INTRODUCTION TO
ANTHROPOLOGY IN A
DECOLONIZING WORLD
Notes of the lectures from Philip De Boeck and Nadia Fadil
2025-2026
KU LEUVEN
Anne De Wever
,Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing World
Filip De Boeck (Central-Africa, Congo, urban, visual arts) & Nadia Fadil (migration & colonialism, Morocco)
Exam (closed book): internalising the course, writing about your own interpretation of specific themes
- 3 open end questions (4 points each)
- Define 4 key terms (2 points each)
Inhoud
Anthropology introduction ....................................................................................................................3
Anthropology vs ethnography ............................................................................................................3
What is ethnography? ...................................................................................................................4
What is anthropology? ..................................................................................................................4
Postcoloniality .................................................................................................................................5
Decolonization ................................................................................................................................5
History and the Anthropological Narrative .............................................................................................6
Joseph Conrad .................................................................................................................................6
Cultural Evolutionism .......................................................................................................................6
Franz Boas: Diffusionism ..................................................................................................................7
Structural functionalism ...................................................................................................................8
Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (20th Ce) ...........................................................................................8
Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) ...............................................................................................9
Denial of coevalness ...................................................................................................................... 10
Johannes Fabian (20th Ce) ........................................................................................................... 10
Writing culture ............................................................................................................................... 11
La Pensée sauvage. Lévi-Strauss, French Structuralism and History...................................................... 12
Lévi-Strauss: French Structuralism ................................................................................................. 12
‘Structural Anthropology’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1963) .............................................................................. 13
Kinship structures ...................................................................................................................... 15
Warm and cold societies ............................................................................................................ 16
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 16
The re-introduction of ‘History’ in the Anthropological Discipline .......................................................... 17
Evans-Pritchard: Anthropology and history ...................................................................................... 17
Annales school .......................................................................................................................... 17
Marshall Sahlins: the making of ‘structural history’........................................................................... 18
Sacred or divine kingship ................................................................................................................ 19
Lunda kingdom .......................................................................................................................... 19
Jan Vansina: oral history ................................................................................................................. 19
The Stranger King........................................................................................................................ 20
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 21
Africa and/in World History: Opening up the Time-Space of History and Transforming Centre-Periphery
Relations ........................................................................................................................................... 21
Mudimbe: the Invention of Africa ..................................................................................................... 22
Ethnic maps ............................................................................................................................... 23
Braudel: an African historiography ................................................................................................... 23
Slavery .......................................................................................................................................... 23
Introduction Catholicism ................................................................................................................ 24
Colonial dislocatory presence ........................................................................................................ 25
The (post)colonial museum and the representation of self and other: who shapes the museum of
tomorrow? ......................................................................................................................................... 26
1
,Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing World
Institutional inertia (passive museum) → forms of collaboration ....................................................... 27
Decolonial action → institutional provenance research & partnerships ............................................. 28
Orientalism ....................................................................................................................................... 29
Edward Saïd (1935-2003) ................................................................................................................ 30
Michel Foucault (1926-1984): notion of discourse ............................................................................ 31
Discourse .................................................................................................................................. 32
Key arguments of orientalism .......................................................................................................... 33
Orientalism as a discourse ............................................................................................................. 34
Orientalism and Anthropology ........................................................................................................ 36
Crisis of representation and ethnography ............................................................................................ 37
Crisis of representation .................................................................................................................. 37
Crisis of ethnographic authority ...................................................................................................... 38
Partial truth.................................................................................................................................... 40
