Colonial Anthropology Research Articles

Pastoral predicaments

This article investigates the growing marginality of pastoralism using the Gujar agitation of 2007–08 in India as a point of entry. Although the process began with colonialism, pastoralism is currently witnessing a crisis in postcolonial India as the consequence of a progressively sedentarising state, intensification of commercialised agriculture and urbanisation. The Gujars of Rajasthan have made claims for recognition demanding scheduled tribe (ST) status to counter inequality. Clearly, this inequality has been historically constituted. Hence, the play of inequality and resistance is addressed through an examination of two clusters of events around the years 2007 and 1857. Currently, the state defines tribes in terms of indices that have been subject to neither review nor public debate. It is not only the vision of the state that is compromised by colonial anthropology and history, but also that of civil society and community. Tragically, communities are forced to format their histories in terms of an archaic indigeneity. Further, claims to social justice and equality are reduced to demands for quotas rather than addressing critically and creatively the violence of development and knowledge. Thus, the politico-administrative category, ST, itself becomes a mode of violence, pointing to the need to debate afresh the grounds on which tribality is constituted.

Chiefs, priests, and praise-singers: history, politics, and land ownership in northern Ghana

In his new book, the eminent anthropologist Wyatt MacGaffey provides an ethnographically enriched history of Dagbon from the fifteenth century to the present, setting that history in the context of the regional resources and political culture of Northern Ghana. Chiefs, Priests, and Praise-Singers shows how the history commonly assumed by scholars has been shaped by the prejudices of colonial anthropology, the needs of British indirect rule, and local political agency. The book demonstrates, too, how political agency has shaped the kinship system. MacGaffey traces the evolution of chieftaincy as the sources of power changed and as land ceased to be simply the living space of the dependents of a chief and became a commodity and a resource for development. The internal violence in Dagbon that has been a topic of national and international concern since 2002 is shown to be a product of the interwoven values of tradition, modern Ghanaian politics, modern education, and economic opportunism.

Folkloric Axis of Relexified Language and the Subversion of Colonial Cultural Hierarchy

Language has an aspect of universality and another aspect of particularity. Ethnic culture is conveyed through the aspect of particularity, and that is the very point which makes a nation particular and its culture distinct. Colonization by imposing colonial language and non-native cultural poetics perishes the aspect of particularity of the substrate language. However, the counteracting strategy of relexification appeals to the universality of superstrate language to transmit the particularity of substrate language. Ethnic folk stories, myths, mythical elements, fables, parables, proverbs, and idioms are interposed on the colonial language to make ethnic colonized culture universally palpable. In this regard, the aspect of universality is provided by the colonial superstrate language and the aspect of particularity by the colonized ethnic language. In general, because of the ubiquity of mythic elements in time and place, the folkloric aspect of relexified language gives nations the sense of dignified historical background and makes the relexified work relevant to a multitude of societies, rather than just one ethnic local community. This paper deals with the way Chinua Achebe uses the folkloric axis of relexified language to bring the particularities of Ibo culture on universal scale and above all to restore the dignity of Ibo cultural identity which was lost through colonial discourse: “Thus, as represented by Chinua Achebe, and contrary to the discourse of colonial anthropology, Umuofia, the primordial Igbo village emerges as a locus of reflective civility” (Irele 9). Achebe’s relexified language gives voice to Ibo experience throughout the English speaking world. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n9p487

UM ESTUDO HISTÓRICO E ANTROPOLÓGICO SOBRE O FILME BOLIVIANO LA NACIÓN CLANDESTINA

No presente texto, buscam-se algumas aproximações entre história, antropologia e cinema a partir da análise do filme boliviano ”La Nación Clandestina”, produzido pelo cineasta Jorge Sanjinés e lançado em 1989. O filme retrata elementos históricos e culturais do povo Aymara, tendo como protagonista Sebastián, membro deste grupo étnico. Por meio desta personagem principal, o cineasta monta uma trama de tensões e conflitos interétnicos, evidenciando as complexas relações entre indá­genas e não indá­genas, diante do contexto do golpe militar na Bolá­via na década de 1960. Uma caracterá­stica associada ao cinema produzido por Jorge Sanjinés é o realismo italiano, que almejava produções fá­lmicas junto ao povo, mostrando as realidades sociais e polá­ticas nos mais variados espaços. O filme busca as relações existentes no interior da comunidade Aymara, sua cosmologia, estrutura de organização social, práticas e rituais feitos pelos indá­genas, para, então, fazer o paralelo com a sociedade não á­ndia da Bolá­via, que transforma em clandestinidade práticas produzidas há séculos pelos grupos étnicos. Daá­ o nome ”La Nación Clandestina”, pois apresenta uma Bolá­via indá­gena que se torna clandestina dentro de seus próprios territórios imemoráveis. Abordar-se-á essa produção fá­lmica pelo viés da antropologia do colonialismo, tendo em vista a permanência do colonialismo interno na Bolá­via após os processos de independência. O filme é permeado de complexidades e possibilita reflexões importantes para pensar as relações entre os universos indá­genas e os não indá­genas, dentro de um Estado-Nação que produz no seu interior ”nações clandestinas”.

