THE LATEST IN THE ZERO SERIES:
- 0.18: Anthropology and the Rise of the Social Sciences within the Structures of Knowledge – Immanuel Wallerstein
- 0.185: Terms of Incorporation, Concepts of Domination
- 0.189: Stanley Diamond & Claude Lévi-Strauss on the Nature and Future of Anthropology
- 0.19: Questions about Colonialism and Anthropology: Epistemology, Methodology, and Politics
- 0.20: “Potentially Dangerous Implications for the Practice of Anthropology Today”
- Welcome to ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY: The End of the Beginning of the End
LATEST ON HTS:
0.18: Anthropology and the Rise of the Social Sciences within the Structures of Knowledge – Immanuel Wallerstein
Professional Knowledge Creation in the World-System
Building an anti-imperialist “anthropology,” plus an anthropology that studies imperialism, and that studies itself as a received invention of imperialism, means much more than just analyzing and questioning how anthropologists served this or that colonial venture. It means totally unthinking anthropology as a social science; more than that, it means totally unthinking social science. For whatever discussions of “decolonizing anthropology” have achieved, this ground was never covered in those discussions.
In the previous posts the discussion was centered on opening questions in a critique of the relationship between anthropology and imperialism, along with questions concerning the terms and concepts that, initially, appear to be central to the debate. Here we focus on the wider intellectual and geopolitical context of anthropology’s institutionalization, and the received baggage of 19th century European social science. In particular, I resort to Immanuel Wallerstein for his analysis of the institutionalization and formalization of the social sciences, and how the very process of institutionalization created the knowledge boundaries, categories, and concepts we use today. Not least among these received conceptual boundaries, fundamental to the division of knowledge into “social sciences,” is the arbitrary construction of “society,” “economics,” and “politics.” Moving beyond the Eurocentrism of the social sciences also means getting past the false divisions in knowledge created by these institutionalized conceptualizations.
The particular works by Immanuel Wallerstein to which I will be referring, or that shape the overall discussion in some way, are:
Wallerstein, Immanuel M. 2006. European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power. New York: New Press. (Ch. 2, “Can One Be a Non-Orientalist? Essentialist Particularism,” 31-49)
Wallerstein, Immanuel M. 1999. The End of the World As We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Ch. 11, “Eurocentrism and its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science,” 168-184)
Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. 1996. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Ch. 1, “The Historical Construction of the Social Sciences, from the Eighteenth Century to 1945,” 1-32)
Wallerstein, Immanuel M. 1991. Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press in association with B. Blackwell. (Ch. 8, “A Comment on Epistemology: What is Africa?” 127-129; Ch. 9, “Does India Exist?” 130-134)
I strongly recommend these for a start. One really cannot “do” or “write” anthropology innocently any more after reflecting on these works.
The Institutionalization of the Social Sciences
In Open the Social Sciences, the Gulbenkian Commission led by Wallerstein, highlighted the main historical trends that led to the institutionalization of knowledge in universities. “The need of the modern state for more exact knowledge on which to base its decisions,” they observe led to the emergence of new, though still uncertain, categories of knowledge already in the 18th century. The university was until then a largely moribund institution, at least since the 16th century, having been too tightly linked with the Church. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, however, the university was largely revived as the primary locus for the creation of knowledge (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 6).
The revival of the university was not actually led primarily by the natural scientists, but rather those who stood to lose most from the development of a hierarchy of a value emerging from the split between science and philosophy (see the “two cultures” below). Instead, it was “historians, classicists, scholars of national literatures…who did most to revive the universities in the course of the nineteenth century, using it as a mechanism to obtain state support for their scholarly work” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 8). They sought the alliance of natural scientists in promoting the new university structures, in order to profit “from the positive profile of the natural scientists,” and in the process reinforcing the distinction, and the tension, between the humanities/arts and the sciences (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 8).
“The intellectual history of the nineteenth century is marked above all by this disciplinarization and professionalization of knowledge,” the Commission argued, pointing to “the creation of permanent institutional structures designed both to produce new knowledge and to reproduce the producers of knowledge” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 7).
In the wake of the French Revolution, and especially in Great Britain and France, the pressure for political and social reorganization were felt strongly by the powers that be. In place of a belief in the “natural order” of things, many now recognized the normalcy of change, and argued that,
the solution lay rather in organizing and rationalizing the social change that now seemed to be inevitable in a world in which the sovereignty of the “people” was fast becoming the norm, no doubt hoping thereby to limit its extent. (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 8).
“But if one were to organize and rationalize social change,” the Commission points out, “one had first of all to study it and understand the rules which governed it” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 8). Hence the proclaimed need for a “social science.” Social science was charged with developing “systematic, secular knowledge about reality that is somehow validated empirically” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 2). The classical premise of science at this point was two-fold: one, the Newtonian vision of a symmetry between past and future, and two, Cartesian dualisms of humans and nature, mind and matter, and so forth. Accompanied by notions of progress, and a finite, knowable world, the aim was to “facilitate the explorations and exploitation demanded by progress, and to make practical and realizable Western aspirations to dominion” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 4). Exploration, exploitation, and rapid social change, all pointed to the need to investigate order, and for that Newtonian physics offered the most useful support.
It was especially in the period from 1850 to 1914, when we witness a university boom in Europe, North America, and Australia, with many new universities being founded in that very period, that we also see the disciplinarization of knowledge in the form of the social sciences as we know them today (Gulbenkian, 1996, pp. 12-13). The five primary social sciences were history, economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology. Owing to the struggle between science and philosophy, and the social prestige of science, the primary emphases of these “social sciences” were the “emphasis on the existence of a real world that is objective and knowable, the emphasis on empirical evidence, [and] the emphasis on the neutrality of the scholar” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 15).
