Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia

Comparative and Historical Colonialism

Jan van Bremen, Akitoshi Shimizu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780700706044
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136105944
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

For a time it was almost a cliche to say that anthropology was a handmaiden of colonialism - by which was usually meant 'Western' colonialism. And this insinuation was assumed to somehow weaken the theoretical claims of anthropology and its fieldwork achievements. What this collection demonstrates is that colonialism was not only a Western phenomenon, but 'Eastern' as well. And that Japanese or Chinese anthropologists were also engaged in studying subject peoples. But wherever they were and whoever they were anthropologists always had a complex and problematic relationship with the colonial state. The latter saw some anthropologists' sympathy for 'the natives' as a threat, while on the other hand anthropological knowledge was used for the training of colonial officials. The impact of the colonial situation on the formation of anthropological theories is an important if not easily answered question, and the comparison of experiences in Asia offered in this book further helps to illuminate this complex relationship.

PART ONE

Anthropology in colonial contexts: historical and comparative perspectives

CHAPTER ONE

Anthropology in colonial contexts

The second Kamchatka expedition (1733-1743) and the Danish-German Arabia expedition (1761-1767)

Han F. Vermeulen

Introduction¹

The relationship between anthropology and colonialism has often been discussed, but its nature is far from clear. The thesis of this chapter is that anthropology was not born from colonialism, but developed within its contexts. The term colonial anthropology therefore has to be redefined as 'anthropology developed in colonial contexts'. This thesis is illustrated by the study of two research expeditions to Siberia and the Middle East in the 18th century. Both expeditions were well prepared and interdisciplinary, had international membership, and were guided by specific instructions as well as questionnaires. The first was the famous second Kamchatka expedition (1733-43), consisting of a sea party led by Vitus Bering to discover the North West Passage and an 'academic party' that included several scholars investigating the land masses of Siberia. It resulted in abundant material in natural history, geography, cartography, and history, both in the form of written documents and of cultural or natural-historical objects. The colonising context in which the expedition was carried out (the expanding Russian Empire, seeking trade and taxation) facilitated ethnographic interests, while the existence of a large number of cultural groups in Siberia led to the emergence of a new scientific practice called Völker-Beschreibung (description of peoples). In the second case, the Danish-German research expedition to Egypt and Yemen (1761-1767), the situation was more ambiguous on both counts. It had no commercial or political interests and was organised to provide contemporary evidence to elucidate the Old Testament. Additional research goals were explorations in natural history, geography and cartography. Although the subject of 'customs and manners' of the population was included in the instructions given to two of the expedition members, these died prematurely, leaving the sole survivor Carsten Niebuhr with a task for which he was not prepared. Niebuhr's findings, mainly in the field of geography, are hailed as important contributions to the exploration of Arabia. Yet his observations did not lead to the emergence of ethnographic the description of peoples formed simultaneously, while he was away, as Niebuhr saw the Arabian people as making up 'one nation', speaking various dialects. This, in turn, may be linked to the fact that he travelled under the guidance of the Turkish authorities, upholding the ideal of Islam as one large community. Thus two colonial contexts yielded quite different results: in the Siberian case, in a Russian context, the enterprise resulted in an emerging practice of ethnography; while in the Danish case, in a Turkish context, it did not. In the first case, colonialism was highly conducive to the formation of ethnography as an emerging anthropological research practice.

Anthropology and colonialism

The connection between science and society is anathema to the history of anthropology, but it lasted well into the 1970s before the close relationship between anthropology and colonialism could be openly discussed in anthropological forums. An early article by Jacques Maquet (1964), the (unpublished) dissertation of Ingeburg Winkelmann at East Berlin (1966), and especially articles by Kathleen Gough (1967-1968) promoted fierce discussion. During these discussions, initially at least, the existence of an intrinsic relation between anthropology and colonialism was dismissed by the majority of practising anthropologists, who indignantly pointed out that this was inconceivable, as anthropology with its emphasis on the study of culture from the viewpoint of its own participants, was striving to do the opposite from what colonialists were doing, namely imposing their culture on the colonised subjects. This reaction, although understandable from the standpoint of professional ethics, was remarkable as there had been times not long before when anthropologists proudly proclaimed their discipline a colonial science per se that was highly useful to national causes. What exactly these causes were was discussed quite openly, not only in the Netherlands where in 1917 a special chair was established in 'colonial ethnology' and where several ethnologists commented on the subject (van Eerde, 1914, 1919; ten Kate, 1916; Fischer, 1931; Schrieke, 1936, 1937; Nooteboom, 1940), but also in fascist Germany (Plischke 1941; Baumann 1944), when, particularly during the years 1938-42 of upsurging Nazism, a form of 'colonial revivalism' occurred in which pleas were made for the application of anthropology (Völkerkunde) in the new colonies that would become available within the Third Reich, hoping that this would improve the professional scope of ethnologists.²

Several decades later, the discussions centred around quite different issues. These included the Social Responsibility Symposium, published in Current Anthropology (Berreman, Gjessing, Gough, 1968); counter-insurgency research in Latin America, particularly the Project Camelot (Horowitz, 1967); and the exchange around 'Anthropology on the warpath' in Thailand in the New York Review of Books (Wolf and Jorgensen, 1970-1971). These were critical times. The contexts of these discussions were decolonisation, imperialism, the Vietnam war, revolutionary and liberation movements in Africa, Latin America, East Asia and South East Asia, etc. In this connection the uses of applied anthropology were discussed and a fundamental critique on British functionalism was formulated, resulting in a decline of the principles of cultural relativism and, a little later, in the rise of reflexivity in anthropology.