Discussion and conclusion ............................................................................................................. 41
Re-inventing ethnography ................................................................................................................... 42
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 42
Reflexivity and positionality ............................................................................................................ 43
Dialogical model ............................................................................................................................ 43
Collaborative anthropology............................................................................................................. 44
Ethnographic refusal and reserve .................................................................................................... 45
Discussion and conclusion ............................................................................................................. 47
Feminism and anthropology ............................................................................................................... 48
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 48
Background: anthropology and the women’s question ...................................................................... 49
Moral/analytical dilemma’s posed by the intersection of feminism and social science ....................... 50
Going beyond a liberal feminist agenda (Mahmud) ........................................................................... 54
Agency (Mahmood) .................................................................................................................... 54
Conclusion and discussion ............................................................................................................ 55
Emotions and Affect ........................................................................................................................... 56
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 56
Study of emotions within anthropology ............................................................................................ 57
Cultural Relativism ..................................................................................................................... 57
Structural functionalism ............................................................................................................. 57
Political economy of emotions .................................................................................................... 57
Emotions as discourse ............................................................................................................... 58
Affect as an anthropological object of study .................................................................................... 58
Methodological challenges: how to study affect? (Jansen) ................................................................ 59
Discussion and conclusion ............................................................................................................. 60
The global emergence of the humanitarian subject .............................................................................. 60
The emergence of the ‘refugee question’.......................................................................................... 61
Refugees as bare life ...................................................................................................................... 62
Refugee question in Europe/France ................................................................................................. 64
Refugee question in Palestine ......................................................................................................... 65
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 66
2
,Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing World
Class 1 (25/09)
Anthropology introduction
Text 1: Interview Achille Mbembe (2013)
• Critically examines the pervasive assumption that difference is inherently a problem that
needs to be solved, rather than a natural state of fact
• Problem: difference is used to construct hierarchies, justify prejudice, and enforce an arbitrary
‘norm’ against which others are deemed deviant, often stemming from colonialism and racism
• Aim: cosmopolitan ethos & deepening of democracy to allow for the pluralism of human
expression and an ethics of care that extends beyond humanity itself, while rejecting the
dangerous concept of a single culture and warning against the re-emergence of cultural
justifications for racism and exclusion
Text 2: ‘Small Places, Large Issues’ (Thomas Hylland Eriksen, 1995)
= a foundational introduction to social and cultural anthropology, bridging the gap between localized
ethnographic studies and universal human questions
• Outlines the discipline’s unique empirical and comparative methodology,
emphasizing fieldwork as a means to understand how social life is enacted across diverse
global contexts
• Eriksen explores essential themes such as kinship, social stratification, and political power,
while navigating the tension between individual agency and the structural preconditions of
society. Ultimately, the work seeks to demonstrate the continued relevance of classic
anthropological theory in making sense of modern global phenomena, including ethnic
violence, nationalism, and the digital landscape
Herodotus = ancient Greek historian, founding father of history
• Offered reflections on the life around the world and mankind
19th Ce.: Edward Burnett Tylor & James Frazer = pioneers in anthropology as a modern science
- Revolved around questions about origin of mankind
- Understand where we come from and learn about the differences and common history
- Made theories on the vision on humanity, in context of a colonized world → superiority and
minority views, anthropology departs from this evolutionary lens with inferior views
Anthropologists in the Victorian era (2nd half 19th Ce) spent their time observing other cultures from ‘within’
by learning their language and trying to understand their way of life compared to the Western lifestyle
• Critique on this method: causes some civilisation to put on show
• Michel-Rolph Trouillot: ‘savage slots’ = tendency to regard some people as primitive and others
as civilized
• Some cultures are ‘untouched’ by the logics of industrialisation, modern-thinking
Anthropology vs ethnography
What is anthropology?
• Study of the human, of the origins of mankind, of the diversity of mankind, of non-Western
customs and cultures, of everyday life
• A practice of education
• Learning from others, not only about others
3
,Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing World
Another view: anthropology = study of cultural difference and differences between people and groups
• Trying to understand otherness
• Commitments of modern anthropology: you go far away to study cultures different from you and
look for those differences → there are a lot of modernisations and differences change over time
What makes anthropology anthropology?
- The method, not the geographical focus (not just Non-Western, bc the west is also included now)
- About living together, what ties us together
What is ethnography?
- Practice of fieldwork (= talk and spend time in foreign contexts)
- Study of everyday life
- Participant observation as its hallmark
>< Ingold: reductivist account of what the discipline stands for by narrowing it down to documentary
aspects
• Anthropology should not be reduced to simply using ethnography as a means to an end
Ingold: “ethnography is a overused term within anthropology and therefore lost it’s meaning”
• Anthropology = studying with and learning from (practice of education)
• Ethnography = a study of, and a learning about
What is anthropology?