Between 1850 and 1945, the new social science disciplines were institutionalized: “This was done by establishing in the principal universities first chairs, then departments offering courses leading to degrees in the discipline” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 3). “Training” was institutionalized as was “research”: “the creation of journals specialized in each of the disciplines; the construction of associations of scholars along disciplinary lines (first national, then international); the creation of library collections catalogued by disciplines” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 3). Of course one of the key elements in this institutionalization was for the social sciences to stress the differences between them, what made them unique, and thus what required that a special place be made for them in the new universities. Institutionalization, disciplinarization, expanding world capitalism, and rapid social change thus all combined to create and shape the social sciences as we have known them. Each of these is tied into the others.
The Eurocentrism of Social Science
Wallerstein’s core argument is that the creation of the structures of knowledge, specifically the institutionalization of the social sciences, is a phenomenon that is inextricably linked to the very formation and maturation of the capitalist world system (or what others might loosely, and less comprehensively, refer to as imperialism or capitalist hegemony). There is nothing that is either natural, logical, or accidental about the institutionalization of the social sciences. The structures of knowledge are accepted ways of producing knowledge of the world. In particular, the universalism-particularism dichotomy, and all framings of knowledge that fit within or between that polarity (of especial relevance to anthropology’s intellectual mission, and central to the revival of cosmopolitanism), is part of the intellectual double bind of the capitalist world system (see Wallerstein, 1991, p. 128).
In broad terms, “social science has been Eurocentric throughout its institutional history,” Wallerstein explains, “which means since there have been departments teaching social science within university systems” (1999, p. 168). There should be no surprise here, he adds, since social science “is a product of the modern world-system, and Eurocentrism is constitutive of the geoculture of the modern world” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 168). In particular, “as an institutional structure, social science originated largely in Europe (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 168).
By “Europe,” Wallerstein means primarily western Europe and North America. One could broaden that, using native studies discourse, to mean Europe and European settler states. Even with that more expansive definition, Wallerstein observes that “the social science disciplines were in fact overwhelmingly located, at least up to 1945, in just five countries – France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and the United States” (1999, p. 168). “Even today,” he continues, “despite the global spread of social science as an activity, the large majority of social scientists worldwide remain Europeans” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 168). Penetrating deeper, Wallerstein argues that,
Social science emerged in response to European problems, at a point in history when Europe dominated the whole world-system. It was virtually inevitable that its choice of subject matter, its theorizing, its methodology, and its epistemology all reflected the constraints of the crucible within which it was formulated. (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 168)
The Eurocentrism of social science has come under increasingly vigorous attack, especially in the period since 1945 with the formal decolonization of Africa, Asia, and much of the Caribbean, and Wallerstein sees this attack as “fundamentally justified.” Moreover, he argues, that “if social science is to make any progress in the twenty-first century, it must overcome the Eurocentric heritage that has distorted its analyses and its capacity to deal with the problems of the contemporary world” (Wallerstein, 1999, pp. 168-169). To do this, we must understand what constitutes Eurocentrism and its “many avatars” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 169).
There are at least five distinct yet overlapping ways that social science is Eurocentric, as Wallerstein explains. The Eurocentrism of social science is expressed in “(1) its historiography, (2) the parochiality of its universalism, (3) its assumptions about (Western) civilization, (4) its Orientalism, and (5) its attempts to impose the theory of progress” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 169).
While “institutionalized social science started as an activity in Europe,” Wallerstein’s argument is about much more than this important historical and cultural recognition. The problem with Eurocentric social science is that it has been “charged with painting a false picture of social reality by misreading, grossly exaggerating, and/or distorting the historical role of Europe, particularly its historical role in the modern world” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 177). “Whatever Europe did,” Wallerstein affirms, “has been analyzed incorrectly and subjected to inappropriate extrapolations, which have had dangerous consequences for both science and the political world” (1999, p. 178).
The Received Baggage of the 19th Century
The “two cultures” division is one of the most fundamental bases for the modern world-system’s structures of knowledge. By the “two cultures” Wallerstein is drawing on the work of C.P. Snow, and referring to the division between the sciences and the humanities. “No other historical system has instituted a fundamental divorce between science and philosophy/humanities,” Wallerstein observes (1999, p. 183). It took about three centuries for this rupture to become triumphant in Eurocentric thought, and to become institutionalized. Now that this has taken place, the “two cultures” is “fundamental to the geoculture and forms the basis of our university systems” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 183).
It is this very split, between the two cultures, that enabled “the modern world to put forward the bizarre concept of the value-neutral specialist, whose objective assessments of reality could form the basis not merely of engineering decisions (in the broadest sense of the term) but of sociopolitical choices as well” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 183). Indeed, one of the central foundations of the Eurocentric social sciences is this very idea of “objective science”:
The idea that science is over here and sociopolitical decisions are over there is the core concept that sustains Eurocentrism, since the only universalist propositions that have been acceptable are those that are Eurocentric. Any argument that reinforces this separation of the two cultures thus sustains Eurocentrism. If one denies the specificity of the modern world, one has no plausible way of arguing for the reconstruction of knowledge structures, and therefore no plausible way of arriving at intelligent and substantively rational alternatives to the existing world-system. (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 183)
With the split between the two cultures, the alternative to “science” was seemingly plagued by “a lack of internal cohesiveness, which did not help its practitioners plead their cause with the authorities, especially given their seeming inability to offer ‘practical’ results” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 6). This story should be very familiar to anthropologists, in their drive to create “applied anthropology” and anthropology in the service of military, intelligence, and colonial administration. The opinions of the authorities, especially those promising funding, and demanding practical benefits, have weighed heavily. From early on, “it had begun to be clear that the epistemological struggle over what was legitimate knowledge was no longer a struggle over who would control knowledge about nature (the natural scientists had clearly won exclusive rights to this domain by the eighteenth century) but about who would control knowledge about the human world” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 6).
