This is an edited version of an early essay that
appeared on Zero Anthropology, and which
stemmed from a graduate-level seminar on
Decolonizing Anthropology at
Concordia University.
Phrases such as “decolonizing
anthropology” and “anthropology
and the colonial encounter” have become
salient in anthropology especially since they
are the titles of two of the better known, most
widely quoted books on the subject. But what
exactly is the subject? Sometimes clarity is
missing on this point. Why is that titles such
as “anthropology and imperialism” or
“de-imperializing anthropology” are absent among
prominent publications? What choices are we
making when we choose the term colonialism,
rather than imperialism?
Throughout the course my writing I admit that
“imperialism” and “colonialism” have frequently
been used interchangeably, especially with
reference to anthropology. I have written about
“re-imperializing” anthropology, as I have about
“re-colonization,” and “decolonizing
anthropology.” Aside from anthropology, dealing
with the two phenomena can lead to choices of
when to use one term and when to use the other.
The choice of term can depend on the historical
setting that one has in mind (whether writing
about actual colonies, or the exertion of force
at a distance); the ultimate intentions of the
given forms of intervention (the effective
inhabiting of another society and efforts to
remake it to suit the desires of the intervening
power, or, the effort to exert and monopolize
power in a given space); or the proximity of the
actors (colonialism usually being an “up close
and personal” kind of relationship). Abstracting
these ideas to the epistemic and methodological
level (“methodological colonialism”) would seem
to create even greater ambiguity around the
choice of terms. It also seems, at first glance,
that “imperial anthropology,” “imperialist
anthropology,” and “anthropological imperialism”
are not all the same thing necessarily.
Colonialism and imperialism should not be
treated as solely academic concepts to be
defined and circumscribed by analysts (usually
within imperial institutions that we call
“universities”), or to see colonialism as
primarily something that is done to others. The
colonized’s “decolonization” (at best, a work in
progress), will always only be a truncated
“achievement” as long as the colonizers have not
challenged their own colonial drives.
In this piece I refer primarily to two items
(there are many more, but these are the simpler
and more condensed pieces I have used for
teaching purposes). One is Ronald J. Horvath’s “A
Definition of Colonialism” (Current
Anthropology, 13 (1), Feb. 1972: 45–57)—the
first article about colonialism to ever be
published by that journal, and even at that late
stage we did not have an article by an
anthropologist as such (Horvath was a professor
of geography). The second is from a large
production, that opens with a decent review of
the histories and theories of colonialism,
imperialism, neocolonialism, and postcolonialism.
That is Robert J.C. Young’s
Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
Colonialism
Young shows concerns about the careless use of
distinct concepts such as colonialism and
imperialism, as if they were simply synonyms:
“The use of the term ‘postcolonial’ rather
than ‘post-imperial’ suggests that a de
facto distinction is being made between the
two, yet a characteristic of postcolonial
writing is that the terms ‘colonial’ and
‘imperial’ are often lumped together, as if
they were synonymous terms. This totalizing
tendency is also evident in the way that
colonialism and imperialism are themselves
treated as if they were homogeneous
practices. Although much emphasis is placed
on the specific particularity of different
colonized cultures, this tends to be
accompanied by comparatively little
historical work on the diversity of
colonialism and imperialism, which were
nothing if not heterogeneous, often
contradictory, practices”. (Young, 2001, p.
15)
There is also basic confusion about if or when
the terms, colonialism and imperialism, should
be separated from one other: colonies constitute
an empire, but imperialism does not necessarily
require colonies.
That the terms are often used synonymously can
also be seen in the work of Edward Said. Frantz
Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre also tended to speak
of colonialism as a single formation, a single
system (Young, 2001, p. 18). Quoting Said, Young
reminds us that his conception of colonialism
was centered on a fundamentally geographical act
of violence employed against indigenous peoples
and their connections to the land.