• Different answers, different perspectives → reality never settles, there always different ways to
approach the same question
• A shared commitment to studying the potentiality of human life
• A critical awareness on the historical and cultural specificity of everyday practices and events
• A shared commitment to your research interlocutors → makes research liable for critique on
being bias
• An embodied construction of knowledge
Double movements of anthropologists
• Opening up, exploring possibilities of human condition: not only ‘what’ does it mean to be
human, but also ‘how’ are certain aspects being performed, lived and experienced (e.g. gender,
poverty, religion)
• Recording the everyday lives and practices of our interlocutors: writing about it, documenting it
• Making lives ‘legible’ (= leesbaar)
• Recording realities is a contradictory movement of opening and closing: inherent paradox
o Accounting for patterns/structure and complexity
o Experiencing realities in their complexity and writing about them imperfectly (cf. other
media than writing, audio, video, performance etc..)
Anthropology as a practiced relationship between self & other; an exercise in understanding & translation
EMIC ETIC
Insiders perspective (not a member per se) Outsiders perspective
Intrinsic cultural distinctions that are meaningful to Data gathering by outsiders that yield questions
the members of a society posed by outsiders
Participating/placing themselves within the culture Not integrating themselves into the culture they’re
of intended study observing
More in-depth, detailed and culturally rich Avoiding altering the culture by direct interaction
4
,Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing World
Anthropology as an academic discipline does not exist in a political or societal void
• Anthropology not only as a specific way of knowing about Anthropos, the way in which we, as
human beings, form a ‘living together’, and inhabit our social worlds
• This knowledge is never innocent but was/ is constructed in the historical contexts of colonialism
• To understand the birth and evolution of anthropology as an academic discipline, we will
therefore also contextualize and scrutinize the knowledge it generates through the critical
theoretical perspective of post-colonial theory and reflections on the need for decolonial
vocabularies.
Reading tip: Joseph Conrad ‘Heart of Darkness’
Postcoloniality
The colonial world ended around 1980, but the ideas left its mark and still influence the way we think &
talk about race
Postcolonial world = (a 3rd, shared) space between the extremes of tradition and modernity
• Space of marginalisation? Mudimbe → Hybridity (botanical metaphor)
o Within the marginalized spaces, there exists a complex interplay of cultural influences
and identities → a hybridity
o Botanical metaphor suggests that this hybridity is not a simplistic blending but a
nuanced and intricate process, much like the intricate interweaving of characteristics in
a hybrid plant
• Space of cultural creativity? Bhadba → Creolisation (linguistic metaphor)
o Within spaces of cultural creativity, there is a process of creolization
o Involves the dynamic blending of cultural elements, resulting in the creation of
something new, vibrant, and distinctly creative
o Linguistic metaphor emphasizes the transformative nature of this process, akin to the
development of a creole language with its own unique characteristics.
• Translation
• Negotiation
• Palimpsest (= manuscript (e.g. parchment or vellum) that has been reused or recycled, with
traces of the original (overwritten) text still visible underneath the new text
Postcolonial theory
• "Post" in postcolonial: a break with the past (post as something subsequent, clearly distinct from
the colonial past)?
• “Post” as continuity, as a period grown out of a reworking of the past in the present, something
that incorporates the previous moments?
→ Postcoloniality vs. decoloniality: a tense relationship?
Decolonization
• Historical moment
• Political & epistemological movement (decolonizing the mind)
➢ Critically challenging the hegemony of the West and/or modernity as main horizon of possibility
➢ Exploring alternative trajectories and complex engagements with modernity (also within the West)
➢ Opening up the horizon of possibilities of what it means to be human (pluriverse)
Anthropology in a decolonizing world
→ How has anthropology renewed itself and shifted and engaged with the coloniality?
5
,Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing World
• Decolonization as an ethnographic moment (studying decoloniality)
• How does the movement of decolonization reshape anthropology?
o What to study?, in what language?, representational authority?, reciprocity? Etc.
• How does anthropology participate in enlarging the possibilities of being human?