A MARCHA DOS CARNEIROS: estratégias de ascensão e mobilidade social da famá­lia Carneiro nas Capitanias do Norte, séculos XVII e XVIII

A famá­lia Carneiro é original de Portugal, tendo chegado á capitania de Pernambuco, na América portuguesa, antes da invasão holandesa. A famá­lia destacou-se por ocupar cargos administrativos e militares, sobretudo, em Pernambuco, e por possuir engenhos. Além disso, a famá­lia contava com uma ampla rede social, estabelecida por meio de casamentos e de amizades. Contudo, para estabelecer-se neste privilegiado espaço social da capitania de Pernambuco e suas anexas, a famá­lia Carneiro passou por perá­odos conturbados, de insegurança polá­tica e econômica, como ocorreu na Guerra dos Mascates (1710-1711). A famá­lia valeu-se de estratégias para ascender socialmente e manter-se no poder, tendo atuando também nas capitanias do Ceará e Rio Grande para diversificar suas atuações polá­ticas e econômicas, e estabelecer novas redes sociais.

The politics of curriculum and pedagogy: teaching cultural studies in North East India

The emergence of cultural studies in the North East of India makes for interesting reading. North East India, with its polyvocal realities entranced in its ethnic diversities, ethnic strifes, internal displacement of people and migration (or infiltration) from Bangladesh and Nepal, ‘Western’ and ‘materialistic’ (read urbane) mode of life in the largely Christian hill states of Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram, which goes against the mainstream Indian grain, and the rhetoric of neglect, should have provided ample opportunities for an engagement with cultural studies. Yet, cultural studies was rather perceived by many as ‘study of culture’ that owes its antecedents to the legacy of colonial Anthropology and Folkloristics (with its colonial etymology and postcolonial mutation) that celebrated the ‘documentary’ over the ‘analytical’. There was strong opposition by others to the ‘migratory’ theories of the West and cultural studies was very often read as transmission of performative genres, that too in the realms of the ‘classical’, and these were sought to be grounded in Sanskrit aesthetics, which was seen as contrapuntal to the Folkloristics Departments and folklore curriculum in some of the universities of the region. Cultural studies was mostly done under the auspices of the English departments in the region, until the first Department of Cultural Studies emerged at Tezpur University in 2002, as a rechristened version of the erstwhile Department of Traditional Culture and Art Forms, which was offering a Master's programme in Cultural Studies with a focus on folklore and Indian aesthetics and Western literary criticism. To be in sync with the changed name, introductory courses in semantics, anthropology and sociology were introduced. Subsequently, the university authorities exerted tremendous pressure to initiate courses in performative arts, ostensibly to make the students ‘more’ employable, which the department continues to resist, by both polemics and evasion.

Diverse approaches in economic anthropology: Some reflections

Anthropology in general has colonial roots and these influences are still in existence. British colonial policy in Africa and Asia began to change in the 1930s thus, it was suddenly decided to “develop” the colonies. This paper is aimed at objectively studying the process of change without committing itself to any particular policy. The skepticism of colonialism and its arrogant assumption of omniscience and opposition to the existing social order were analyzed. The colonial regime was engaged in the expansion of cash economy and missionary approach. Accordingly anthropologists were cast into the mould of the colonial stereotypes and monolithic notions with functionalist overtones which were the keynote of the colonial anthropology of that time. The functionalist studies dealt with family life, customs, folklore, economic activities and religion. Subsequently, several monographs emerged on the gamut of culture and integration emphasizing diffusionism. The studies were largely based on relations between the individuals occupying specific roles in social structure. By and large, anthropological studies have completely ignored the genesis and basis of social relations, class formation, conflict, contradictions and the question of gender in particular. Precisely this is the crucial point which economic anthropology-formalism, substantivism, structuralism and materialism approach, respectively. In the present exercise an attempt is made to briefly appraise these schools of thought. Key word: Economic anthropology.

