COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND ITS ALTERNATIVES

Anthropologists have long been critics of sexism, colonialism, racism, inequality, and capitalist exploitation, especially in the sites and contexts in which they practice ethnographic research. And yet anthropology remains a colonial discipline, a reality that shapes its theories and methods and limits its possibilities for engaged political action. Exploring this reality and pointing the way toward alternatives are the aims of this chapter.

Anthropology emerged as a scientific discipline during the colonial era, when Europeans were consolidating their control over the non-Western territories that they had subjugated to their rule. The people of these territories became anthropology's objects of analysis, and anthropology became the discipline in the Western scientific academy dedicated to the study of non-Western peoples. Within the emerging social sciences, anthropology laid claim to the "primitive" world as its intellectual turf, occupying what has been called the "savage slot" in academia and ceding the study of the modern or "civilized" to other fields (Trouillot 1991). Critical to this project was the ethnographic method, including the techniques of participant-observation through long-term field research, which enabled anthropologists to access the insiders' perspectives on their own societies. Scholars debate anthropology's contributions to colonial rule, with some calling it the "handmaiden of colonialism," created merely to serve colonial interests, a charge that others reject (Lewis 2013). But whatever service they may have provided colonizers, anthropologists benefited more from colonialism than the colonial powers did from anthropology. Colonial domination of non-European others made the world safe for anthropological fieldwork: With the natives violently "pacified" and their territories opened for exploration, anthropologists could readily move in to local indigenous communities and set up shop (Asad 1979, 91–92). The colonial power structure enabled Europeans to safely observe and participate in the lives of non-Europeans, to establish the long-term, intimate relations that became the basis for and the hallmark of ethnographic fieldwork.

Yet, rarely if ever did anthropologists of the colonial era mention the fact of colonialism or its possible impacts on the people they studied. Although they worked with people whose lives were lived under the shadow of colonial rule, their own practice made possible by that rule, anthropologists wrote as though they were studying a world apart, their objects living in original societies untouched by outside influence. As Talal Asad observed, this blindness to — or willful ignorance of — the colonial context was widespread and persisted well into the twentieth century: "It is not a matter of dispute that social anthropology emerged as a distinctive discipline at the beginning of the colonial era, that it became a flourishing academic profession towards its close, or that throughout this period its efforts were devoted to a description and analysis — carried out by Europeans, for a European audience — of non-European societies dominated by European power. And yet there is a strange reluctance on the part of most professional anthropologists to consider seriously the power structure within which their discipline has taken shape" (Asad 1973, 14–15).

Anthropologists have since become much more aware of their discipline's colonial origins, and anthropology in general has become more critical and political. A so-called crisis of anthropology came in the 1970s, when the formal end of colonialism in most of the world shattered "the optimistic scientific disciplinary confidence" of the past (Stocking 2001, 320) and anthropologists' claims to universal, generalizable knowledge about human culture became untenable. New concerns, new theories, and new methodologies began to take hold. Ethnographers began to denounce the conditions of inequality and disempowerment that many of their friends and collaborators in the field experienced, offering powerful critiques of the racist, sexist, capitalist formations that characterized their fieldsites. Feminist anthropology, meanwhile, gained greater influence as its long-standing concerns with gender, sexism, and sexuality, and of gendered and racialized power more generally, moved closer to the center of anthropological attention. Many anthropologists were influenced by postcolonial theory, becoming critical of the effects of European colonialism — and of subsequent programs, including neoliberal capitalism — on the societies that they studied. Such concepts as "community," "development," even "culture" became explicit targets of critique as anthropological analysis became global, historical, and concerned with power at the most local of sites. Anthropology had its postmodern turn, during which scholars interrogated the discipline's claims to knowledge and found them wanting, calling into question the very possibility of scientific objectivity. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as part of what is sometimes referred to as the "writing culture" moment, anthropologists began to deconstruct ethnography's authorial techniques and to experiment with new forms of ethnographic expression, often including their subjects' voices in their texts and recognizing the anthropological self as an actor in the social world being depicted (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). Feminist anthropologists, their earlier efforts at literary experimentation neglected or derided, critiqued the writing culture project's attempt to include "other voices" as a co-optation rather than a truly dialogical innovation (Abu-Lughod 1991; Behar and Gordon 1996; Visweswaran 1994). More recently, collaborative, activist, and engaged forms of research emerged as efforts to make anthropology more productive for the peoples under study and more ethically sustainable for anthropologists themselves.