One can sum up in this way the key dichotomies that arose from the 19th century institutionalization of the social sciences, dichotomies that are vital to sustaining the Eurocentrism of the social sciences:
- science versus philosophy/humanities
- discontinuity-continuity
- state-centrism in analysis
- idiographic versus nomothetic
- determinism versus agency
- objectivity versus subjectivity
- politics versus economics
In review:
Anthropology’s Baggage
The Gulbenkian Commission devoted attention to each of the five social sciences. What follows is their description and analysis of the emergence, institutionalization and disciplinarization of anthropology. At the most basic level, the expansion of the modern world-system involved the European encounter and usually conquest of the peoples of the rest of the world. In particular, those people who were organized in social structures that Europeans classed as small, without written records, and not part of a geographically wide ranging religious systems, were classed as “tribes” or “races.” They became the domain of what would later be called anthropology. Anthropology had largely begun as a practice of explorers, travelers, and officials of the colonial services of the European powers, and then subsequently became institutionalized as a university discipline (Gulbenkian, 1996, pp. 20-21).
Anchored within the structures of the university, anthropologists were constrained to maintain the practice of ethnographic fieldwork “within the normative premises of science” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 21). Some were of course attracted to ideas of a universal natural history of humanity, with assumed stages of development, but their discipline was one pressed into studying particular peoples, requiring a very specific methodology, that of fieldwork. Consumed with the ostensible interest in human difference, and the particulars of non-European modes of being, anthropologists largely adhered to an idiographic epistemology, with some lingering desires for developing nomothetic propositions (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 22).
Anthropology’s special baggage then – in the preliminary type of analysis offered by the Gulbenkian Commission – was idiographic research, focused on the non-West, and in particular focused on tribes (not the non-Western “high civilizations” that were more the domain of the Orientalists). As we go further, this analysis will be deepened significantly, but it will be useful to remember some of the broad historical forces at work, as presented in this essay.
Phrases such as “decolonizing anthropology”* and “anthropology and the colonial encounter” have become salient in anthropology especially since they are the titles of two of the better known, most widely quoted books on the subject. What subject? That is what is lacking clarity, because presumably the phrases above are meant to mean something, and if so, then one has to wonder: why not “anthropology and imperialism” or “de-imperializing anthropology”? What choices are we making when we choose the term colonialism, rather than imperialism?
Throughout the course of this blog, “imperialism” and “colonialism” have frequently been used interchangeably, especially with reference to anthropology. I have written about “re-imperializing” anthropology, as I have about “re-colonization,” and “decolonizing anthropology.” Aside from anthropology, dealing with the two phenomena can lead to choices of when to use one term and when to use the other: the choice of terms can depend on the historical setting that one has in mind (whether writing about actual colonies, or the exertion of force at a distance); the ultimate intentions of the given forms of intervention (the effective inhabiting of another society and efforts to remake it to suit the desires of the intervening power, or, the effort to exert and monopolize power in a given space); or the proximity of the actors (colonialism usually being an “up close and personal” kind of relationship). Abstracting these ideas to the epistemic and methodological level (“methodological colonialism”) would seem to create even greater ambiguity around the choice of terms. It also seems, at first glance, that “imperial anthropology,” “imperialist anthropology,” and “anthropological imperialism” are not all the same “thing” necessarily. Before proceeding to the next in this series of lectures/essays, that will situate the institutionalization of anthropology within expanded and renewed Euro-American imperialism in the late 19th century, it seems necessary to spend some time on the question of terminology.
One of the persistent themes in this essay will be the fact that colonialism/imperialism should not be treated as solely academic concepts to be defined and circumscribed by analysts (usually within imperial institutions that we call “universities”), or to see colonialism as solely something that is done to others. The colonized’s “decolonization” (at best, a work in progress), will always only be a truncated “achievement” as long as the colonizers have not “decolonialized” themselves as well (I use these two different terms to refer to distinct sides of anti-colonialism).
In this piece I refer primarily to two items (there are many more, but these are the simpler and more condensed pieces I use for teaching purposes). One is Ronald J. Horvath’s “A definition of colonialism” (Current Anthropology, 13 (1), Feb. 1972: 45-57) – the first article about colonialism to ever be published by that journal, and even at that late stage we did not have an article by an anthropologist as such (Horvath was a professor of geography). The second is from a large production, that opens with a decent review of the histories and theories of colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, and postcolonialism. That is Robert J.C. Young’s Postcolonialism: An historical introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
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Colonialism
Young begins by sounding very concerned about the careless use of distinct concepts such as colonialism and imperialism, as if they were simply synonyms:
The use of the term ‘postcolonial’ rather than ‘post-imperial’ suggests that a de facto distinction is being made between the two, yet a characteristic of postcolonial writing is that the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘imperial’ are often lumped together, as if they were synonymous terms. This totalizing tendency is also evident in the way that colonialism and imperialism are themselves treated as if they were homogeneous practices. Although much emphasis is placed on the specific particularity of different colonized cultures, this tends to be accompanied by comparatively little historical work on the diversity of colonialism and imperialism, which were nothing if not heterogeneous, often contradictory, practices. (Young, 2001, p. 15)
There is also basic confusion about if or when the terms, colonialism and imperialism, should be separated from one other: colonies constitute an empire, but imperialism does not necessarily require colonies. That the terms are often used synonymously can also be seen in the work of Edward Said. Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre also tended to speak of colonialism as a single formation, a single system (Young, 2001, p. 18). Quoting Said, Young reminds us that his conception of colonialism was centered on a fundamentally geographical act of violence employed against indigenous peoples and their connections to the land.