The Residue of Colonial Anthropology in the History and Political Discourse of Northern Ghana: Critique and Revision

AbstractThe received history of northern Ghana is based on anthropological assumptions imported by colonial officials at the end of the 19th century. This history is now unreflectively incorporated in the political discourse of the north, associated with ongoing conflicts that threaten at times to engulf all three northern regions in warfare. A critique of colonial anthropology, in combination with new research, suggests an alternative history of the North.

In Difficult Order: Anthropology, History, Politics, DisciplineDifficult Folk? A Political History of Social Anthropology. By David Mills. New York: Berghahn, 2008.

In Difficult Order: Anthropology, History, Politics, Discipline<i>Difficult Folk? A Political History of Social Anthropology</i>. By David Mills. New York: Berghahn, 2008.

Reading Development and Writing Africa: UNFPA, &lt;i&gt;Nervous Conditions&lt;/i&gt;, and &lt;i&gt;The Book of Not&lt;/i&gt;

Reading Development and Writing Africa:UNFPA, Nervous Conditions, and The Book of Not Fawzia Mustafa (bio) One of the most resistant and resilient borders of contemporary critical studies in most disciplines of the humanities still appears to be the conceptual one encircling the category of "human": who is, what is not.1 While it would be comforting to think that since at least the mid-twentieth century we no longer need to negotiate it as a (non-inclusive) category because the critiques of humanism and post-enlightenment metaphysics of presence, enjoined with the new cartographies of colonial discursive practices, have more or less laid the issue to rest, we nevertheless still find ourselves doing so. This is in part because we are still entrapped by humanist and anti-humanist coalitions, but other barriers also exist. Being human, inhuman, humane, dehumanized, or dehumanizing, for example, always plays along the fault line—border—of the literal and the figurative, reminding us that despite our desire for the root term's fixity, it cannot be as long as we function within language. Thus, many of the humanist intellectual borders we encounter and cross as students, as scholars, and as teachers allow us to reiterate what we claim we already know, even though we still have difficulty coming to terms with it. I attempt to explore this difficulty, what Homi K. Bhabha calls "the problematic of modernity," by reading the contemporary sign, Development, and its tropologies within two agonistic "African" discursive sites where race and gender still serve as the tenors of difference. My general claim is that "Africa," and the event of African literatures, are key among an array of discursive realms wherein Development has long been the concealed signifier of the (new) "danger that the mimetic contents of a discourse will conceal the fact that the hegemonic structures of power are maintained in a position of authority through a shift in vocabulary in the position of authority," and, [End Page 379] Bhabha goes on to add, "there is for instance a kinship between the normative paradigms of colonial anthropology and the contemporary discourse of aid and development agencies. The 'transfer of technology' has not resulted in the transfer of power or the displacement of a neo-colonial tradition of political control through philanthropy—a celebrated missionary position."2 In other words, after colonialism Development is the means whereby any subaltern, understood as such in relation to the hegemonic West, or any patriarchal system, remains always already a subaltern despite as well as in collusion with constantly fluid linguistic turns. Development maintains this status quo, especially when it claims not to, and this is evident whenever its documents are historicized. To illustrate the facility of this practice, I examine briefly a United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Country Report and attempt to re-establish the elasticity of its deployment of the category of gender, as well as the proper history of its racialized terrain.3 My main examination focuses on the Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga's two novels, Nervous Conditions (1988) and The Book of Not (2006), however, and my readings seek to show in more detail how Development's entangled and entangling discourse actually works.4 Since one or another manifestation of development underwrites and informs most of the interrogations that the term "postcolonial" and its constituent units, such as "Africa and African," have undergone, it is helpful first to briefly review its trace. Just within the last two decades, for example, I'm referring to the other end of what Anne McClintock in her 1994 essay "The Angel of Progress," characterizes as the inflection of the Enlightenment within the mis-use or limit of the term "postcolonial."5 It is, she writes, "haunted by the very figure of linear 'development' that it sets out to dismantle. Metaphorically, [the term] marks history as a series of stages along an epochal road from the 'precolonial' to the 'colonial' to the 'post-colonial'—an unbidden, if disavowed, commitment to linear time and the idea of 'development.'"6 On another level of inquiry, Homi K. Bhabha's exhaustive and persistent critique of location reads and re-reads the reiteration of "the problem of the ambivalent temporality of...

What has anthropology learned from the anthropology of colonialism?

