The intellectual heritage of European expansion that we inherit as anthropologists – certainly not without modification and criticism – is again the subject in this series. If Immanuel Wallerstein explained which agendas became dominant with the institutionalization of the social sciences, with some notes on why they became dominant, Pierre Bourdieu provides some explanation as… [Read more…]
November 22, 2009 by Maximilian Forte
Cultural imperialism rests on the power to universalize particularisms linked to a singular historical tradition by causing them to be misrecognized as such. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999, p. 41) If the social sciences are Eurocentric, does this also mean that they are imperialist? Where Immanuel Wallerstein finds liberalism as the underpinning of the geoculture of… [Read more…]
November 11, 2009 by Maximilian Forte
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… [Read more…]
November 8, 2009 by Maximilian Forte
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… [Read more…]
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November 26, 2009 by Maximilian Forte
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