Tala Asad (ed). Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter.

Keyword: colonialism; imperialism; history of anthropology; British functionalism; French Structuralism; comparative analyes (or lack thereof); honest and integrity in ethnography; In conversation with: a range of postcolonial ethnographers; Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, LeviStrauss, Leach, Taussig (for his way of dealing with the colonial encounter) Useful for: understanding the history of anthropology, and gaining a better understanding for the downfall of functionalism. The introductory chapter may be of use in teaching an undergraduate course in anthropology...and is certainly an important text for understanding the relationship between anthropology and colonialism and imperialism. Summary Notes: Functional anthropology, in Britain, emerged as a field that emerged as a distinct discipline after World War I, and assured academic status by universities after World War II Shortly after, people began to have misgivings about the field... Edmund Leach, for instance, argued that the doctrine of functionalism ceased to carry conviction. The self-evident strength of socio-cultural anthropology is no longer so strong Asad asks What has happened to British anthropology?

Social Anthropology: could, at one point, be defined as the study of 'primitive societies' In the 1960s and 70s, however the coherence of style is absent... Anthropologists study both 'simple' and 'complex' societies...they resort to participant observation, statistical techniques, historical archives, and other literary sources; anthropologists find themselves intellectually closer to economists and political scientists or psychoanalysts or structural linguists or animal behaviourists than to other anthropologists....

Why, all of a sudden, do anthropologists see connections with economists and political scientists? Part of the reason is the fact that the world in which social anthropology is embedded has been shifting since WWII These changes have highlighted the fact that anthropology doesn't simply apprehend the world, but the world determines how anthropology will apprehend the world

Cam Note: why can't the world apprehend anthropology? Colonial and Postcolonial:
The attainment of political independence by colonial, especially African countries in the late '50s and the early '60s accelerated the trend, apparent since the war, of socioeconomic change, involving these countries in the planned development of national networks of communications, electrification and broadcasting; the promotion of education

and of rural improvement projects; the shift of political power from 'tribal' leaders to the nationalistic bourgeosie (13).

the growing criticism of functionalism was connected with a range of factors, not the least of which being anthropology's intimate connection with colonialism...and the anthropologist's framework, and the increasing importance of indigenous history, anthropology's past was brought to light....and anthropology had to face it's colonial past At the same time, there was growing criticism of functionalist theory and its relevance, or accuracy, in ethnographic accounts

Critiques of Functionalism: 1. it never adequately clarified the distinction between a totalising method (in which the formation of parts is explained with reference to a developing structure of determinations) and ethnographic holism (in which the different 'institutions' of a society are all described and linked one to another) 2. Since it had in general confused structural determination with simultaneity, concrete developments in the world outside pushed functional anthropology until it collapsed into microsociology Cam Note: you could never have a truly functional anthropology today, because thinkers and ethnographers are attuned to the constant intersubjective becoming-withs of different places. The boundaries are not so easily determined between individual societies or cultures. This is something one learns from Haraway, Clifford, Latour, Tsing, and a range of postcolonial researchers. This is, however, not to say that local studies are not important, but they are always connected with a bigger, crosscultural picture in mind. Asad notes that anthropologists in his time were choosing to re-orient themselves in relation to a 'multitude of fragmentary problemspolitical, economic, domestic, cultic, etc.--at much smaller scales...

Anthropology's Colonial origins: It's not in dispute whether anthropology came into its own during the colonial era..... Yet, there is a strange reluctance on the part of anthropologists to take seriously the power structure in which their discipline took shape Significantly, Asad calls for a nuanced approach to dealing with Anthropology's colonial connections. He suggests that one should not make overly exaggerated statements on either side....anthropology is neither able to shed its colonial heritage completely, nor is it little more than the 'handmaiden of colonialism'

Asad's interesting take:

The colonial power structure made the object of anthropological study accessible and safe because of it sustained physical proximity between the observing European and the living non- European became a practical possibility (17).

asad writes about the asymmetry of the dialectic of world power....there is always a power relation....also an asymmetrical (complementary in Bateson's terms) relationship.... Asad's nuanced approach leads him to argue that he thinks it's a mistake to view social anthropology as primarily an aid to colonial administration. Rather, he sees this as, at least partially, the result of the inherently contradictory nature of bourgeois consciousness. He wants us to apprehend these contradictions, and to do so requires understanding the relationship between the West and the Third World...

