Syllabus Anthropology Colonialism Post Colonialism CIEE_UNL 2014

Dialectical Anthropology, 2024

In 1968, during an intense period of anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa, Kathleen Gough famously asserted what is now largely taken for granted within the discipline: anthropology is a child of Western imperialism (1968). Since then, the discipline's engagement with imperialism has, I would argue, flowed in three broad currents-all touched upon in this collection-whose inter-connectedness and intensity have varied over time.

Reviews in Anthropology, 2012

Social Anthropology, 2008

The emergence of the anthropology of colonialism in the 1990s has stimulated and enhanced critical reflection on the cultural and historical embedding of the discipline of anthropology, offering what is in effect a historiography of the discipline's present. How has this historical consciousness changed the contours of the discipline? Has it allowed anthropologists to critically distance their discipline from its intimate involvement with the world of modernity, development and the welfare state, as it first emerged under colonial rule? Have anthropologists learned that, instead of targeting and thus essentialising otherness, we should now study the processes by which human differences are constructed, hierarchised and negotiated? This presentation focuses on recent developments in European and North American anthropology in order to discuss the potential effects of the anthropology of colonialism's historical consciousness on anthropological ontologies (epitomised by current discussions on 'indigenous peoples'), epistemologies (in reconceptualising 'field' and 'method') and ethics. It thus tries to outline the ways in which the critical promise of the anthropology of colonialism faces the obstacles that the present-day heritage of colonialism puts in the way of realising its future potential.

Annual Review of Anthropology, 1997

The study of colonialism erases the boundaries between anthropology and history or literary studies, and between the postcolonial present and the colonial past. From the standpoint of anthropology, it is also reflexive, addressing the colonial use and formation of ethnography and its supporting practices of travel. Since the 1960s, the study of colonialism has increasingly presented a view of colonialism as struggle and negotiation, analyzing how the dichotomous representations that Westerners use for colonial rule are the outcome of much more murky and complex practical interactions. By thus treating Western governmentaliry as emergent and particular, it is rewriting our histories of the present. The art of government lies in knowing nothing at the proper moment. Edgar Wallace (1912) [T]here is too much hypocrisy in East Africa today. The European official and the European settler rule and maintain their prestige mainly by hypocrisy, their inner motives would hardly stand examination; the Indian trader makes his living by downright dishonesty or at best by sheer cunning which is hypocrisy; the African clerk or laborer often disregards fulfilling his part of a contract and even a very educated African will pretend to love the European whereas his heart is nearly bursting with envy and hatred. Julius Kambarage Nyerere (1952) 163 0084-6570/97/1015-0163S08.00 164 PELS Allcs Verstehen 1st daher immer zugleich ein Nicht-Verstehen, alle Obereinstimmung in Gedanken und Gefuhlen zugleich ein Auseinandergehen. Wilhelm von Humboldt (quoted in Fabian 1995)

Social Anthropology/ Anthropologie Sociale, 2008

Reviews in Anthropology, 2004

Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2020

European colonialisms (circa. Late 1400) are complex, particularized, and changing political- economic-social-religious systems of domination. In the pursuit of capital accumulation and appropriation, Western European colonialisms generated and benefited from racialized and racist logics. Following the “formal” decolonization of much, but not all, of the colonized world—from Haiti in 1804, to Cameroon in 1960, to Papua New Guinea in 1975, to Timor-Leste in 2002—colonial structures, relations, and imaginaries often persisted in altered forms. Social scientists draw variously from political economy and historical materialism as well as postcolonial thought and cultural materialism within the broader field of colonial studies to both critique European colonialisms of the past and reveal the persistence(s) of colonial relations/structures in the present. Colonial “durabilities” and the “coloniality of being” continue to inform post-colonial political economies, social relations, and knowledge productions, creations, circulations, and contestations. The protraction of colonial domination(s) into the early 21st Century have given rise to reinvigorations of anti-colonial and postcolonial critique, including decolonial options and polygonal projects of decolonization. Widespread discontent regarding the persistence of “colonialism in the present” are manifested in the vocal and visible debates within early 21st Century universities around decolonizing knowledge, including struggles to decolonize the discipline of geography.

Ch. 4 of In Defense of Anthropology: An Investigation of the Critique of Anthropology. This is a discussion of the relationship of American and "British" anthropologists and anthropology to colonialism in the 20th century

Studies in Social and Political Thought, 2006

The class, race, culture and gender assumptions, beliefs, and behaviors of the researcher her/himself [must] be placed within the frame of the picture that she/he attempts to paint (Harding 1987: 9).

2001

Series Preface vii Preface to the Second Edition viii Preface to the First Edition ix 1. Proto-Anthropology 1 Herodotus and other Greeks 1; After Antiquity 3; The European conquests and their impact 6; Why all this is not quite anthropology yet 10; The Enlightenment 11; Romanticism 15 2. Victorians, Germans and a Frenchman 20 Evolutionism and cultural history 21; Morgan 23; Marx 25; Bastian and the German tradition 27; Tylor and other Victorians 29; The Golden Bough and the Torres expedition 32; German diffusionism 35; The new sociology 38; Durkheim 39; Weber 41 3. Four Founding Fathers 46 The founding fathers and their projects 49; Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders 52; Radcliffe-Brown and the 'natural science of society' 55; Boas and historical particularism 58; Mauss and the total social prestation 61; Anthropology in 1930: parallels and divergences 64 4. Expansion and Institutionalisation 68 A marginal discipline? 69; Oxford and the LSE, Columbia and Chicago 72; The Dakar-Djibouti expedition 74; Culture and personality 77; Cultural history 80; Ethnolinguistics 82; The Chicago school 83; 'Kinshipology' 86; Functionalism's last stand 90; Some British outsiders 92 5. Forms of Change 96 Neo-evolutionism and cultural ecology 99; Formalism and substantivism 104; The Manchester school 107; Methodological individualists at Cambridge 112; Role analysis and system theory 117 6. The Power of Symbols 120 From function to meaning 121; Ethnoscience and symbolic anthropology 125; Geertz and Schneider 127; Lévi-Strauss and structuralism 130; Early impact 133; The state of the art in 1968 135 vi A History of AntHropology 7. Questioning Authority 138 The return of Marx 139; Structural Marxism 141; The not-quite-Marxists 145; Political economy and the capitalist world system 147; Feminism and the birth of reflexive fieldwork 151; Ethnicity 155; Practice theory 158; The sociobiology debate and Samoa 161 8. The End of Modernism? 166 The end of modernism? 171; The postcolonial world 176; A new departure or a return to Boas? 179; Other positions 184 9. Global Networks 192 Towards an international anthropology? 194; Trends for the future 200; Biology and culture 203; Globalisation and the production of locality 211 Bibliography 221 Index 239