Privileged observers and colonial continuities

Abstract

AbstractAnthropological debates about development are often framed by a moral contrast between pure and instrumental knowledge. But the good of anthropology is situationally produced, as we can demonstrate by reflecting on the discipline's institutional conditions. Institutional contexts sustain our professional identities and research practices, including the claimed differences between them. These contexts are in turn produced by political economies of development expertise and academic knowledge production. Indeed, social anthropology's core research practices were shaped by its configuration within political economies of colonial governance, and they were perpetuated through the expansion of university systems. We should, then, stop sustaining the fictions that our work is situated outside political economies of interest or that we write purely in pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Rather, we need to be more transparent about the economies that determine the kinds of knowledge we produce and the political implications of what we authorize as knowledge.