Asad's Thesis:
For these contradictions to be adequately apprehended it is essential to turn to the historical power relationship between the West and the Third World and to examine the ways in which it has been dialectically linked to the practical conditions, the working assumptions and the intellectual product of all disciplines representing the Europeans understanding of non-European humanity (19).

CHAPTER ONE: Peter Forster. Empiricism and Imperialism: A Review of the New Left Critique of Social Anthropology Forster offers a critical analysis of the New Left's critique of anthropology, ultimately arguing that many of the more polemical arguments are unfounded... He finds the origins of the new left critique in the 'dismemberment' of colonial empires....empires that were previously the 'stamping' ground for anthropologists.... At the same time, the critique stems from disenchantment with functionalism....

Some Versions of the critique: some, like Goddard, advocate a greater concern for the metaphysical elements of Durkheim's thought.... Functionalism naturalised only a portion of Durkheim's arguments, leaving out his attention to metaphysical details and speculation.... Others, like Leach, suggest that anthropologists should have a greater appreciation for LeviStrauss' structuralism (a form of structuralism that allows for the study of myths, and comparative, cross-cultural analyses) Another criticism suggests that anthropologists have either ignored, or not taken seriously enough, the colonial situation...

Forster's three areas of concern: 1) the question of value-free social anthropology, and the role of the anthropologist in society 2) the concept of relevance 3) the concept of commitment

Value-free social anthropology: Though the New Left suggests that anthropologists blindly believe themselves to be 'value-free', Forster argues that no social scientist, of any political persuasion, actually believes in valuefreedom... The question of value-freedom is often needlessly meshed with 'objectivity'.... ultimately, however, Forster suggests that anthropologists should be careful pushing overly radical political agendas....and what they say about a given culture better be 'true'

the concept of relevance: related to the previous issue....people are concerned that anthropology, if it remains overly theoretical, and removed from the lives of those its studies, will lose relevance...political relevance. Forster agrees that the dismemberment of colonial empires means a crisis of identity for anthropologists...but not irrelevance... Forster is a dick.

The Left's theoretical arguments: Forster sees some merit here.... the argument is that anthropology has suffered theoretically from its colonial ties Specifically, many anthropologists call for a Marxist theoretical foundation, one tied to strong political commitments People, like Durkheim, were used selectively, no better was fully and completely Durkheimian

Anit-functionalist sentitments within functionalism:

There was an anti-functionalist response within functionalism, from Leach, foreshadowed by Gluckman's response to Malinowski, which still appealed to the idea of a self-stabilising system. This stood in sharp contrast to Levi-Strauss's opposition to functionalism, which concerned itself with the unconscious nature of collective phenomena and in this way broke sharply with empiricism (33).

The New Left's theoretical critique is, basically, a critique of empiricism, which has been a mainstay foundation in a range of British scholarly disciplines.

Forster Concludes: despite the range of disciplines...a basic unity of concern is the relationship between anthropology and colonialism... this is a concern of the intellectual Left Just because Durkheim and Levi-Strauss were naturalised, that is no reason to support that this is for the disadvantage of the discipline.

Cam Note: this is a lazy, and not entirely compelling, argument....

CHAPTER FOUR: Talal Asad. Two European Images of Non-European Rule Asad looks at the epoch within which anthropology developed its distinct character....

Asad's definition of anthropology: Anthropology is a holistic discipline, nurtured by bourgeois society, which studies non-European societies which have come under its economic, political and intellectual domination.... Asad wants to explore the political conclusions of functional anthropology, in order to see how European historical experience of subordinate non-European peoples has shaped its objectification of the latter....

Functional Anthropology's view of political domination: in general, the structure of traditional African states is represented in terms of balance of powers, reciprocal obligations and value consensus......

