Class 1: introduction to Anthropology in
a Decolonizing world
Anthropology:
- Study of the human;
- Study of the origins of mankind;
- Study of the diversity of mankind, the study of non-western customs and
cultures;
- Study of everyday life;
- ….
No shared research object; what do anthropologists have in common?
- Ethnography
o The practice of ‘field work’;
o The study of everyday life;
o Participant observation as its hallmark.
Ingold: reductivist account of what the discipline stands for by narrowing it down
to documentary aspects. Anthropology is more than field work and participant
observation, don’t reduce is to positivism. Instead he states:
‘I want to insist, rather, on anthropology as a practice of education’.
What is anthropology?
- Different answers, different perspectives;
- 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;
- An embodied construction of knowledge. Experiencing things, feeling
things until you understand it.
Anthropology’s double movement:
- Critically opening up and exploring the possibilities of the human condition
(what does it mean to be human?)
- Recording the everyday lives and practices of our interlocutors;
- Making lives ‘legible’(leesbaar).
Recording realities is a contradictory movement of opening and closing. Inherent
paradox and contradiction:
- Accounting for patterns/structure and complexity;
- Experiencing realities in their complexity and writing about them
imperfectly (cf. other media than writing, audio, video, performance etc.)
Anthropology doesn’t only study what, but also how (eg how is gender
performed, how is poverty lived and experienced, how is religion practiced.
Anthropology as a practiced relationship between self and other; as an exercise in
understanding and translation: EMIC vs ETIC.
Emic: An Emic view stand for letting go of yourself, and jumping in to something
different. Not always a comfortable encounter. You place yourself within the
culture of the intended study. This gives you more detail and culturally rich
information. You don’t necessarily have to be a member of said culture.
,Etic: The researched does not integrate himself into the culture they are
observing. Some anthropologists choose this method so they do not alter the
culture they are studying by direct interaction. Etic perspective is data gathering
by outsiders that yield questions posed by outsiders.
Anthropology as academic does not exist in a political or societal void. We don’t
only study humans, we also pay a lot of attention to knowledge not being
innocent, but is always constructed by historical/power context. We will
contextualize the generated knowledge through the critical theories like post
colonialism.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
Postcoloniality
Tradition vs modernity. Postcolonialism is in between. Mudimbe states that this
causes poverty, slums, marginalization etc. Because you cant go backwards nor
forwards when you’re in this in between space.
Postcolonialism critics are more positive. The third space is a space of
opportunity, creativity. Is characterized by words like hybridity, creolisation
(mixing languages like Papiamento), translation, negotiation and palimpsest (text
written on top of another text. So they wipe a country (text) clean to write
something new).
“Post” in postcolonial: a break with the past (post as something subsequent,
clearly distinct from the colonial past?) Cfr. The decolonization movement,
inspired in part by the work of Argentinian thinker Walter Mignolo.
OR “post” as continuity, as a period grown out of a reworking of the past in the
present, something that incorporates the previous moments?
Postcoloniality-decoloniality: a tense relationship?
Decolonization
- Historical moment;
- Political movement;
- Epistemological movement (decolonizing the mind)
o Critically challenging the hegemony of ‘the West’ and/or ‘modernity’
as main horizon of possibility;
o Exploring alternative trajectories and complex engagements with
modernity (also within the west);
o Opening up the horizon of possibilities of what it means to be human
(pluriverse) there’s multiple views of the world.
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?
, Les 2, History and the Anthropological
Narrative:
“heart of darkness”: Key novel about the dynamics of colonization. Illustration of
evolutionist notions of time.
Marlowe, Conrads alter ego in search of Mr. Kurtz. Search for the Other (Africa)
turns out to be a meeting with our dark inner Self.
Going upstream is like travelling back in time, a very evolutionist thing.
Cultural Evolutionism:
- Lewis Henry Morgan (Iroquois, foreign Ethnicity group in New York,
Ethnographer) and ‘armchair anthropologists’ Henry Maine, Edward
Burnett Tylor. Armchair being that they did not go out in the field.
- Influence of Darwinism.
- Very racial theories.
Birth of Physical Anthropology:
Anthropology and Race in Belgium and the Congo (Maarten Couttenier)
Cultural Evolutionism was seen as racist and condemned in the academic world.
Tylor’s Unilineal Evolution theory: Savagery -> Barbarism -> Civilization.
(History of mankind) Very archaeological approach.
Barbarism:
- Lower barbarism: Humans start making pottery;
- Middle barbarism: Domestication of plants and animals (Old World) and
irrigated agriculture (Americas);
- Upper barbarism: iron smelting and use of iron tools.
The Natural History Museum: a 19th century evolutionist narrative.
Evolutionist think of bringing humankind to the ultimate evolution form. So
colonizers would bring civilization to Africa etc. By interfering in their civilization,
cfr. Clothing, building villages, forbidding polyamory. They tried to make them
into the image of the colonizer themselves.
For this they used physical violence like whipping, but also symbolic
violence, making them feel the need to mimic. If you could prove to be living like
Europeans, which was inspected, you could receive a diploma of an evolved
person.
This draws an image of how racist evolutionism was, because they
believed there was a final form of civilization.
In the second half of the 20th century there was a 19th century nostalgia. Museum
as altar for the premodern. They wanted to travel back in time (very evolutionist
thing). Evolutionist see Congolese as living ancestors. A previous evolution
version. They put them up in zoos, so the people of Belgium could see how these
savages lived.
a Decolonizing world
Anthropology:
- Study of the human;
- Study of the origins of mankind;
- Study of the diversity of mankind, the study of non-western customs and
cultures;
- Study of everyday life;
- ….
