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Situations
ESSAYS ON
THE CONTEXTUALIZATION
OF ETHNOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGE
Edited by
AFTERWORD
From the History of Colonial Anthropology
to the Anthropology of Western Hegemony
TALAL ASAD
I
The story of anthropology and colonialism is part of a larger narrative which
has a rich array of characters and situations but a simple plot.
When Europe conquered and ruled the world, its inhabitants went out
to engage with innumerable peoples and places. European merchants, soldiers,
missionaries, settlers, and administrators-together with men of power who
stayed at home, they helped transform their non-European subjects, with varying degrees of violence, in a "modern" direction. And of course, these subjects
were not passive. The story recounts how they understood initial encounters
with Europeans in indigenous cultural terms, how they resisted, adapted to,
cooperated with, or challenged their new masters, and how they attempted
to reinvent their disrupted lives. But it also tells of how the conditions of
reinvention were increasingly defined by a new scheme of things-new forms
of power, work, and knowledge. It tells of European imperial dominance not
as a temporary repression of subject populations but as an irrevocable process
of transmutation, in which old desires and ways of life were destroyed and
new ones took their place-a story of change without historical precedent
in its speed, global scope, and pervasiveness.
It was in this world that anthropology emerged and developed as an academic discipline. Concerned at first to help classify non-European humanity
in ways that would be consistent with Europe's story of triumph as "progress"
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(Stocking 1987; Bowler 1989), anthropologists then went out from Europe to
the colonies in order to observe and describe the particularity of non-European
communities, attending to their "traditional" cultural forms or their subjection to "modern" social change.
There is nothing startling today in the suggestion that anthropological
knowledge was part of the expansion of Europe's power, although there is a
general consensus that the detailed implications of this bald statement need
to be spelled out. The question then arises as to whether we want to fill in
the broad picture of anthropology's growth that is already familiar to us or
to illuminate through anthropology aspects of the transformation of which
this discipline was a small part.
It is possible, at any rate, to deal straight away with some vulgar misconceptions on this subject. The role of anthropologists in maintaining structures of imperial domination has, despite slogans to the contrary, usually been
trivial; the knowledge they produced was often too esoteric for government
use, and even where it was usable it was marginal in comparison to the vast
body of information routinely accumulated by merchants, missionaries, and
administrators. Of course, there were professional anthropologists who were
nominated (or who offered their services) as experts on the social life of subjugated peoples. But their expertise was never indispensable to the grand process of imperial power. As for the motives of most anthropologists, these, like
the motives of individuals engaged in any collective, institutional enterprise,
were too complex, variable, and indeterminate to be identified as simple political instrumentalities.
But if the role of anthropology for colonialism was relatively unimportant,
the reverse proposition does not hold. The process of European global power
has been central to the anthropological task of recording and analyzing the
ways of life of subject populations, even when a serious consideration of that
power was theoretically excluded. It is not merely that anthropological fieldwork was facilitated by European colonial power (although this well-known
point deserves to be thought about in other than moralistic terms); it is that
the fact of European power, as discourse and practice, was always part of the
reality anthropologists sought to understand, and of the way they sought to
understand it.
II
What preexisting discourses and practices did anthropologists enter when they
went at particular imperial times to particular colonial places? What concepts
of dominant power did they assume, modify, or reject, as they tried to observe
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317
has its origins in the political response of European conservatives to the threat
of the French Revolution.
The eighteenth century in Europe witnessed the development of a bourgeois social and moral order based on the principle of individual private property (Hi1l1969; Porter 1982). Especially in England, this meant underwriting
de facto class privileges through the systematization of law as precedent. The
rhetoric of revolutionary France, with its attack on inherited privilege and
prejudice in the name of universal reason and justice, was clearly a threat
to conservative England. This was how Edmund Burke, the great spokesman
of English class privilege, conceptualized the ideological danger facing that
class, and how he theorized his counterattack. What made justice, and coherent social life itself, possible, was "tradition," and "tradition" consisted in
a reverence for unbroken continuity, for the prejudices of the past, and it was
indeed antithetical to the irresponsibility of free reason and the disruption
of radical change.! Thus for Burke "the past" is not a particular (and changing) conception of one's inheritance-including those parts that are argued as
being relevant to the present as compared with others that are not. "The past"
is a palpable point of authority to which one is either linked by mimetic action or from which one is forever severed.
