Anthropology, imperialism, and epistemic domination

Anthropology, imperialism, and epistemic domination

Ryan Schram
ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building 410 (A02)
Week of April 07, 2025 (Week 7)

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2025/7

Main reading: Simpson (2014)

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

Robeson County, North Carolina

Figure 1. A Google Maps image centered on North Carolina, United States, with a placemark on Lumberton, the largest town in Robeson County, inland and near the southern border of the state.

A “mixt Crew,” “no Indians”

When the colonial project extends to what is today Robeson County, its officials unexpectedly find people already living there.

A 1754 report to the governor of North Carolina on the state of the rural counties of the colony is the earliest known record of settlement:

Drowning Creek on the head of Little Pedee, 50 families a mixt Crew, a lawless People, possess the Lands without patent or paying quit rents; shot a Surveyor for coming to view vacant lands being inclosed in great swamps (as quoted in Blu 1980, 38)

The author also says that there were “no Indians” here.

• The “mixt” people spoke English. (Most new arrivals were Scottish and in fact spoke Gaelic.)
• They were reported to have a European lifestyle, including keeping Africans as slaves, but also held land in common until the 1730s [according to 19th century secondary sources; see Blu (1980), 37]
• While memories of Scottish settlers did identify these pre-existing populations as Indian, most government reports identify them as “free persons of color” (Blu 1980, 37)

The Lumbee as a people

From the time of their incorporation into North Carolina, the multiracial population of Robeson County has identified as Indian, but disagree of many of the details:

• Some say they are descendants of Croatan people who adopted and married with the survivors of the lost 16th century English colony of Roanoke Island
• Others say they are related to certain bands of Cherokee who did not relocate to Oklahoma, but are distinct from the Eastern Cherokee, who remained in the west of North Carolina.
• Others say they descend from Cheraw or in-migrating Native American populations.

Lumbee is a name that a people calls itself (an endonym). It simply signifies the people of the Lumber River, rather than making a specific claim of ancestry.

North Carolina and the US federal government have usually met the Lumbee halfway

• North Carolina agreed that a new teacher-training institute would be an Indian school, rather than a segregated school open to African Americans.
  • Today this school is the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.
• The US Congress has passed special laws addressing the status of Lumbee but has withheld recognition of any tribal government. Today Lumbee are recognized only by North Carolina.
• Kamala Harris and Donald Trump pledged to support federal recognition in the 2024 presidential campaign.

Anthropology is a part of Lumbee history

State and federal government agencies have wanted a definitive answer to the question of Lumbee origins in order to make a political decision on how to treat Lumbee as a society.

Karen Blu discusses some of the positions that physical anthropologists have offered to the state to help them:

One theory has its roots in anthropologist James Mooney’s Siouan Tribes of the East (1894), which was apparently a basis on which J. R. Swanton, another anthropologist, constructed his argument concerning the "Probable Identity of the 'Croatan' Indians" (U.S. Senate Reports 1934:3–6). Swanton maintained that the Indian ancestors of the ‘“‘Croatans’’ probably came from a number of Siouan speaking groups in North and South Carolina, such as the Cheraw, Keyauwee, Eno, Shakori, Waccamaw, and Cape Fear. He further notes the possibility that "a few families or small groups of Algonquian or Iroguian [Iroquoian] connection may have cast their lot with this body of people, but contributions from such sources must have been relatively insignificant" (U.S. Senate Reports 1934:6). (Blu 1980, 41)

• For the experts, Lumbee people are known as “tri-racial isolates,” and that makes them like many other similar Creole communities. So, the government concludes, they can’t really be a Native American nation like other Native American nations.
• If Lumbee is an endonym, then it competes with the many names, exonyms, that outsiders call Lumbee people: Scuffletown, mulattos, free people of color, etc.

“Before it is too late”

European colonialism after the end of the slave trade is motivated by paternalism

• European colonial policymakers often believed that colonized people they governed were vanishing cultures or dying races
• They advocated for policies of non-interference, “indirect rule,” and “native protection” (e.g. Lugard 1922)
  • Respect for native custom in a particular tribal territory quickly turns into (literally) an apartheid policy if imposed inflexibly (Mamdani 1996).

Scientists of this period also held similar ideas

Early anthropologists and natural historians were motivated by a belief in vanishing or dying cultures to conduct research “before it is too late” (Gruber 1970; see also Mitchell 2014)

• Lewis Henry Morgan wanted to document Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) ways of life and forms of kinship as an empirical basis for theories of the origin and evolution of society.
• Boasian anthropologists’ ethnographic projects were often a “salvage” operation to record a disappearing way of life and way of thinking (Gruber 1970).
  • They relied on interviews with people who had experienced an intact cultural pattern.
  • Their ethnographic descriptions were a reconstruction of a past society rather than of one in which they immersed themselves.
  • The Smithsonian Institution and other government agencies sponsored this kind of research. Their stated motives were scientific, but salvage research also informed the government’s relationships with tribal nations.

Parallel lines of paternalistic preconceptions

Colonial administrators and early anthropologists both separately adopt the premise that colonized peoples are vanishing cultures.

They both pursue projects on that basis in parallel.

What if anything did these two separate developments have to do with each other?

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 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.

Risley and Hutton’s censuses count and sort people into categories that they designed

• Their “anthropology” is purely an etic perspective, with no attention to the emic perspective.
• They know people by exonyms but pay little attention to peoples’ endonyms.

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.

Epistemic inequality: Whom do you trust to know what they say?

Everything anyone knows, they know because someone told them.

But we don’t believe everything we hear. Some people are assumed to be better knowers than others.

For Fricker (2007),

• you can treat someone as an informant, that is, a person who is capable of giving credible testimony; or
• you can treat someone as a source of information, that is, someone from whom you can take information, but without regard to their perspective on that information.

All cultural anthropologists want to present an emic perspective, but they differ in how they frame people as knowers

• Malinowski ([1922] 1932) treats all people of Kiriwina as sources of information. He’s quite explicit about this (see page 83).
• Who is an example of an anthropologist who regards people as informants (or credible witnesses)

The double bind of continuity

Anthropologists’ writings about Native societies in North America take on a second life.

It is not merely a case of people assuming that anthropologists are better or smarter. There is a system that places ethnographic texts in this position with respect to the people they describe.

• Native societies adapt to living under settler colonialism in order to ensure their continuity as a people with self-determination.
• Change means that these societies appear to have lost the traditions which are the basis of their claim to autonomy within the settler state.

References and further reading

Blu, Karen I. 1980. The Lumbee problem : the making of an American Indian people. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press. http://archive.org/details/lumbeeproblemmak0000bluk.

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.

Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Fuller, C. J. 2017. “Ethnographic inquiry in colonial India: Herbert Risley, William Crooke, and the study of tribes and castes.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23 (3): 603–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12654.

Gruber, Jacob W. 1970. “Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 72 (6): 1289–99. https://www.jstor.org/stable/672848.

Lugard, F. D. 1922. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. Edinburgh, London: W. Blackwood and Sons. http://archive.org/details/cu31924028741175.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1922) 1932. Argonauts of The Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd. http://archive.org/details/argonautsofthewe032976mbp.

Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Mitchell, Lee Clark. 2014. Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton 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.