On the other hand, Young offers some useful
ideas about why the terms have been understood
by some as referring to distinctly different
phenomena:
“The term ‘empire’ has been widely used for
many centuries without, however, necessarily
signifying ‘imperialism’. Here a basic
difference emerges between an empire that
was bureaucratically controlled by a
government from the centre, and which was
developed for ideological as well as
financial reasons, a structure that can be
called imperialism, and an empire that was
developed for settlement by individual
communities or for commercial purposes by a
trading company, a structure that can be
called colonial. Colonization was pragmatic
and until the nineteenth century generally
developed locally in a haphazard way (for
example, the occupation of islands in the
West Indies), while imperialism was
typically driven by ideology from the
metropolitan centre and concerned with the
assertion and expansion of state power (for
example, the French invasion of Algeria).
Colonialism functioned as an activity on the
periphery, economically driven; from the
home government’s perspective, it was at
times hard to control. Imperialism on the
other hand, operated from the centre as a
policy of state, driven by the grandiose
projects of power. Thus while imperialism is
susceptible to analysis as a concept (which
is not to say that there were not different
concepts of imperialism), colonialism needs
to be analysed primarily as a practice:
hence the difficulty of generalizing about
it”. (Young, 2001, pp. 16-17)
As
many others observed previously, Young also
recognizes that if we restrict discussion to
colonialism alone, then one has to be mindful
that historically there has been immense
diversity in colonial forms. There have been
colonies of settlement (for example, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, the U.S.); colonies of
exploitation (where no large European settlement
was the aim, as much as the extraction and
export of local resources); and various dominant
colony-like enclaves, such as military bases on
islands, in harbours or other strategic points,
that sometimes forged commercial relations with
a nearby mainland. There is the added fact that
colonies could allow for limited forms of local
rule, while in other cases they were
administered directly from the colonial
metropole (sometimes the very same colonial
power could use both strategies, at different
times). Some colonies were governed through
native intermediaries, while others implanted
officials from the “mother country.” Some
colonial powers tried to effect cultural
assimilation, while others did not. Some
stationed their armies in the colonies, and
others instead preferred to rely more on locally
recruited armies. Thus, as Young argues, a
“general theory” of colonialism is more than
just a challenge.
Young prefers to see “imperialism” as referring
to a “global political system,” but that too
begs the question as to why he would leave out
the economic dimension, and whether there has
not also been a diversity of global political
systems.
The very interesting question that Young raises,
is whether this discussion in the end boils down
to: (a) a rather sterile and abstract academic
discussion, and, (b) one that is
meaningful mostly from the perspective of the
colonizers themselves:
“the apparent uniformity or diversity of
colonialism depends very largely on your own
subject position, as colonizing or colonized
subject. From the position of the ruling
colonial power, its administrators, and from
the perspective of historians of British
colonial history such as John MacKenzie,
Britain’s different colonies do indeed look,
and were, different in the ways in which
they were acquired and administered….From
the point of view of the indigenous people
who lived their lives as colonial subjects,
however, such distinctions have always
seemed rather more academic. As far as they
were concerned, such colonial subjects lived
under the imposition of British rule, a view
not discouraged by the imperial ideology of
Pax Britannica. Anti-colonial
practices of cultural resistance to the
dominant ideology of imperialism encouraged
the critical analysis of common forms of
representation and the processes of
knowledge-formation. At another level, the
links established between Irish, South
African and Indian nationalists at the end
of the nineteenth century were developed to
share knowledge of anti-colonial techniques
and strategies. An attack on a police
station in Ireland functioned in a very
similar way, and with very similar
objectives, to an attack on a British
barracks in India. The differences in
colonial history, in administrative
practices, or constitutional status…made for
very little difference as far as
anti-colonial revolutionary strategies were
concerned. From the point of view of
anti-colonial political activists, the
British Empire looked much the same
everywhere….Postcolonial critique tends to
take the same point of view because it
identifies with the subject position of
anti-colonial activists, not because of its
ignorance of the infinite variety of
colonial history from the perspective of the
colonizers”. (Young, 2001, pp. 18-19)
Imperialism
Imperialism as a term became current in
English only in the second half of the
19th-century (Young, 2001, p. 26, drawing on
Hobsbawm). The concept originated in Britain,
and it was not a concept that originated with
Marx. As Young explains, while originally
referring to direct conquest and occupation
(nation-states develop empires by making
colonies, thus becoming imperial states whose
action over others is imperialist), thanks to
Marxism the concept usually became one that
referred to a general system of economic
domination, with or without direct political
domination (i.e., there could be imperialism
without colonies). Why “post-colonialism”
ultimately makes sense, Young suggests, is that
those subjected to it have most often used the
term colonialism to refer to previous
systems of domination they suffered under the
British and French for example, while using the
term imperialism to refer to American
domination in the present—essentially a
distinction between “old” imperialism and “new”.
