Comments on: Being History

By: Daniel Varisco

Daniel Varisco — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 14:36:23 +0000

Dear Herb and Robert,
Thanks for addressing the issue of the current trend of dissing (as in distancing and disagreeing) the past of anthropology as a discipline. As Robert notes, we are all products of our time, which does not mean that we accepted what we were taught or culturally bred to assume was reality. In the early part of the 20th century the world was indeed in a colonial frame and there were many communities that so-called “modernity” had rarely touched. Early anthropologists, like Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard, studied communities that were more or less isolated from colonial control and so-called modernity. Both these scholars, by the way, did not parrot or agree with the colonial administrators, but attempted to analyze what they saw and heard in the local language as objective as they thought they could. For all the criticism of Margaret Mead, much of which was jealousy, her work brought anthropology into public view as a way of connecting to what most people considered exotic. When you read “Coming of Age,” you realize that culture plays a major role in who we are but basically we have similar drives. To argue that ethnographers “exoticized” the people they studied ignores the many texts that promoted the idea of a shared humanity. We were the only social science that, for the most part, considered humanity as having evolved. Those who wish to “decolonize” the discipline should consider that the historical record is replete with colonization and domination since the time of the first written records. The ethnographic documentation of communities that were either burdened directly by such domination or were outside the mainstream is a valuable corrective to what gets written in texts.
When I arrived for fieldwork in a tribal community in North Yemen in 1978, this part of Yemen had never been part of Western colonial domination (unlike the British protectorate created in the south). There was no electricity for the villages, which came soon after, no TV and virtually no government aid. The traditional agriculture I studied had changed little from what I started reading about in 13th and 14th century Yemeni agricultural texts. Today, of course, Yemen is very much embroiled in the neocolonial (a more useful term than post-colonial) and neoliberal political and economic mesh that dominates the Middle East. To really understand the rapid social and cultural change in Yemen requires knowing what came before.

By: Robert Launay

Robert Launay — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 02:01:52 +0000

I fully agree with you that anthropological representations were not, at least for the most part, “dictated by colonial interests or policy.” But, like anyone else, they were creatures of their time and place, and often took the colonized world for granted. There were indeed heuristic reasons for taking cultures, societies, dare I say “tribes”? as self-contained discrete entities, a heuristic which formed the basis of some remarkable ethnographies. Yet this was also a distorted reality — rather like Mercator maps of the world. But you are quite right that kin groups, witchcraft, and possession cults were real. I can personally attest to that. The shift in perspective that has allowed contemporary anthropologists to see the limitations of their predecessors also, I am afraid, blinds them to realities that their predecessors witnessed and analyzed at first hand. I have lived to understand some of the phenomena to which my predecessors were blind, while also aware of others to which my younger colleagues are equally blind. I am increasingly reluctant to cast the first stone ..l.in either direction.

By: Herbert Lewis

Herbert Lewis — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 19:30:15 +0000

Aah, my friend and esteemed fellow senior colleague, there is much to admire in your discussion. Nevertheless, I must take issue with the notion that “our” old-fashioned ethnography was generally directed by colonial perspectives, or even interests. There is so much we could discuss, but let me just mention your paradoxical treatment of kinship and religion in the old days. On the one hand you speak of the old-time emphasis on kinship and on shamanism and witchcraft as serving “to exoticize colonialized peoples.” But you then say from your own experience how “phenomenally real” kin groups were “and not simply fictions of the colonial imagination.” I can attest to how phenomenally real the spirits were that possessed the mediums among the Oromo where I worked in Ethiopia in the mid-1960s. Is it possible that these ethnographic accounts were actually reasonable approximations of the way the people lived and thought back then?
There are many reasons for ethnographers seeming to treat the peoples they studied as having “discrete systems of thought, kinship, religion, economy, or politics” that were not dictated by colonial interests or activity. The reasons require investigation; perhaps there were good heuristic reasons for such approaches. Furthermore, there were many exceptions to this practice. The problems of permeable borders, overlap, “diffusion,” etc. were always of interest and problematic. A historicist understanding might reveal these better than presentist interests.