The emergence of the anthropology of colonialism in the 1990s has stimulated and enhanced critical reflection on the cultural and historical embedding of the discipline of anthropology, offering what is in effect a historiography of the discipline's present. How has this historical consciousness changed the contours of the discipline? Has it allowed anthropologists to critically distance their discipline from its intimate involvement with the world of modernity, development and the welfare state, as it first emerged under colonial rule? Have anthropologists learned that, instead of targeting and thus essentialising otherness, we should now study the processes by which human differences are constructed, hierarchised and negotiated? This presentation focuses on recent developments in European and North American anthropology in order to discuss the potential effects of the anthropology of colonialism's historical consciousness on anthropological ontologies (epitomised by current discussions on ‘indigenous peoples’), epistemologies (in reconceptualising ‘field’ and ‘method’) and ethics. It thus tries to outline the ways in which the critical promise of the anthropology of colonialism faces the obstacles that the present‐day heritage of colonialism puts in the way of realising its future potential.

Reading Dialogic Correspondence: Synge's The Aran Islands

Reading Dialogic Correspondence:Synge’s The Aran Islands Veerendra Lele After one hundred years, how might we read John Millington Synge's The Aran Islands anthropologically and ethnographically? The book bears a long history of interpretations by Synge's contemporaries, by literary artists and scholars, and by anthropologists.1 All of these interpreters critique, correctly, the romantic interests in "primitives" particular to both the Revivalist political aesthetic and to early colonial anthropology—and to its product, fieldwork ethnography. More recently, scholars have salvaged Synge from the Orientalist-cum-nationalist box and argued that he develops an early form of realism from a "displaced nostalgia."2 Scholars also note that while conforming to the still-emergent ethnographic conventions of his time, Synge simultaneously challenges these conventions through his autobiographic presence.3 Considered as an ethnographic work, this should not surprise us, if by ethnography we mean "the attempt to understand another life world using the self—as much of it as possible—as the instrument of knowing."4 Anthropologists now recognize the dangers of primitivism, and they have internalized the critique of power differentials, including colonial and postcolonial analyses, that condition so many modern epistemologies. And anthropologists have internalized something else: an understanding that ethnography itself is a cultural practice, and a dialogic one at that.5 The Aran Islands and the Aran Islands are both historically specific discursive objects—"places" are always arbitrated concepts—overlapping perhaps, but not isomorphic. The Aran Islands is certainly fictive, but like all fiction it is constrained by what is possible. Reading it now ethnographically, one can sense a creative agency expressed through particular cultural practices, with linguistic practices being primary. There is little interest in The Aran Islands in archaeological [End Page 124] anthropology as Synge is interested in other types of artifacts, among them languages, bodies, and folklore. His physical anthropology, his "ethnometry," resides in his musings on the supposed correspondence between physical features and personality, an awkward, and to our ears unseemly, traverse of the Cartesian divide. Reading Synge's text as straight ethnography is problematic, as others have noted.6 But Synge's autobiographic and dialogic presence is itself part of the potential ethnography that is The Aran Islands. As a writer—as the "graph" of the term "ethnographer"—he shifts from the agent-patient approach of the natural sciences, and instead develops a novel ethnographic disposition, a dialogic disposition. Though there is in The Aran Islands the residue of "objective scientific" ambition, there is also the subjective, and ultimately, the more human: for what are we, but subject—or subjected, as Nietzsche would have it—positions? Of talking with Máirtín, old and blind, Synge's first teacher and guide in Inis Mór, Synge writes, Then we talked about Inishmaan. "You'll have an old man to talk with you over there," he said, "and tell you stories of the fairies, but he's walking about with two sticks under him this ten year. Did ever you hear what it is goes on four legs when it is young, and on two legs after that, and on three legs when it does be old?" I gave him the answer. "Ah, master," he said, "you're a cute one, and the blessing of God be on you. Well, I'm on three legs this minute, but the old man beyond is back on four; I don't know if I'm better than the way he is; he's got his sight and I'm only an old dark man.'"7 Mikhail Bakhtin analytically describes two forms of Socratic dialogue as "anacrisis" and "syncrisis." Anacrisis requires, or demands, a response, "the provocation of the word by the word."8 The semantic content of such exchanges includes the formal reproduction of subject positions and differentials. In contrast, syncrisis is the bringing together of perspectives, in Bakhtin's assessment, concordant with his concept of heteroglossia. From my own fieldwork in contemporary spoken Irish in Aran, ag labhairt ("to speak") seems more anacritic and ag caint ("to talk") more syncritic. The mixture of syncrisis stands in contrast [End Page 125] to what Bakhtin argues is the monologic impetus of the classical dialectic...