Yet, despite its concern with power, injustice, and inequality, including its critique of its own colonial past, dominant anthropology — like all academic disciplines — remains part of a larger colonial project. From a decolonial perspective, this is the case not merely because of anthropology's emergence within the era of colonialism but because of its inherent coloniality. For contemporary scholars and students, it is less relevant to ask whether early anthropologists colluded with colonizers to facilitate colonial rule than it is to examine the inscription of coloniality in anthropology's DNA. To understand this claim, in this chapter we explore the idea of coloniality and the role that science — including so-called soft sciences like anthropology — have played in maintaining it.

It is impossible in one small book to provide a comprehensive summary of the extensive, interdisciplinary scholarship on colonialism and postcolonialism, or the so-called decolonial turn. Nor can we delineate the variations within the colonial project stemming from the different national origins of the colonizers, the cultures of the colonized, or the specificities of the colonial encounter in different world regions. Nor is that necessary for our argument. The idea of "the colonial" here does more than reference the events of a particular historical period. Rather, we use "the colonial" and "coloniality" to mark an entire structure of racialized and gendered power and social inequality within which ethnographic research has been, and continues to be, conducted; decolonizing is the process of undoing that inequality, of exposing and dismantling ethnography's deep coloniality. Thus, in what follows we describe a theoretical framework for remaking colonial anthropology, employing some of the insights gained from a reading of feminist theory, indigenous critique, and the decolonial turn, which we consider to be underutilized resources for decolonizing anthropology. (Throughout, the more technical aspects of the discussion can be found in the endnotes.) We then assess anthropology and its history, reviewing its colonial origins and the formation of its dominant variety in the twentieth century, exploring the coloniality inherent in traditional anthropological practice. This section is followed by a look at some alternative approaches — including feminist, collaborative, world, and activist anthropologies — that represent precedents for pushing back against colonial anthropology. Those approaches inspired our own project, which we discuss in more detail in the chapters that follow.

Anthropology, Coloniality, and the Politics of Knowing

DECOLONIAL FEMINIST THEORY

In the most general sense, the colonial era can be said to have begun with the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the "New World" in 1492. It lasted into the mid-twentieth century, by which time most colonized lands had become independent nations. But centuries of political, economic, and cultural rule by Europeans and U.S. Americans over the rest of the world's peoples left their mark on the way all people continue to live, act, and think. Decolonial theory represents an effort to examine and challenge the many ways in which colonial experience is embedded, not just in people's everyday lives, but in scholarly efforts to understand those lives and to write about them.

World history, for example, has traditionally been written from the perspective of the West, for a Western audience, focusing on Western accomplishments. Until relatively recently, when non-Western people appeared in these histories it was as savage others standing in the way of civilization's "progress" and the unfolding of the West's manifest destiny. Early social scientists, concerned with contemporary realities more than historical ones, produced similar stories, with non-Western people understood as evolutionary precursors to modern Europeans, living relics of the past who might, with proper guidance, someday attain the Europeans' level of civilization. Western "Man" was taken for granted as representing the fundamentally human, and Western experience was equated with human experience, universal and all-encompassing (Wynter 2003).

By the mid- to late twentieth century — as the colonial era was finally ending in most of the world, with the formation of independent nations out of formerly colonized territories — the hegemony of the Western perspective was being questioned, significantly by non-Western scholars who rejected the universalist posture of Western historiography and science. The interdisciplinary field of postcolonial studies drew scholarly attention to the West's construction of itself through its colonial encounters with non-Western others. For postcolonial scholars like Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, the West (the "occidental") and the non-West (the "oriental") were not fundamental opposites but deeply intertwined and mutually constitutive (Said 1978). The world, in other words, is not merely the story of the modern West, nor history solely the product of Western expansion and its impacts (Bhambra 2014). Postcolonialists argued instead that the idea of "the West" itself was a product of colonial engagement with the colonized, as colonizers encountered difference and, in the process, invented themselves and imagined their own inherent superiority (Said 1978, 1993). Postcolonial scholars inserted other histories, other narratives into the historical record, calling on the experiences of the subjugated (the "subaltern") to diversify and problematize the universalist narrative of the West. But these postcolonial insights came with a caveat: In the process of writing about the subaltern, Spivak warned, scholars must be cautious about "speaking for" them, introducing a concern with the politics of representation into the postcolonial conversation (Spivak 1988; see also Spivak 1999). Spivak and other feminist scholars criticized academics who pretended to give voice to the oppressed, seeming to allow the subaltern to speak for themselves while obscuring the power and privilege that permitted academics to author such accounts.

