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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Decolonizing the Curriculum
- Sprache: Englisch
Decolonization has been a buzzword in anthropology for decades, but remains difficult to grasp and to achieve. This groundbreaking volume offers not only a critical examination of approaches to decolonization, but also fresh ways of thinking about the relationship between anthropology and colonialism, and how we might move beyond colonialism’s troubling legacy.
Soumhya Venkatesan describes the work already underway, and the work still needed, to extend the horizons of the discipline. Drawing on scholarship from anthropology and cognate disciplines, as well as ethnographic and other case studies, she argues both that the practice of anthropology needs to be and do better, and that it is worth saving. She focuses not only on ways of decolonizing anthropology but also on the potential of ‘a decolonizing anthropology’.
Rich with insights from a range of fields, Decolonizing Anthropology is an essential resource for students and scholars.
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Seitenzahl: 407
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Note on Racialized Terms
1 Introduction: Decolonizing Anthropology and a Decolonizing Anthropology
Colonial legacies
Colonial legacies of anthropology
The problem of the West
The problem of race
The body of the anthropologist – western and white?
Anthropology as a practice
My journey into anthropology
Writing this book
Outline of chapters
A final word
Notes
2 What is Decolonization?
Types of colonialism
Soul decolonization
Decolonization max
Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality (MCD)
(De)colonization of the mind
Emancipatory and unificatory potential
Questioning decolonization
Disenclosure and motley
Decolonization, disenclosure and the motley in the metropole
Conclusion
Notes
3 Colonialism–Anthropology
Anthropology and British colonialism – some case studies
Case Study 1: The ethnographic state and its afterlives
Case Study 2: The Rhodes–Livingstone Institute (RLI)
Case Study 3: Reification and refinement
Case Study 4: Domestication
Opening up anthropology
Rethinking and refiguring anthropology
For liberation?
Disagreements
Inappropriately engaged?
The ‘repugnant other’
Conclusion
Notes
4 Epistemological and Epistemic Justice
Epistemological and epistemic justice
Promoting epistemological justice in the academy
Not just material benefits but also radical questioning?
Claiming full belonging
Ethnography and the question of epistemic privilege
Resonances and possibilities
Keeping a space open for critique
Conclusion
Notes
5 Ignorance and Ignoring
Anthropology and ignorance
White ignorance
Whiteness studies
It’s not nice to talk about race
How to know self, other and the world differently
The anthropology of global white supremacy
The power of ignorance and ignoring
Conclusion
Notes
6 Understanding and Transforming Universities: The Potential of Ethnography and Anthropology
The changing (and not so different) university
Curriculum
Exploring curricular effects
Diversification
Differential awards
The fact of evaluation and the taming of radical ideas
Accidental effects
Conclusion
Notes
7 On Courses and in Classes
My curricular experiment
The problem of knowledge
Knowledge gaps and limits
Anthropological modes of knowing
The canon and the problem of the dead (or alive) white man
Experiments and critical inclusions
A focus on questions
The question of theory in decolonization
Conclusion
Notes
8 Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 If US land mass were distributed like US wealth...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Decolonizing the Curriculum
Anna Bernard,
Decolonizing Literature
Ali Meghji,
Decolonizing Sociology
Sarah A. Radcliffe,
Decolonizing Geography
Robbie Shilliam,
Decolonizing Politics
Soumhya Venkatesan,
Decolonizing Anthropology
Decolonizing Anthropology
An Introduction
Soumhya Venkatesan
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Soumhya Venkatesan 2025
The right of Soumhya Venkatesan to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4059-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4060-0(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024935359
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
For
Appa: his caring detachment and love of Tamil
Amma: her courage and grace
Swathi: my sister and one of my best friends
Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time in the making, and I have many people to thank. When I began work on it in early 2020, COVID was just making its presence felt. My father’s sudden death from COVID in India in October 2020 made the pandemic personal – something that was happening to us, his family and friends, and to the whole world in unfathomable and terrible ways that connected people yet revealed deep divisions in resources, approaches and access to health care and vaccines. Almost two years later, Queen Elizabeth II died, and this time the world came into view in a different way – for some people, even in far-flung places, it seemed to be a personal tragedy; for others, it was a chance to re-evaluate the past and future directions and to re-forge or seek to cut connections. As I finalized the revisions, the terrible Hamas attack and Israel’s retaliation have renewed attention on what humans do to each other and how the past informs the present. Throughout these tumultuous and thought-provoking times, I read, thought about and discussed different aspects of colonization and decolonization with various people – students, friends and colleagues – and wrote draft chapter after draft chapter. Writing a synthetic book is a completely different project compared to one based on fieldwork, albeit no less immersive. I am grateful to all the people who suggested things to read, checked my understanding of work based on their own regional or topical expertise, and provided generous and rigorous critique.
