It is relatively often argued that anthropology was the handmaiden of colonialism, and ultimately oppressive of the peoples it studied.
I am not so sure about this.
By far the majority of turn of last Century field anthropologists seem not to have been explicitly racist in intention. It seems to me that much of their work is based on the idea that colonists/invaders should leave indigenous people alone, as they had working societies, and that Western intrusion messed things up.
However, their work can be implicitly racist. They lived in racist colonialist societies – this was unavoidable. The chance of anyone completely escaping that complex was remote. Their cultural background, while it enabled them to see things that locals ignored, also blinded them to things that locals would consider vital. So they were unable to perceive some events, and this distorted what they did. The anthropologists’ values (ideas of good etc) may also not be compatible with the ruling local ideas of what was good. Thus they may have criticized local powers, or seen things local powers would prefer to ignore, and those local powers then tried to defend themselves and argue that the anthropologist was racist because they did not understand the necessary virtues of the ruling class. I’m not saying either side was right here.
The anthropologist was also generally able to study because of the colonial power and commercial mechanisms which attempted to dominate the field site and this must have affected the response they got from locals. Too many anthropologists ignored this fact (partly again I think to try and reconstruct pre-colonial life as a working whole that did not need imperialism to perfect). It is certainly possible that some anthropologists acted as spies, and hoped to gain permanent work and status with the colonial authorities, but I don’t know of any evidence suggesting this was a common career path, or produced specially distorted accounts of heathen savagery – they were not missionaries. However, I’ve known too many people not get back from the field completely intact, to think that colonialism always provided protection after the 1970s….
Anthropologists also had to report their ‘findings’ in ways which were approved by other anthropologists, colonial officials or what have you. It would be unlikely that anyone could get a book published saying “I did not understand anything here”, although some of the early US bureau of ethnography laundry list reports are pretty close to being random collections of stuff with little attempt to make sense of it, beyond translation. The requirement for sense making would also have made a huge impact on what was reported, and what was understood and what was noticeable elsewhere.
It is impossible to do research outside of one’s cultural and political milieu, we can only do the best that is possible at the time, and dialogue between the ‘studier’ and those being ‘studied’ is vital to comprehension of any kind, so the Indian responses, (to take an example) are important. At least, in general, the anthropologist was put in a position where they had to learn from some of those they studied, as they probably did not come into the field with a local language or local customs. They had to talk with locals and could not live without some learning from them. Statistical sociologists could completely avoid that.
So while things were not exactly perfect, on the whole, I think most anthropologists did the best they could for the people involved, within the usual patterns of knowledge distortion and failure.
Tags: Disinformation, knowledge
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