This, then is the functional anthropological image of political domination in the socalled tribal world: an emphasis on the integrated character of the body politc, on the reciprocal rights and obligations between rulers and ruled, on the consensual basis of the ruler's political authority and administration, and on the inherent efficiency of the traditional system of government in giving every legitimate interest its due representation (105).

historical realities are more complicated than these views.... This view ignores a basic political reality in Africa, that since the 19th C there was the pervasive presence of colonial power....the conquest of European political and capitalist countries.... Even when later anthropologists began to refer to the colonial presence as part of the local structure they generally did so in such a way asd the obscure the systematic character of colonial domination and to mask the fundamental contradictions of interest inherent in the system of Indirect Rule the functionalist equated empircal work with fieldwork, and tended to define their theoretical foundations in terms of practical fieldwork...not questions of political economy....

Difference between the way Evolutionists and Functionalists Objectified Colonial Subjects:
...unlike ninteenth century anthropology, the objectification of functional anthropologists occurred within the context of routine colonialism, of an imperial structure of power already established rather than one in prcess of vigorous expansion in which political force and contradiction are only too obvious (115).

Cam Note: part of the problem, and something implicit in Asad's account, is the fact that because functionalism didn't dive into broader theoretical questions of political economy, and dynamic social and economic factors, they ended up treating imperialism as a background, or ignoring it completely. It became too much a part of the underground. This is, for me, one reason why mundane elements of daily life are so important in anthropological studies!

In conclusion:
...by refusing to discuss the way in which bourgeois Europe had imposed its power and its own conception of the just political order on African and Islamic peoples, both disciplines were basically reassuring to the colonial ruling classes (118).

Johannes Fabian. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object

Keywords: time; natural history; evolution; functionalism; history of anthropology; (post-)colonial theory; emergence; methology In conversation with: Clifford, Asad, Charis Thompson (in terms of the multiple forms of time), Haraway, Rabinow, Bourdieu Fabian provides a fascinating, and ultimately compelling, critique of anthropology's engagement with questions and theoretizations of time. Though perhaps too polemical, Fabian traces striking connections between the secularization of time in Judeao-Christian societies, the rise of capitalism, colonialism, and evolutionary theories (both in the natural and social sciences) in the 19th C, and anthropological theories in the era of late capitalism. Fabian suggests that the naturalized, standardized, linear notion of time that led early evolutionary anthropologists to develop their progress narratives, and their 'stages' of civilization, still serves as the foundation for anthropology's construction of it's object of study, the Other. By relegating the Other to the categories of 'primitive', 'tribal', 'savage', anthropologists distance themselves from their object in both space and time. Fabian calls for a direct engagement with, and reworking of, anthropological conceptions of time, which he believes should lead to recognition of the coevalness of intersubjective time experienced by both observers and those observed. Fabian's Thesis:
It is not the dispersal of human cultures in space that leads anthropology to 'temporalize' (something that is maintained in the image of the 'philosophical traveler' whose roaming in space leads to the discovery of 'ages'); it is naturalized-spatialized Time which gives meaning (in fact a variety of specific meanings) to the distribution of humanity in space (25).

Critique: Fabian's argument is convincing, but unlike Haraway, Thompson, he undertheorizes the importance of both the anthropologist and their Other interacting, but from different conceptions of embodied temporality. Thompson, for instance, shows that even in one ART lab, ontological choreography requires one to coordinate not just a range of bodies and technologies, but also a range of seemingly disparate temporal rhythms.... Summary Notes: PREFACE: Fabian acknowledges that it is easy to show, for instance, that one speaks through time, but it is very difficult to speak OF time For Fabian, time , like language or money, is a carrier of significance, a form through which we define the content of relations between the Self and the Other..... this book is a collections of essays about anthropology through time...no anthropology of time... Fabian examines past and present uses of Time as a way of construing the object of anthropological discipline....

Cam Note: In connection with Charis Thompson, it's interesting that Fabian begins by describing the fact that anthropologic objects, like parents and babies, and bodies (in Mol)...are made...materialized...enacted.... Fabian wants to study the 'we' and the 'other' dialectically...

