Power and Anti-Imperial Anthropology

Below is a recent blog post by Dr. Maximilian Forte, university professor, political anthropologist and general dissident, who has written extensively and critically on the history of anthropology, and has provided much needed commentary on the ridiculous tragedy of the Human Terrain System program run by the U.S military. 

In this post Max drops some quotes from John Gledhill’s Power and its Disguises, one of my very favorite texts (I keep it front and center on my book shelf) and a great resource for getting a real sense of where political anthropology has been moving the last 10 years or so. He then provides some follow-up commentary and perspective well worth reading.

I suggest you go over to Max’s website and have a look because the man is one of the most cogent and ethically-minded anthropologists working in the field today. Enjoy.

Colonial and Anti-Imperial Anthropology

by Maximilian Forte

The following quotes come from John Gledhill’s Power and its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Pluto, 2000).

page 1:

Half a century ago, the subject matter and relevance of political anthropology still seemed relatively easy to define. Under Western colonial regimes, one of the most valuable kinds of knowledge which anthropologists could offer to produce was that relating to indigenous systems of law and government. Most colonial governments had opted for systems of indirect rule. Colonial authority was to be mediated through indigenous leaders and the rule of Western law was to legitimate itself through a degree of accommodation to local ‘customs’.

In the last analysis, however, the laws and authority of the colonizers were pre-eminent. Anthropologists in the twentieth century found themselves in the same position as clerics in the Spanish-American Empire at the dawn of European global expansion. The authorities were interested in witchcraft accusations and blood feuds with a view to stamping out what was not acceptable to European ‘civilization’. Yet there were some areas of indigenous practice, such as customary law on property rights, which colonial regimes sought to manipulate for their own ends, and might even codify as law recognized by the colonial state. This bureaucratic restructuring of indigenous ‘traditions’ and socia1 organization was generally carried out within a framework of European preconceptions, giving anthropologists an opportunity to offer their services in the cause of making colonial administration work.

A particularly intractable problem for the colonial regimes was that of finding persons who could play the role of authority figures in areas where state-less or ‘acephalous’ societies predominated.

page 3:

…the critical strands of an anthropological approach to politics were not those that became hegemonic in the discipline in the period after 1940. This was the date when the British structural-functionalists established ‘political anthropology’ as a formalized sub-field.

…most of the profession did display ‘willingness to serve’. More significantly, the analyses of mainstream academic anthropology, in both Britain and the United States, proved incapable of confronting the fact that its object of study was a world structured by Western colonial expansion and capitalist imperialism in a systematic way.

pages 3-4:

…it remains necessary to strive for the decolonization of anthropology today. The problem is not simply the relationship between the development of anthropology and formal colonial rule, but the historical legacies of Western domination, the continuing global hegemony of the Northern powers, and contemporary manifestations of racial and neo-colonial domination in the social and political life of metropolitan countries.

First, a note about terminology from a guilty party who frequently has used, and often still uses, the phrase “decolonized anthropology.” What Gledhill is speaking about is anthropology on the side of the colonizers, colonial anthropology in the sense that it served the mission of colonization. “Decolonized anthropology” can therefore sound strange, if we are still speaking of the anthropology of contemporary Western elites–it can sound strange because it suggests that these elites (Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown, etc.) were themselves colonized, that their discipline was occupied by dominant, foreign interests, and that we, their successors, need to liberate ourselves from that dominance much the same as colonized territories in Africa.

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Publisher Comments about the book Power and its Disguises:

Arguing that an anthropology that confronts the politics of academic knowledge can transcend its colonial origins to challenge enthnocentrism, Power and Its Disguises explores both the complexities of local situations and the power relations that shape the global order. The book begins by analyzing the politics of societies without indigenous states and non-Western agrarian civilizations in order to confront the politics of domination and resistance within the colonial contexts that gave birth to the discipline.The author then examines the contemporary politics of Africa, Asia and Latin America, showing that historically informed anthropological perspectives can contribute to debates about democratization by incorporating a 'view from below' and revealing forces that shape power relations behind the formal facade of state institutions. Examples are drawn from Brazil, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia, India, Mexico, Peru, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Sri Lanka, amongst others.Emphasizing the need to avoid both romanticism and blanket pessimism, the book shows how the study of micro-dynamics of power in everyday life coupled with sensitivity to the interactions between the local and global offers critical insights into such issues as state terror and ethnic violence, the emancipatory potential of social movements and the politics of rights, gender and culture. The book ends with discussion of the politics of academic research and academics' efforts to play a critical role.