the making of our postcolonial worlds (see Scott 1999).

There have been critics, of course, who are skeptical about this thematization of governmentality in the anthropology of colonialism. The more sympathetic of them argue that neither the old master-narrative of progress and modernization nor the new Foucauldian revisionism are adequate because neither appreciates the inherent doubleness of colonial rule. The essential paradox of the colonial state, it is argued, is that it was always caught between two principal imperatives— ruling subjects and making citizens—and, therefore, always moved simultaneously in two directions: co-ercion and civilization. The crucial hinge on which this doubleness hung was the colonial language of law and legality (Comaroff 1998). In a related direction some critics have been concerned that the whole relation between metropole and colony has been ill-conceived (Cooper and Stoler 1997). The worry here is the assumption among many students of empire of a Manichaeism that sees the problem of colonialism as a binary—colonizer colonized—one. These critics argue that, to the contrary, the conception of an encounter between an empty colony simply remade by Europe and a Europe that remains ever unmarked by its empire is untenable. They urge a view that places metropole and colony in a single (if internally differentiated) analytical field, and focuses precisely on the multiple tensions—inclusions exclusions, hierarchies, reversals, etc.—through which Europe and its empire were (unevenly and asymmetrically) co-constructed.

Since its emergence as a distinctive theme in anthropology in the 1970s, the problematization of colonialism has been thought of as part of an orientation towards the present at least as much as, if not more than, the past. In this sense there has always been about it an animating ethos of criticism—whether criticism of our worlds or criticism of our disciplines. The anthropological problem about the colonial past, in other words, has been connected to raising critical questions about the postcolonial present: it is part of the making of a distinctively postcolonial anthropology. However this connection and its implications have been more often assumed than systematically thought out. Consequently, anthropology has been less concerned than it might, not merely about the ways in which understandings of the colonial past are conditioned by contemporary ‘scenes of inquiry,’ but more importantly about the ways in which a self-consciousness about alterations in the latter ought strategically to alter the kinds of questions we pursue about the nature of the former. The point, then, is that for anthropological criticism to have purchase on the present it is not enough to insist that the purview of colonial studies be enlarged (to encompass Europe, for instance, or gender, or the state), it is necessary to specify the domain of contemporary questions that are being addressed in so doing. This is the only way to gauge the extent to which our critical exercises are meeting a contemporary demand as opposed to simply expanding an already established cognitive field.

This is the challenge. It is an important challenge because the crisis upon which the formerly colonized world entered in the 1980s and 1990s (unlike those of the 1960s and 1970s) is a crisis not merely of policy orientations or development options or even ideological alternatives. It is a crisis of the legitimacy of the modern modernizing assumptions that have undergirded the very making of these colonial and postcolonial societies and polities (assumptions, for example, about the relation between culture and politics; between nation and sovereignty; between individual rights and historical traditions, and so on). Our conjuncture, in short, is shifting. And therefore, if it is to more adequately theorize the relation between the problem–space in which it produces knowledge and the questions through which it does so, the anthropology of colonialism has to attend more systematically to the changing contours and character of this postcolonial present and its crisis.

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