Class 2 (2/10)
History and the Anthropological Narrative
Key words: Evolutionism, diffusionism, structural functionalism, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, “denial of
coevalness”, “Writing Culture”
History and the Anthropological Discourse. The Gradual Marginalisation of the Historical Narrative
Joseph Conrad
= Polish-English writer, ‘The Heart of Darkness’ (1902, about dynamics of colonization)
• Trip to Africa, along Congo River
• Search for the ‘other’ (in Africa) becomes a meeting with our dark inner self
• Illustration of evolutionist notions of time, ‘traveling through time by moving space’
Cultural Evolutionism
= human cultures change over time through a process similar to biological evolution, progressing through
stages from simple to complex
• Influenced by Darwinism (concepts like variation, inheritance, and selection to study how cultural
traits, such as beliefs, languages, and customs, spread and change across populations through
social learning and transmission)
• Monocultural rationale
Lewis Henry Morgan (American ethnographer, studied Native Americans: Iroquois) & Edward Burnett
Tylor (English anthropologist, focuses on Darwinism)
• Tylor’s unilinear evolution: human societies develop over time and follow three stages of
evolution: savagery, barbarism, and civilization
o E.g. evolution lower to upper barbarism: making pottery → domestication of plants &
animals, irrigated agriculture → making iron tools
• Same path for all societies, every culture wants/needs to progress (Critique: no, they don’t!)
• Denial of cultural diversity (which is critiqued by Boas/Diffusionism)
• Morgan studied the Iroquois from an ‘antiquarian’ standpoint, as if they were the distant past of
his own ancestors, instead of just a different society
• Shows superiority and inferiority between developed and undeveloped countries
• Eurocentric bias, as it often positions European culture as the pinnacle of development
Henry Maine (British jurist & historian)
• Theory: societies progress from a "status" system, where an individual's rights and obligations are
determined by their social position, to a "contract" system, where they are based on voluntary
agreements.
o Early societies were organized around family and kinship, with individuals bound by their
group's status
o Modern, progressive societies increasingly use contract to define relationships and rights
6
, Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing World
Tylor & Maine = ‘armchair anthropologists’ → rely on other sources (travellers, missionaries) rather than
doing fieldwork themselves
The Natural History Museum (= Afrikamuseum Tervuren): a 19th century evolutionist narrative
• Originally built to showcase King Leopold II's Congo Free State
• Museum as altar for the premodern
o Museum was then seen as what we lost, what we were before (celebration of strength of
Belgium)
• Rebranded 10y ago to get rid of the colonial name: museum wants to decolonize the place, but it
is very hard when the place is made to celebrate colonization
o The primitive art section as the most important collection → stolen art!
Growing nostalgia in 19th Ce for the old times (ancien régime) → colonization helped to sooth these
feelings
• “À la recherche du temps perdu” (Proust)
• The colonial state intervened in all kinds of ways from fashion, religion, relationship, family, food
• Natives who follow the rules set by colonizers = évoluee/évoluant
Village Congolais (World Fair 1897)
• ‘human zoos’: world fair in Tervuren where they built central African huts to ‘display’ primitive
races: the Congolese people as ‘living ancestors’
o Attracted 2 million visitors
o Some of the Congolese people died bc of the Belgian climate → Belgian people didn’t
want to bury them so they burned their bodies
o Now a place of memorial for those people
Franz Boas: Diffusionism
Franz Boas: ‘Father of American Anthropology’
• German-American anthropologist & pioneer of modern anthropology
• Studied culture & language of the Baffin Island Inuit (in Canada)
• For him, the object of anthropology = to understand the way in which culture conditioned people
to understand and interact with the world in different ways
o To do this it was necessary to gain an understanding of the language and cultural
practices of the people studied
• Big influence, significant students of his were: A. L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir,
Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, …
Diffusionism (by Boas)
• Early 1900’s movement that started to contest (unilinear) evolutionism
o There is not 1 narrative that can be told about the origin and evolution of cultures
o Not every society evolved everywhere in the same way, e.g. progressing through a set of
hierarchic technological and cultural stages like Western-European culture
• Culture develops historically through interactions of groups of people and the diffusion of ideas
o Rejects "stage"-based organization of ethnological museums, instead prefers to orders
items on display based on the affinity and proximity of the cultural groups in question
• There is no process towards continuously ‘higher’ cultural forms
o Cultural relativism: cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher/lower, or better or
more correct → all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture, and judge
according to their own culturally acquired norms
7
ANTHROPOLOGY IN A
DECOLONIZING WORLD
Notes of the lectures from Philip De Boeck and Nadia Fadil
2025-2026
KU LEUVEN
Anne De Wever
,Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing World
Filip De Boeck (Central-Africa, Congo, urban, visual arts) & Nadia Fadil (migration & colonialism, Morocco)
Exam (closed book): internalising the course, writing about your own interpretation of specific themes
- 3 open end questions (4 points each)
- Define 4 key terms (2 points each)
Inhoud
Anthropology introduction ....................................................................................................................3
Anthropology vs ethnography ............................................................................................................3
What is ethnography? ...................................................................................................................4
What is anthropology? ..................................................................................................................4
Postcoloniality .................................................................................................................................5
Decolonization ................................................................................................................................5
History and the Anthropological Narrative .............................................................................................6
Joseph Conrad .................................................................................................................................6
