If the social sciences are Eurocentric, does
this also mean that they are imperialist?
Where Immanuel Wallerstein finds liberalism as
the underpinning of the geoculture of the
capitalist world-system, rooted in Eurocentrism,
Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999) find their
counterparts in the hegemonic theories current
in academia. They speak of commonplace notions
and theses with which one thinks, but
about which one does not think (Bourdieu &
Wacquant, 1999, p. 41). And why not?
“these presuppositions of discussion which
remain undiscussed, owe much of their power
to convince to the fact that, circulating
from academic conferences to bestselling
books, from semi-scholarly journals to
expert’s evaluations, from commission
reports to magazine covers, they are present
everywhere simultaneously, from Berlin to
Tokyo and from Milan to Mexico, and are
powerfully supported and relayed by those
allegedly neutral channels that are
international organizations…and public
policy think tanks”. (Bourdieu & Wacquant,
1999, p. 41)
The
work of “theorization” not only abets but
furthers the universalization of certain texts,
while obscuring their historical origins.
Bourdieu and Wacquant are here essentially in
agreement with what Wallerstein argued in terms
of the Eurocentrism of the social sciences,
taking it deeper and linking it to a form of
epistemic colonialism. As they explain it,
“these commonplaces of the great new global
vulgate that endless media repetition
progressively transforms into universal
common sense manage in the end to make one
forget that they have their roots in the
complex and controversial realities of a
particular historical society, now tacitly
constituted as a model for every other and
as a yardstick for all things”. (Bourdieu &
Wacquant, 1999, p. 42)
It’s not just the theories, or philosophical
fashions that are globalized, as the origins of
these are fairly easy to spot. Instead, what
Bourdieu and Wacquant note really escapes
scrutiny is the sudden, apparent globalization
of seemingly technical terms or concepts such as
“multiculturalism.” We all end up on the same
page either way, speaking an international
lingua franca that is historically and
ideologically situated within the authorized
mindsets of a dominant world power (Bourdieu &
Wacquant, 1999, pp. 43-44). Here they move us
from Eurocentrism to its more contemporary and
specifically American variant.
The American
Mecca
Innocently and just out of curiosity, I was
asked by a colleague if I would be in
Philadelphia. I asked in return: “Why? What’s in
Philadelphia that should interest me?” Of course
my colleague was simply referring to the
upcoming annual meeting of the American
Anthropological Association, when whole
departments in Canada lose their faculty to this
annual pilgrimage to the centre of
anthropological power, to catch some of the
light of the American luminaries, and
(unintentionally?) massaging the ego of the
monster. When I try to reverse the question, for
fun, with American colleagues—“Will you be at
CASCA this year?”— I get mild expressions of
surprise at the question. We all travel to the
AAA, it’s the centre; we don’t all go to CASCA,
it’s the periphery. If one does not see the
geoculture of the world-system at work in the
political economy of academia, then one is just
not looking.
Turning their attention specifically to the
United States, and dominant theories there for
discussing race and ethnicity, Bourdieu and
Wacquant find the emergence of a globalized
sociological orthodoxy, “one of the most
striking proofs of the symbolic dominion and
influence exercised by the USA over every kind
of scholarly and, especially, semi-scholarly
production, notably through the power of
consecration they possess and through the
material and symbolic profits that researchers
in the dominated countries reap from a more or
less assumed or ashamed adherence to the model
derived from the USA” (1999, pp. 45-46). Where
Wallerstein spoke of the original Eurocentrism
of the social sciences, Bourdieu and Wacquant
find this has particularly developed into
contemporary Americanization, the
Americanization of the Western world, and the
Americanization of the universal. The products
of American research, they say (quoting Thomas
Bender), acquire “‘an international stature and
a power of attraction’ comparable with those of
‘American cinema, pop music, computer software
and basketball’” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999, p.