As I describe in the Introduction, I wrote much of this book with the input of student volunteers, who discussed draft chapters with me extensively over the three years of the project. Some of them graduated and others took their place. Some, even after graduation, continued to participate, comment and inspire. The students are: Lucy Anderson, Charlotte Antilogus, Megan Bonfield, Florence Brown, Brendan Cox, Ruby Davis, Samuel Denny, Natalia Galindo Freire, Honor Gitsham, Regina Ho, Lauren Howie, Jack Keelan, Kasia De Kock Jewell, Clementine Lawrence, Michaela Lawrence, Patrick Jones-O’Brien, Ethan Butland O’Dwyer, Guendalina Magnoni Stella, Gabriele McGurk, Maria Obrebska, Megan Riley, Isabel Sturgess, Robin Tang, Xanthe Tsapparelli, Hannah Wheeler and Isabella Wimmer. My deepest thanks to all of them. My thanks also to the Social Anthropology department and the School of Social Sciences at Manchester for enabling financial compensation to the students for their intellectual labour. I also thank all my students and doctoral candidates at Manchester for critically engaging with my ideas and teaching me even as I taught them.
Tulasi Srinivas and Anthony Simpson read early drafts of the entire manuscript, and Stef Jansen read the final version in full. Their feedback has been invaluable. Elsayed Elsehamy Abdelhamid, Claire Alexander, Chloe Nahum-Claudel, Michelle Obeid and Chika Watanabe read and commented on different chapters. Sonja Dobroski and Peter Wade helped me grapple with complex questions and terminologies pertaining to race and indigeneity. I tried out some of the arguments at the Manchester Social Anthropology Research Away Day, the Decolonising Anthropology? studio sessions of the Association of Social Anthropology multi-part online conference, the Durham Anthropology Seminar, STAR2, comprising doctoral candidates at the Scottish universities, and with colleagues at the workshop held with Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Manchester. Molly Geidel, the translator of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, kindly checked over my understanding of Rivera Cusicanqui’s ideas. I am very grateful to all of them.
Countless friends and colleagues have listened to, argued with and enriched my understandings of decolonization and related debates. I would particularly like to thank Kodili Chukwuma, Paolo Heywood, Leo Hopkinson, Stef Jansen, Sachiko Kubota, James Laidlaw, Nayanika Mookherjee, Michelle Obeid, Abeyami Ortega, Chimwemwe Phiri, Adam Reed, Angela De Souza Torresan and Peter Wade. Marilyn Strathern has been a constant inspiration.
At Polity Press, I am grateful to Ian Malcolm for his faith in the project, Pascal Porcheron, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, Neil de Cort and other team members. I am grateful to the reviewers of this book for their critical and careful feedback. Thanks to Megan Caine of Monkeyproof and Gail Ferguson for copy-editing the manuscript.
My daughters, Aliya and Taylor, have put up with my obsession with decolonization for years, as has my good friend Imogen Stidworthy. Jon has lived with, read and critically engaged with almost every bit of (and also various other ideas that did not end up making it into) this book.
No piece of scholarship is ever the product of one person’s thinking or work, and I cannot thank all these people and many, many others enough. No piece of scholarship is either fully finished or perfect – I take full responsibility for any shortcomings.
Note on Racialized Terms
It is hard to know what terminology to use when discussing people in terms of racial categories, especially when speaking across diverse national contexts and usages. Like any classification of people, racialized categories are relational and contextual. That is, one category is defined in relation to other categories in the series, and a person’s identity is defined by interactions between what they think they are, what other people think they are and what they think other people think they are; and all categories can change depending on the specific context of who is speaking to whom, with what purposes and with what meanings each party attaches to the categories (meanings that are generated by historically changing social structures, such as hierarchies of power, wealth and value). When navigating this complex and shifting terrain, I will use terms such as ‘Black’, ‘Native’, ‘European’/‘non-European’ and ‘non-white’ (this latter often specifically in relation to the ‘whiteness’ of anthropology) as shorthand devices to approximate familiar categories in world history, without making essentialist claims about any, or collapsing difference within each, category. When citing or engaging with the work of other authors, I follow their usage, including their capitalization.