On the other hand, Young offers some useful ideas about why the terms have been understood by some as referring to distinctly different phenomena:
The term ‘empire’ has been widely used for many centuries without, however, necessarily signifying ‘imperialism’. Here a basic difference emerges between an empire that was bureaucratically controlled by a government from the centre, and which was developed for ideological as well as financial reasons, a structure that can be called imperialism, and an empire that was developed for settlement by individual communities or for commercial purposes by a trading company, a structure that can be called colonial. Colonization was pragmatic and until the nineteenth century generally developed locally in a haphazard way (for example, the occupation of islands in the West Indies), while imperialism was typically driven by ideology from the metropolitan centre and concerned with the assertion and expansion of state power (for example, the French invasion of Algeria). Colonialism functioned as an activity on the periphery, economically driven; from the home government’s perspective, it was at times hard to control. Imperialism on the other hand, operated from the centre as a policy of state, driven by the grandiose projects of power. Thus while imperialism is susceptible to analysis as a concept (which is not to say that there were not different concepts of imperialism), colonialism needs to be analysed primarily as a practice: hence the difficulty of generalizing about it. (Young, 2001, pp. 16-17)
As many others observed previously, Young also recognizes that if we restrict discussion to colonialism alone, then one has to be mindful that historically there has been immense diversity in colonial forms. There have been colonies of settlement (for example, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S.); colonies of exploitation (where no large European settlement was the aim, as much as the extraction and export of local resources); and various dominant colony-like enclaves, such as military bases on islands, in harbours or other strategic points, that sometimes forged commercial relations with a nearby mainland. There is the added fact that colonies could allow for limited forms of local rule, while in other cases they were administered directly from the colonial metropole (sometimes the very same colonial power could use both strategies, at different times). Some colonies were governed through native intermediaries, while others implanted officials from the “mother country.” Some colonial powers tried to effect cultural assimilation, while others did not. Some stationed their armies in the colonies, and others instead preferred to rely more on locally recruited armies. Thus, as Young argues, a “general theory” of colonialism is more than just a challenge. Young prefers to see “imperialism” as referring to a “global political system,” but that too begs the question as to why he would leave out the economic dimension, and whether there has not also been a diversity of global political systems.
The very interesting question that Young raises (2001, pp. 18-19), is whether this discussion in the end boils down to (a) a rather sterile and abstract academic discussion, and, (b) one that is meaningful mostly from the perspective of the colonizers themselves:
the apparent uniformity or diversity of colonialism depends very largely on your own subject position, as colonizing or colonized subject. From the position of the ruling colonial power, its administrators, and from the perspective of historians of British colonial history such as John MacKenzie, Britain’s different colonies do indeed look, and were, different in the ways in which they were acquired and administered….From the point of view of the indigenous people who lived their lives as colonial subjects, however, such distinctions have always seemed rather more academic. As far as they were concerned, such colonial subjects lived under the imposition of British rule, a view not discouraged by the imperial ideology of Pax Britannica. Anti-colonial practices of cultural resistance to the dominant ideology of imperialism encouraged the critical analysis of common forms of representation and the processes of knowledge-formation. At another level, the links established between Irish, South African and Indian nationalists at the end of the nineteenth century were developed to share knowledge of anti-colonial techniques and strategies. An attack on a police station in Ireland functioned in a very similar way, and with very similar objectives, to an attack on a British barracks in India. The differences in colonial history, in administrative practices, or constitutional status…made for very little difference as far as anti-colonial revolutionary strategies were concerned. From the point of view of anti-colonial political activists, the British Empire looked much the same everywhere….Postcolonial critique tends to take the same point of view because it identifies with the subject position of anti-colonial activists, not because of its ignorance of the infinite variety of colonial history from the perspective of the colonizers.
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Imperialism
Imperialism as a term became current in English only in the second half of the nineteenth century (Young, 2001, p. 26, drawing on Hobsbawm). As Young explains, while originally referring to direct conquest and occupation (nation-states develop empires by making colonies, becoming imperial states whose action over others is imperialist), thanks to Marxism the concept usually became one that referred to a general system of economic domination, with or without direct political domination (i.e., there could be imperialism without colonies). Why “post-colonialism” ultimately makes sense, Young suggests, is that those subjected to it have most often used the term colonialism to refer to previous systems of domination they suffered under the British and French, for example, while using the term imperialism to refer to American domination – essentially a distinction between “old” imperialism and “new”. As Young says, “history has not yet arrived at the post-imperial era” (Young, 2001, p. 27).
Imperialism became a target of anti-colonial struggle, and understood as a general concept of domination, probably with the advent of the Communist International of 1919 (see: archive of the Communist International, 1919-1943; Comintern archives; League Against Imperialism). Reverting to his position as an analyst, Young situates imperialism in a way that it pertains to rivalry between expansionist states, seeking to enhance national prestige and domestic political and social stability, and finding outlets for expanded capitalist production and consumption (Young, 2001, pp. 30-33).
While saying that imperialism is never static, he does seem to find comfort in trait-listing imperialism, which is fine for historical sketches that provide broad characteristics of imperialism at different times, but not so useful for the purposes of contemporary critique. In fact, it can be very counterproductive. The problem, apparently not within the scope of Young’s overview, is that of imperialism denial, which often resorts to ironically static and simplistically empirical historicist analogies. If any traits between “alleged” imperialism today do not square with those of other powers of yesterday, some imperialism deniers seize this as “evidence” that today’s imperialism is not imperialism at all, and that only sinister “biased” characters would insist on using the label. Curiously, given that imperialism denial is today a primarily American phenomenon, few Americans who deny imperialism on the grounds of historicism would be willing to perform the same mental operations when it comes to their own nation: since America of a century ago is little or nothing like America today, then there is no America today. Moreover, denying that America was ever imperialist, is denying that America was ever America.
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Neo-colonialism
Neo-colonialism has come to refer to a system of formal political independence, with direct economic control exercised by foreign power. If we were meant to have clear definitional boundaries between “colonialism” and “imperialism,” the concept neo-colonialism would seem to merge the two: “Neo-colonialism is…the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress (Kwame Nkrumah, 1965, p xi)” (quoted in Young, 2001, p. 44). The first and most prominent theorist of neo-colonialism was not a Western academic, but rather the Ghanaian independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah saw neo-colonialism as the American stage of colonialism, of an empire without formal colonies (Young, 2001, p. 46).
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Anthropological Correlates of Imperialist Theories?