Decolonial theory shares some basic premises with postcolonial and subaltern studies, especially in its effort to see Western experience not as a universal project of Europe but as a particular one of engagement between Europe and the colonial world. But decolonial theorists reject postcolonial studies' reliance on works of European philosophy, drawing instead from, and continuing the work of, non-Western, colonized writers and intellectuals. Decolonial theory reaches beyond the academy to valorize the knowledges of the colonized — ways of thinking that colonizers tried to suppress or destroy — and calls attention to the work of thinkers (indigenous and Black people, among others) not ordinarily recognized as such within the Western canon.

Most significant for our discussion is decolonial theory's distinction between colonialism and coloniality. Colonialism is a system of political, economic, and cultural domination in which one nation or people establishes sovereignty over another. Coloniality is what endures, long after the formal systems of colonial rule have disappeared. It includes structures of and ideas about race, gender, and sexuality characteristic of colonialism and is animated by its logics of rationality, heteronormative patriarchy, white supremacy, and Eurocentrism. For cultural theorist Nelson Maldonado-Torres, coloniality refers to the enduring patterns and systems that emerged during the colonial era and that continue to define cultural meanings, economic organization, social relations, and knowledge production: "Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day" (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 243).

Sociologist Aníbal Quijano observes that coloniality "is still the most general form of domination in the world today, once colonialism as an explicit political order was destroyed. It doesn't exhaust, obviously, the conditions or the modes of exploitation and domination between peoples. But it hasn't ceased to be, for 500 years, their main framework" (Quijano 2007, 170; see also Quijano 2001). Or, as Ranajit Guha puts it, "The colonial experience has outlived decolonization and continues to be related significantly to the concerns of our time" (Guha 2001, 41–42).

Examples of coloniality in contemporary society abound. To mention but one, take the prevalence of white Western standards of female beauty — lightness of skin, straightness of hair, thinness of nose, and so on — in many places, both within and outside the West (Bryant 2013; Svitak 2014). Non-Western women purchase skin lighteners, hair straighteners, and other cosmetics in an effort to approximate the Eurocentric ideal, while global popular culture valorizes that ideal through entertainment, advertising, beauty pageants, and the like (Cohen, Wilk, and Stoeltje 1995; Goldstein 2000). The persistence of these beauty standards — established in colonial times and existing well beyond the end of colonialism in most of the world — demonstrates the coloniality of beauty today. Importantly, however, conformity with Western ideals is not universal: Women in many societies (including Western women of color) have challenged white Western standards, valorizing the beauty of non-Western and nonwhite features, often through organized movements, education and ad campaigns, and documentary films (Feminist Africa 2016; Sefa-Boakye 2015; Steele 2016). This fact points to another element of coloniality: It is not uniform and all encompassing, but often fragmented and contains spaces for resistance (see figure 1.1).

Decolonial theory takes seriously the role of race in the colonial project. The concept of race was critical to the founding and maintenance of all colonial institutions, beliefs, and behaviors. Racist assumptions about the natural superiority of the European over the non-European served to organize the entire colonial framework of rule, what Quijano calls the "colonial matrix of power." Colonized peoples were defined within the racist colonial matrix as savages, "the ultimate locus of inferiority," reduced to the category of natural objects and so inherently governable by the civilized. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos et al. observe, the non-Western person was "constituted as an intrinsically disqualified being, a collection of characteristics that were markers of inferiority towards the power and knowledge of the West and, thus, available for use and appropriation by the latter" (Santos, Nunes, and Meneses 2007, xxxv). Being inherently inferior to the European forms of

knowledge and belief, non-Western forms could be replaced — by force, if necessary — with colonial understandings. This was a critical dimension of colonialism that complemented its exploitive, extractive side with a "civilizing mission" intended to uplift the non-European through education, religion, and reform. Christianity, European language, Western styles of dress, of sexual modesty, of personal deportment — all of these and more were presumed to be superior to the local varieties and so would replace them. "Race" located native inferiority in the body of the colonized, destining nonwhites to servitude and abuse. Intellectual ability was also supposed to coincide with race: Colonizers viewed themselves as capable of rational thought, colonized peoples as only able to respond to base urges and emotions. Those unable to think for themselves, consequently, were considered disposable — rapeable, killable fodder for colonial armies and factories and farms (Mbembe 2003).