Critical Inuit studies: an anthology of contemporary Arctic ethnography

Part I: Figuring MethodFlora and Me: Collaboration and Combat in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta of Southwest Alaska, Molly Lee Listening to Elders, Working with Youth: Changing Dimensions of Theory and Practice in Alaskan Arctic Research in the 21st Century, Carol Zane Jolles Participatory Anthropology in Nunavut, Michael Kral and Lori Idlout Time, Space, and Memory in Inuvialuit Narratives, Murielle Nagy Anthropology in an Era of Inuit Empowerment, Edmund (Ned) SearlesPart II: ReConfiguring Categories: CultureThe Pipeline to Citizenship: The Inuvialuit Land Claims Agreement and Economic Development and the Expectations of Indigenous Citizens, Pamela Stern Showing Traditions: Cultural Productions and Cultural Survival among the Iglulingmiut, Nancy Wachowich Culture as Narrative: Who is telling the Inuit Story?, Nelson Graburn six gestures, peter kulchyski The Ethical Injunction to Remember: Memory, Cultural Survival and Ethics in Nunavut, Lisa StevensonPart III: ReConfiguring Categories: PlaceInuit Place Names and Sense of Place, Beatrice Collignon Inuit Social Networks in an Urban Setting, Nobuhiro Kishigami Inuit Geographical Knowledge One Hundred Years Apart: Place Names in Tinijjuarvik [Cumberland Sound], Nunavut, Ludger Muller-Wille and Linna Weber Muller-Wille Iglu to Iglurjuag: The Anthropology of Colonialism in Culture, Home and History, Frank James Tester

Dutch Colonial Anthropology in Indonesia

AbstractAttempts to assess the results of colonial anthropology in Indonesia faced some problems, which, until recently, have not been dealt with properly. Therefore, in a newly published comprehensive history of anthropology in the Netherlands, several studies focused on the character, rather than on the substance of colonial anthropology. In the case of Dutch colonial representations of Indonesia, 'colonial anthropology' appears to be an assemblage of various disciplines that constituted a fragmented whole (Indologie; Dutch Indies Studies) from which today's Dutch academic anthropology emerged. However, projection of current conceptions of anthropology into the colonial past resulted in a tendency to neglect some major characteristics of early representations that are imperative for the interpretation of these representations. Besides, a rather limited familiarity amongst present-day anthropologists with the way in which Dutch colonial politics became immersed in international discourses resulted in misappraisal of an essential change in colonial knowledge: the shift from local to analytical representations, deeply affecting the portrayal of Indonesian cultures. In colonial knowledge production, emphasis moved from ethnographic particularism to essentialist conceptions like 'Knowledge of the Native'. This shift also had serious consequences for the academic position of ethnology amongst other colonial disciplines. Until recently, this misappraisal could escape notice because students of Dutch colonial anthropology were insufficiently aware of the effects on interpretation of the great variety of disciplinary discourses, so characteristic for Dutch colonial studies. Therefore, we will here concentrate on these effects and on the growing intertwinement of knowledge and politics which was directly related to the international orientation of colonial policy that became increasingly prominent after the mid-nineteenth century.

Transgressing boundaries. An explanation and an announcement

Some readers of Archaeological dialogues may be surprised to discover that the discussion article featured in this issue neither is written by an archaeologist nor makes overt reference to archaeology. Curious as that may seem, we see this as a productive move in the journal's continuing mission to find innovative, and sometimes provocative, ways to stimulate conversations that transgress disciplinary boundaries. In soliciting this piece, we felt that, as two of the most important contributors to the theoretical development of the historical anthropology of colonialism and as scholars who have been at the forefront of cultural anthropology's new re-engagement with the study of material culture, the work of Jean and John Comaroff offers an exceptional opportunity for a creatively heuristic conjuncture between archaeology and cultural anthropology, and that it deserves to be widely read and discussed by archaeologists.

”The West“ and the Anthropology of Other People's Colonialism: Frederick Starr in Korea, 1911–1930

-Frederick starr (1858-1933) was the first anthropologist to hold a position at the University of Chicago, where he taught from the foundation of the institution in 1892 until his retirement in 1923. He had wide research interests and was an avid fieldworker, making numerous study trips to Mexico, Liberia, the Congo, the Phil ippines, and in the United States. Starr first traveled to Japan in 1904, where he arranged for the exhibition of several hairy Ainu at the St. Louis Exposition, and over roughly twenty-five years before and after his formal retirement increasingly turned his attention to work in Japan and Korea. Although he never undertook concentrated, long-term fieldwork in a single location of the sort that would become standard practice after Franz Boas in the United States and Bronislaw Malinowski in Britain, Starr's six trips to colonial Korea1 between 1911 and 1930 (three others were aborted) totaled some nine months in duration. His experience in Japan was even more extensive; he died in Tokyo on his fourteenth visit. Starr taught Japanese topics from his earliest days at the University of Chicago, and the Chicago Annual Register for 1922?23 lists also what was probably the first course on Korean ethnography to be offered in an American university. He was, finally, a public intellectual?and