1 Introduction: Decolonizing Anthropology and a Decolonizing Anthropology
Can we decolonize anthropology? Can anthropology enable decolonization? These questions have been asked before and doubtless will be again. They keep arising because, as a discipline, social-cultural anthropology promises much. Simultaneously focusing on human difference and human unity, the discipline seems to suggest the possibility of creating a shared world of common flourishing, without eradicating that which makes different forms of life and sociality viable and meaningful. And yet criticisms abound that the discipline has not lived up to that promise, neither in its own internal organization and practices, nor in its research practices or its modes of generating anthropological knowledge and applying this in the world. Thus Girish Daswani argues that ‘anthropology is currently facing the dilemma of situating itself as a discipline that allows for the possibility of decolonial approaches while being unable to truly decolonize’ (2021; see also Gupta and Stoolman 2022). Those who are both committed to, yet critical of, anthropology are concerned with two things: getting the anthropological house in order, and also enabling anthropology to make a positive difference in a world marked, and made profoundly unequal and unjust, by colonialism. These two aims often go under the term ‘decolonization’. But the scope of the term remains vast, and Jonathan Jansen, Professor of Education, who in 2009 became the first Black rector and vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State in South Africa, asks ‘What does the word even mean? . . . Is decolonisation simply a byword for the proxy discontents in education and society?’ (2019: 1–2).
In the simplest sense, decolonization refers to the formal end of colonial rule. Here, colonialism is understood as the domination of one people (the colonized) by another (the colonizer) through the claiming and implementation of political and other forms of control (Jansen and Osterhammel 2017). The colonized territory is not sovereign, neither able to make internal decisions nor enter into international agreements on its own behalf. Most territories formerly colonized by Europe are now independent sovereign states, even though only in theory because they remain subject to economic and military coercion by other more powerful states, often (but not always) former colonizers. Massive forced and other shifts of population into both colonized areas and the metropole, continuing Indigenous struggles in settler colonies, and patterns of wealth and other flows and impoverishment all mean that the term has a moral and political force beyond ‘flag decolonization’ (ibid.). Among other things, the term folds in anti-racism, self-examination, representational practices and demands for epistemological and epistemic justice. Its use is widespread, albeit not understood identically, in formerly colonized areas and in former colonial centres or the metropole, which further has what Harrison describes as its internal colonies (2010 [1991]: 2).
My own usage of the term ‘decolonization’ refers to the undoing of the logic of the colonizer (Gerber 2018; Mbembe 2021), i.e., the creation of and occupation of a centre and the definition of all others in relation to and for the benefit of this centre. European colonial powers followed this logic, of course, but it is not unique to them, although the scale of European colonization was unprecedented as were the effects. But there are many usages, and this is not the first publication to bear the title Decolonizing Anthropology. So let me explain my approach and contribution. My book has the subtitle ‘An Introduction’. It thus begins with an exploration of the term ‘decolonization’ as adopted by different scholars and activists. I suggest that the term is wide in its scope and is used to pursue diverse and somewhat contradictory aims. In part, this is because of the different histories and practices of colonialism worldwide, and therefore the different aims and processes of decolonization in different contexts. For this reason, I suggest that the term itself merits critical anthropological scrutiny, and I advocate the adoption of more precise vocabularies for the hoped-for progressive changes in different places and by different kinds of people. I then turn to active attempts to decolonize anthropology, both in terms of reckoning with its colonial roots and as heralded by Faye Harrison’s influential edited volume Decolonizing Anthropology (2010 [1991]). Harrison’s volume is built around two key axes, the first of which is the promotion of deeper anthropological engagements with questions of race/racism by centring the work of African-American anthropologists and articulating new directions for anthropology based on this corpus, which begins from the Black experience as opposed to white problematizations. This includes re-examining anthropological framings. Second, Harrison outlines an ‘anthropology for liberation’, calling for anthropologists to actively shape a better world with, and for, their research participants. Harrison’s work has set new research agendas and has been taken up widely. It has also encouraged more critical examinations of whiteness in anthropology and the reproduction of privilege, including along geographical lines that map onto colonizer/colonized distinctions. This is enormously significant work.
However, it remains important to maintain a distinction between anthropology (an academic discipline that seeks to understand and analyse) and activism (directed attempts to intervene in and shape the world). Different kinds of people – raced, gendered and Indigenous – have been trying to fight continuing inequities and oppression arising from, but not only from, colonization. Although it is important to work with and support them, it is equally important to understand what they do and why their attempts are/are not successful, and to communicate this understanding to research participants as well as more generally. Indeed, in some instances this might be more valuable than throwing one’s efforts into activism, particularly when what is at stake for the anthropologist is different from what is at stake for those fighting for change on their own behalf and who may have disagreements among themselves about means and ends. We learn from them, but we can also inform in ways that enable future action and objections. For that reason, this book advocates the maintenance of a distinction between anthropological knowledge generation and activist theories of knowledge (knowing in oppositional ways and oriented towards transformation).
