Decolonizing Anthropology (eBook)

An Introduction

Soumhya Venkatesan (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
316 Seiten
Polity (Verlag)
978-1-5095-4061-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Decolonization has been a buzzword in anthropology for decades, but remains difficult to grasp and to achieve. This groundbreaking volume offers not only a critical examination of approaches to decolonization, but also fresh ways of thinking about the relationship between anthropology and colonialism, and how we might move beyond colonialism's troubling legacy.

Soumhya Venkatesan describes the work already underway, and the work still needed, to extend the horizons of the discipline. Drawing on scholarship from anthropology and cognate disciplines, as well as ethnographic and other case studies, she argues both that the practice of anthropology needs to be and do better, and that it is worth saving. She focuses not only on ways of decolonizing anthropology but also on the potential of 'a decolonizing anthropology'.

Rich with insights from a range of fields, Decolonizing Anthropology is an essential resource for students and scholars.

Soumhya Venkatesan is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

Textauszug

2
What is Decolonization?

‘The postcolonial is a desire, the anticolonial a struggle, and the decolonial an ugly neologism.’

(Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, cited in Gago 2020: xiv)

Decolonization is one of the buzz words of the twenty-first century. Cusicanqui’s indictment above and Leon Moosavi’s reference to decolonization as a bandwagon (2020) indicate some ambivalence towards it. This is perhaps because the scope of the term is both wide and sometimes internally contradictory. Different invitations and injunctions to decolonize may:

• seek more equitable distributions of existing goods or better representation of under-represented groups in various arenas, including scholarship;
• focus on remediation, i.e., making up for denied access to valued goods;
• seek to promote social equity and justice;
• push for critical examinations of what is known and how it has come to be known and disseminated;
• seek epistemological and epistemic justice;
• require a reckoning of flows of wealth and consequent reparations;
• require the removal of objects and names that valorize colonizers and colonialism;
• demand the decentring of Europe and the proper recognition of other locations as central in their own right, rather than as existing only in relation to Europe;
• comprise projects of rejection and recovery; and
• demand radical change, including complete reorganization of social and political arrangements.

The above list is indicative, not comprehensive. When I began systematically thinking about decolonization, I felt that the term and injunctions to decolonize were often being stretched in too many directions, a bit like a metaphor we have in Tamil that roughly translates as ‘like putting a G-string on an elephant’. And they seemed to involve some essential paradoxes: could one use the same term to make, often rightful, demands both for a bigger share of the pie and/or a seat at the table without shaking up the status quo too much and for radical transformation? Calls to decolonize sometimes appear illiberal and regressive (e.g., as used by some Hindu conservatives in India who argue that homosexuality was a colonial import). They may universalize problems that are place specific. Often, they generate binaries that ignore a basic entanglement of colonizers and formerly colonized, both of whom are products of colonization in complex and not easily soluble ways (see Nandy 1998 [1983]). There seem to be as many ways of thinking about decolonization as there are people calling for it.

Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh argues that social movements can be significant in terms of the kinds of conversation they enable, rather than necessarily in terms of their clarity or achievement of objectives (2022: 3). In that sense, the ‘decolonization turn’ has opened up rich conversations and contestations wherever it has appeared. These are worthy of anthropological attention, revealing as they are of diverse diagnoses, aspirations and attempts to (re)claim the world and flourish within it. In this chapter, I work with three questions: What do people mean when they use the word decolonization? How do aspirations to decolonize play out in different places, whether former colonies or the metropole? Are other terms or a different language more suitable for specific ailments and aims?

In order to address these questions, I provide an indicative survey of diverse usages and valences of the term ‘decolonization’ and related variants. I show that the term spans various ways of understanding and dealing with colonial legacies. These can range from what can be described as individual-centred approaches to radical approaches that call for a complete dissolution of extant arrangements. I then turn to alternative, yet complementary, conceptualizations of the contemporary predicament and to potential solutions. Before I do that however, I outline a simple reason why decolonization may look different in different places: colonization took on different forms around the world and involved very diverse populations in very different kinds of colonial relations. As anthropologist Francis Nyamnjoh points out, ‘since context matters, decolonisation cannot be articulated in abstraction. What is the context in which current clamours for decolonisation are inserted?’ (2016: 129).

