Week 4—Imperialism as close encounter

Week 4—Imperialism as close encounter

Main reading: Sahlins (1988)

Other reading: Sahlins (1992); Sahlins (1996); Bashkow (2004); Englund and Leach (2000)

For Wolf, Trouillot, and other critics of the “primitive isolate,” the most important force in the history of many if not all societies is…

Did you say colonialism? Yes, absolutely. The world we live in today is in many respects shaped by legacies of European colonial control of societies outside of Europe.

Interestingly enough, colonialism has taken on a new life. It has become a watchword of critique of the contemporary order and its politics. Not so long ago, many different situations in the contemporary world were seen in the lens of “globalization” and “global capitalism” (The anthropology department used to teach an introductory class on globalization, ANTH 1002: Anthropology and the global.) Increasingly, people are rethinking these ideas in terms of the legacies of colonialism.

• What was colonialism? Is colonialism something of the past, or the present?
• When people talk about a situation, either from the past or in the present, in terms of colonialism, what specifically do they mean to point to or highlight?

In this week’s readings, we meet Marshall Sahlins. Sahlins accepts Wolf’s critique of anthropology, and also acknowledges that every society is a product of historical forces and events. Yet in saying this, he also problematizes Wolf’s historical approach. For their to a structure of interaction, exploitation, domination, and dependency between two societies, people in those societies have to enter into relations, and that means that they have to have common understanding. They need to share a system of categories that overlaps their respective cultural systems of thought. In the encounter between people from different cultures, each side has to translate the other into familiar terms. Only then can a new system that incorporates both emerge.

So the structures of domination that bring different communities into unequal relationships now are a byproduct of another process in a conjuncture (or intersection) of two cultural systems.

• What is an example of a contemporary cultural conjuncture? Are there cultural conjunctures in Sydney?
• Are there kinds of experiences or events that transcend culture, and will have an objective meaning and objective consequences for people who experience them? Are there things that happen in a society’s history which a people cannot see in their own cultural categories?
• If colonialism as a structure can only emerge from a series of cultural conjunctures, does that change how we see contemporary situations that inherit the colonial structures of the past?

Sahlins is bringing back the linguistic analogy. He has heard the critiques of this metaphor. Yes, if we frame people’s collective life in community as an expression of a symbolic grammar, then we assume that this collectivity is fixed and frozen and bounded. Cultures do interact but not in a random way. But, even so, we need the analysis of symbolic categories to understand why people experience historical events the way they do, and hence why these events become meaningful for them.

References

Bashkow, Ira. 2004. “A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries.” American Anthropologist 106 (3): 443–58. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2004.106.3.443.

Englund, Harri, and James Leach. 2000. “Ethnography and the Meta‐Narratives of Modernity.” Current Anthropology 41 (2): 225–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/ca.2000.41.issue-2.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1988. “Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of ‘The World System’.” Proceeedings of the British Academy 74: 1–51. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/74p001.pdf.

———. 1992. “The Economics of Develop-Man in the Pacific.” Res 21: 13–25.

———. 1996. “The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology.” Current Anthropology 37 (3): 395–428. https://doi.org/10.1086/204503.