As Young says, “history has not yet arrived at
the post-imperial era” (Young, 2001, p. 27).
“history has not yet arrived at the
post-imperial era”
Imperialism became a target of anti-colonial
struggle, and understood as a general concept of
domination, probably with the advent of the
Communist International of 1919 (see: archive of
the
Communist International, 1919-1943;
League Against Imperialism). Young
situates imperialism in a way that it pertains
to rivalry between expansionist states, seeking
to enhance national prestige and domestic
political and social stability, and finding
outlets for expanded capitalist production and
consumption (Young, 2001, pp. 30-33).
Neo-colonialism
Neo-colonialism has come to refer to a system of
formal political independence, with direct
economic control exercised by a foreign power.
If we were meant to have clear definitional
boundaries between “colonialism” and
“imperialism,” the concept neo-colonialism would
seem to merge the two: “Neo-colonialism is…the
worst form of imperialism. For those who
practise it, it means power without
responsibility and for those who suffer from it,
it means exploitation without redress (Kwame
Nkrumah, 1965, p xi)” (quoted in Young, 2001, p.
44). The first and most prominent theorist of
neo-colonialism was not a Western academic, but
rather the Ghanaian independence leader, Kwame
Nkrumah. Nkrumah saw neo-colonialism as the
American stage of colonialism, of an empire
without formal colonies (Young, 2001, p. 46).
“Neo-colonialism is...the worst form
of imperialism”
Anthropological Correlates of Imperialist
Theories?
Regarding imperialist theories of indigenous
cultures, Young’s synthesis is one of the more
useful ones. On the one hand, the French
mission civilisatrice, “assumed the
fundamental equality of all human beings, their
common humanity as part of a single species, and
considered that however ‘natural’ or ‘backward’
their state, all native peoples could
immediately benefit from the uniform imposition
of French culture in its most advanced
contemporary manifestation” (Young, 2001, p.
32). This shares the identical assumptions of
cultural evolutionism and more recent
international development theory. It is also an
unstated premise of the “democracy promotion”
campaign of American liberal imperialism today.
To the upholders of the idea of essential
sameness, critics appear to be denying the
humanity of humans: all humans want freedom, so
the story goes, and if you don’t believe that
Iranians “deserve democracy,” and want to live
like us, then you are denying their essential
humanity. If you do not want “democracy” for
Iranians, then it is probably because you think
“they aren’t good enough” to have it. As Young
argues, the “very assumption [of equality] meant
that the French model had the least respect and
sympathy for the culture, language and
institutions of the people being colonized—it
saw difference, and sought to make it the
same—what might be called the paradox of
ethnocentric egalitarianism” (Young, 2001,
p. 32).
The irony is that the alternative was no less
imperialist. British imperialism from the
mid-1800s onwards assumed a radical,
racially-based difference between the British
and their subjects. Assimilation, strictly
speaking, would be impossible: assimilating
Africans would make as much sense as putting
suits on chimps or trying to teach table manners
to dogs, so the thinking went. As Young
explains,
“the British system of relative
non-interference with local cultures, which
today appears more liberal in spirit, was in
fact also based on the racist assumption
that the native was incapable of education
up to the level of the European— and
therefore by implication required perpetual
colonial rule. Association neatly offered
the possibility of autonomy (for some),
while at the same time incorporating a
notion of hierarchy for the supposedly
less-capable races”. (Young, 2001, p. 33).
Today such a position would be held as
less-than-liberal, particularly with the revival
of liberal interventionism under the banner of
the “responsibility to protect” (R2P).