46). If the analysis of this as a simplistic
form of imperialism, of violent imposition, does
not work, it does not mean that a more subtle,
more “collaborative” form of imperialism is not
at work:
“Symbolic violence is indeed never wielded
but with a form of (extorted) complicity on
the part of those who submit to it: the
‘globalization’ of the themes of American
social doxa, or of its more or less
sublimated transcription in semi-scholarly
discourse, would not be possible without the
collaboration, conscious or unconscious,
directly or indirectly interested, of all
the passeurs, ‘carriers’ and
importers of designer or counterfeit
cultural products (publishers, directors of
cultural institutions such as museums,
operas, galleries, journals, etc.) who, in
the country itself or in target countries,
propound and propagate, often in good faith,
American cultural products, and all the
American cultural authorities which, without
being explicitly concerted, accompany,
orchestrate and sometimes even organize the
process of collective conversion to the new
symbolic Mecca”. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999,
p. 46)
However, that is not sufficient for explaining
the domination of American academic research
products. What we need to pay attention to,
Bourdieu and Wacquant argue, is the role of
research granting agencies and philanthropic
foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation
(1999, p. 46). We could go further and point to
a bevy of other granting foundations, from the
Ford Foundation, to the Fullbright Scholar
Program, and Wenner-Gren, all of which could be
seen as performing the academic equivalent of
the U.S. military’s former School of the
Americas (known now as the Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation). Aside from
these foundations, internationally scholarly
publishing tends to reinforce the conceptual
priorities of the dominant (Anglo-)American
centre, and here Bourdieu and Wacquant single
out Basil Blackwell in particular, for imposing
titles that are more in accord with “planetary
common sense” (such as the existence of an
“underclass”), even with texts that not only
debunk the concept, but whose authors and
editors vigorously protest the imposition.
Similarly, though “cultural studies” did not
exist as an entity in French universities, this
did not stop Routledge from publishing a
compendium on French Cultural Studies (1999, p.
47).
Back to
Anthropology and Imperialism
As
has been set forth so far, the imperialism of
anthropology is not simply based on the role of
anthropologists in the service of this or that
colonial administration. If that was the mere
extent of the relationship, then that would be
good news. Instead the relationship goes much
deeper, one that is more structural, and less a
collection of individual tales from the field.
Anthropology was born in the Western world and
institutionalized in a specific manner, in
particular universities, at a critical point in
capitalist world history. Interestingly, for
those who study imperialism in the media, and
the rise of visual anthropology, this was the
same period that marked, as Shohat and Stam
(2002, p. 117) put it, “the giddy heights of the
imperial project, with an epoch where Europe
held sway over vast tracts of alien territory
and hosts of subjugated peoples.” Like cinema,
institutionalized anthropology also emerged at
the end of the 1800s, as the U.S. conquered the
Philippines in a bloody war that some say killed
at least 200,000 people in outright fighting,
and as many 1.5 million people in the first four
years of occupation; born around the same time
as the American massacre of the Sioux at Wounded
Knee in 1890; at roughly the same time as the
1884 Berlin Conference, when European powers
agreed on the division of Africa into colonial
possessions; again, in the same period as the
British occupation of Egypt in 1882, and the
Battle of Rorke’s Drift between the British and
Zulus in 1879. The leading cinema-producing
countries, were also the leading imperialist
countries, and the leading seats of
anthropology: Britain, France, Germany, and the
U.S. Imperialism provided the subject matter,
the supporting structures, the dominant
conceptual concerns, and the motive for
anthropology.
Institutional anthropology has been located
within one particular centre, specifically a
North American and north-western European one.
In terms of the continued dominance of American
anthropology in particular, one has to bear in
mind the sheer quantitative dominance in terms
of number of scholars, number of university
departments, associations, conferences, journals
and research funds, a dominance that is so
massive in quantitative terms that it acquires a
qualitative value.
The
very fact of “world anthropologies” makes
reference to this domination, and is supposedly,
presumably, an answer to it.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1999. “On
the Cunning of Imperialist Reason.” Theory,
Culture & Society 16 (1): 41-58.
Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. 2002. “The
Imperial Imaginary.” In Kelly Askew and Richard
R. Wilk, editors, The Anthropology of Media:
A Reader, pp. 117-147. Oxford: Blackwell.
