====== Week 7—Anthropology, imperialism, and epistemic domination ======

===== Week 7—Anthropology, imperialism, and epistemic domination =====

**Main reading:** Simpson (2014)

**Other reading:** Shah (2007); Cohn (1987); Chatterjee (1998); Chatterjee (2011)

This week’s topic takes us away from the abstract ideas we’ve been discussing so far and allows us to come at our main questions from a different angle.

Societies are not “static, primtive isolate[s]” (Wolf 1984). To write an ethnography in this way is to deny the self-evident fact that the observer and the object of observation are (1) both people, and both capable of thinking and reflection, and (2) part of a shared social space, and not separated by a permanent boundary.

Ultimately we must conclude that anthropology is part of the world that it describes.

  * What happens when social observers deny that they coexist with the people they observe?
  * What do observers owe to the people they observe, and the wider community of humanity?

===== References =====

Chatterjee, Partha. 1998. “Community in the East.” //Economic and Political Weekly// 33 (6): 277–82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4406377.


———. 2011. “Lineages of Political Society.” In //Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy//, 1–26. New York: Columbia University Press.


Cohn, Bernard S. 1987. “The census, social structure, and objectification in South Asia.” In //An anthropologist among the historians and other essays//, 224–54. Delhi: Oxford University Press.


Shah, Alpa. 2007. “The Dark Side of Indigeneity?: Indigenous People, Rights and Development in India.” //History Compass// 5 (6): 1806–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00471.x.


Simpson, Audra. 2014. “Constructing Kahnawà:ke as an ‘Out-of-the-Way’ Place: Ely S. Parker, Lewis Henry Morgan, and the Writing of the Iroquois Confederacy.” In //Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States//. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376781.


Wolf, Eric R. 1984. “Culture: Panacea or Problem?” //American Antiquity// 49 (2): 393–400. http://www.jstor.org/stable/280026.



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