Types of colonialism

Historian Nancy Shoemaker identifies twelve types of colonialism, based on colonial intentions, although she points out that her list is neither exhaustive nor are different types mutually exclusive (2015). Equally, not all forms of colonialism are European in origin. I reproduce, slightly abridged, her typology for interested readers. If you already know this, you can skip it. But the key point is that even European colonialism looked very different in different places, and even in the same place at different times. For example, we can think of the many modes of governance under colonialism in the same broad region (reading Mamdani’s 1996 Citizen and Subject on just South Africa is pretty mind-boggling). Given this diversity, how well do calls for decolonization travel?

Shoemaker’s Typology of Colonialism1

Settler Colonialism. Large numbers of settlers claim land and become the majority. Employing a ‘logic of elimination’, they attempt to engineer the disappearance of the original inhabitants everywhere except in nostalgia.

Planter Colonialism. Colonizers institute mass production of a single crop, such as sugar, coffee, cotton, or rubber. Though a minority, members of the ruling class might belong to an empire that enables their political, legal, and administrative control. Their labor demands cannot be satisfied by the native population, so they import African slaves or indentured laborers, as with the ‘coolie’ and ‘blackbirding’ trades.

Extractive Colonialism. All the colonizers want is a raw material found in a particular locale: beaver fur, buffalo hides, gold, guano, sandalwood. The desire for natural history specimens and ethnographic artefacts could also be considered extractive colonialism. A slash-and-burn operation, extractive colonialism does not necessarily entail permanent occupation, but it often seems to follow. Extractive colonizers might destroy or push away Indigenous inhabitants to access resources but more typically depend upon native diplomatic mediation, environmental knowledge, and labor. Consequently, marriage ‘in the custom of the country’ is more common with extractive colonialism than with settler and planter colonialism.

Trade Colonialism. Classic histories of the British North American colonies focus on mercantile capitalism’s control over trading relationships. The colonial periphery feeds the metropole with raw materials, and the metropole manufactures guns, cloth and other goods to sell in its colonies. Tariffs and the policing of smuggling regulate trade to ensure that capital accumulates in the metropole. Trade coercion also exists outside of imperial networks, as when the British Opium War concluded in 1842 with China’s concession to open additional ports, besides Canton, to foreign trade.

Transport Colonialism. US pressure on Japan to open ports to foreigners in 1854 was not about trade but rather transport: Commodore Matthew Perry wanted safe havens for American whaleships. Transport colonialism includes hubs (the Azores, Hawai‘i, and other island chains that became supply depots in the age of sail; steamship coaling stations; US-built airstrips and troop transfer stations on Pacific islands during World War II). It also entails route defenses, such as the US forts constructed on the Great Plains to protect American migrants on the Oregon Trail, and engineering projects that expedite travel, such as the Panama Canal. Transport colonialism does not mandate displacement of native peoples, but it does have a great impact on local economies and cultures by creating contact zones.

Imperial Power Colonialism. Sometimes the purpose of colonialism appears to be simply expansion for its own sake, to aggrandize domains. Imperial rivalry between France and Britain in eighteenth-century North America and the nineteenth-century Pacific involved settler, planter, and extractive colonialism but also inspired competition to amass territory ahead of the other empire.

Not-in-My-Backyard Colonialism. Colonizers sometimes want an empty place far away as wasteland for depositing convicts or conducting dangerous experiments. The British representation of Australia as terra nullius initially justified Botany Bay, a prison colony. France and Chile also established penal colonies on Pacific islands. In the twentieth century, US atomic testing relocated Marshall Islands inhabitants, much as settler colonialism might do, but not because anyone else would settle there. France also used distant colonies, first Algeria and then the Tuamotus, as atomic test sites.

Legal Colonialism. Through diplomacy or by force, one people might claim independent or superior legal authority in another’s territory. In nineteenth-century treaties with peoples deemed barbaric, the United States assumed legal jurisdiction over American nationals. For example, the 1844 Treaty of Wanghia established extraterritorial courts administered by US consuls and, in the twentieth century, allowed for the US District Court of Shanghai.

Rogue Colonialism. Colonialism is...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 13.11.2024
• Reihe/Serie: Decolonizing the Curriculum
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: anthropological education • Anthropological Studies • Anthropology • anthropology education • Decolonial Studies • Decolonization • decolonizing anthropology • decolonizing anthropology an introduction • Decolonizing the Curriculum • introduction to anthropology • introduction to decolonization • introductory anthropology • philosophy of anthropology • postcolonial theory • Soumhya Venkatesan • Venkatesan
• ISBN-10: 1-5095-4061-X / 150954061X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4061-7 / 9781509540617