The beginning of the 16th century was marked by Europe’s first big expansion in its history. The political and economic situation in Europe sent the two Iberian kingdoms across the Atlantic, in a race for wealth in which they first witnessed the existence of a new, up to that point unknown civilization. In those moments of initial contact, two different worldviews slowly built over long years of history, collided. The collision caused the spread of countless particles; two cultures broken into their deepest, most hidden aspects of existence were now a subject to a constant comparison and wonder among their members, each of them trying to define itself and the myth that it lives in, through the other. To stare in the eyes of the “Other” meant to transcend beyond the boundaries of one’s “Own world” and face the challenges that lay within this newly born connection. If we try to grasp each culture and society, in Eric Wolf’s sense, as a result of historically interwoven processes, this initial contact between two different societies, in our example between the Iberians and the Native Americans, represented just one of the many interconnected niches between cultures that form the fabric of one world history, in which everything is connected. No human society is left isolated, but is directly or indirectly influenced by the sole existence of other societies. The Indians and the Westerners started building a “common world” by merging the cultural characteristics together. When Europe conquered the world, following Europe’s ideological patterns, its inhabitants helped transforming the world of the non-Europeans in a “modern” direction. The natives or the “peoples without history” in turn, were not passive as it would be expected, but they resisted, adapted to, cooperated with or challenged their new masters and ultimately, although in a subtle way, changed them. (Wolf, 2010)
It was in a world like this, a world of interchangeable destruction and invention, that anthropology was born. The new contact with the “other” required new ways of thinking in order to fully understand the “new” culture and was also an endless inspiration of a romanticized curiosity and exploration, that has lead the humankind forward ever since the beginning of its existence. In this text, I will try to present the viewpoints of a few influential anthropologists concerning the birth and transformation of anthropology in a close relationship with colonialism and the problems that today’s scientists are facing due to anthropology’s Eurocentric# nature.
2. The Quest to Civilize the Savages#
Being aware of the devastating consequences of the many centuries-long colonization processes on non-European grounds and following the logically developed negative view on colonialism, I believe that it is in each anthropologist’s nature to cringe on the thought of the conditions in which anthropology was born as a science. Today, it is hard to deny the fact that anthropology is a product of Europe’s imperialism and its provider – colonialism. “Anthropology is an outcome of an historical process, which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent human beings have had their resources plundered, their institutions and beliefs destroyed while they themselves were ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage, and contaminated by diseases they were unable to resist. Anthropology is the daughter to this era of violence” (Lévi-Strauss, 1966). At the time of Europe’s internal race for larger portion of the rest of the world, in the occidental# world reigned the concept of social evolution – the idea that human societies are developed in a particular direction. Inspired by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, what once referred only to the Natural, now found its application in the Social, under the leitmotif: “from lower, to higher; from Indians to Westerners”. This clearly put the West European societies on the pinnacle of human development, giving them the right to civilize their “lower” fellow human beings and show them the path to modernization. This claim was used to justify the colonization process when it was morally and scientifically questioned, but instead lead to devastating results and an enormous loss on cultural diversity (Kröll, 2009, pp. 12-17).
Knowing this and having in mind the very essence of anthropology as a study of humankind by humans makes the discipline be a target of various negative claims about its function and its crucial role in the imperialistic politics during the colonizing process. Anthropology developed itself as a study of the “Unknown” or the “Other#”, placing the anthropologists in a position of direct mediums and informers about the particularities of the new cultures they were studying. Unlike the devastating consequences of the application of the social evolutionism in the physical anthropology, which lead to genocides all over the European colonies, the function that social and cultural anthropologists had during the colonization, receives a milder criticism. Despite the logical remark of Godfrey Wilson that „It is the scientists’ business to undertake (…) patient and objective study, it is the business of government and industry to make use of their results in fashioning out in the present whatever future they desire.”, emphasizing that even if the anthropologists had no direct impact on the administration, the information they produced could be easily taken advantage of for purely political goals. Talal Asad argues, however, that the “knowledge produced by anthropologists was often too esoteric for government use, and even where it was usable it was marginal in comparison to the vast body of information routinely accumulated by merchants, missionaries, and administrators.” (Asad, 1995, p.18) He doesn’t completely reject the possibility of such interactions between the anthropologists and the imperial power, however states that “it is a mistake to view social anthropology in the colonial era as primarily an aid to colonial administration, or as the simple reflection of colonial ideology.“(Asad, 1995, p.18)