What are the implications of such a political genealogy for the way anthropologists have addressed change in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial societies? One implication, I would suggest, has been the difficulty of
theorizing the place of non-Western traditions within the contemporary scheme
of things, except perhaps when they are depicted as "myths" that help people
cope with disorientation or resist oppression. Indeed, such depictions often
reinforce the assumption (even where this is not explicitly argued or intended)
that traditions in the contemporary world may be regarded as functionally
valuable insofar as they "empower the weak," but only because the universal
principles of the Enlightenment project have not yet been fully realized.
A prominent example of this is the reaction of Western social scientists
and Orientalists to the contemporary growth ofIslamic rhetoric and practice
I. Thus it is with reference to this historical construction that Macintyre (1980:63) writes:
"from Burke onwards, [conservatives] have wanted to counterpose tradition and reason and tradition and revolution. Not reason, but prejudice; not revolution, but inherited precedent; these
are Burke's key oppositions. Yet if [my] arguments are correct it is traditions which are the bearers
of reason, and traditions at certain periods actually require and need revolutions for their continuance. Burke saw the French Revolution as merely the negative overthrow of all that France
had been and many French conservatives have agreed with him, but later thinkers as different
as Peguy and Hilaire Belloc were able retrospectively to see the great revolution as reconstituting
a more ancient France, so that Jeanne D~rc and Danton belong within the same single, if immensely complex, tradition."
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in the Middle East. Thus, since the nineteenth century, it has not been common to find Western writers expressing the need to explain processes of Europeanization and secularization as opposed, that is, to describing them. The
reason is that those processes are taken to be natural. The political invocations of Islamic traditions in that region have, on the other hand, been the
object of a swelling stream of anxious explanation in recent years. What explains the recurrent political assertiveness of Islamic tradition? Typically, the
answers tend to be given in terms of the localized failures of modernization,2
or in terms of an irrational reluctance to abandon tradition. 3 But while there
can be no doubt that Muslim societies have changed radically over the past
two centuries, and that this has involved the adoption of Western institutions, values, and practices, it is not at all clear that every form of re-argued
Islamic tradition must be seen either as an anomaly or as a spurious claim
to historicity. The need to explain such developments as anomalies in the
modern world indicates something about the hegemonic discourses of "progress," and about some of the fears underlying them in the contemporary West.
III
In an earlier period, when "progressive" Western scholars were less anxious
about developments in the societies they studied, there was also a concern
to explain away what appeared to be anomalies in the process of modernization experienced by colonized populations. An interesting example from the
history of British anthropology is the attempt by members of the RhodesLivingstone Institute in central Africa to explain the persistence of "tribalism."
It is sometimes forgotten that functionalist anthropologists were as interested in analyzing "modern" change in colonial Africa as they were in reconstructing "traditional" cultures. The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, in what is
now independent Zambia, was a well-known research center devoted from
the late 1930s on to documenting economic, political, and religious changes
affecting African populations. In spite of all the social problems involved, the
2. For example: "Contrary to their expectations, however, education (even higher education)
fails to provide them with the keys to modernity. It is from these circles that the heavy battalions
of the Islamicist movement are drawn. They are the living symbols, and their numbers are massive, of the failure of the independent state's modernization project" (Kepel 1985:218).
3. Thus the eminent Middle East specialist, Leonard Binder (1988:293): "From the time of
the Napoleonic invasion, from the time of the massacre of the Janissaries, from the time of the
Sepoy mutiny, at least, the West has been trying to tell Islam what must be the price of progress
in the coin of the tradition which is to be surrendered. And from those times, despite the increasing numbers of responsive Muslims, there remains a substantial number that steadfastly [stubbornly] argue that it is possible to progress without paying such a heavy cultural price." Binder's
own closely argued book conveys the same Western message to Islam.