Key to this difference is anthropology’s main tool – ethnography, which remains open-ended in its engagement with people and their life-worlds and committed to understanding diverse ways of being in the world. Part of anthropology’s strength is the slowness and immersive nature of its research methodologies, based on intimate, long-term relations with people in order to try to holistically understand how they see, and live in, the world. Drawing on the growing focus in anthropology on right-wing actors, I suggest that expanding our focus to people (powerful or otherwise) who actively resist progressive or equitable change and fight to reproduce the status quo is perhaps as important as is supporting people in their struggles. Working only with anti-racists does not tell us about the quotidian and institutional ways in which racism is reproduced and defended by those not on the receiving end of it. Working with people who are identified as racist (even if they would not self-identify as such) can tell us why they understand and act in the world as they do, thus possibly enabling the building of common ground and a consensus towards change. This means stepping away from the assumption that the anthropologist must support research participants’ aims and struggles. In other words, I suggest that a decolonizing anthropology is possible in other, albeit complementary, ways to what has come hitherto.
I extend this understanding of a decolonizing anthropology to the institution that most of us know best – the university. The university, in both its global and local instantiations, especially the metropolitan university, is increasingly the target of calls to decolonize – as are various diverse academic disciplines, including anthropology – yet this does not seem to be happening, and we need to do everything we can to build a better and more equitable university and anthropology. This includes asking how we, especially those of us in elite institutions, reproduce centres and margins that continue to look recognizably colonial. Equally, I suggest that we use anthropological methods and tools to understand the university, both as a global form and in its local instantiations. Such a focus includes asking why calls for radical transformation of universities or disciplines do not receive wider support, or are tamed, turned into box-ticking exercises at worst or restricted to the production of one or more radical courses for students. The revolutionary praxis of participant observation (Shah 2017) can be turned to the worlds we inhabit on a daily basis and in which we are deeply complicit.
On the whole then, I argue that decolonization is best understood as a set of demands and processes, some of them deeply contradictory and certainly not adding up to a clear-cut destination. These demands and processes can be engaged sympathetically and rigorously, thoughtfully supported, and studied and analysed – not with a view to debunking but with anthropological attention to nuance, contradiction, means and goals – and thus furthered or refined. We are trained as anthropologists and we teach as anthropologists. We can use this critical training to make a better world, not only by intervening in it but also by applying our discipline’s methods, tools and approaches to better understand it. This book, then, is both about decolonizing anthropology and a decolonizing anthropology.
Colonial legacies
Colonial legacies are complicated. In his introduction to an edited journal issue on how we might think of these, Benoît de L’Estoile (2008) argues that one source of confusion with the phrase ‘colonial legacies’ is the implication that ‘there is an essence of colonialism, overlooking the diversity of colonial practices and relations’ and, further, that this places us in the position of passive recipients of a legacy from the past. De L’Estoile suggests that we might more usefully make a distinction between ‘colonial relations’ and ‘colonization’. Colonial relations is a generic term that specifies a set of relations that have structured, albeit differently in different places and with respect to different kinds of person, the relations between Europeans and non-European inhabitants of the world from around the fifteenth century. These relations, although patterned, have played out on the ground in a multitude of ways that defy easy comprehension or disentanglement. De L’Estoile uses the more restricted term colonization to describe ‘the political control of a territory by a foreign power with a view to incorporation and exploitation (but not necessarily including settlement); in that sense, colonisation is but one possible mode of colonial relations’ (ibid.: 269).
Formerly colonized nations continue to work out their own escapes from, or modes of retaining or reshaping, colonial relations, for example, what to do with the colonial language and whether to maintain or dismantle colonial-era penal and civil laws, institutions, educational systems and their content, and infrastructural patterns. The crucial point is that in former colonies some colonial relations may continue to obtain after the end of colonization – some unconsciously – while others either fall by the wayside or are consciously dropped. Where active decisions are made, they can give rise to contestations and conflict. Several scholars argue that these kinds of working-out have not taken place in the metropole to the same extent, leading to imperfect decolonization, a lack of self-understanding and continued claims of exceptionalism. Thus, Priyamvada Gopal writes:
‘Europe’s’ engagement with decolonisation must begin . . . [with] an unflinchingly truthful engagement with the pivotal role of empire and colonialism in its own making. This would encompass not just ‘Europe’s’ own forays into and influence upon the world, a staple of imperial history, but a sustained study of how those forays and the world itself – made ‘Europe’ and, certainly, the ‘West’. (Gopal 2021: 879)
What form should such a sustained exploration take? In terms of a reckoning with the past, this must involve some form of epistemic and epistemological justice that not only retells the story of colonialism and colonization from the perspective of the colonized but reveals the ways in which colonialism materially benefited colonizing nations and shaped them in diverse ways that continue to date and have not been fully acknowledged. We see such calls in, among other texts, Frantz Fanon’s writing, which has profoundly shaped decolonizing movements.