Excellent justification for dialectical study:

To consider the relation dialectically means to recognize its concrete temporal, historical, and political conditions. Existentially and politically, critique of anthropology starts with the scandal of domination and exploitation of one part of mankind by another (x)

Fabian is concerned that anthropologists have constantly been forced to cover up a fundamental contradiction: on the one hand, anthropologists assert that their work rests on ethnographic research involving personal, prolonged interaction with the other....on the other hand, they pronounce upon the knowledge gained from such research a discourse of the Other in terms of distance, spatial and temporal.... Fabian wants anthropologists to consider the ideological nature of temporal concepts which inform theories and rhetoric. He also wants researchers to pay attention to Intersubjective Time....time which does not measure but constitutes those practices of communication called fieldwork.... Fabian finds much to like in Bourdieu's theory of Time and cultural practice....

CHAPER ONE: Time and the Emerging Other: knowledge is power... Anthropology's claim to power originated at its roots.... there is no knowledge of the Other which is not also a temporal, historical, political act...

From Sacred to Secular Time The Philosophical Traveler: in the Judeo-Christian tradition Time is conceived as the medium of a sacred history. Time was celebrated as a sequence of events that befall a chosen people.... This was a linear conception of time...in contrast to pagan, cyclical views of time...including views of reincarnation, etc. faith in a covenant between Divinity and one people....trust in divine providence....make for sacred conceptions of time....they stress the specificity of Tim....its realization I na given cultural ecology.... steps toward modern involve a succession of attempts to secularize Judeo-Christian Time by universalizing and generalizing it.... universal time was most likely established in the Renaissance.

Interesting connection between anthropology, the Enlightenment and the universalization of time:
...there are good reasons to look for decisive developments, not in the moments of intellectual rupture achieved by Copernicus and Galileo nor, for that matter, by Newton and Locke, but in the century that elaborated the devices of discourse we now recognize as the foundations of modern anthropologythe Age of Enlightenment

Fabian suggests that, as people begin to travel, sailing all over the work....people began to see this travel as traveling through time....when one stops in underdeveloped societies, they are struck by the fact that they made passage 'through time'... the idea of philosophical travel, the conception of travel as science, could leave the problem of Time implicit....

travel was important to the bourgeosie in Europe....this led to these conceptions o philosophical time travel... Fabian argues that the idea of a knowledge of Time, which was prefigured in Christianity, but which found its legs in the Enlightenment, is an integral part of anthropology's intellectual equipment...and baggage....

From History to Evolution: there remains much confusion in terms of people's understanding of evolutionary theory. For instance, it is important to distinguish Darwin and Spencer the starting point for any attempt to understand evolutionary temporalizing will be the achieved secularization of Time There were, of course, a range of biological thought before Darwin... When Darwin became popularized, people like Spencer, and other social theorists, incorporated his work into their theories of social evolution..... And, don't forget the importance of Lyell's uniformatarianism and gradualism.... The new naturalized time of evolutionary thought, unlike either the preceding sacred or secular forms....allowed Time to no longer be a vehicle for a continuous, meaningful story...it was a way to order an essentially discontinuous and fragmentary geological and paleontological record.... social evolutionists accepted this naturalized time...some even took and never thought twice about how they were conceptualizing time (Morgan, Spencer, Tylor are all included) these thinkers SPATIALIZED time....time was not a chain, but a tree....

Cam Note: the tree is an important metaphor in the biological sciences as well...the tree of life, for instance...and D and G criticize the tree metaphor in the development of their rhizome.... the tree is a simple way to construct classificatory schemes based on subsumption and hierarchy... Ever since, anthropology's treatment of time has lead researchers to construct relations with the Other by means of temporal devices that implied an affirmation of difference as distance....rather than holding those difference together, in an intersubjective relationship in time...

Early Evolutionists and the persistence of Naturalized time:

Tylor or Morgan are for many anthropologists still the uncontested founders of their discipline and, while most of their 'artificial constructs' may now be rejected, the naturalization of Time which was evolutionism's crucial epistemological stance remains by and large unquestioned (16).

Fabian believes that the persistence of naturalized time is regressive...and has kept anthropology

from developing meaningful and respectful engagements with the Other Significantly, Fabian believes that this leads to a situation where people do not study the Other, but in terms of the Other.... Primitive is a temporal concept...it is a category not an object....which means it already serves to limit analysis....