Slash and Burn: A Swidden Critique of Sri Lankan AnthropologyAnthropologizing Sri Lanka: A Eurocentric Misadventure. By Susantha Goonatilake. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. 306 pp.

Anthropologists are one of Sri Lanka’s minor export industries. In this polemic, the Sri Lankan social scientist Susantha Goonatilake, who disapproves of both anthropology and the Sri Lankans who practice it, takes aim at the two most prominent among them, Gananath Obeyesekere and Stanley Tambiah. For good measure he also throws in two non–Sri Lankans, Richard Gombrich and Bruce Kapferer. All four write about the religion of the Sinhalese, and it is their representations and interpretations of Sinhala religion that stir Goonatilake’s ire. This is a relentlessly angry and intemperate book whose slash-and-burn approach undermines its own argument. Goonatilake’s thesis is essentially that “the anthropology of the four authors is seriously flawed with respect to basic facts on the ground, the methodology used, and the conclusions arrived at” (p. xiii). His central theme is that these four authors engage in a colonial anthropology that fails to do justice to the complexity of Sri Lankan (read Sinhala Buddhist) civilization. These writings, he asserts, “‘are worse than anything colonial anthropology wrought, and in fact, worse than the colonial writings of the 19th and early 20th centuries on Sri Lanka” (p. xiii). He adds a strongly worded attack on Sri Lankan “institutions and individuals . . . [who act] as a social cognitive matrix that filters the local reality for the visiting anthropologists” (p. xiv). These critiques are liberally laced with strong doses of attacks ad hominem. Goonatilake deals with these writers book by book, giving no quarter to any argument, minor point, assertion, and statement that comes his way. He devotes four chapters to Obeyesekere and Gombrich, three to Kapferer, two to Tambiah, and three to what he calls the sociology of Sri Lankan anthropology. He raises some issues worthy of discussion, such as the pitfalls in gen-

Susantha Goonatilake. Anthropologizing Sri Lanka: A Eurocentric Misadventure. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

In this “exercise in the sociology of anthropology” (p. xii), Susantha Goonatilake portrays contemporary anthropology of Sri Lanka as “worse than anything colonial anthropology wrought, and, in fact, worse than the colonial writings of the 19&lt;+&gt;th and early 20&lt;+&gt;th centuries” (xiii). Goonatilake focuses his attacks on selected works by Gananath Obeyesekere, Richard Gombrich, Bruce Kapferer, and Stanley Tambiah, and in the last chapter widens his critique to include almost every other scholar of Sri Lanka. While Goonatilake offers very good summaries of these texts and provides some pointed critiques, especially of Tambiah's more explicitly political writings, his analysis does not add up to an effective dismissal of post-colonial anthropological thought on Sri Lanka. While Goonatilake's book seems to try to be a Sri Lankan version of Ronald Inden's Imagining India, he undermines this ambitious project with his personal political animosities and his misreadings of anthropology.

