Indigenous Studies and Engaged Anthropology

The Collaborative Moment

Paul Sillitoe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367668990
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317117216
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Advancing the rising field of engaged or participatory anthropology that is emerging at the same time as increased opposition from Indigenous peoples to research, this book offers critical reflections on research approaches to-date. The engaged approach seeks to change the researcher-researched relationship fundamentally, to make methods more appropriate and beneficial to communities by involving them as participants in the entire process from choice of research topic onwards. The aim is not only to change power relationships, but also engage with non-academic audiences. The advancement of such an egalitarian and inclusive approach to research can provoke strong opposition. Some argue that it threatens academic rigour and worry about the undermining of disciplinary authority. Others point to the difficulties of establishing an appropriately non-ethnocentric moral stance and navigating the complex problems communities face. Drawing on the experiences of Indigenous scholars, anthropologists and development professionals acquainted with a range of cultures, this book furthers our understanding of pressing issues such as interpretation, transmission and ownership of Indigenous knowledge, and appropriate ways to represent and communicate it. All the contributors recognise the plurality of knowledge and incorporate perspectives that derive, at least in part, from other ways of being in the world.

Chapter 1 The Dialogue between Indigenous Studies and Engaged Anthropology: Some First Impressions

Paul Sillitoe

DOI: 10.4324/9781315588377-1

When I was engaged in some teaching at the University of Papua New Guinea (PNG), I had an awkward experience. A colleague became increasingly irate during a conversation after a seminar. It was over a book that had recently appeared that was proving – bafflingly, to my colleague – influential among anthropologists. He told me that he could not recognize much about his life and ideas as a Papua New Guinean in the book; in fact frankly he could not understand it at all really. It sowed a seed, albeit at the time, as often happens, I did not realize that it had been planted in my mind. It was further stimulated to germinate when I heard Roger Keesing describe, and subsequently I read, how when the Kwaio people, who live on Malaita in the Solomon Islands, agreed to him living with them, they did so thinking that he would support ‘their efforts to codify their customary law and ancestrally imposed taboos so as to demand their recognition by the state’ (1992: vii). An expectation that he declared was a ‘curse’ because he could not write such a ‘customary lawbook … from the critical standpoint of an anthropologist’ (1992: 13), and he never attempted to do so, leaving the project to ‘the Kwaio themselves’ (1992: 13).

It seems odd that an anthropologist should declare that he could not engage with what was of interest and concern to the people he lives with, because it is not relevant from his research perspective (Morauta (1979) made a similar observation some time ago). Or that a discipline that purports to further understanding of other cultural ways of being in the world should produce work in which the subjects themselves cannot recognize their behaviour or ideas (see Owusu 1978: 312; Nakata 1998; Lassiter 2005: 121). The nagging worries prompted by these two experiences and others are, for me, behind this volume, which seeks to engage with such issues, and help us to see beyond, and work towards resolving, such contradictions.

The Society Concept and Domination

The notion of society – which was central to the book that so infuriated my PNG colleague – illustrates the nature of such contradictions. It is an idea that has long presented us with problems. The people I know in the Papua New Guinea Highlands not only apparently have no such concept (and certainly no word that comes anywhere near it, to my knowledge) but also behave in ways that make it difficult to identify such a meta social collectivity (for instance, all those who speak the same language – who we might consider as constituting a society – have no collective name for themselves and differ in social behavioural particulars from place to place (Sillitoe 1979, 2010)). Regardless of the apparently imposed, ‘second intention’ status, of the term society, social scientists assume that all human beings must live in a society – that we find such everywhere – that persons interact as collectivities and observe certain agreed norms to guide their behaviour – or else their disciplines have no meaning (Tuhiwai Smith 1999: 47–50). Indeed it is this concept that underpins their claim to some intellectual authority and ability to further our knowledge and understanding of human interaction and behaviour.