AFTERWORD
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move from a "primitive" life toward "civilization" (Wilson 1945) was conceptualized as a progressive development.
When Max Gluckman succeeded Godfrey Wilson as the Institute's second
director, the basic categories for apprehending that transformation were altered from "primitive" and "civilized" to "tribal" and "industrial." These categories were central to the administrative discourses of various colonial interests,
including the copper mining company of Northern Rhodesia. (Many of the
studies by Institute researchers were carried out in response to specific administrative problems [e.g., Epstein 1953, 1958].) A major preoccupation of
the Institute, Gluckman wrote in 1961, was to understand the persistence of
"tribalism," especially in the mines and townships which represented the most
modern sectors of social life. "Tribalism," unlike "nationalism," was not intrinsic to modern life, and its presence needed explaining. Gluckman and his
associates (notably Mitchell and Epstein) insisted that "tribalism" in urban
areas was nothing more than a form of reconstructed group identity, something that would later be renamed "ethnicity." Since identities were inevitably
determined by the economic conditions of towns as contemporary "social fields"
(the phrase is Gluckman's), their compatibility with modernity was assured.
Such tribalism was not a relic of the (traditional) past but a function of the
(modern) present.
Tribalism acts, though not as strongly, in British towns: for in these Scots and
Welsh and Irish, French, Jews, Lebanese, Africans, have their own associations,
and their domestic life is ruled by their own national [sic] customs. But all may
unite in political parties and in trade unions or employers' federations. Tribalism in the Central African towns is, in sharper forms, the tribalism of all towns.
(Gluckman 1961:76)
Thus even for functionalist anthropologists of the colonial period the normality of colonized peoples was sometimes affirmed by arguing that their life
was essentially the same as that of the metropole, albeit perhaps a little less
developed along the universal path to modernity.
It is not only what historical events are felt to need explaining but also
the terms in which they are thought to be persuasively accounted for that
reveals the force of hegemonic discourses. Kuklick's story of the archeological
disputes over the origins of the famous ruins of Zimbabwe, in the former British colony that adopted that name, is a revealing illustration of this point.
Kuklick describes in detail how,
seeking to legitimate their rule, British settlers and African nationalists subscribed to very different accounts of the building of the ruins, basing their
construction alternatively in ancient times and the relatively recent past, and
identifying the builders-or, at least architects-either as representatives of some
non-African civilization or members of the indigenous population. (This volume, pp. 137-38)
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As AD
Yet what emerges strikingly from her account is the fact that Rhodesian settlers and Zimbabwean nationalists shared the basic terms of a historical argument. They accepted and used the modern European language of territorial
rights and its essential preconditions: only long, continuous, settled association with a given territory could give its inhabitants exclusive title to it. Indeed, that was precisely the point of difference-according to the classical European law of nations-between a wandering "tribe" and a settled "nation." Thus
the influential eighteenth-century philosophe Emer de Vattel:
It is asked whether a Nation may lawfully occupy any part of a vast territory
in which are to be found only wandering tribes whose small numbers can not
populate the whole country. We have already pointed out, in speaking of the
obligation of cultivating the earth, that these tribes can not take to themselves
more land than they have need of or can inhabit and cultivate. Their uncertain
occupancy of these vast regions can not be held as a real and lawful taking of
possession; and when the Nations of Europe, which are too confined at home,
come upon lands which the savages have no special need of and are making
no present and continuous use of, they may lawfully take possession of them
and establish colonies in them. (Curtin 1971:44-45).
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The uncritical reproduction of administrative-legal discourse by anthropologists of the colonial period was not confined to those who studied the
functioning of African tribal courts. In much anthropological theory of that
time the primary form of all social relationships in colonized societies was
talked about in quasi-legal terms as "rights" and "duties."4 The indeterminate,
contradictory, and open-ended character of social structures was reduced in
this way to the status of a precisely articulated and consistent legal-administrative document.