Regarding imperialist theories of indigenous cultures, Young’s synthesis is one of the more useful ones. On the one hand, the French mission civilisatrice “assumed the fundamental equality of all human beings, their common humanity as part of a single species, and considered that however ‘natural’ or ‘backward’ their state, all native peoples could immediately benefit from the uniform imposition of French culture in its most advanced contemporary manifestation” (Young, 2001, p. 32). This shares the identical assumptions of cultural evolutionism and more recent international development theory. It is also an unstated premise of the “spreading democracy” thesis of American imperialism today. To the upholders of the idea of essential sameness, critics appear to be denying the humanity of humans: all humans want freedom, so the story goes, and if you don’t believe that Iranians “deserve democracy,” and want to live like us, then you are denying their essential humanity. If you do not want “democracy” for Iranians, then it is probably because you think “they aren’t good enough” to have it. As Young argues, the “very assumption [of equality] meant that the French model had the least respect and sympathy for the culture, language and institutions of the people being colonized – it saw difference, and sought to make it the same – what might be called the paradox of ethnocentric egalitarianism” (Young, 2001, p. 32).
The irony is that the alternative was no less imperialist. British imperialism from the mid-1800s onwards assumed a radical, racially-based difference between the British and their subjects. Assimilation, strictly speaking, would be impossible: assimilating Africans would make as much sense as putting suits on chimps, or trying to teach table manners to dogs. As Young explains, “the British system of relative non-interference with local cultures, which today appears more liberal in spirit, was in fact also based on the racist assumption that the native was incapable of education up to the level of the European – and therefore by implication required perpetual colonial rule. Association neatly offered the possibility of autonomy (for some), while at the same time incorporating a notion of hierarchy for the supposedly less-capable races” (Young, 2001, p. 33). Today, in fact, it might appear less liberal, with the revival if liberal interventionism under the banner of the “responsibility to protect.”
Both forms of imperialism are arguably variations of liberalism. One, ethnocentric egalitarianism, promises to open the doors of empire to all subjects willing (or not) to undergo cultural transformation, which serves to spread empire into the hearts and minds of the dominated. The dominated are thus “liberated” – liberated from the “burden” of being themselves, of being different. The other variant, a racist “respect” for difference, substitutes tolerance for equality. Both equality with the other, and, tolerance of the other, are vaunted as lofty and noble liberal values. Both are equally imperialist. One understates difference, the other overstates it. Both, arguably, recognize difference only to the extent and in the manner that suits the particular goals of power.
Anthropology seems to have had its own “Dual Mandate” of “protection” and “exploitation” with regards to the peoples at the focus of its mission as a university discipline (when anthropology, by definition, was that which you never did at home). Protection came in the form of salvage ethnography, cultural resource management, and some forms of advocacy. Exploitation: by recruiting natives to transcribe their cultures, for academic projects, and by lifting cultural artifacts and even human remains and amassing them in academic institutions. This is not to mention various types of “applied anthropology,” in service of corporations, development, international lending agencies, and military and intelligence communities.
Ethnographic Colonialism, Anthropological Imperialism, and Incorporationism
Back to the terminological problem underscored at the very start. It turns out that even some imperialists could be anti-colonialist, because maintaining colonies was expensive and inefficient where economic dominance and hegemonic political power were concerned. This poses a problem for us then, in our choice of terms: it seems one could be in favour of “decolonizing” anthropology while defending anthropological imperialism (hypothetically). That is meaningful only if we intend to use these terms in order to associate anthropology with (a) certain academic activities that resemble colonialism and imperialism on an intellectual level, and/or, (b) actual policies and practices of states and corporations.
Colonialism may be better coupled specifically with ethnography, in analytical terms, since both require physical presence, in person, and a form of settling within someone else’s home – entering their territory, and setting up camp. This is what we might call “ethnographic colonialism” and it seems to make more sense than calling anthropology colonial, unless one is focusing on anthropologists working in colonial settings. Otherwise, it would seem to be better to couple anthropology as a broad endeavor, with another equally broad endeavor, imperialism. “Anthropological imperialism” could then refer to institutionalized, professionalized, theoretical practice, where anthropologists speak about what is humanity, “on behalf of” all of humanity.
Is there an “anthropological neo-colonialism”? One could argue, as we will see later on, that various national anthropologies, instituted in (few) universities in Africa and Asia following formal political decolonization, were in fact neo-colonial in their political positioning with respect to the state and its nation-building mission, and with respect to its content which was focused on national development.
Ultimately, however, the plethora of concepts (empire, imperial, imperialist, colonial, colonialist, neo-colonial, etc.) can be see as variations, fluctuating in time and space, of a much broader phenomenon that encompasses them all, that renders them means toward and end. That end would be what I refer to as incorporationism. Neither imperialism nor colonialism make sense by themselves, until one relates them to their fundamental premises, ideals, and goals: to make use of others by various means of exploitation, drafting others into one’s sphere in order to extract from them whatever is valued.
The purpose here has been to signal the understandable confusion that can arise in discussing the relationship between anthropology and empire, at the very least on a conceptual level – that is, if we omit the discussions to follow, which should deepen this discussion much further.
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* The phrase, “decolonizing anthropology,” when entered as a search term (retaining the enclosing quotes), produces 3,530 results in Google, and 230 citations in Google Scholar. For a phrase that we are told is prominent in anthropology, or that refers to an important concern that has been the subject of much writing, one will note two things: (a) in the first set of results, my own web pages dominate the top listings, with the others pertaining to Faye Harrison’s edited collection; and, (b) that both Harrison’s volume is out of print.
Introduction
On 26 February 2009, a report by John Stanton was published on this blog (Some Breaking News on the Human Terrain System: Death Threats Against Female Colleagues). At the time it caused some uproar, was discussed on several other blogs, and perhaps no other story on this blog received so many comments as that one (200 comments to be exact). The story was followed up with this one: US Army 101st Airborne Investigative Report on Human Terrain System. In the midst of the furious commentary, many allegations were made about the person at the center of the story, Dr. Marilyn Dudley-Flores. Now, for the first time, Dr. Dudley-Flores presents her own story to the public. The text that follows was first sent to me by Dr. Dudley-Flores as an e-mail message earlier this week, and it is of course reproduced here with her permission and approval.