These attempts inform understandings of action in the present, but we may also go beyond that by asking proactively how we want to deal now with colonial legacies. In this attempt we may take inspiration, as de L’Estoile does, from the poet René Char, whose words he translates as ‘our legacy comes to us without any testament’ (De L’Estoile 2008: 270). De L’Estoile writes:
Legacies are not simply ‘handed down’; they are often claimed and negotiated, but also repudiated, selectively accepted, falsified or challenged. They involve various feelings, nostalgia and jealousy, remembering and forgetting, gratitude or bitterness. They may elicit contestation and negotiation, struggle for recognition and suspicions of illegitimacy. A legacy creates relationships (sometimes quite conflicting) between the various potential heirs: legacy at the same time divides and relates, as suggested by the double meaning of share, to divide and to have in common (‘to perform, enjoy, or suffer in common with others’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary). Dealing with colonial legacies points less to the ‘bequest of the coloniser’ than to the modalities of sharing, including through conflict, whatever remains of a long history of mutual relationship. (ibid.)
That is, a legacy is not binding, even if it is hard to shake off. This is because some legacies may be impossible to see, much less jettison. Scholarly as well as other work can identify colonial legacies and reveal their inter-weavings with current ways of knowing, being and doing. Such work can be and is carried out both within and beyond the academy. It may include reappraisals, including those aimed at epistemological and epistemic justice (discussed in chapter 4), repair, restoration, reparation or repudiation. Equally, following due consideration, some aspects may be deemed worth maintaining, albeit in more equitable ways.
Albert Memmi argued that while colonialism destroys the colonized, it rots the colonizer (2003 [1957]). We need not go so far, but it is important to acknowledge that colonialism was not something that happened only to the colonized; it also changed the colonizers and their very ways of being in, and knowing, the world (Nandy 1998 [1983]). Colonial legacies still inhere, often unexamined, in various metropolitan institutions, including universities, and in disciplinary engagements with the world. My own focus here is mainly the metropole. This book thus asks how the colonial past is narrated, justified and sanitized in the metropole, understood as a reluctant post-colony. How can anthropology in the metropole, along with cognate disciplines, enable a fuller and more just engagement with the colonial past and ongoing colonial legacies? How can anthropology shed light on resistance to such engagements or learn from and inform diverse attempts to build a better world? How can anthropological tools and methods be deployed in these attempts? Further, how can anthropology deal with its own colonial legacies and reform itself?
Colonial legacies of anthropology
Gopal argues that a sustained exploration of colonization and decolonization and a grappling with colonial legacies need to take place in the metropolitan university, which has been constituted in no small measure by colonial knowledge projects and extractions. This is also the case for disciplines originating in the colonial era, such as anthropology, which, at least in the Anglosphere, is located in the ‘Westernized university’ (Grosfoguel 2013). Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that, by their very constitution, the knowledge protocols of the university and university-based academic disciplines remain Eurocentric, generating what he calls a ‘hyperreal Europe’ (2000). This is not a real place, but it is one that exerts a powerful hold over the imagination and sucks all kinds of knowledge into itself, reframing and re-presenting it. Further, as ‘the globality of academia is not independent of the globality that the European modern has created’, European thought remains simultaneously indispensable and inadequate for describing non-western modernity (ibid.: 46). This, Chakrabarty writes, can either give rise to a politics of despair or motivate the provincialization of Europe. This latter strategy explores ‘how [European] thought – which is now everybody’s heritage and which affects us all – may be renewed from and for the margins’ (ibid.: 17, emphasis mine; see also Mbembe 2021). In this sense, and as I will discuss later, some calls to decolonize are aimed at encouraging Europe to live up to the vision of itself that it has assiduously propagated and to share the world equitably with others whom it has long exploited and repudiated.
What are the colonial legacies with which anthropology has to contend and how does it constitute itself in relation to them? For now, we can divide them into three interrelated categories.
The problem of the West
A hyperreal ‘West’ – not quite a place, although loosely located now in Europe and the United States – haunts anthropology. Within and beyond the discipline, it is variously, often simultaneously, considered excessive and epidemic – absolutist, multiple and contradictory, and never fully expungable, recognized as both an aspiration and a threat, as a comparator and as malleable, potentially shaped by importing knowledges and ways of being from another hyperreal place – the ‘non-West’.
What is anthropology’s relation to the West? Can an academic discipline founded in colonial times and located in the modern university ever fully divest itself of its ‘western-ness’? In their edited volume Who are ‘We’?, which unpacks the ways in which the ‘we-ness’ of anthropologists is imagined, based on disciplinary training and membership in a shared historically western intellectual tradition, Liana Chua and Nayanika Mathur argue that ‘an element of ambivalence, if not outright antagonism, to their “own” (usually western) background has frequently characterised the activities of anthropologists, particularly those working within the anglophone mainstream’ (2018: 2). Can anthropology, both located in, and critical of, a western intellectual tradition, pose an otherwise to a dominant and absolutist West? If yes, then from where and how? Does anthropology function as a kaleidoscope, revealing to the viewer dazzling possibilities that emerge from putting together fragments from all over the world to create a new image to which humanity can aspire, or does it function as a mirror, concerned with seeing the world in ways that do little more than reflect the West back to itself? Can anthropology escape the West? These questions are raised anew by those who seek to decolonize the discipline.