Cultural Evolutionism .......................................................................................................................6
Franz Boas: Diffusionism ..................................................................................................................7
Structural functionalism ...................................................................................................................8
Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (20th Ce) ...........................................................................................8
Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) ...............................................................................................9
Denial of coevalness ...................................................................................................................... 10
Johannes Fabian (20th Ce) ........................................................................................................... 10
Writing culture ............................................................................................................................... 11
La Pensée sauvage. Lévi-Strauss, French Structuralism and History...................................................... 12
Lévi-Strauss: French Structuralism ................................................................................................. 12
‘Structural Anthropology’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1963) .............................................................................. 13
Kinship structures ...................................................................................................................... 15
Warm and cold societies ............................................................................................................ 16
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 16
The re-introduction of ‘History’ in the Anthropological Discipline .......................................................... 17
Evans-Pritchard: Anthropology and history ...................................................................................... 17
Annales school .......................................................................................................................... 17
Marshall Sahlins: the making of ‘structural history’........................................................................... 18
Sacred or divine kingship ................................................................................................................ 19
Lunda kingdom .......................................................................................................................... 19
Jan Vansina: oral history ................................................................................................................. 19
The Stranger King........................................................................................................................ 20
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 21
Africa and/in World History: Opening up the Time-Space of History and Transforming Centre-Periphery
Relations ........................................................................................................................................... 21
Mudimbe: the Invention of Africa ..................................................................................................... 22
Ethnic maps ............................................................................................................................... 23
Braudel: an African historiography ................................................................................................... 23
Slavery .......................................................................................................................................... 23
Introduction Catholicism ................................................................................................................ 24
Colonial dislocatory presence ........................................................................................................ 25
The (post)colonial museum and the representation of self and other: who shapes the museum of
tomorrow? ......................................................................................................................................... 26
1
,Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing World
Institutional inertia (passive museum) → forms of collaboration ....................................................... 27
Decolonial action → institutional provenance research & partnerships ............................................. 28
Orientalism ....................................................................................................................................... 29
Edward Saïd (1935-2003) ................................................................................................................ 30
Michel Foucault (1926-1984): notion of discourse ............................................................................ 31
Discourse .................................................................................................................................. 32
Key arguments of orientalism .......................................................................................................... 33
Orientalism as a discourse ............................................................................................................. 34
Orientalism and Anthropology ........................................................................................................ 36
Crisis of representation and ethnography ............................................................................................ 37
Crisis of representation .................................................................................................................. 37
Crisis of ethnographic authority ...................................................................................................... 38
Partial truth.................................................................................................................................... 40
Discussion and conclusion ............................................................................................................. 41
Re-inventing ethnography ................................................................................................................... 42
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 42
Reflexivity and positionality ............................................................................................................ 43
Dialogical model ............................................................................................................................ 43
Collaborative anthropology............................................................................................................. 44
Ethnographic refusal and reserve .................................................................................................... 45