One last point before we proceed: as we know, the U.S. Congress is conducting an assessment of the Human Terrain System (see: John Stanton: U.S. Congress to Assess Human Terrain System [29 September 2009]; U.S. Congress and the Human Terrain System [04 October 2009]; and, John Stanton: US Congress Rewards Failure, Puts Personnel in Harm’s Way [10 October 2009]). It may be useful for all parties to send as much information and analysis as possible to the U.S. House and Senate Armed Services Committees, in order to assist them in their review.
It may be for naught, as the same U.S. Congress has supported HTS generously. Indeed, one HTS blogger, “Caleb” (who of course blocked access to his blog, Always Under Way, as soon as it started to get attention) was already celebrating the Congressional review in his post for Wednesday, 30 September, 2009, “H.R. 2647“:
“This will be an opportunity for this amazing program to gain even greater buy-in by Congress, the Department of Defense, and the Obama Administration – all of whom have expressed their support for the program….That’s right, support the expansion of the HTT concept, including to other combatant command areas of responsibility!! We’re worldwide!” [his emphasis]
Well, Caleb was totally wrong about the play, “Anthropology–Or How to Win Friends and Influence Afghans,” thinking it was a prestige-making event that would applaud HTS, rather than criticize and mock it. He is very cheerful, and while his gushing optimism may be correct when it comes to Congress supporting HTS further (I think it will), the idea would be to make it as difficult as possible for them to accept a positive assessment without producing a tortuous, labored explanation.
From Marilyn Dudley-Flores:
[originally directed primarily to Christian Caryl at Foreign Policy]
I have just seen your piece entitled “Reality Check: Human Terrain Teams” over the Foreign Policy website dated 8 Sep 2009 ( http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/08/reality_check_human_terrain_teams ).
I have no major argument with your piece, but I do feel you unfairly cast me in a “feuding” role with soldiers in the field in Afghanistan. You wrote that writer John Stanton “included excerpts from an internal investigation by the 101st Airborne Division that harshly criticized failings in training and administration that contributed to a disastrous feud between one of the HTT scientists, Marilyn Dudley-Flores, and regular Army troops in the field in Afghanistan involving allegations of sexual harassment and death threats against the professor.” Who were these regular Army troops?
I wanted to let you know that at no time was I locked in a feud with anyone at all in Afghanistan. There is a clear difference between a feud and a systematic running assault. One implies something along the lines of a more or less equal conflict that proceeds over time; the other has one or more perpetrators attacking a victim or victims.
FYI. I was sent out from Stateside to Afghanistan, spending 7-8 days in transit. Upon my leaving Fort Benning, Georgia was the only prior “heads-up” that was given to my team that I was being sent to them to co-lead and to provide counterinsurgency research services for the division-level Human Terrain Analysis Team (HTAT) on Bagram air base. The HTAT was then wired up to the 101st Army Airborne, although how we were wired up was not clear, because none of the women were allowed by the HTAT team leader to make briefings to or go to meetings with the senior staff officers of the 101st Army Airborne, as we were supposed to do. On Bagram, I almost immediately found my SECRET clearance only “pending,” although official documents on me do not reflect that, indicating that by 1 Sep 2008 I had an unfettered SECRET clearance. Having only a “pending” SECRET meant that I could not be badged to work in my own office on Bagram. This was a mystery (and still is in some respects) until HTS management “worked the issue” and got me badged somehow.
After about two weeks waiting to be badged, when I was able to get into my office in the day-to-day, after some time, I saw the female complement of the HTAT (three women) working in the office under such a regime, as if they were POWs, hectored around by, evidently what turned out to be two phony PhDs, a former Special Forces man with an apparent learning disorder and a lot of muscle, and an immature 30-year-old 1LT in the Puerto Rican National Guard. The “muscleman,” our HTAT’s deputy team leader, had formerly worked for the subcontractor company that had recruited and hired me for the HTS through an American Sociological Association ad. Present on our team was a decent young man with good credentials, a military veteran, and a criminal justice background, but he was due to rotate back Stateside soon after I arrived. With him gone, we were at the entire mercy of the others as I would go on to experience with the other women.
In the meantime, my subcontractor company, stopped paying me. About a month on the scene, in early December, the day after they began to catch my pay up, they inexplicably fired me from my position as a key asset to the Army Human Terrain System in the war zone. This is a little like a soldier in the foxhole saying to his mates, “Sorry, guys, I’m off the clock, my pink slip has been handed to me.” HTS managers apparently didn’t know anything about it.
HTS managers scrambled to turn this new fiasco around. That is when the managers discovered some sort of communication between Bagram and the little hiring company exuding false information about the fit of my body armor and my ability to get in and out of humvees. Even after this was laid to rest, a company spokesperson was talking to authorities on Bagram about my having been fired. HTS managers had to go to extraordinary steps to make it clear that the 101st was supposed to be communicating about HTAT personnel with them and no one else.
This situation might not have existed except that the phonies had been “empire building” and covering their lack of ability to perform our mission with one or more Reserve Information Operations officers on the 101st’s senior staff who were jones’ing to hook up with the HTS program and make the large amount of money that HTS’ers did. That element covered for their inadequate performance, as well as contributed to the information ops that was devised against me while I was in transit to Bagram. (Read: a weapon of war was used against me before I set foot on Bagram.) I was not a welcome addition to the team because the baddies already figured out that I had a substantial background from Googling on me. (They did not previously know me from training, although one of the women recalled seeing me around Fort Leavenworth. Several hundreds or thousands of hits will come up if you Google on “Dudley,” “Dudley-Rowley,” or “Dudley-Flores.”) They evidently feared exposure as posers and they found a lot of fodder with which to propagandize me.