Diffusionists, Functionalists, Structuralists, Culturalists: all of the subsequent anthropological disciplines fared no better in terms of time...because they either ignored or denied its significance... This is especially true because many of these disciplines emphasized synchronic analyses....de Saussure, Mauss, Durkheim,.... Even the cultural anthropologists in the states, like Mead, Boas, and Benedict didn't fare well... cultural relativism relatived cultural time, but left universal time an assumed fact of biological evolution....

Some Uses of Time in Anthropological Discourse: Scizogenic use of time: the anthropologist incorporates different conceptualizations of time in the field than in their writing.... Ultimately, Fabian wants to develop a critique of anthropological discourse that uses anthropology's conceptualization of time as its starting point...

Major Uses of Time: 1) Physical Time: parameter or vector in describing the sociocultural process. It appears in evolutionary, prehistorical, reconstruction over vast spans but also in objective or neutral time scales used to measure demographic or ecological changes. The assumption is that this kind of Time, while it is a paramter of culture process...is not subject of cultural variation 2) Mundane Time and Typological Time: Mundane time connotes to me a kind of world-wise relation to Time, while resting assured of the workings of physical time in natural laws governing the universe. Typological time signals a use of time which is measured, not as time elapsed, but in terms of socioculturally meaningful events or, more precisely, intervals between such events. Typological time underlies qualifications like preliterate vs literate, tribal vs feudal, primitive vs industrial... 3) Intersubjective Time: emphasizes the communicative nature of human interaction. Time is a constitutive dimension of social reality. No matter whether one studies synchronic or diachronic processes...they are all CHRONIC.

The importance of Intersubjective Time:

Once Time is recognized as a dimension, not just a measure, of human activity, any attempt to eliminate it from interpretive discourse can only result in distorted and largely meaningless representations. The irony is that formal models, which are often presented as the most 'scientific' form of anthropological discourse, try in fact to ignore the one problem, Time, which has been recognized as the greatest challenge by modern natural science (25).

the naturalization of Time defines temporal relations as exclusive and expansive....the primitive is not YET civilized....but through it's temporal unfolding...it will become civilized... Fabian suggests that his critique can be used in a richer critique of Anthropology's colonial past....because it uncovers a much deeper link between Enlightenment ideas, progress narratives, evolutionary thought and anthropological fieldwork...VERY COOL!

CONCLUSION: Issues for Debate: Fabian's goal is to dismantle certain assumptions, to make way for a more thorough critique of anthropological assumptions... Fabian isn't sure Marxist anthropology can solve the problem, because it too is stuck in an allochronic worldview (re: Marx's distinction between primitive and capitalist markets....and his own vague evolutionary ideas) Tradition and modernity are not opposed...nor in conflict.. what are opposed are not the same society at different points in development...but different societies occupying the same time...

The importance of Praxis...and the problems of holistic social science: 1) by insisting that culture is a system which 'informs' or 'regulates' actions...holistic social science fails to provide a theory of praxis....it causes anthropologists to constantly conduct their research from a distance...from outside... 2) Failure to conceive a theory of praxis blocks the possibility to perceive anthropology as an activity which is part of what it studies... Cam Notes: these are powerful arguments.... THERE ARE WAYS TO MEET THE OTHER ON THE SAME GROUND, IN THE SAME TIME!

James Clifford. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

Keywords: globalization; modernization; cultural studies; literary studies; history of anthropology; postcolonialism;emergence; postmodern optimism; hybridity; ethnographic authority In conversation with: Anna Tsing, Asad, Fabian, Haraway, Latour, Michael Fischer, Frankfurt School; Krecauer Introduction: The Pure Products Go Crazy: Clifford opens with an odd poem by William Carlos Williams, a surrealist artists, who wrote a poem about a girl he called Elise.... Something about this girl throws Williams off The girl seemed to represent where society and culture were headed.... Williams poem is a rush of associations... Clifford uses this poem to serve as a pretext for his book....a way of starting in which a predicament... Williams poem sums up a concern raised by a number of people....about modernity ruining some pure authenticity...

Williams' poem is different because it marks a new turn:

By the 1920s a truly global space of cultural connections and dissolutions has become imaginable: local authenticities meet and merge in transient urban and suburban settings settings that will include the immigrant neighborhoods of New Jersey, multicultural sprawls like Buenos Aires, the townships of Johannesburg (4).

the ethnographic modernist searches for the universal in the local, the whole in the part..

