Anthropology in Question

Abstract

Anthropology, abstractly conceived as the study of man, is actually the study of men in crisis by men in crisis. Anthropologists and their ob? jects, the studied, despite opposing positions in the "scientific" equation have this much in common: if not equally, still they are each objects of contemporary imperial civilization. The anthropologist who treats the indigene as an object may define himself as relatively free, but that is an illusion. For in order to objectify the other, one is, at the same time, compelled to objectify the self. On this score, the anthropologist betrays himself as inevitably as he does the native whom he examines. There? fore, when Levi-Strauss, whom I take to be both the most representative and the most elusive of contemporary anthropologist argues that, as the offspring of colonialism, "anthropology ... reflects, on the epistemo logical level, a state of affairs in which one part of mankind treats the other as an object," he tells us only half the truth.1 The other half is critical. For the anthropologist is himself a victim, and his power of decision is a fiction, embedded as it is in the exploitative foundations of civilization. Edmund Carpenter relates a case in point: the presumed results of an official experiment in communication to which he lent himself in Australian New Guinea. Although questioning the ethic of the undertaking, he argues that the disorganization, indeed the destruction of the village culture under systematic electronic assault (tape recordings, film and so forth) which his team initiated, could be justified only by the knowledge gained of analogous processes in our, the colonizing, society.2 Unless the anthropologist confronts his own alienation, which is only a special instance of a general condition, seeks to understand its roots and subsequently matures as a relentless critic of his own civili? zation, the very civilization which converts man into an object, he cannot understand or even recognize himself in the man of another culture or that other man in himself. Thus when Levi-Strauss finally