Not able to zing me back Stateside within a few days, the real slagging began. While sexual harassment was present, and had been before I had arrived, that was the least of our problem. All of us women were in fear of physical intimidation, as had been used on us. And, a major biggy: the “Rev. Dr.” Sturgis, the team leader, was ramping up the immature 1LT to view us as traitors. Outside the wire, in the field in Ghazni Province, in December 2008, he had the 1LT trying to maneuver us into specific villages where we knew specific Taliban military commanders had re-infiltrated. We already had enough data we needed about those villages to know they were red hot and no purpose was served by going there for more interviews, us women unarmed. We would, in fact, have been going off mission as previously briefed if we would have gone to those areas. The three of us women on that mission knew what the story was on that note. The 1LT was following directions from Sturgis to position us to get attacked and killed. (At no time was anyone “just trying to scare us.”) And, the 1LT was so vapidly enamored with Sturgis with his promises of Dubai vacations, good officer evaluation reports, cherry postings, etc. that he would have been dumb enough to drive us over an IED-strewn road if Sturgis had told him to do it. None of the HTS managers back Stateside changed words with me when I turned to them for advice and told them that I was not taking the women into those places. The 1LT was crestfallen when he heard from higher-ups on the FOB where we lived on-mission that those places were too hot. But, he really was fit to be tied when he saw John Stanton’s story in December that tagged on a paragraph about us women’s difficulties in the field (that did not disclose any information from the scene that could not be found over Wikipedia). And, in any case, I was not the one to leak that news to Mr. Stanton.
But, Sturgis and his buddies likely thought that I was the leaker since they were obsessed with targeting me. So, next thing we knew, we were being hustled away from FOB Ghazni back to Bagram. Come to find out, Sturgis, himself and/or through the 1LT, communicated to the CO of the FOB that we were in violation of operational security and needed to come back to Bagram to be called to account. We were greeted to a sign in the office about being traitors (as seen over http://zeroanthropology.net/2009/02/26/some-breaking-news-on-the-human-terrain-system-death-threats/). No one ever debriefed us about any OPSEC violation. The 1LT’s behavior worsened.
On the 31st of December 2008, Sturgis and the 1LT tried to get me off alone on a part of the Joint Operations Compound on Bagram that we never used, but we women foiled that attempt. In the meantime, while the 1LT had a pistol and a rifle, the civilian men (except one of the posers who had gone on vacation) were buying long guns in the bazaar and trying to get them operational. One of the women, a civilian who was a Army Reserve captain, but not in uniform on this tour of duty, was hard over to obtain a weapon. Her husband from Stateside was demanding that she buy a gun if push came to shove. When military women in my sleeping hooch on Bagram found out what was happening to me, they lent me a rifle to keep in my sleeping cubicle in case they had to step out and would not be able to defend me. (One of the women’s superiors had previously barred the 1LT from their workplace on Bagram because of his inappropriate behaviors.)
I began carrying my combat knife at all times. On the 2nd of January 2009, we discovered the death threat written in Spanish on a dry erase board in the office. After five days’ trying to get advice from a silent HTS management back Stateside, at the behest of friends, family, and the other women, I asked my Member of Congress to get a message to the Commanding General about what was happening to us. A few hours’ later, HTS Deputy Program Manager, retired Army Colonel Steve Rotkoff phoned and told me to come back Stateside to report on what had been going on.
I did so and fully expected to re-deploy from the verbal and gestural responses I was getting from HTS managers who heard my three-and a-half-hour report. But, instead, afterwards, I was left for about four weeks in a Kansas City hotel room until I received a firing notice in the e-mail from the subcontractor that recruited me and hired me for the HTS. They claimed that BAE and the government authorized them to fire me for inadequate performance. Pinging HTS managers to confirm that this was, indeed, a genuine firing this second time around, met with silence. Two days later, John Stanton had the first of his stories up online about what happened to me and the other women.
It is interesting to note that in the timeframe that we women were trying to get help, and as subsequent events played out, HTS salesmen were selling the program to President Obama for the cornerstone of the civilian surge in Afghanistan: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/03/27/afghan_plan_adds_4000_us_troops?mode=PF
How we were treated suggests that our concerns were covered up so as not to blemish the sales pitch to the President. For, in the case of the only Afghanistan HTAT, it demonstrated that the HTS was easily sabotaged from its internal “bugs” contradictory to its mission as a warfighting system.
In the meantime, Sturgis was recalled around the same time as myself and fired or forced to resign. However, he almost immediately found work with some facet of Glevum Associates and I would not be surprised if he found his way back to Afghanistan: Kabul or back on Bagram — by June 2009. (Glevum was a subcontractor in service to MPRI-L3 that was on contract with the government to provide various media assessment support services in the region to HTS, the 101st Army Airborne [now to the 82nd Army Airborne], and another client.)
I was fired before the 101st was able to complete their “window dressing” investigation that involved no Criminal Investigation Division authorities. Two-thirds or more of the report given to my Member of Congress is a tissue of lies. The pictorial evidence meant they had to cop to the fact that sexual harassment was going on. Some parts of the report are actually revealing, however. Like, how the 1LT acted in ways to make his death threat credible. Like, (and I learned this later from more information sent my Member of Congress) how the Special Forces “muscleman” had his Joint Ops Compound badge revoked for his failure to lead as “deputy team leader.” Like how the “Rev. Dr.” and the muscleman were blacklisted for contract hire in connection to any 101st capacity ever again.
When I FOIPA’d for the background materials that went into the 101st’s “investigation,” I obtained Sworn Statements from three Army lieutenant colonels on the senior staff of the 101st and an Army Reserve LTC working for an HTS unit near ours. The 101st’s investigation lasted from about mid-January to late March. In the last week of their investigation, they pulled these Sworn Statements out of these LTCs. All of them would be viewed as “false official statements” under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Recall that by this time I had already been fired. In that final week of the investigation, statements were sought from these men to the tune that I told incredible stories about famous people I knew, about my prior military and other background, about poor alleged production that came from me (Sturgis blocked all of us women from briefing any senior officers about the operationally relevant data that we had uncovered in our counterinsurgent activities as we were supposed to do). Additionally, these Army field-grade officers made whopper statements about my being so fat that I had to come through doors at an angle and could barely walk and stand upright on a level floor or fit into a tactical vehicle. One of these men claimed that I was in the central Joint Ops Compound building all the time complaining about living conditions, etc. The fact is, the whole time I was in Afghanistan, I was only in the office part of that closely neighboring building for a grand total of two hours, about one and a half hours spent with an Army Inspector General LTC explaining what was happening to me and the other women just prior to being sent outside the wire to FOB Ghazni. A FOIPA procedure revealed that the man didn’t even file a report on my visit.
