Introduction: Five theses on ethnography as colonial practice¹

Abstract

Despite the influence of Thomas Kuhn on critical assessments of anthropology, disciplinary histories written by anthropologists still tend to be self-serving. To this day, it seems evident to look upon the great thinkers of anthropology, those whom we think revolutionized its theories and methods, as the main carriers of the history of anthropology. Our own research projects, concerning localized, contextual histories of ethnographic practices in colonial Tanganyika (Pels) and Vietnam (Salemink), made us consider the history of anthropology from another angle. We feel that the emphasis on the "big men" of anthropology in disciplinary histories obscures the way in which ethnography was linked to the construction of colonial and neo-colonial societies. In the following text we elaborate some theses on the historical relevance of ethnographic practice, understood in relation to the anthropological discipline and to its respective local and historical contexts. These theses are obviously not the definitive outcome of a rewriting of anthropology's history, but we consider them to be necessary steps toward a critical reflection on the relations between ethnography and colonialism.First Thesis: Disciplinary history obscures the way in which academic anthropology was linked to the construction of colonial and neo-colonial societies through ethnographic practice.

What has anthropology learned from the anthropology of colonialism?

“…If the ethnographic authority of ‘being there’ was thus shown to be essentially incomplete, it was not out of a pure interest in intertextuality or dialogue 9 but to reconstruct the material mediations of such constructions of the field – that is, whether the mode of the ethnographers' being there evoked memories and practices of trade, military violence, revenue extraction, or missionary presence (see Pels and Salemink 1994a: 16; 1999). ‘Memories of trade’ could, indeed, persuade an ethnographer that it was not her ‘being there’ but the nineteenth‐century arrival of a naturalist (in this case, Alfred Russel Wallace) that turned out to be the more significant moment to understand the field in which she was engaged (Spyer 2000), and other monographs have circumscribed their field in terms of the previous arrival of a missionary (Pels 1999a; Steedly 1993).…”

“…If, therefore, the dichotomous representations of colonisers versus colonised were the dominant discourse in which the ideals of colonial society were formulated, the anthropology of colonialism took the conditions of possibility of such oppositions, and the modes of production of knowledge that characterised the historical relationships from which they emerged, as its object. This distinguishes the anthropology of colonialism from the classical history of anthropology, since the former starts from the assumption that ‘it is better to regard academic anthropology as a specific instance of ethnographic practice rather than the other way around’ (Pels and Salemink 1994a: 5). Instead of taking academic anthropology as a phenomenon sui generis , the anthropology of colonialism studied the ethnographic practices that provided the conditions of possibility for its classifications of colonisers and colonised.…”

“…This delineation of object did away with the simple‐minded discussion about whether anthropologists had been complicit with colonial rule or not (Pels and Salemink 1994a) and turned towards an awareness of more complicated entanglements: even if Alfred Haddon was critical of the ‘red hand of British aggression’, his elders convinced him that it was not wise to publish such statements (see Stocking 1993); while Bronislaw Malinowski may have taught us more about our shared humanity with Trobriand islanders than anybody else, he was savvy enough to sell Trobrianders in the British publishing market as ‘savages’; and while our colleagues of the Rhodes‐Livingstone Institute may have harboured Left‐wing leanings and sympathised with African nationalism, they needed to be useful to the Rhodesian colonial establishment at the same time (Schumaker 2001). In short, the anthropology of colonialism taught us that it is difficult not to think in terms of the ontologies that are globally dominant in one's own time, even if the practical relationships on which they are based refute them empirically.…”

“…4 4 This study of representations‐in‐context explains why scholars studying colonialism were some of the first critics of the ‘literary turn’ in anthropology: their studies told them that one cannot expect to change unequal power relationships only by experimenting with the representations of otherness (see Asad 1994; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Fabian 1991; Pels and Salemink 1994a; Said 1989). Such critical engagements with textuality today result, among other things, in much broader diagnoses of what it means to ‘rule by expertise’ (Mitchell 2002; Mosse 2005).…”

The Repugnant Other: Soldiers, Missionaries, and Aid Workers as Organizational Migrants

“…98 But as Pels and Salemink state, "even those missionaries who had little or no tolerance toward 'other' customs had to communicate the Gospel, and to learn another language to do so." 99 With regard to Muslim missions, Ho argues that-at least for the Hadrami diaspora in the Indian Ocean from the sixteenth century onward-there existed no such link with trade and conquest, and contacts were on the basis of exchange. The practice of building schools and mosques and learning the local language, however, is no different.…”