Where does this put people such as my highland New Guinea friends who do not seemingly have such an idea? In a word, it puts them at a disadvantage when faced with social scientists, who claim to use this concept and a barrage of related ones to understand their behaviour. But we find anthropologists in an odd position too – as I have pointed out previously (Sillitoe 2007: 157–8) – of appearing to know more about the people they study than they know about themselves, when the object of study is their ideas and behaviour – which is of them. Some social scientists are astonishingly, indeed arrogantly confident in the supremacy of their knowledge, as evident in the following comment criticizing a paper that I submitted to a journal, where I remarked on the propriety of anthropologists assuming to represent a superior understanding:

I disagree strongly with the statement: “It is no longer tenable – if it ever was – for us to represent the lifeways, beliefs, etc., of those we study. Most populations are able to represent themselves”. The literature is full of examples of literate populations not understanding their sociocultural system. The locals are not aware of the problems that the anthropologists address and the uses of their work; there is an “unconsciousness” in sociocultural systems and the locals do not understand these; the locals do not fully understand the interplay of their own meanings nor see the interrelations between the domains of their sociocultural system.

It is reminiscent of Malinowski's (1922: 11–12) comments about ‘depicting the constitution’ of Trobriand society where the problem was that the ‘natives obey the forces and commands of the tribal code, but they do not comprehend them’ and consequently ‘it would be futile to attempt questioning a native in abstract, sociological terms’, which we might take as early authorization for the imposition of the concept of ‘society’ and associated social science ‘theory’, or an admission of the inevitability of Westerners introducing such foreign notions to make sense of what they observe, hear and experience. It is time to move beyond the participant-observation approach that his work heralded towards participatory-reflection (Sillitoe 2012), collaboratively formulating new approaches that allow the ‘natives’ to express their understandings.

What does this suggest about the discipline of anthropology? It seems to confirm, as some indigenous scholars in particular argue, that it serves, wittingly or unwittingly, as an agent of Western domination. It has scarcely done so by acting as the ‘handmaiden of colonialism’, as some ill-informed critics suggest (Sillitoe 2006: 7) – anthropologists having contributed relatively little to colonial administrations in their domination of subject peoples, being largely considered whacky, irrelevant outsiders (much as they are in some development circles today). But the discipline has acted as a notable force for Western domination of others by forcing understanding of their lifeways to fit Western concepts, to serve the intellectual concerns and agendas of Western authorities (see, for example, Banerjee's and Linstead's 2004 critique of the ‘indigenous land ethic’ concept). The Canning Basin case study discussed by Tran Tran in this volume illustrates the consequences for Aboriginal people in Australia, of how government administered legal recognition of native title to land and water resources dispossesses and distorts native views and rights.

But to play devil's advocate, which is my intention in this introduction to stir up interest, it is arguable, taking a postmodern line, that such an outcome was inevitable. How else might we expect these Western intellectual intruders to make sense of communities elsewhere, already socialized as they were into an understanding of the world, except according to the concepts and knowledge they had inherited from their culture? This is an inescapable bugaboo that stalks us, for no matter how much we struggle to see that our work is as true as we can make it to those we seek to understand, it is a vain hope from a postmodern viewpoint (Flaherty et al. 2002). So maybe it is inevitable that we focus on concerns that may be irrelevant to those we live with and produce work in which they cannot recognize their behaviour or ideas? If so, all the more reason for a dialogue with, or better still collaboration with indigenous scholars. For this is surely one way to break out of the postmodern impasse.