The problem of race
Race is hard to pin down. Peter Wade, who has worked on race in Latin America for well over two decades, writes, ‘I still feel a deeply rooted uncertainty about exactly what “it” is and how to approach “it”. This, I think, is no bad thing and guards against the over-simplification of something that, rather than being a single object, is a mercurial, shape-shifting and slippery set of ideas and associated practices, which exist always in relation to other phenomena’ (2015: xi).
Most contemporary anthropologists are clear that race is a social construction and that epidermal or morphological differences do not translate in some biological or essential way to ‘natural’ or cultural differences between people. However, racialization has real social and material effects; it is, as Carolyn Rouse argues, a ‘Durkheimean social fact’ (2023: 362). This may take the form of asserting exceptionalism and of naturalizing inequality, both on the basis of race. Race is a relational category, and experiences of being raced vary across place and time. Racialization, and the experience of the self as raced, are affected by diverse variables, including historical factors, laws, class, gender, demographic patterns and location.
In 1991, Faye Harrison argued that neither mainstream nor radical/critical anthropology had made a strong contribution to our understanding of racism and the sociocultural construction of racial differences (2010 [1991]: 3). Although much work has since been done on these questions, including through a growing focus on whiteness, anthropology continues to struggle with how to think about and what to do with race. This is partly because race is a shifting category, and has been overlaid by other terms that also focus on difference – culture, ethnicity, religion, place of origin – in seemingly more benign ways, but which still carry the seeds of essentialism. Anthropologists have participated in this work, replacing race with other, often relativist, concepts that simultaneously emphasize equality and difference (e.g., Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss both foregrounded culture, albeit in different ways). But not talking about race does not eliminate racism; race muteness may reinforce it. This is something with which attempts and calls to decolonize are centrally concerned.
The body of the anthropologist – western and white?
When the figure of the West is personified, it is as a white man (the white woman occupies a more ambiguous position as lesser than the white man and needing protection from the West’s others). It is he who purportedly can lay full claim to values understood as ‘western’, for example, freedom, rationality and detachment, or to competencies associated with the West, such as scientific or technological innovation, disinterested pursuit of knowledge, and the ability to create universal, rather than particular, knowledge. Where the West is valorized, its others are deemed lacking – perpetually needing intervention and education, and also often museumization. Where it is not, its others may be viewed more positively and as able to offer alternative ways of being from which the West can learn. Either way, the West’s others are drawn into the purview of the West in ways that advance the interests of the latter. This is Edward Said’s point in Orientalism (1978). Anthropology too has long been a player of this particular game.
The above three legacies have raised various questions within the discipline, two of which I will flag up here. The first is the whiteness of the discipline and the fact that researchers are often white and the researched non-white. This is a continuation of colonial patterns. The second is the legacy of a conceit of detached objectivity that ethnography and anthropology were (still are?) deemed to require. Thus, Harrison writes about Melville Herskovits’s scepticism about African-American scholars’ ability to conduct objective research on race and politics in Africa, and his consequent gatekeeping of African Studies in the 1950s (Harrison 2008: 14).
Both anthropology’s whiteness and presumptions of detachment and separation from research subjects and sites have increasingly become a focus of attention and critique. Today, a growing number of anthropologists choose research topics on the basis of their political values, and they fully acknowledge the role of personal attributes in the formation of these values and the changes they hope anthropological work might help bring about. There are also growing numbers of non-white anthropologists, some of whom are choosing to conduct research among their communities of origin in ways that are oriented towards active and transformative care. This has given rise to calls to recognize the worth of this kind of action/applied anthropology and its contributions to anthropological knowledge and methodologies. It is clear that the discipline cannot continue to reward only work oriented mainly towards the production and furthering of anthropological theory, especially if non-white anthropologists are choosing more applied approaches to knowledge generation. A related question focuses on the status of the non-white anthropologist within the discipline. Various accounts (e.g., Uperesa 2016) also describe the experience of non-white anthropologists of being treated like ‘marginal guests’ or discuss their treatment as ‘native anthropologists of home’ as neither fully an anthropologist nor fully a ‘native’ but rather a sort of bridge between the two, or as an inconvenient insider-outsider who is taken seriously neither as anthropologist nor as native.
Anthropology, then, needs to do more as a discipline to build a better house in which different kinds of anthropologist/anthropology can flourish. As Daswani (2021) argues, ‘simply including more Black, Indigenous, Brown, and Asian bodies’ does not mean more inclusivity in practice (see also Gupta and Stoolman 2022). The ‘we’ of anthropology requires attention (Chua and Mathur 2018), as do questions of what anthropology looks like to people who are invested in the discipline in different ways and seek to shape it as a practice that extends itself virtuously while remaining recognizable to diverse participants.