No shared research object; what do anthropologists have in common?
- Ethnography
o The practice of ‘field work’;
o The study of everyday life;
o Participant observation as its hallmark.
Ingold: reductivist account of what the discipline stands for by narrowing it down
to documentary aspects. Anthropology is more than field work and participant
observation, don’t reduce is to positivism. Instead he states:
‘I want to insist, rather, on anthropology as a practice of education’.
What is anthropology?
- Different answers, different perspectives;
- 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;
- An embodied construction of knowledge. Experiencing things, feeling
things until you understand it.
Anthropology’s double movement:
- Critically opening up and exploring the possibilities of the human condition
(what does it mean to be human?)
- Recording the everyday lives and practices of our interlocutors;
- Making lives ‘legible’(leesbaar).
Recording realities is a contradictory movement of opening and closing. Inherent
paradox and contradiction:
- Accounting for patterns/structure and complexity;
- Experiencing realities in their complexity and writing about them
imperfectly (cf. other media than writing, audio, video, performance etc.)
Anthropology doesn’t only study what, but also how (eg how is gender
performed, how is poverty lived and experienced, how is religion practiced.
Anthropology as a practiced relationship between self and other; as an exercise in
understanding and translation: EMIC vs ETIC.
Emic: An Emic view stand for letting go of yourself, and jumping in to something
different. Not always a comfortable encounter. You place yourself within the
culture of the intended study. This gives you more detail and culturally rich
information. You don’t necessarily have to be a member of said culture.
,Etic: The researched does not integrate himself into the culture they are
observing. Some anthropologists choose this method so they do not alter the
culture they are studying by direct interaction. Etic perspective is data gathering
by outsiders that yield questions posed by outsiders.
Anthropology as academic does not exist in a political or societal void. We don’t
only study humans, we also pay a lot of attention to knowledge not being
innocent, but is always constructed by historical/power context. We will
contextualize the generated knowledge through the critical theories like post
colonialism.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
Postcoloniality
Tradition vs modernity. Postcolonialism is in between. Mudimbe states that this
causes poverty, slums, marginalization etc. Because you cant go backwards nor
forwards when you’re in this in between space.
Postcolonialism critics are more positive. The third space is a space of
opportunity, creativity. Is characterized by words like hybridity, creolisation
(mixing languages like Papiamento), translation, negotiation and palimpsest (text
written on top of another text. So they wipe a country (text) clean to write
something new).
“Post” in postcolonial: a break with the past (post as something subsequent,
clearly distinct from the colonial past?) Cfr. The decolonization movement,
inspired in part by the work of Argentinian thinker Walter Mignolo.
OR “post” as continuity, as a period grown out of a reworking of the past in the
present, something that incorporates the previous moments?
Postcoloniality-decoloniality: a tense relationship?
Decolonization
- Historical moment;
- Political movement;
- Epistemological movement (decolonizing the mind)
o Critically challenging the hegemony of ‘the West’ and/or ‘modernity’
as main horizon of possibility;
o Exploring alternative trajectories and complex engagements with
modernity (also within the west);
o Opening up the horizon of possibilities of what it means to be human
(pluriverse) there’s multiple views of the world.
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?
, Les 2, History and the Anthropological
Narrative:
“heart of darkness”: Key novel about the dynamics of colonization. Illustration of
evolutionist notions of time.
Marlowe, Conrads alter ego in search of Mr. Kurtz. Search for the Other (Africa)
turns out to be a meeting with our dark inner Self.
Going upstream is like travelling back in time, a very evolutionist thing.
Cultural Evolutionism:
- Lewis Henry Morgan (Iroquois, foreign Ethnicity group in New York,
Ethnographer) and ‘armchair anthropologists’ Henry Maine, Edward
Burnett Tylor. Armchair being that they did not go out in the field.
- Influence of Darwinism.
- Very racial theories.
Birth of Physical Anthropology:
Anthropology and Race in Belgium and the Congo (Maarten Couttenier)
Cultural Evolutionism was seen as racist and condemned in the academic world.
Tylor’s Unilineal Evolution theory: Savagery -> Barbarism -> Civilization.
(History of mankind) Very archaeological approach.
Barbarism:
- Lower barbarism: Humans start making pottery;
- Middle barbarism: Domestication of plants and animals (Old World) and
irrigated agriculture (Americas);
- Upper barbarism: iron smelting and use of iron tools.
The Natural History Museum: a 19th century evolutionist narrative.
Evolutionist think of bringing humankind to the ultimate evolution form. So
colonizers would bring civilization to Africa etc. By interfering in their civilization,
cfr. Clothing, building villages, forbidding polyamory. They tried to make them
into the image of the colonizer themselves.
For this they used physical violence like whipping, but also symbolic
violence, making them feel the need to mimic. If you could prove to be living like
Europeans, which was inspected, you could receive a diploma of an evolved
person.
This draws an image of how racist evolutionism was, because they
believed there was a final form of civilization.
In the second half of the 20th century there was a 19th century nostalgia. Museum
as altar for the premodern. They wanted to travel back in time (very evolutionist
thing). Evolutionist see Congolese as living ancestors. A previous evolution
version. They put them up in zoos, so the people of Belgium could see how these
savages lived.