3. Anthropology – Decolonized?
Even though the question of whether anthropology had a (direct or indirect) role in politics is disputable, it would be completely wrong to overthrow anthropology’s Eurocentric nature. The self proclamation of the “Westerner” as a pinnacle of human development, made him, seen through his occidental scope, the only one capable of scientific praxis. Anthropology was made by the Europeans in order to be able to testify for the existence of the people that were living in the newly discovered land, which inevitably makes the science Eurocentric. However, ever since the decolonization process has started, the object of anthropological research has slowly begun to shift from “the Other” to “Ourselves”. This has given a chance to the once colonized societies to contribute to the anthropological research, with increasingly gaining literacy and building a middle class capable of doing anthropology. It would be only fair to add though, that despite all the efforts, the anthropological dogmatized Eurocentrism is hard to root out. In her text “The Anthropological Discourse on India: Reason and Its Other”, Veena Das clearly states: “The possibility of transcending their own ideology through an intellectual appropriation of other values is open to the Western anthropologists. But Indian anthropologists have no legitimate way of applying the same method to the ideology of their own culture. The knowledge categories of non-Western cultures are simply unanchored beliefs, whereas the Western categories acquire the status of scientific and objective truths”(Das in: Borofsky 1994, 136.) Speaking about her homeland India, which was once the largest British colony, she brings up the importance of the contribution of Indian anthropologists when it comes to an anthropological research on their culture and society, pointing out the need of representing their country “not as if it were absent and silent”, but quite in the contrary “insert their voices within a plurality of voices in which all kinds of statements- prescriptive, normative, descriptive, indicative – are waging a virtual battle about the nature of Indian society and the legitimate space for social sciences in this society” (Das in: Borofsky 1994, p. 143)
However, Thomas Hylland Eriksen doesn’t ignore the problems that a decentralized anthropology would bring to the field: “This decentralization (and some would say decolonization) of the discipline, although admittedly still modest, has led to new challenges for anthropologists in bringing us closer to our objects of study and, in some cases, engaging in a theoretical dialogue with them”(Eriksen, 2010, p.273). Roberto Damatta, a Brazilian anthropologist has written exactly on this problem. In “Some Biased Remarks on Interpretivism: A View from Brazil”, he speaks of two different anthropologies; one whose objects are far-away, curious tribes and one whose object is the anthropologist’s own society. He then adds that in both of the cases, there is a certain blindness that has to be taken in account. In traditional anthropology we have the needed distance that has to be kept in order to attain objectivity in the fieldwork on the one hand, but on the other hand we also have the somewhat totemic association between the researcher and the object studied, giving the researcher a certain “authority”, despite the descriptive nature of the ethnography. In the other case, when one is speaking of one’s own culture there is the tendency to replace description with interpretive narration which quickly becomes an “opinion”, but there is also the fact that, unlike in the traditional anthropology, the researcher has to deal with varieties of people in order to do justice to the object investigated. Combining the two different approaches would lead us to a mutual “truth”, in which both the foreign and the domestic anthropologists would have their own say. (Das in: Borofsky 1994, pp.19-34)
4. Epilogue
Despite the numerous (and only rightfully so) prescribed criticisms on early anthropology, I want to believe that there was science done just for the sake of science – that there existed people who undergone through the explorer’s endeavor just to feel the joy of being one of the few who were given the chance to testify for the existence of one other way of being a human. And to learn. Learn from the “Other”. Beside this maybe poetically romanticized view on anthropology as an outcome of pure curiosity and thirst for knowledge, what I believe to be more important is to learn from the mistakes of the anthropologists in the past. Unfortunately, the damage done is irreversible. The only thing left to do is try to destroy the Eurocentric dogma and overcome all the difficulties that lay ahead, by opening the way to all the anthropologists, disregarding of their nationality, to contribute in creating mutual truths about what it actually means to be human and help this unique science develop in the right direction.
References
Asad, Talal (1995), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, London (Neuaufl. 1995); DaMatta, Robert (1994): Some Biased Remarks on Interpretivism: A View from Brazil. In: Robert Borofsky (ed., 1994): Assessing Cultural Anthropology, New York: McGraw-Hill. 119–131.
Das, Veena (1994): The Anthropological Discourse on India: Reason and Its Other. In: Robert Borofsky (ed.,1994): Assessing Cultural Anthropology, New York: McGraw-Hill. 134-144.
Eriksen, Hylland Thomas (1995): Small Places, Large Issues (2010), Pluto Press. 270-274.
Kröll, Friedhelm (2009): Grundlagen sozialwissenschaftlicher Denkweisen, Wilhelm Braumüller, Universitäts – Verlagbuchhandlung, Wien. 12-17
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1966): Anthropology: Its Achievement and Future, Current Anthropology
Wolf, Eric Robert (1923): Europe and the People without History, Univ. of California Press, 2010
Marija Grujovska
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