Discussion and conclusion ............................................................................................................. 47
Feminism and anthropology ............................................................................................................... 48
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 48
Background: anthropology and the women’s question ...................................................................... 49
Moral/analytical dilemma’s posed by the intersection of feminism and social science ....................... 50
Going beyond a liberal feminist agenda (Mahmud) ........................................................................... 54
Agency (Mahmood) .................................................................................................................... 54
Conclusion and discussion ............................................................................................................ 55
Emotions and Affect ........................................................................................................................... 56
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 56
Study of emotions within anthropology ............................................................................................ 57
Cultural Relativism ..................................................................................................................... 57
Structural functionalism ............................................................................................................. 57
Political economy of emotions .................................................................................................... 57
Emotions as discourse ............................................................................................................... 58
Affect as an anthropological object of study .................................................................................... 58
Methodological challenges: how to study affect? (Jansen) ................................................................ 59
Discussion and conclusion ............................................................................................................. 60
The global emergence of the humanitarian subject .............................................................................. 60
The emergence of the ‘refugee question’.......................................................................................... 61
Refugees as bare life ...................................................................................................................... 62
Refugee question in Europe/France ................................................................................................. 64
Refugee question in Palestine ......................................................................................................... 65
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 66
2
,Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing World
Class 1 (25/09)
Anthropology introduction
Text 1: Interview Achille Mbembe (2013)
• Critically examines the pervasive assumption that difference is inherently a problem that
needs to be solved, rather than a natural state of fact
• Problem: difference is used to construct hierarchies, justify prejudice, and enforce an arbitrary
‘norm’ against which others are deemed deviant, often stemming from colonialism and racism
• Aim: cosmopolitan ethos & deepening of democracy to allow for the pluralism of human
expression and an ethics of care that extends beyond humanity itself, while rejecting the
dangerous concept of a single culture and warning against the re-emergence of cultural
justifications for racism and exclusion
Text 2: ‘Small Places, Large Issues’ (Thomas Hylland Eriksen, 1995)
= a foundational introduction to social and cultural anthropology, bridging the gap between localized
ethnographic studies and universal human questions
• Outlines the discipline’s unique empirical and comparative methodology,
emphasizing fieldwork as a means to understand how social life is enacted across diverse
global contexts
• Eriksen explores essential themes such as kinship, social stratification, and political power,
while navigating the tension between individual agency and the structural preconditions of
society. Ultimately, the work seeks to demonstrate the continued relevance of classic
anthropological theory in making sense of modern global phenomena, including ethnic
violence, nationalism, and the digital landscape
Herodotus = ancient Greek historian, founding father of history
• Offered reflections on the life around the world and mankind
19th Ce.: Edward Burnett Tylor & James Frazer = pioneers in anthropology as a modern science
- Revolved around questions about origin of mankind
- Understand where we come from and learn about the differences and common history
- Made theories on the vision on humanity, in context of a colonized world → superiority and
minority views, anthropology departs from this evolutionary lens with inferior views
Anthropologists in the Victorian era (2nd half 19th Ce) spent their time observing other cultures from ‘within’
by learning their language and trying to understand their way of life compared to the Western lifestyle
• Critique on this method: causes some civilisation to put on show
• Michel-Rolph Trouillot: ‘savage slots’ = tendency to regard some people as primitive and others
as civilized
• Some cultures are ‘untouched’ by the logics of industrialisation, modern-thinking
Anthropology vs ethnography
What is anthropology?
• Study of the human, of the origins of mankind, of the diversity of mankind, of non-Western
customs and cultures, of everyday life
• A practice of education
• Learning from others, not only about others
3
,Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing World
Another view: anthropology = study of cultural difference and differences between people and groups
• Trying to understand otherness
• Commitments of modern anthropology: you go far away to study cultures different from you and
look for those differences → there are a lot of modernisations and differences change over time
What makes anthropology anthropology?
- The method, not the geographical focus (not just Non-Western, bc the west is also included now)
- About living together, what ties us together
What is ethnography?
- Practice of fieldwork (= talk and spend time in foreign contexts)
- Study of everyday life
- Participant observation as its hallmark
>< Ingold: reductivist account of what the discipline stands for by narrowing it down to documentary
aspects
• Anthropology should not be reduced to simply using ethnography as a means to an end
Ingold: “ethnography is a overused term within anthropology and therefore lost it’s meaning”
• Anthropology = studying with and learning from (practice of education)
• Ethnography = a study of, and a learning about
What is anthropology?