Anthropology as a practice
My use of practice here follows the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. He defines practice as:
any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (MacIntyre 1981: 30)
Let us consider this in relation to anthropology. There are clearly recognized methods – participant observation, open-ended research questions, a hermeneutics of attention and acceptance, living with rather than looking at. There are shared understandings of what constitutes excellence – ‘thickness’ of ethnography, ground-up rather than top-down conceptualizations, the generation of knowledge through mutual interaction. To ‘do’ anthropology is to deploy these methods and accept these standards. But it is also to accept that other standards and methods may arise, as may other goals. MacIntyre writes: ‘Practices never have a goal or goals fixed for all time . . . but the goals themselves are transmuted by the history of the activity’ (ibid.: 33). They are also shaped by those who participate in the activity, bringing new reasons, protocols and goals to bear on it. This does not mean the abandonment of what makes it recognizably anthropological – the kinds of question anthropologists ask, the methods we employ, the kind of knowledge anthropological work produces. But these, as well as purposes and conceptions of excellence, are open to evaluation, disputation and extension.
New forms of thinking with and doing anthropology may come from new participants, hitherto overlooked participants or participants who straddle multiple academic or other practices. This can reshape the internal goods of anthropology – the sense that one has undertaken good research in ways that work for oneself as well as for the research subjects, has understood something, has changed something in the world – whether by positing a new way of thinking about something or opening up anthropology to different possibilities.
Attempts to systematically extend the practice of anthropology so that its conception of the relationship between ends and means is realized and the full participation of diverse actors is enabled require the exercise of virtues. Following MacIntyre, we might identify these virtues as courage, justice and honesty, among others. Brushing aside criticisms, from those who call for decolonization for instance, rather than engaging with them diminishes anthropology as a practice. This does not necessarily entail agreement, but it must entail honest, rigorous and justice-oriented engagement. Sustaining the life of anthropology and extending it virtuously would also include conducting research in good faith, drawing from relevant knowledge and citing accordingly rather than instrumentally or narrowly, learning from just criticisms, whether from within or without, and refraining from shoring up the ramparts to reproduce privilege.
MacIntyre argues that practices wither or are corrupted when a focus on external rewards (renown or fame, status, promotions, differential salaries, invitations to speak and membership of exclusive ‘clubs’) overrides the internal goods of the practice. This is partly because external rewards are finite and can be cornered by a better-located or otherwise advantaged few. Further, although practices are sustained by institutions, they must not, MacIntyre warns us, be confused with institutions. That is to say, the university sustains anthropology, but its concern is not necessarily with the internal goods of anthropology or of any other academic discipline. Rather, like other institutions, it is necessarily concerned with external goods – money, accreditation, league tables, student numbers, post-study employment, quantitative markers of satisfaction. Institutions make possible the continuation of a practice, but in controlling access to rewards they can also corrupt that practice, privileging external over internal goods. Institutions, as I will discuss in chapter 6, can also tame just demands for change, bureaucratizing or otherwise blunting them. The discipline should, therefore, not make the purposes of the university its own.
Why does all this matter for a book on decolonizing anthropology? It matters for at least two reasons. First, recognizing anthropology as a practice means that we can also recognize its worth to us as participants while being fully aware that during the development of the discipline various inequities have arisen and been allowed to remain, which we as practitioners can move to redress or eliminate because we care about the discipline and its present and future. We can shift its horizons, its approaches and its methods. We need not throw out the baby with the bathwater. This book does not call for the dissolution of anthropology (unlike, for instance, Magubane and Faris 1985) because bad things have been done in its name or on the basis of anthropological work. Rather, it suggests that we take a long hard look at anthropology and ask how we can do better.
Second, we can interrogate the ways in which, over time, barriers have been put in place that limit full participation in the practice and confine the achievement of both internal and external goods of the practice to certain kinds of body, often in certain locations and consonant with extant asymmetries and hierarchies. What difference might it make to the practice to, as Mwenda Ntarangwi calls it, reverse the gaze (2010), that is, to approach the practice from the outside or from its marginal participants, laying bare its conceits and inequities as well as re-imagining its potential with a view to rethinking and rebuilding it, not beyond recognition, but more equitably and justly? After all, several of us came into anthropology precisely because it offered us much more lively ways of understanding, being in and acting on the world.
My journey into anthropology
I am female, born and brought up in India, in an upper caste and an upper-middle-class family. I have been in universities my entire adult life. I am now 53 years old and have been a UK-based anthropologist for over twenty-five years. I have taught at the University of Manchester since 2006.