Both forms of imperialism are arguably
variations of liberalism. One, ethnocentric
egalitarianism, promises to open the doors of
empire to all subjects willing (or not) to
undergo cultural transformation, which serves to
spread empire into the hearts and minds of the
dominated. The dominated are thus
“liberated”—liberated from the “burden” of being
themselves, of being different. The other
variant, a racist “respect” for difference,
substitutes tolerance for equality. Both
equality with the other, and, tolerance of the
other, are vaunted as lofty and noble liberal
values. Both are equally imperialist. One
understates difference, the other overstates it.
Both, arguably, recognize difference only to the
extent and in the manner that suits the
particular goals of power.
Anthropology seems to have had its own “Dual
Mandate” of “protection” and “exploitation” with
regards to the peoples at the focus of its
mission as a university discipline (when
anthropology, by definition, became that which
you never did at home). Protection
came in the form of salvage ethnography,
cultural resource management, and some
forms of advocacy. Exploitation:
by recruiting natives to transcribe their
cultures, for academic projects, and by lifting
cultural artefacts and even human remains and
amassing them in academic institutions. This is
not to mention various types of “applied
anthropology,” in service of corporations,
development programs, international lending
institutions, and military and intelligence
agencies.
Ethnographic Colonialism, Anthropological
Imperialism, and Abduction
Back to the terminological problem underscored
at the very start. It turns out that even some
imperialists could be anti-colonialist, because
maintaining colonies was expensive and
inefficient where economic dominance and
hegemonic political power were concerned. This
poses a problem for us then, in our choice of
terms: hypothetically at least, it seems
one could be in favour of “decolonizing”
anthropology while defending anthropological
imperialism, not that what this would mean is
clear.
Colonialism may be better coupled specifically
with ethnography, superficially at least, since
both require physical presence and a form of
settling within someone else’s home—entering
their territory, and setting up camp. This is
what we might call “ethnographic colonialism”
and it seems to make more sense than calling
anthropology colonial, unless one is focusing on
anthropologists working in colonial settings.
Otherwise, it would seem better to couple
anthropology as a broad endeavour, with another
equally broad endeavour, imperialism.
“Anthropological imperialism” could then refer
to institutionalized, professionalized,
theoretical practice, where anthropologists
speak about what is humanity, “on behalf of” all
of humanity.
Is
there an “anthropological neo-colonialism”? One
could argue that various national
anthropologies, instituted in (few) universities
in Africa and Asia following formal political
decolonization, were in fact neo-colonial in
their political positioning with respect to the
state and its nation-building mission, and with
respect to its content which was focused on
national development.
Ultimately, however, the plethora of concepts
(empire, imperial, imperialist, colonial,
colonialist, neo-colonial, etc.) can be see as
variations, fluctuating in time and space, of a
much broader phenomenon that encompasses them
all, that renders them means toward and end.
That end would be what I refer to as
abduction which involves both incorporation
and exploitation. Neither imperialism nor
colonialism make sense by themselves, until one
relates them to their fundamental premises,
ideals, and goals: to make use of others by
various means of exploitation, drafting others
into one’s sphere in order to extract from them
whatever is valued.
The purpose here has been to signal the
understandable confusion that can arise in
discussing the relationship between anthropology
and empire, at least on a conceptual level.
* Since this essay was first written
circa 2009, with some revisions and edits in the
version above, the author’s work has expanded
considerably on the following fronts: (1)
elaborating the history of the development of
the concept of “imperialism” since its origins,
and by examining early theories; (2)
“anthropological imperialism” now more closely
resembles what Johan Galtung called “scientific
colonialism”—not mentioned in the essay above;
(3) “abduction” is a relatively recent emphasis
or lens in the author’s work.
Bibliography
Asad, Talal (Ed.). (1973).
Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter.
London: Ithaca Press.
Harrison, Faye (Ed.). (1991).
Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further
Toward an Anthropology for Liberation.
Washington, DC: Association of Black
Anthropologists, American Anthropological
Association.
Horvath, Ronald J. (1972). “A
Definition of Colonialism”. Current
Anthropology, 13(1), 45–57.
Young, Robert J.C. (2001).
Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
