Table of Contents
How can we decolonize the study of difference?
How can we decolonize the study of difference?
Ryan Schram
ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building 410 (A02)
Week of May 09, 2022 (Week 11)
Slides available at http://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2022/11
Main reading: Bamford (2004)
Is anthropology a form of colonialism?
According to Shah (2007), the 1901 and 1931 censuses of British India are major sources for the official sense of the category of tribe (see also Fuller 2016, 2017).
They were designed by “anthropologists,” or so they said:
- Herbert Hope Risley created the 1901 census, and this and other bureaucratic records of the colonial population were based on his understanding of racial differences.
- John Henry Hutton created the 1931 census. He has a more credible claim to being an anthropologist. He was appointed as a professor of anthropology at Cambridge, so some anthropologists must have thought he was OK. But even in his own day he was out of step, and relied on an evolutionary framework for human social and cultural differences.
Insofar as Risley and Hutton’s censuses count and sort people into categories that they designed, then their “anthropology” is purely an etic perspective.
Does a census create an imagined community?
In a revised edition of Imagined Communities, Anderson says that the census, the map, and the museum are three core tools of colonial power, and three seeds of a future national consciousness (Anderson [1983] 2006, chap. 10). But why?
- Answers to a census question about identity are exonyms by definition.
- A colonial census sorts people of one territory into many small categories of identity. A national imagined community is based on a mass population and a normative standard of a dominant culture.
- Colonial censuses tend to place different communal identities on a scale from primitive to civilized (see Risley and Hutton).
- Anderson seems to suggest that any modern postcolonial nation would also see itself as a colonizer of some marginalized communities inside of itself.
If an imagined community of a nation inherits a conceptual framework from colonial knowledge, then so too does anthropology.
Thinking like a census taker
Anthropology today does not have any vestige of racial theories or evolutionary types. It instead frames difference in a lens of cultural relativism.
Anthropology learns from the ground up, like a child being taught by a parent. But every anthropologist will always filter what they observe through categories they already possess. Everyone does that.
As a way of understanding people, anthropology has to make a specific commitment to a theory of the world in the most basic sense, a theory of what makes things what they are: an ontology.
Metanarratives of change, for instance, can differ greatly but still have the same stock characters
- Individual people
- Social, collective forces
The metanarratives differ in the relationships between these two types of thing, but in any of the dominant frameworks, everything is either one or the other. They have the same ontological commitments.
The anthropologist is never the only analyst in the room
Anthropologists are people watching people.
There is nothing special to what anthropologists do; everyone is always doing fieldwork in their own lives.
Kamea people analyze each other, but with different categories
- They don’t only ask: “Where were you born?”
- Men might also ask: “What trees and plants contributed to your birth, and where were they planted?” (see Bamford 2007, 43)
Secret knowledge revealed only to men makes the second question more salient, but only because it rests on ontological assumptions about biology, bodies, and selfhood.
Strong and weak readings of alternative ontologies
Imagine you meet someone who says “I am a sea eagle” or “My yams respect me and I respect them.”
The weak reading of these statements is that sea eagle and a yam’s attitudes are metaphors for something else.
- The weak reading leaves your own ontological commitments secure, because you assume that these statements represent thoughts of a collective consciousness.
The strong reading is that these statements produce a specific shared reality
- Yams have the capacity to feel emotions if everyone acts as if they do.
- A woman can be a biological mother after death, but only if we collectively will ourselves to ignore the role of doctors, nurses, IVF clinics, and the county clerk who issues the birth certificate.
A person contains multitudes
Marilyn Strathern on the question of personhood and social theory:
Far from being regarded as unique entities, Melanesian persons are as dividually as they are individually conceived. They contain a generalized sociality within. Indeed, persons are frequently constructed as the plural and composite site of the relationships that produced them. (Strathern 1988, 13)
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