ANTHROPOLOGY: “BASTARD CHILD” OF IMPERIALISM’S COMING OF AGE AT THE DAWN OF 21ST CENTURY

Abstract

Abstract Complexities of power/knowledge relationships are widely recognized, theorized and examined in multiplicities of contexts in social sciences and humanities. In this presentation I will, however briefly, examine how and why anthropology, often referred to as the bastard child of nineteenth century Western imperialism, has transformed itself at the dawn of twenty first century, at least according to the American Anthropological Associations (AAA:2012), to become one of the “most humanistic of sciences and scientific of humanities.” A discipline with the current goals of producing and “disseminating anthropological knowledge to solve human problems”, according to the AAA, the institutional governing body of the field in the United States of America. History of the development of anthropology, like other social sciences and humanities disciplines, has been shaped by the diverse relationships of its practitioners, the anthropologists, to the fluid nature of Western imperial powers. That is, transforming from empires of commerce, and conquest to “empires by invitation or empires of trust”, during the twentieth century, especially after the Second World War. Here I will focus on the following significant questions: How did the instrumental uses by Western colonial powers of anthropologists and cultural knowledge they produced about the non-Western colonized societies during the nineteenth and early twentieth century shape trajectories of the development of the discipline? How or whether the ab/uses of anthropology and anthropologists changed during the two World Wars as well as the anti-colonial wars of liberation in Asia, Africa and Latin America? What were the impact of Western decolonization, onset of the Cold War, wars by proxies, and creation of neo-empires by “invitation/trust”, on anthropology, after the end of WWII? More significantly, how did the triumph of Western Capitalism over the USSR, the beginning of war on global terror (after September 11-2001) and the need for counterinsurgency (COIN) campaigns in the Middle East influence militarization/weaponization of anthropology and anthropologizing the military? Also explored will be the role of recently trained non-Western or “native” anthropologists in reassessing anthropology’s imperialist past and its extremely critical contemporary stance.