As I have said elsewhere, I think the whole debacle started out small with the posers and their buddies not wanting to be found out to be posing and/or inadequate to the mission, along with such facts that they had probably, in toto, been paid about one million federal dollars for not doing the work of the HTAT and instead spending a good portion of their time abusing the HTAT women. Yet to be discovered is what, if any role, Sturgis and one of the Info Ops officers played in diverting or causing to be misused (if indeed the case) a federal money train of perhaps as much as five million dollars from federal contractor MPRI-L3 to Glevum Associates where the HTS and the 101st Airborne and another party were clients. It will also be revealing to find out who all among the 101st senior staff were in on the active perpetration in the overall affair, who were passive perpetrators, and just how widespread was any sort of “social contagion” from Sturgis et al.’s mythmaking among the 101st senior staff officers. Whomever all were in uniform who participated in these events should be held to account just for giving the 101st a black eye on the “Duty, Honor, Country” front. So far, my FOIPA’d information suggests that almost all the 101st’s senior staff officers were ultimately involved in some way. If that is so, where is the 101st’s Army Airborne’s honor?
After I was fired…. When John’s 26 February 2009 article made the international online media, I began to be “counterblogged” over the Open Anthropology website (now Zero Anthropology). The blogger was an Army lieutenant colonel I did not know, LTC Robert Bateman. He was found to be counterblogging on me from his Pentagon computer during duty hours from his work in a DoD think tank close to the SECDEF. Besides Dr. Max Forte’s publicized data, I also FOIPA’d the proof right out of Bateman’s machine. In his blogs, he made crazy statements to make it sound like I never worked with Dr. Louis Dupree on the rescue and relocation of Afghans (a theme that the Bagram HTT LTC would hype in his Sworn Statement riddled with falsehoods). Bateman went on that I might be a fake veteran, and that “Mata la vaca” means “The Cow Kills.” I and my supporters’ analysis later found out that one of his associates is close to the HTS and has a history in opposition research. That person was Sean McFate, Dr. Montgomery McFate’s husband. I had to be separated from Dr. Dupree, now seen by a wider audience as the stellar Afghanistan scholar that he always was, because how crazy would it be seen in the media if a Dupree associate on a substantial project involving Afghans was removed from Afghanistan and the HTS (amid public accusations that very few scholars with any Afghanistan credentials are in the country with HTS)?
I did not engage in a disastrous feud with soldiers in the field, but I most assuredly am doing my best to let Congress and federal executives know what happened to me and the other HTAT women in Afghanistan in detail. Because, it is our story that is the “poster child” of what has gone wrong with the Army’s Human Terrain System. There are many stories like ours from among our “big tent” teammates from former and currently serving HTS’ers. Ours was just more egregious in many ways. However, in the aggregate, there is a clear signal in the noise, a pattern that reveals the raging flaws in the HTS program and who all are/have been those who create and/or duplicate those flaws. In many respects I have been making a human terrain analysis of the Human Terrain System. My abilities are not so much from my intermittent 30-year background as a professor, as from the other things I have done to put food on the table during that same time span, like having been a soldier, having been an investigative news reporter, having done criminal justice research for real live drug and human trafficking cases, and having sought grants and contracts for scientific studies outside of Academe in which I partnered. It is, in fact, this background in addition to my academic PhD that made me a logical asset for the HTS.
What has not been widely mentioned in the media thus far has been my prior background at the forefront of “human terrain analysis” in the organization of social structural concepts and analytical techniques for a victimization and property damages assessment for Kuwait toward the end of the Gulf War. This effort that created a body of methodology and some other features, like a hybrid team for insertion into a war-torn area and a reachback-like cell preceded Mitzy Cybele Carlough’s (aka Montgomery McFate’s) 1994 dissertation by at least three years, her bar napkin epiphany by 10 years, and the 2006 Army and Marine Field Manual on counterinsurgency by 15 years. (By the way, the other HTAT women did not even know this until I told them at supper in the chow hall the night before I was flown off of Bagram in January. So much for my bragging on myself and talking about “famous people.”) I only mention it now to show how dysfunctional the HTS was/is.
It is the height of craziness that I was not re-deployed with the HTS. What is more, though I have been in demand for other programs requiring a SECRET clearance, I can’t be hired for the jobs because Sturgis and collaborators screwed my clearance up. I call them collaborators in every sense of the word because they not only sabotaged me, but the functioning of a warfighting system in Afghanistan. At the end of the day, what was done was sabotage and not merely “grab assing” among bored field-grade officers and sophomoric pranksterism with civilian “good ol’ boy” buddies. And, it is a national shame that HTS higher-ups thanked me for my role in bringing it to their attention, my life on the line, by firing me to cover up the facts. We Viet Nam Era vets call such treatment the “f**k you very much for your service” phenomenon. The more things change the more they stay the same.
To date, I have pulled together 600+ pages of evidence, analyses, and narrative. This packet is in the hands of members of both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees and other interested parties. I can forward a copy to you, Mr. Cary, if you are interested.
In the meantime, please know that I was not a party to a “disastrous feud.” I and my female teammate were victimized by “snakes in our foxhole” while attempting to perform our duties. We tried to get help as best we could, and at other times, we kept our heads down to survive. Other than that note, thank you for writing about the HTS. It is important to keep it in the media eye and to discuss its issues.
Many Kind Regards,
Marilyn “Stryker” Dudley-Flores, PhD
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