The Anthropologist’s Dilemma
Charles W. King
The discipline of anthropology has a problematic past. It was created by the imperial powers of the eighteenth century to apply scientific rigor to examinations of their imperial subjects in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The premise of these studies of subject peoples was to catalog how they were different from their European masters. This is a process which social scientists now term ‘othering’. Describing persons as ‘others’ permits that would violate societal norms if taken against people you identify with. The ways in which imperial anthropologists described their subjects further established justification for European imperial domination. Cultures in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia were frequently described as emotional and matriarchal, in contrast to rational and patriarchal Europeans. For societies like those of imperial Europe that associated femininity with irrationality, and that prized the scientific and the rational as inherently morally superior describing a culture as matriarchal or emotional is a way of describing them as inferior.
Being inferior and being sub-human was a distinction made by imperial anthropologists or the government that funded them, it provided justification for the way those government wanted to treat their subjects. The historiography of slavery in the United States is an excellent example of this. To this day most American high school students are taught that slaves in the American South had a matriarchal culture. The historical record does not support this. Enslaved women were more equal to their male peers and had more access to positions of authority within enslaved communities, but only relative to free women at the time. Nowhere in the United States were enslaved women at the top of the hierarchy of enslaved people. What is a matter of historical record is that enslaved people in the United States were not considered to be human. This is a matter of record in speeches, laws, and court decisions and one of the frequent rationales for their supposed inferiority was a lack of a capacity for reason.
The historic purpose of anthropology as justification for enslavement and exploitation is something that the discipline continues to grapple with today. For policy-makers it is important to take lessons from anthropology’s attempts to reform their discipline. The western world continues to prize rationality, and it is easy to describe those it competes with as irrational, whether they are religious zealots, nationalist fanatics, or both. Previous articles have discussed the rationality and strategic value of suicide terrorism and nuclear weapons, and warned how treating these threats as the results of irrationality is unproductive and dangerous. A certain amount of ‘us versus them’ is inescapable in geopolitics, borders are drawn on maps and people self-identify as specific nationalities and cultures. Policy-makers must be careful not to exacerbate these perceptions. Doing so makes it easier to justify exploitation and the use of force, and harder to come to diplomatic agreements. Policy-makers must be wary of repeating the mistakes of their imperialist forebears who treated the rest of the world as resources to be enslaved and exploited and suffered a crippling backlash in the twentieth century.
Further Reading
Jane Burbank, and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History. (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2010).
Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York City, NY: Pantheon Books, 1978).
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)