I came to anthropology late, following an undergraduate degree in History in Madras (Chennai) and a Master’s degree in the history of art at the National Museum in Delhi, both in India. For my Master’s dissertation, I planned to focus on the iconography of Warli ritual painting. The Warlis are an Indigenous group in Western India (a ‘tribe’ as they are known in India) who make highly stylized ritual geometric paintings.
My research focus in the field shifted to a government development initiative that encouraged Warlis to paint on cloth and paper for sale. This brought money into Warli villages, but also other changes. Men replaced women as the ‘artists’ (almost everyone used the English word). They even took over ritual painting on walls, hitherto the province of older women. Compared with the more formulaic paintings on walls, those for sale were much more narrative in style, depicting various Warli activities, such as charcoal making, in vivid and interesting ways. I was puzzled that no one I met seemed to lament the exodus of women from the painting, but equally interested in the innovation and creativity that commodification seemed to have engendered. I returned to Delhi buzzing with questions. My supervisor, Professor Jyotindra Jain, who was the director of the National Crafts Museum, suggested that history of art would not allow me to ask the questions I now wanted to ask, and directed me to anthropology. I was hooked, reading voraciously (see Ntarangwi 2010 for a similar account of first encountering anthropology). When a scholarship was advertised for Indian scholars wanting to do a Master’s degree in social anthropology, to introduce them to the discipline, I applied and was successful.
I was twenty-four when I moved to Cambridge, United Kingdom, leaving the Indian subcontinent for the first time. I completed my Master’s degree in 1995 and began a PhD in anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 1996. I wanted to continue working in the field of craft development in India. My experience with the Warli painters had shown me how much development intervention, especially when supported by the state, could change things on the ground even in a short time.
I decided to work in Pattamadai, famous for its fine sedge mats woven by Tamil Muslims and the target of both governmental and non-governmental development interventions since the 1950s. I had three main questions: first, how were various development interventions shaping the weaving industry? Second, to what extent were colonial-era and post-colonial discourses used to promote and market ‘traditional Indian crafts’ informed by weavers’ own understandings of their work? Third, did the identification of the weavers as traditional Indian craftspeople and of their objects as crucial to a Hindu ritual economy enable them to push back against the growing hostility to Muslims within Tamilnadu, and India? If so, how?
Here, I will talk about only two aspects of my doctoral work (Venkatesan 2009): Pattamadai Muslims’ ways of approaching the rise of majoritarian Hinduism; and, relatedly, the ways in which they used their mats to help them find a valued place in the national narrative. First, relations on the ground are rarely captured in grand narratives of victims and oppressors. In Pattamadai, Muslims worked with resonances, ambivalences and a longue durée knowledge of others – local Hindus, development practitioners, state actors and so on – in sophisticated ways. They were, in Mattingly’s terms (2014), researchers of and experimenters in their own lives and world, vulnerable to, but also the shapers of, others’ visions of them. Binary understandings of politics and identity or oppressor/oppressed dichotomies do not, I think, quite capture the incompleteness and conviviality (Nyamnjoh 2017 [2015]), the moral experimentation (Mattingly 2014), ‘the ordinary as an achievement’ (Das 2012) and the frictions of lived life. Broader analyses of domination, hegemony and exclusion, especially on larger scales, are useful, but local understandings and practices complicate them (see Venkatesan 2012, 2019).
Second, I began to think about objects as agents, enabling the enactment of human intentions. Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency (1998) had just been published, and it gave me a way of thinking with and against things as agents (see Venkatesan 2010). This led me to my next research project. Wanting to explore how things become primary agents, that is, fully and independently active in the world in human-like ways, I began work, also in Tamilnadu, with Hindu priests who transform statues of deities into living embodied gods (e.g., Venkatesan 2020). I thus began participating in major reappraisals of religion in anthropology. These involved moving away from understandings of religion smuggled in from Christianity, with its emphasis on immaterial entities (soul, spirit, etc.), to religion as a form of mediation (Meyer 2020), in which materials and things are crucial. We can call this a decolonizing thrust in the anthropology of religion.
During this fieldwork, I began to do something I call back-and-forth ethnography. I would discuss ethnographic texts I thought might interest the priests, to see how they understood and interpreted them. A discussion about renouncer expectations of reciprocity and soteriological freedom from Leela Prasad’s 2007 book Poetics of Conduct with two Brahmin priests led me to think about freedom and how anthropologists have not focused much on this concept, neither theoretically nor ethnographically. James Laidlaw’s 2002 article on ethics and freedom had already led to a new direction in the anthropology of ethics. That, along with this conversation with the priests, inspired me. Equally, since my Pattamadai days I had been thinking about the growth of populist majoritarian politics and the ways in which hitherto perfectly reasonable people could be persuaded by demagoguery cloaked in lofty concepts. Much work was being done in India on this, and I wanted to ask similar questions of England, where the populist right was surging, with freedom as its concept of choice.
