The Canadian Anthropological Tradition and Land Claims

Abstract

The Canadian Anthropological Tradition and Land Claims David W. Dinwoodie (bio) Claudio Lomnitz observes that whereas Mexican anthropology once played a central role in national consolidation, it now contributes more to the education apparatus and state relations with middle-class sectors. Despite such shifts in direction, Lomnitz argues, Mexican anthropology has been in each phase a vehicle of policy, an academic field effectively absorbed by the state, continually "confined to its preexisting public, to a national public that cares only about the solution to the so-called national problems" (2005:191). Going further, he suggests, "Mexican anthropology has reached a point in which it must transcend the limitations imposed by its historical vocation as a national anthropology" (2005:167). Canadian anthropology today risks the same sort of exhaustion. In the land claims era (from the 1970s through the present day) anthropological and ethnohistorical research on First Nations has polarized in accordance with roles assumed in land claims litigation. One group applies a version of social evolutionism based on a categorical divide between primitive community and formalized society in order to argue that prior to European influence, First Nations never formally held land (Flanagan 2000; Widdowson and Howard 2008). Another group applies primordialist ethnonationalism to argue that prior to contact all Canadian Aboriginals lived in a state of nationhood (Denis 1997; Macklem 2001). Research is so parochial that, as Noel Dyck observed, those who study traditional culture, verbal practice, or expressive culture too often overlook the material exigencies of First Nations life as it is lived by the vast majority (2003). Those who study social dysfunction and material exigencies disregard the fleeting moments during which people speak non-utilitarian languages and reflect on apparently irrelevant events. And although few in either camp seem to have noticed, the bulk of anthropology done in Canada these days is by contract—that is to say, it is for-profit research that transforms lived memory and experience into privileged [End Page 31] information on a corporate model. Each with their own incentive structure, these approaches rarely have engaged each other, and the result is intellectual stultification. The range of questions asked in the anthropology of aboriginal Canada is limited by attention to the Indian question seen as the great national problem of the day. I do not mean to minimize the Indian question or advocate research on the irrelevant and the uninteresting, but to suggest that the work of certain key figures in Canadian anthropology went beyond national anthropology per se and, thus, that Canadian anthropology need not view itself as exclusively national tradition in Claudio Lomnitz's sense of this phrase (Lomnitz 2005). Key figures have inquired into First Nations history empirically and without predetermining their findings in accordance with short-term state policies. They have explored cultural practices in relation to a set of political principles beyond those currently in favor in Ottawa. This careful analytic bracketing (not suspending!) of partial contemporary frames is particularly important when considering the challenges our current state of affairs poses to cultural analysis. As John Gray aptly observes, as a "consequence of mass migration, new technologies of communication and continued cultural experimentation, nearly all societies today contain several ways of life, with many people belonging to more than one" (2000:1). The challenge late modernity poses to cultural analysis is not simply that of diversity. What poses the greatest challenge to cultural analysis is the fact that the ways of life of interest to us interpenetrate each other. "Though distinct, these ways of life are not independent," observes Gray; rather, they "interact continuously—so much so that it may be hard to tell the difference between them. Indeed, since many people belong to more than one, it may be impossible to distinguish them completely" (2000:11). The problem with anthropology's orientation to Aboriginal culture history today is that it makes two key assumptions that limit inquiry. First, it assumes an overly tidy and discrete political environment in which no pre-1970 ideas or commitments have any currency today. And second, it assumes an overly tidy cultural environment in which ways of life are independent and can be readily delimited, enumerated, and labeled. I suggest that this...