Mission Statement:
This book proposes a different historical vision. It does not see the world as populated by endangered authenticitiespure products always going crazy. Rather, it makes space for specific paths through modernity, a recognition anticipated by Williams' discrepant question: what is 'given off' by individual histories like Elsie's? Are the 'isolate flecks' dying sparks? New Beginnings? (5).

Clifford argues that geopolitical questions have become very important...we must ask 'whose reality? Whose new world?

Colonialism: the invasion by an ambiguous person of questionable origin anticipates developments that would become widely apparent only after the Second World War.... Colonial relations would be contested.... After 1950 peoples long spoken for by Western ethnographers, administrators, and missionaries began to speak for themselves on a global stage... It was difficult to keep these people in their traditions (re: natural) places....of subordination....

Cam Note: Interesting, post-World War 2 was also the time of the rise of Big Science, the development of genetics, etc....but it was also the last time that people were generally optimistic about technoscience. Is there any connection between the post-colonial period and the pessimism towards science....or is this just the postmodern conditions? Rather than homogenization, this period saw people asserting their differences in novel ways... Why, for instance, must Elsie symbolize a dead-end for Williams? Williams assertion that Elsie is a impure figure might be a gendered statement....the hybrid female....impure women, prostitutes, impure cultural artifacts... As woman, clifford suggests that Elsie is either a symbol for failure, or a symbol for hybrid success...an alternative to sexist definitions of beauty. Rather than a dead end, Elsie is a symbol of emergent possibilities.... Clifford claims that only one of Elsie's emergent possibilities is going to be explored in this book....her 'dash of Indian Blood'... Clifford's book is tracing a postcolonial crisis of ethnographic authority (Latour's We Have Never Been Modern) The book is about Western visions and practices....but also how these visions and practices are responding to forces that challenge their authority... It's about the overlay of traditions that characterizes the 20th century A modern ethnograpy of constantly moving conjunctures....

Modern Ethnography Vs. Western Anthropology:

A modern 'ethnography' of conjunctures, constantly moving between cultures, does not, like its Western alter ego 'anthropology,' aspire to survey the rull range of human diversity of development. It is perpetualy displaced, both regionally focused and broadly comparative, a form both of dwelling and of travel in a world where the two experiences are less and less distinct (9).

Cam Note: this is an amazing quote.... This book migrates between local and global perspectives (Tsing)

PART ONE: Focuses on strategies of writing and representation, stategies that change historically in response to the general shift from high colonialism around 1900 to postcolonialism and neocolonialism after the 1950s. In this section, Clifford tries to show that ethnographic texts are orchestrations of multivocal exchanges occurring in politically charged situations. The subjectivities produced are constructed domains of truth...serious fictions. Once this is recognize, the possibility for diverse postcolonial ethnographic invention emerges.... PART TWO: portrays ethnography in alliance with avant-garde art and cultural criticism, activities with which it shares modernist procedures of collage, juxtaposition, and estrangement. Clifford is exploring the possibilities of a twentieth century poetics of displacement PART THREE: turns to history of collecting, particularly the classicification and display of primitive art and exotic cultures. His general aim is to displace any transcendent regime of authenticity, to argue that all authoritative collections, whether made in the name of art of science, are historically contingent and subject to local reappropriation

PART FOUR: Explores how non-Western historical experiencesthose of orientals and tribal native Americansare hemmed in by concepts of continuous tradition and the unified self. Clifford argues that identity, considered ethnographically, must always be mixed, relational, and inventive.... Major Arguments: ethnography shares important connectiosn with surrealism...it is an artful, and contingent cultural practice.... Clifford wants to open up the connection between art and science....between disciplinary science and the avant-garde...

I reopen the frontier, suggesting that the modern division of art and ethnography into distinct institutions has restricted the former's analytic power and the latter's subversive vocation (12).

ethnography is a hybrid activity....it appears simultaneously as writing, as collecting, as collage, as imperial power, as subversive critique..... Clifford's topic is a mode of travel....a way of understanding and getting around in a diverse world thhat, since the sixteenth century, has become cartographically unified.