• Different answers, different perspectives → reality never settles, there always different ways to
approach the same question
• A shared commitment to studying the potentiality of human life
• A critical awareness on the historical and cultural specificity of everyday practices and events
• A shared commitment to your research interlocutors → makes research liable for critique on
being bias
• An embodied construction of knowledge
Double movements of anthropologists
• Opening up, exploring possibilities of human condition: not only ‘what’ does it mean to be
human, but also ‘how’ are certain aspects being performed, lived and experienced (e.g. gender,
poverty, religion)
• Recording the everyday lives and practices of our interlocutors: writing about it, documenting it
• Making lives ‘legible’ (= leesbaar)
• Recording realities is a contradictory movement of opening and closing: inherent paradox
o Accounting for patterns/structure and complexity
o Experiencing realities in their complexity and writing about them imperfectly (cf. other
media than writing, audio, video, performance etc..)
Anthropology as a practiced relationship between self & other; an exercise in understanding & translation
EMIC ETIC
Insiders perspective (not a member per se) Outsiders perspective
Intrinsic cultural distinctions that are meaningful to Data gathering by outsiders that yield questions
the members of a society posed by outsiders
Participating/placing themselves within the culture Not integrating themselves into the culture they’re
of intended study observing
More in-depth, detailed and culturally rich Avoiding altering the culture by direct interaction
4
,Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing World
Anthropology as an academic discipline does not exist in a political or societal void
• Anthropology not only as a specific way of knowing about Anthropos, the way in which we, as
human beings, form a ‘living together’, and inhabit our social worlds
• This knowledge is never innocent but was/ is constructed in the historical contexts of colonialism
• To understand the birth and evolution of anthropology as an academic discipline, we will
therefore also contextualize and scrutinize the knowledge it generates through the critical
theoretical perspective of post-colonial theory and reflections on the need for decolonial
vocabularies.
Reading tip: Joseph Conrad ‘Heart of Darkness’
Postcoloniality
The colonial world ended around 1980, but the ideas left its mark and still influence the way we think &
talk about race
Postcolonial world = (a 3rd, shared) space between the extremes of tradition and modernity
• Space of marginalisation? Mudimbe → Hybridity (botanical metaphor)
o Within the marginalized spaces, there exists a complex interplay of cultural influences
and identities → a hybridity
o Botanical metaphor suggests that this hybridity is not a simplistic blending but a
nuanced and intricate process, much like the intricate interweaving of characteristics in
a hybrid plant
• Space of cultural creativity? Bhadba → Creolisation (linguistic metaphor)
o Within spaces of cultural creativity, there is a process of creolization
o Involves the dynamic blending of cultural elements, resulting in the creation of
something new, vibrant, and distinctly creative
o Linguistic metaphor emphasizes the transformative nature of this process, akin to the
development of a creole language with its own unique characteristics.
• Translation
• Negotiation
• Palimpsest (= manuscript (e.g. parchment or vellum) that has been reused or recycled, with
traces of the original (overwritten) text still visible underneath the new text
Postcolonial theory
• "Post" in postcolonial: a break with the past (post as something subsequent, clearly distinct from
the colonial past)?
• “Post” as continuity, as a period grown out of a reworking of the past in the present, something
that incorporates the previous moments?
→ Postcoloniality vs. decoloniality: a tense relationship?
Decolonization
• Historical moment
• Political & epistemological movement (decolonizing the mind)
➢ Critically challenging the hegemony of the West and/or modernity as main horizon of possibility
➢ Exploring alternative trajectories and complex engagements with modernity (also within the West)
➢ Opening up the horizon of possibilities of what it means to be human (pluriverse)
Anthropology in a decolonizing world
→ How has anthropology renewed itself and shifted and engaged with the coloniality?
5
,Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing World
• Decolonization as an ethnographic moment (studying decoloniality)
• How does the movement of decolonization reshape anthropology?
o What to study?, in what language?, representational authority?, reciprocity? Etc.
• How does anthropology participate in enlarging the possibilities of being human?
