It is often forgotten that anthropology mdash the scientific study of cultural difference mdash arose from situations that required a practical management of cultural differences. Out of the practical contexts of colonial contact mdash administration, mission, nationalism, policing, settler cultivation, tourism, warfare mdash emerged methods, and images of otherness, that inform anthropological notions of cultural difference to this day. The essays in this volume share the assumption that ethnography, far from being the unique purview of anthropology, is a broader field of practice out of which and alongside which anthropology attempted to distinguish itself as a scientific discipline. They explore a variety of situations in colonial south and southeast asia and africa and in the treatment of the indigenous inhabitants of north america and australia to provide genealogies of present day anthropological practices, tracing them back to the subjects of colonial ethnography. This book introduces into the history of anthropology many of the insights developed in recent studies in history, cultural studies, and the anthropology of colonialism. It can serve as a course book in the history of anthropology and the anthropology of colonialism, while at the same time addressing a much larger audience of students of colonial history, of the history of science and modernity, and of globalization.

Oscar salemink is program officer for social sciences and humanities, the ford foundation vietnam. Introduce s a new rigor to the debates concerning ethnography, anthropological discourses, and imperialism. Nicholas thomas, australian national university please choose whether or not you want other users to be able to see on your profile that this library is a favorite of yours.

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description: american ethnologist is a quarterly journal concerned with ethnology in the broadest sense of the term. The editor welcomes manuscripts that creatively demonstrate the connections between ethnographic specificity and theoretical originality, as well as the ongoing relevance of the ethnographic imagination to the contemporary world. 4 the moving wall represents the time period between the last issue available in jstor and the most recently published issue of a journal. In rare instances, a publisher has elected to have a zero moving wall, so their current issues are available in jstor shortly after publication.

Peter pels is professor in the anthropology of sub saharan africa, university leiden, the netherlands. It is often forgotten that anthropology the scientific study of cultural difference arose from situations that required a practical management of cultural differences. Out of the practical contexts of colonial contact administration, mission, nationalism, policing, settler cultivation, tourism, warfare emerged methods, and images of otherness, that inform anthropological notions of cultural difference to this day. Locating the colonial subjects peter pels and oscar saleniink despite the initiative of george stocking jr. And others in the 19605, and the impressive amount of historical scholarship that has developed since, the historiography of anthropology is still marked by a certain whig interpretation.

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Its principle of abridgment stocking 1982:3 is to project the self image of twentieth century academic anthropology onto all ethnographic activities that played a role in the formation of the discipline. The history of anthropology therefore still concentrates largely on ideas, on the formation and background of the theories and methods that are supposed to constitute anthropology 39 s core. For a large number of its practitioners, the real history of anthropology commenced only at the time that theoretical and research expertise were fused in the person of the professional fieldworker. This implies, more often than not, that ethnographic practices by nonprofessionals are measured against anachronistic standards, insufficiently set within their historical contexts, or written out of the discipline 39 s history alto gether. This can at least partly be explained by the hierarchical relationship between pure and applied anthropology that has dominated the discipline since world war ii. The very use of the term applied suggested the existence of a pure disciplinary core that was relatively autonomous from historical circumstance or practical use. In a review of anthropology outside the academy, susan wright has criticized such implicit hierarchies of pure, 39 applied, and no longer anthropologists, the latter being those who are trained as anthropologists but find employment outside the academy 1995.

The latter were for quite some time assumed to be lost to the pro fession, implying that the anthropological discipline and its identity were thought to be exclusively located within the academy. However, from the 19705 onward more and more anthropologists work in nonaca demic settings, and their demands for representation on professional plat forms are increasingly heard fluehr lobban 1991 goldschmidt 1979 the academic disavowal of practical application is, of course, an odd strategy of professionalization when compared to other professions. Med ical doctors, lawyers, or psychologists do not lose their professional cre dentials when, after their academic studies, they start to work as general practitioners or therapists. In anthropologyland, however as in allied disciplines like sociology those who are not exclusively preoccupied with the construction of academic knowledge, but are involved with its application, are often considered a lesser breed of scholars. The implicit and, as wright argues, unfounded assumption is that applied work during the second quarter of this century, at about the same time that the boasian school achieved a similar academic autonomy in the united states.