The doctrines of cultural relativism and liberalism, strongly attached to professional ethics in the pre-World War II period (Tennekes, 1971), were probably a major reason for denying the relationship between anthropology and colonialism (apart from the methodological argument mentioned above). Against charges that anthropology was the 'child of imperialism' (Gough, 1968a-b), the 'daughter to this era of violence' in which 'one part of mankind treated the other as an object' (Levi-Strauss, 1966: 126), or even a form of 'scientific colonialism' (Galtung, 1967; Lewis, 1973), Raymond Firth in a distinguished lecture in 1972 stated that 'anthropology is not the bastard of colonialism but the legitimate offspring of the Enlightenment' (Firth, 1972: 26; 1975: 44). In the same year a seminar was held at Hull, initiated by Ian Cunnison and resulting in a volume edited by Talal Asad (1973). This volume contained essays with relatively mild conclusions, which nevertheless inspired a seminar at the London School of Economics that attacked the basic premises of the Hull seminar. Peter Loizos, editor of the book that came out of the LSE seminar (1977), found the (implicit) argument that anthropology was an accomplice of colonialism 'acrimonious' and pleaded for more nuancy in studying this relationship (Loizos, 1977a). In this context the chances for a serious study of the relationship between anthropology and colonialism were not very favourable, although the subject did appear on the agenda. It was the heyday of critical anthropology (Scholte, 1969), a 'crisis in [British] anthropology' (Banaji, 1970), 'the end of anthropology' (Worsley, 1970), and of attempts toward 'reinventing anthropology' (Hymes, 1972).

In the following years, however, the history of anthropology indeed profited from the renewed interest in the study of its past and present links to academia and wider society. The notion that scientific ideas were social 'constructions', leading to the thesis that cultural traditions were (continuously) being 'invented' (Hobsbawm, 1983), was particularly fruitful. This, in turn, led to an inversion of the relationship between the observer and the observed as well as to an increased self-consciousness in ethnography. Whereas in the earlier histories of anthropology (Haddon, 1910; Penniman, 1935; Mühlmann, 1948) attention had been paid primarily to the genealogical history of ideas about 'other', non-Western peoples, the interest now focused on the observer instead of on the observed. No longer were distant peoples studied, but the European scholars that had studied them. The accompanying turn to reflexivity (Scholte, 1969; Ruby, 1980) strongly expressed itself in the domain of visual anthropology and the relations between anthropology, photography and cinematography (Poignant, 1980; Theye, 1989; Edwards, 1992), sensitive as these fields are to the selection and editing of images by anthropologists. Another major influence on the change in focus or 'gaze' (as the fashionable term has it) was the critical work of Edward Said, who in Orientalism (1978) pointed out that many colonial images were type-cast in order to comply with stereotypical European representations of 'other' peoples, particularly those living in the Middle East. More recently the reflexive turn in anthropology was inspired by the work of post-modernist authors such as Geertz, Clifford, Rabinow and others (cf. Clifford and Marcus, 1986), as well as by the emergence of the 'anthropology at home' movement (Jackson, 1987) and by feminist anthropology. All these movements increasingly questioned the hitherto largely accepted view of anthropology as the cultural study of 'others', and the enlightened colonial attitude implicit in this view.

From a historical perspective, the relationship between anthropology and colonialism has been so tight that it is possible only now, in the 1990s, to speak plainly of the history of anthropology in colonial contexts (plural). In his recent volume on Colonial Situations (1991), George Stocking stressed the necessity of pluralising the 'colonial situation' in order to 'explore in greater depth a variety of differing "colonial situations", the range of interaction of widely differing individuals and groups within them, and the ways in which these situational interactions conditioned the specific ethnographic knowledge that emerged' (Stocking, 1991: 5). One year later, Nicholas Dirks published a collection of essays earlier appearing in the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History, under the significant title Colonialism and Culture (1992). Following up on the initiative of Stocking, Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink organised a seminar on 'Colonial Ethnographies' at Amsterdam in 1993, which resulted in a four-issue volume of the journal History and Anthropology (Pels and Salemink, 1994).

Such is the current status of the subject. Apart from early articles such as Leiris (1950), Balandier (1951) and several monographs (Leclerc, 1972 and Copans, 1974 in France; Gotsch, 1983 and Harms, 1984a-b in Germany), we have three edited volumes by Asad (1973), Stocking (1991), and Dirks (1992); two issues of journals by Loizos (1977), Pels and Salemink (1994); several recent studies by Nicholas Thomas (1991, 1994); and some isolated chapters in books written by Kuper (1973, ch. 4); Kuklick (1991 ch. 5) and Stocking (1995 ch. 8). All in all that is not a great deal for such a large and clearly important subject! The results of the Leiden conference on anthropology in the colonial contexts of East and South East Asia, published in this volume, are therefore more than welcome. They complement the volume edited by Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer on Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (1993), which deals mainly with the South Asian context.

It seems that the rise of epistemological critique and post-modernism in the humanities, together with the general failure of world political systems such as communism and Marxism, and the rise of 'late capitalism' (Jameson, 1990) have been favourable factors for the development of a critical, historical interest in anthropology's past and present conditions. Critique in anthropology, nowadays, seems to be identical to historical critique, but surely this cannot be done sol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• ANTHROPOLOGY OF ASIA SERIES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Anthropology in colonial contexts: a tale of two countries and some
• Part One: Anthropology in colonial contexts: historical and comparative perspectives
• Part Two: Japanese anthropology in colonial contexts: East Asia, South-East Asia and Oceania
• Part Three: Dutch anthropology in colonial contexts: South-East Asia
• Afterword Colonialism, anthropology and the politics of professionalisation: an argumentative afterword