Class 2 (2/10)
History and the Anthropological Narrative
Key words: Evolutionism, diffusionism, structural functionalism, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, “denial of
coevalness”, “Writing Culture”
History and the Anthropological Discourse. The Gradual Marginalisation of the Historical Narrative
Joseph Conrad
= Polish-English writer, ‘The Heart of Darkness’ (1902, about dynamics of colonization)
• Trip to Africa, along Congo River
• Search for the ‘other’ (in Africa) becomes a meeting with our dark inner self
• Illustration of evolutionist notions of time, ‘traveling through time by moving space’
Cultural Evolutionism
= human cultures change over time through a process similar to biological evolution, progressing through
stages from simple to complex
• Influenced by Darwinism (concepts like variation, inheritance, and selection to study how cultural
traits, such as beliefs, languages, and customs, spread and change across populations through
social learning and transmission)
• Monocultural rationale
Lewis Henry Morgan (American ethnographer, studied Native Americans: Iroquois) & Edward Burnett
Tylor (English anthropologist, focuses on Darwinism)
• Tylor’s unilinear evolution: human societies develop over time and follow three stages of
evolution: savagery, barbarism, and civilization
o E.g. evolution lower to upper barbarism: making pottery → domestication of plants &
animals, irrigated agriculture → making iron tools
• Same path for all societies, every culture wants/needs to progress (Critique: no, they don’t!)
• Denial of cultural diversity (which is critiqued by Boas/Diffusionism)
• Morgan studied the Iroquois from an ‘antiquarian’ standpoint, as if they were the distant past of
his own ancestors, instead of just a different society
• Shows superiority and inferiority between developed and undeveloped countries
• Eurocentric bias, as it often positions European culture as the pinnacle of development
Henry Maine (British jurist & historian)
• Theory: societies progress from a "status" system, where an individual's rights and obligations are
determined by their social position, to a "contract" system, where they are based on voluntary
agreements.
o Early societies were organized around family and kinship, with individuals bound by their
group's status
o Modern, progressive societies increasingly use contract to define relationships and rights
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, Introduction to Anthropology in a Decolonizing World
Tylor & Maine = ‘armchair anthropologists’ → rely on other sources (travellers, missionaries) rather than
doing fieldwork themselves
The Natural History Museum (= Afrikamuseum Tervuren): a 19th century evolutionist narrative
• Originally built to showcase King Leopold II's Congo Free State
• Museum as altar for the premodern
o Museum was then seen as what we lost, what we were before (celebration of strength of
Belgium)
• Rebranded 10y ago to get rid of the colonial name: museum wants to decolonize the place, but it
is very hard when the place is made to celebrate colonization
o The primitive art section as the most important collection → stolen art!
Growing nostalgia in 19th Ce for the old times (ancien régime) → colonization helped to sooth these
feelings
• “À la recherche du temps perdu” (Proust)
• The colonial state intervened in all kinds of ways from fashion, religion, relationship, family, food
• Natives who follow the rules set by colonizers = évoluee/évoluant
Village Congolais (World Fair 1897)
• ‘human zoos’: world fair in Tervuren where they built central African huts to ‘display’ primitive
races: the Congolese people as ‘living ancestors’
o Attracted 2 million visitors
o Some of the Congolese people died bc of the Belgian climate → Belgian people didn’t
want to bury them so they burned their bodies
o Now a place of memorial for those people
Franz Boas: Diffusionism
Franz Boas: ‘Father of American Anthropology’
• German-American anthropologist & pioneer of modern anthropology
• Studied culture & language of the Baffin Island Inuit (in Canada)
• For him, the object of anthropology = to understand the way in which culture conditioned people
to understand and interact with the world in different ways
o To do this it was necessary to gain an understanding of the language and cultural
practices of the people studied
• Big influence, significant students of his were: A. L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir,
Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, …
Diffusionism (by Boas)
• Early 1900’s movement that started to contest (unilinear) evolutionism
o There is not 1 narrative that can be told about the origin and evolution of cultures
o Not every society evolved everywhere in the same way, e.g. progressing through a set of
hierarchic technological and cultural stages like Western-European culture
• Culture develops historically through interactions of groups of people and the diffusion of ideas
o Rejects "stage"-based organization of ethnological museums, instead prefers to orders
items on display based on the affinity and proximity of the cultural groups in question
• There is no process towards continuously ‘higher’ cultural forms
o Cultural relativism: cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher/lower, or better or
more correct → all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture, and judge
according to their own culturally acquired norms
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