Anthropology and colonialism

This special issue contributes to an emerging literature on the materialities of colonial government by considering the changing relations between practices of data collecting, styles of anthropological knowing and modes of governing which target the conduct of colonial and metropolitan populations. Drawing on comparative studies from Australia; the Australian administered territory of Papua; France; French Indo-China; New Zealand; North America and the UK; the papers consider the implications of different forms of knowledge associated with practices of collecting—anthropology, archaeology, folklore studies, demography—in apparatuses of rule in various late nineteenth and early twentieth-century contexts. This introduction outlines the rationale for the volume and elaborates the concept of “anthropological assemblage” which helps focus the authors' explorations of the socio-technical agencements which connected museum, field, metropolis and colony during this period. In doing so, it points towards a series of broader themes—the relationship between pastoral power and ethnographic expertise; the Antipodean career of the Americanist culture concept; and the role of colonial centres of calculation in the circulation of knowledge, practices of collecting and regimes of governing—which suggest productive future lines of inquiry for “practical histories” of anthropology.

Mitchell, Mark D. and Laura L. Scheiber (2010)  Crossing Divides: Archaeology as Long-Term History.  In Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400-1900, edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell, pp. 1-22.  University of Arizona Press, Tucson. 

Few cultural and political events have stimulated as much debate among social scientists as the Columbian Quincentennial. For archaeologists especially, the 1992 commemoration of Columbus’s landfall in the New World provoked a wide-ranging and critical debate. At first, the discussion was largely reflexive and focused on the political context of archaeological practice, on the responsibilities of archaeologists to descendant communities, and on the disciplinary divide separating history from anthropology. More recently, attention has turned to the development of new theoretical approaches for studying colonial interaction, inspired especially by political economy and poststructural social theory. The result has been a surge of interest in post-1500 indigenous communities and a rapidly growing body of archaeological knowledge about the ways in which the processes of European colonialism were integrated, accommodated, resisted, and transformed by native peoples.

But even as research on colonial interaction has become more prominent and methodologically sophisticated, many scholars have continued to rely on untested conceptual frameworks for understanding how and why native societies changed after the advent of European. Despite evidence of their inadequacy, the same conventional explanations for the course of post-1500 culture change continue to be given. American Indians and First Nations peoples continue to be portrayed as primitive environmentalists, living lightly on the land in a homeostatic state of nature, even as evidence mounts that they were responsible for shaping the ecosystems encountered by the first European settlers. Archaeologists continue to assume that European technologies rapidly and decisively replaced indigenous technologies, despite evidence for the persistent use of stone and bone tools. Historians acknowledge the impact of native actions on colonial society, but the dominance of the colonists, with their more powerful weapons, their superior disease resistance, and their outsized avarice, is seldom questioned. And although the triumphal story of European progress has lost some of its luster, the teleology at its heart can still be found in the assumption of inevitable cultural collapse that infuses research on recent native peoples. In part, the ongoing reliance on conventional narratives of change reflects the asymmetrical outcome of colonial interaction. In the end, the result was decisive: millions of native people dead, the survivors driven from their homes, forced to assimilate, forced to deny their heritage and their identity. Many of their descendants now live in crushing poverty. The consequences for native peoples have been so overwhelming that many scholars have believed they also were inevitable, and this has discouraged critical

In part, the ongoing reliance on conventional narratives of change reflects the asymmetrical outcome of colonial interaction. In the end, the result was decisive: millions of native people dead, the survivors driven from their homes, forced to assimilate, forced to deny their heritage and their identity. Many of their descendants now live in crushing poverty. The consequences for native peoples have been so overwhelming that many scholars have believed they also were inevitable, and this has discouraged critical research on the course of colonial interaction. But the assumption of inevitability merely poses questions: On what evidence are conventional narratives based? Who produced them and when? In this chapter, we explore the origins of these narratives, consider why they have endured, and introduce approaches to challenge them.