IV
The essays by Tomas (on Radcliffe-Brown in the Andamans) and Bashkow
(on Schneider's intellectual biography) are valuable contributions to our
knowledge of the history of colonial anthropology. But I have been arguing
that we also need to pursue our historical concerns by anthropologizing the
growth of Western imperial power, because unless we extend our questions
about the cultural character of that hegemony, we may take too much for
granted about the relationship between anthropology and colonialism. A
number of scholars have begun to address themselves in interesting ways to
this extended enquiry (e.g. Cooper & Stoler 1989). It needs to be stressed,
however, that it is not enough for anthropologists to note that that hegemony was not monolithic, or that Western power continually evoked resistance.
It is not enough because conventional political history of colonial times and
places has always been a record of conflict: between different European interests, between different groups of non-Europeans, as well as between colonizers and colonized. We do not advance matters much conceptually if we
simply repeat slogans about conflict and resistance in place of older slogans
about repression and domination. An anthropology of Western imperial power
must try to understand the radically altered form and terrain of conflict in4. Thus Radcliffe-Brown (1950:11): "An important element in the relations of kin is what
will here be called the jural element, meaning by that relationships that can be defined in terms
of rights and duties .. .. Reference to duties or rights are simply ways of referring to a social relation and the rules of behaviour connected therewith. In speaking of the jural element in social
relations we are referring to customary rights and duties. Some of these in some societies are
subject to legal sanctions, that is, an infraction can be dealt with by a court of law. But for the
most part the sanctions for these customary rules are what may be called moral sanctions sometimes supplemented by religious sanctions."
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augurated by it-new political languages, new powers, new social groups, new
desires and fears, new subjectivities.
Turner's contribution in this volume is an anthropological account of aspects of precisely that transformation. He documents a profound change in
Kayapo perspectives over the three decades of his involvement with them.
Faced with white power, there is now not only a new assertiveness about their
ritual life and conventional dress, but a new conception of their collective
identity. Instead of seeing themselves as the autonomous paradigm of humanity, the Kayapo now present themselves as part of a dominated ethnic group
(the Indians) engaged in political struggle with a dominant ethnic group (the
whites). Turner notes that "over the past half-dozen years, the Kayapo have
staged a series of demonstrations against a variety of threats to their political,
social, and territorial integrity and their economic subsistence base" (this
volume, p. 303), and goes on to describe how Kayapo traditions have become
politicized and how his own conception of their culture was altered as a consequence of his involvement in their struggles. This involvement came through
his use of audio-visual media. Resorted to at first for narrow documentary
purposes, audio-visual media soon assumed a critical role in the Kayapo struggle
against encroaching white power. "The Kayapo have passed rapidly from the
initial stage of conceiving video as a means of recording events to conceiving
it as the event to be recorded, and more broadly, conceiving events and actions as subjects for video" (this volume, p. 307).
Turner's account of the changing concept of "culture"-from a closed system of mutually referring symbols and meanings to practices of collective identity that are technologically representable and legally contestable-is a substantial contribution to the anthropology of Western imperial hegemony that
I am urging. It also illustrates the importance of some points I have argued
above, including the ways in which contest and conflict are increasingly relatable to legal forms (even when governing powers seek to deny their legality). But in addition it deals with something that needs to be pursued more
systematically: the role of Western technologies in transforming colonial subjects. Just as modern modes of locomotion (railways, motorcars, etc.) have
altered concepts of time and space (Schivelbusch 1986), so Turner reminds
us that modern modes of representation (e.g., film and video) have helped
to reconstitute colonized subjectivities. All these things have certainly been
very important for the changes that Western hegemony has brought about.
It is necessary, however, to extend the concept of technology to include all
institutionalized techniques that depend on and extend varieties of social
power.
Right through modern imperial times and places, Western techniques for
governing subjects have radically restructured the domain we now call societya process that has reorganized strategies of power accordingly. This process
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has been extensively written about (and not only by Foucault and his followers) in the context of modern European history, but far less so in the context
of Europe's imperial territories. In fact the difference between the processes
of transformation in the two contexts remains to be properly explored. Grasping that difference seems to me to require in part a closer examination of the
emerging discourses of "culture" (cf. Asad 1990). Until we understand precisely how the social domain has been restructured (constituted), our accounts
of the dynamic connections between power and knowledge during the colonial period will remain limited.
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