Anthropologizing Sri Lanka: A Eurocentric Misadventure

Susantha Goonatilake, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001, xiv + 306 pages.Reviewer: Karine Bates McGill UniversityIn Anthropologizing Sri Susantha Goonatilake, a Sri-Lankan researcher cross-appointed to the New York Center for Studies of Social Change and the Vidyartha Centre in Colombo, Sri Lanka, reviews recent work on Sri by four renowned anthropologists affiliated with prestigious Western universities: Richard Gombrich (Oxford), Gananath Obeysekere (Princeton), Bruce Kapferer (London), and S.J. Tambiah (Harvard). Through a critical analysis of their works on Sinhala Buddhism, Goonatilake wishes to demonstrate these authors' Eurocentric biases and limited understanding of Sri Lanka's culture and society. Goonatilake sees in the works of Gombrich, Obeysekere, Kapkerer, and Tambiah a resurgence of a virulent colonial anthropology in Sri Lanka (p. xiv) and rebukes these authors for offering misinformed accounts of Sinhala Buddhism.To develop his argument, Goonatilake has divided his book into five parts. First, he situates the anthropological research on Sri in the global context of the history of anthropology. In part 2, he reviews Gombrich's and Obeysekere's attempt to interpret Sinhala with reference to Protestantism. Thirdly, he examines Kapferer's analysis of the central role of sorcery in Sinhala society. In part four, he presents Tambiah's study of fratricide. Finally, he focusses on the cultural and educational backgrounds of these experts on the anthropology of Sri Lanka. Therefore, what Goonatilake proposes is not only an analysis of anthropological research on Sri but also a study of the anthropologists themselves.In part 1, Goonatilake describes the dominant and yet evolving theoretical landscape within which anthropological research tends to be framed. He begins with a reminder that much of current anthropological work is still based on Western models originating in 17th-century Europe. However, he also points to competing frameworks emerging in Asia and non-Western countries that seem to have had a growing impact not only on ways to conduct anthropological research but also on the ways in which anthropologists, especially those from Western countries, are perceived by the societies they purport to study. He also points out how the spread of in Western countries may have impacted Western thinking, much in the same way previous contacts between Europeans and Sri Lankans had changed Sri Lankan thinking. Emphasizing that Sri has never been isolated from foreign influence, Goonatilake concludes part one by questioning anthropological work on Sri Lankan society that fails to consider the many cross-influences between European and Sri-Lankan cultures and ways of thinking.In chapters 2-5, the author analyzes the thesis of Buddhism proposed by Gombrich and Obeysekere. Goonatilake criticizes the methodology of the authors, as well as their knowledge of the contexts within which concepts of Protestantism and have evolved and have been used. Richard Gombrich's book Buddhist Precept and Practice (1991) describes the study of a village in which Buddhist life is undisturbed by external influence and then transformed by the introduction of Protestantism by missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Gombrich and Obeysekere's Transformed: Religious Change in Sri (1988), the anthropologists based their study on Obeysekere's idea of Protestant Buddhism. For him, Protestant consists in protest against the British and also in an integration of various characteristics of those colonizers. Protestant has in turn been transformed through changes in class-based values.Goonatilake highlights the Eurocentric biases apparent in Gombrich's conception of Buddhism, including common Western misunderstandings of Sri Lankan concepts such as dukkha. He also faults Gombrich for arriving at the conclusion--on rather scanty data--that Sri Lankan's practices and precepts of are discrepant. …

Equivocal Connections: Fonseca Cardoso and the Origins of Portuguese Colonial Anthropology