Distinguishing ‘Terms of Intention'

On what grounds has Western academic discourse assumed authority for its concepts and understanding (Tuhiwai Smith 1999: 59–65)? Unlike technological inventions, from which the domination of Western culture largely stems – the diffusion of which to the presumed betterment of humankind informs international development¹ – Western philosophical knowledge is not demonstrably superior. When we take a closer look at the notion of society and other such ideas, we see the questionability of their assumed authority. The concept of ‘society’, a ‘term of second intention’ in logic (as formulated by the Scholastics of the Middle Ages), is one for which we have no empirical sense derived evidence, unlike a ‘term of first intention’ such as ‘human individual’, which refers to someone/thing that we can see, touch, hear, smell etc. (see Russell 1946: 463–4; Jacob 2003; Encyclopædia Britannica 2009). While ‘terms of first intention’ concern particular unique examples of phenomena – such as anyone reading this book – to which we can refer in our discussions and compare our ideas whatever our socio-cultural background (assuming that all humans have the same senses); ‘terms of second intention’ concern universalizing abstractions – such as a group of socially interacting human beings – afford no concrete referent as abstract ideas (I cannot sit my idea of English society in a chair to investigate it further, unlike my brother).

¹ I am speaking historically here and leaving aside the increasingly evident environmental problems that industrialization brings.

The origin of such abstract concepts is a philosophical conundrum going back at least to Plato's metaphysical ‘Theory of Forms’, which asserts that for ideas represented by general terms such as justice, beauty etc., there exist somewhere beyond our ken timeless, ideal, mind-independent, supernatural-power-[God]-created entities. But it appears that the ‘Theory of Forms’ ideal types differ between intellectual traditions, these culturally informed general terms being subject to wide cultural-linguistic variation, which as second order intellectual constructions present us with abstract categories that are particularly difficult to access, translate and correlate cross-culturally. And we certainly cannot rank them, one superior to another, except on subjective criteria according to your culturally informed values. What is encoded and thought about as a category in one language – say a collection of interacting human beings comprising a society descended from a troupe of hairy apes – may be encoded quite differently in another – say a clan that according to origin myths came from a flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos.

The so-called theories of social science are consequently socio-culturally and historically situated constructions, more so than natural science theory, which focuses experimentally on ‘terms of first intention’ phenomena and uses rigorously defined and universally agreed ‘terms of second intention’ to interpret results. The predictable consistency of the things comprising many scientific ‘terms of second intention’ facilitates such theorizing – at least on planet Earth – one molecule of CO₂ is constituted exactly the same and behaves identically to any other – at least in the macro-world we inhabit. It is the control, and scope to interfere in the natural world, which this predictability allows, that underpins aforementioned scientific technology that shores up Western domination. Human behaviour, as we know, does not show such consistency, which compounds the problems faced by social science because not only are its ‘terms of second intention’ culturally and historically contingent but its ‘terms of first intention’ are individually highly variable too! The social sciences are only now facing up to the implications of individual behavioural variation with the move from a structural to a processual focus, challenging assumptions about homogenous normative codes guiding social interaction or members of the same social group sharing the same concepts, values etc. You have only to ask a sample of persons met in the street what they understand by the word ‘society’ to see this, for you will receive a range of differing answers – that is, those of us who have the concept of ‘society’ cannot even agree what it is (not even social scientists!).

Tackling Dominance: Ideology versus Theory

The difference between the ‘terms of intention’ that the natural and social sciences investigate has prompted me to argue that it is more accurate to talk about social science ideology than theory (Sillitoe and Bicker 2004). The implications of admitting that social science deals in ideology not theory are considerable. It undermines dominance of Western social science. It indicates that there are no objective grounds for declaring one view better than another; it is a subjective matter informed by culturally shaped values that can vary widely (Stanfield 1985). And it reveals the part anthropology has played in furthering domination by intellectual means, contributing to the proliferation of social science theories – that are subject to rapid fashion changes that seem uncannily to track ideological fashions in Western society – which the discipline consequently imposes somewhat dubiously elsewhere, emp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 The Dialogue between Indigenous Studies and Engaged Anthropology: Some First Impressions
• PART I: ENGAGING WITH INDIGENEITY
• PART II: PROBLEMS OF REPRESENTATION AND RIGHTS
• PART III: CHALLENGING THE DOMINANCE OF THE ACADEMY
• Index