Pure science did not become a high water mark of professional anthropology until after world war ii, when academic appointments boomed and decreased the necessity for anthropologists to advertise their practical utility. Like the classical anthropology it criticized, this new professionalism often relied on a juxtaposition of a positive, emancipated, and academic core of ideas with a negative past of colonial practice, an image of emanci pation through science and literature that was as old as colonial policy itself viswanathan 1989. This was not the only way in which anthropol ogy remained entangled with colonial subjects. Since the 19605, the cri tique of anthropology severely damaged the dyadic image of anthropol ogy, one that isolated the relationship between a detached and pure scientific observer and his informants. Instead, it was argued that this view of the anthropological relationship ignored its situatedness in a his tory of global inequality, perpetuated by the unequal power relations between a universal anthropological subject and his local coproducers of knowledge.

The triple sense of our use of the term colonial subjects reflects this critical consciousness. First, the colonial subjects of anthropol ogy are the detached observers who welded power to knowledge by claiming universality for the latter, a claim that could serve to distract from their position in a field of local colonial interests. The second set of colonial subjects are the topoi of colonial discourse, the rhetorical com monplaces that organized the intellectual containment of the practical anxieties of colonial rule and became sufficiently entrenched in academic discourse to survive decolonization.

Last, the colonial subjects of anthro pology are its subject peoples: the races, tribes, or ethnic groups targeted by both colonial states and anthropologists as future citizens. It is within this triangle of discursive strategies, of universal subject, colonial commonplace, and global and local citizenship, that anthropology found, and still finds, its proper locus. It is, however, insufficient to restrict this inquiry to the realm of dis cursive strategies: practical anthropologies are not mere rhetorical con structions. Throughout its history, the writing of ethnogra phies and anthropological reflections required authors to distance them selves from the relationships within which their experience of human dif ference was formed. As many critics of orientalism, colonial discourse, anthropology, or social science in general now agree, they did this by essentiajizing selected traits of observer and observed, producing dehis toricized representations of cither subject, or object, or both, that obscure, obliterate, or transform the relationship negotiated in practice.

Perhaps the most obvious illustration of this intellectual movement from relation to essence is the way in which historical relationships of geographical location, based on the practice of travel from europe, have been transformed into objects of study like the indian, oriental, or african. The essays that follow work, each in its own way, toward novel syntheses, but cannot be expected to draw together a field in which so many accepted generalizations, once analyzed historically, turn out to rest i. The distinction between strategy implying a proper locus, or subject position out side tin 39 l.irgeled group mid tactic a bricolage of political calculations in which subject and target arc coeval is gleaned from de cerleau iqh^:xix for an application to the history of ethnography, sec byrnes uyj >.

In this particular case, it is congruent with foucault 39 s dis tim lion between discourse and discursive practice l97: oo. We shall, therefore, try to situate these essays in some of the major colonial relationships that europeans have forged in the nineteenth century sec tion 6 , and attempt to suggest how this approach affects our understand ing of the history of twentieth century professional anthropology sec tions 7 and 8. Disciplinary anthropology and the if anthropology is viewed as a discipline, it is identified with an academic location, which implies that the most important intellectual events in anthropology 39 s history are deemed to have taken place in scientific soci eties or at universities in britain, france, the united states, germany, and perhaps some other centers in the west.

Obvious though the identification of anthropology and academy may seem al present, it is very much a product of anthropology 39 s self conception in the double sense of self image and self production . This becomes clear when we consider the career of the volume anthropology ami the colonial encounter, edited by at the time of its publication, anthropology and the colonial encounter was taken up in a heated debate about the extent to which british anthro pologists had been engaged in aiding and abetting british colonial policy in africa scholte 197 , a debate following on the denunciation of the involvement of anthropologists in u.s. Counterinsurgency projects in latin america and southeast asia wolf and jorgensen 1970.2 asad 39 s vol ogy and colonialism goody 1995:7 9 kuklick 1993 kuper 1986.