EquivocalConnections: FonsecaCardosoandthe Origins ofPortuguese ColonialAnthropology RICARDO ROQUE Thisarticle is abouttheequivoquesofanthropology's colonialencounter as wellas thestory ofintellectual artefacts. Itaddresses an old debateon thegenealogy of anthropological knowledge, at thecore of whichis a sharedassumption:anthropologists and historians today perceivethe history ofanthropology as intertwined withcolonialhistory. Few,ifany, anthropologists orhistorians woulddisagree that theanthropology ofnonWestern peoples is genealogically embeddedin imperialexpansionor colonialcontexts, andthatwecanhardly imagine colonialpowerwithout somesortofanthropological knowledge as bedside company. Itisalsotrue thatthisassumption hasnotbeenatalldevoidofstrong moralconvictions about theevil natureof colonialismand its friendly anthropologies, a moralimpetus particularly evident inearlier approaches to thesubjectin the1960sand '70s. Sincethattime,though, withtheexception ofTalal Asad'sseminal assessment in1973,historians havegiven itlittle systematic attention as a subject initsownright.1 As GeorgeStocking notedin1991, the'assumption thatanthropology was linkedto Western colonialism' seemstohavesurvived intheprofessional culture ofanthropologists more intheform ofa 'commonplace ofdisciplinary discourse' thanas a 'serious interest inthehistory ofanthropology incolonialcontext'.2 Although the Portuguese case has been entirely leftout of thispictureby English literature, Stocking'sremarks applyto the Portuguese anthropological discourse sincethe1970s.Havingitsprofessional identity closely associated with politicaloppositionto the authoritarian Estado Novo regime, Portuguese socialanthropology, bornintoinstitutional autonomy outof theAprilRevolution in1974,hasbeeneagerto accuseearlier generations of (physical) anthropologists ofracialprejudice and complicity withthe 1 Anthropology and theColonial Encounter ',ed. byTalal Asad (London:IthacaPress,1973). George W. Stocking,Jr, 'Colonial Situations', in Colonial Situations. Essays on the Contextualizationof EthnographicKnowledge, ed. by George W. Stocking,Jr (Wisconsin: University of WisconsinPress,1991), p. 4. This statement was reinforced in 1992,in his The Ethnographer's Magic and OtherEssaysin theHistoryofAnthropology (Wisconsin:University ofWisconsinPress,1992),p. 213. ORIGINS OF PORTUGUESE COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 8l imperial state.Veryfewhaveundertaken a seriousand critical historical approach tosucha pervasive disciplinary assumption.3 Anthropology's colonial history retainsits attractive power,but the commonplace does not satisfy historians and anthropologists anymore. Quiterecently thestudyoftherootsofcolonialanthropology or,more specifically, ethnography, hasreceived careful andnovelcritical attention. Pels and Salemink'sColonial Ethnographies of 1994 and two recently published volumesof 1999are devotedto exploring and reworking the agendaopenedup by Asad's volume.4Crucialin thenew impulsefor objectifying anthropology and colonialismare Pelsand Salemink'sprogrammatic formulations. Restoring Stocking's historicist appealtodebunk the'presentisibiasofdisciplinary history, Pelsand Salemink arguefora widerand non-disciplinary understanding ofpractitioners and forms of anthropology.5 The genealogy of ethnographic theories and methodsis nowregarded as locatedintheheterogeneous andpluralrealms of'colonial practice'and 'colonial subjects',well beyondthe boundariesof the academicprofession. Colonialcontexts suchas missionary work,settlement ,war and pacification, government or tradere-emerge as crucial moments andagentsofanthropology's past.6Atthesametime, their idea of a 'practicalhistory of anthropology' offers an important attempt to departfromthe literary reductionisms of discourseand intertextual analysis. Weareaskedtoturn ourenergies instead tothestudy ofpractices, locating textinitssituations of(co)production and'material mediations'.7 3 CompareAlfredo Margarida,'Le colonialismeportugaisetl'anthropologie', inAnthropologie etImpérialisme, ed. byJeanCopans (Paris:FrançoisMaspero, 1975),pp. 307-44; Mario Canova Moutinho,'Aetnologiacolonialportuguesae o Estado Novo', inO FascismoemPortugal.Actas do Coloquio realizadona Faculdadede Letrasem Marco de 1980 (Lisbon:Regrado Jogo,1982), pp. 415-43; Rui Pereira,'O desenvolvimento da ciencia antropológicana empresacolonial do Estado Novo', in O Estado Novo - das origensao firn da autarcía, 11(Lisbon: Fragmentos, 1986), 89-101; Donato Gallo, Antropologia e Colonialismo. O Saber Portugués (Lisbon: Heptágono, 1988); Rui Pereira,'A questäo colonial na etnologia ultramarina',Antropologia Portuguesa,7 (1989),61-78; JorgeFreitasBranco,'Cultura como ciencia?Da consolidaçao do discursoantropológicoà institucionalizaçao da disciplina',herHistoria,8 (1986),75-103. Fora morecriticalview, see: Rui Pereira,'Colonialismo e antropologia:a especulaçao simbólica', RevistaInternacional de EstudosAfricanos* 10-11 (1989),269-81. 4 Colonial Ethnographies, ed. by PeterPels and Óscar Salemink:Historyof Anthropology, specialissue,8 (1994); Colonial Subjects.EssaysinthePracticalHistoryofAnthropology, ed. by PeterPelsand Oscar Salemink(AnnArbor:University ofMichiganPress,1999); Anthropology and Colonialismin Asia and Oceania, ed. byJan Van Bremenand AkitoshiShimizu(Surrey: Curzon, 1999). See also Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformationof Anthropology. The Politicsand Poeticsofan Ethnographic Event(London:Cassell, 1999). GeorgeW. Stocking, Jr,Race, Cultureand Evolution.EssaysintheHistoryofAnthropology, 2ndedn (Chicago:University ofChicago Press,1982),dd. i-h. PeterPels and Oscar Salemink,introduction: Five Theses on Ethnographyas Colonial Practice',Historyof Anthropology, 8 (1994), 1-34; Pels and Salemink,introduction:Locating theColonial SubjectsofAnthropology', inColonial Subjects,pp. 1-^2. 7 introduction:LocatingtheColonial Subjects. . .'. In supportofthisargument see Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture.Anthropology, Travel and Government(Cambridge:Polity, 1994). 82 RICARDO ROQUE However,as often occurswithevery programmatic formula, notall is equallydevelopedbyotherscholars, evenbytheproponents themselves. The effort to shakedisciplinary histories seemsto havecometo thefore, whileother linesofenquiry appeartoremain initsshadow.Historians...