Anthropology, Colonialism, And The Archive

History and Anthropology The relationship between anthropology and history has always been a somewhat complex one (Evans-Pritchard, 1962a). Indeed, Victorian anthropology was obsessed with questions of historical development, but the way in which these questions were articulated ultimately led to a historical fallacy (Stocking, 1987). With the backlash against the evolutionary paradigm within anthropology, functionalists, structural functionalists, and American cultural anthropologists came to a-historicise their field sites. History was marginalised to nothing more than a vaguely useful tool for the historical reconstruction of a past cultural formation (Axel, 2002). This can be seen for example in the work of Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and Evans-Pritchard. Malinowski's (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific does not deal in any detail with any historical background to the islands, but focuses instead on an ethnographic present. Further, in his work on the Nuer in Sudan, Evans-Pritchard (1940) explicitly focuses on an ethnographic present which ignores the way in which the Nuer have been shaped by colonial experiences and extends the ethnographic situation in which he found himself backward into the pre-colonial period. Strangely though, Evans-Pritchard in his later work was more concerned to show the ways in which anthropology and history are, in fact, not dissimilar. Evans-Pritchard (1962a) argues that the functionalist critics of diffusionism and evolutionism should not have focused on history, but rather critiqued the writing of bad history. He goes on to argue that there are some very damaging consequences in anthropology's breach with history; firstly, anthropologists use historical sources uncritically as they are divorced from history's critical method. Secondly, anthropologists have seldom made very serious efforts to construct any information from the historical record. They have thus seen the pre-colonial as a static given and also have not seen the historical depth as being related to the thoughts and actions of people living in the here and now. Finally, the anti-historicism of anthropology prevents a full understanding of social change (Evans-Pritchard, 1962b). Furthermore, Evans-Pritchard argues, history is losing out on great theoretical advances by its lack of engagement with anthropology. Evans-Pritchard points to the New Cultural History school, and the work of Marc Bloch, as an example of the way in which social history provides a more holistic understanding of historical events. This overlap of relevance does not just mean that the disciplines can learn from each other, it means that, in aim and method, 'both are trying to do the same thing, to translate one set of ideas in terms of another, their own, so they may become intelligible' (1962b:58). However, this view of anthropological knowledge as partial, and as historically based (Evans-Pritchard, 1962a) was not the norm within anthropology. Schapera (1962) begins his critique of Evans-Pritchard by pointing out Evans-Pritchard's own a-historicity, and the historical basis found in functionalists like Raymond Firth. Schapera argues that the ethnographic should be the focus, and that there should be an historical basis to this, but that ethnographic fieldwork has to remain the data of anthropological work. Contemporary with this concern for history in British anthropology was a field which emerged in America in the 1950s and 1960s - ethnohistory. This was particularly associated with Native American land claims and was more practical than theoretical and was thus rather different from both anthropology and history (Krech, 1991; Barber and Berdan, 1998; Harkin, 2010). However, as the field developed, it became increasingly interested in theory, and broadened its scope from North America into South America and Melanesia (Krech, 1991; Harkin, 2010). But Harkin (2010) has shown that the relationship between ethnohistory and other forms of historicized anthropology is an important boundary; ethnohistory retains a certain practical basis formed in litigation. This is different to what I am trying to achieve here.

Post-structural, post-colonial, and post-modern. A second focus on history within the discipline of anthropology, and closer to the focus of this thesis, comes in the 1980s a reflexive turn in anthropology which was to a degree reliant on history and had a strong focus on the world economic system and on the emergence of anthropology within the colonial context. This movement can be seen much earlier than the 1980s with the effects of Asad's (1973) edited volume Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter where he tells anthropologists not to ignore the history of colonialism in the discipline and that colonialism and anthropology emerged at broadly similar times, but were by no means synonymous (as this thesis will go on to suggest). For example, the relationship between colonialism and anthropology is exemplified by books such as African Political Systems (1940), a work by Myer Fortes and Evans-Pritchard which compared state and acephelous African societies for the purposes of better colonial government. But Asad points to some of the contradictions which can be seen in anthropology during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, pointing to anthropologists like Gluckman as an example of how anthropology was able to separate itself from colonialism through perceptive ethnography. Moreover, whilst anthropology helped colonial government, it was not the cause of it and thus anthropologists could work effectively in post-colonial situations. These issues were tied to broader theoretical concerns within anthropology surrounding the so-called crisis of representation - asking whether and how anthropology could represent the Other. Indeed, even ethnohistorical or historically based arguments such as Sahlins's Islands of History (1985) can be understood as being about broader questions of who can speak for whom, and by what means (Borofsky, 1997). It is here that anthropologists begin to study the colonial context as a way of understanding the emergence of the discipline. Wolf (1982) in Europe and the People Without History argues that "...the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality" (Wolf, 1982:1). Wolf uses the concept of the World System to show that the current economic system was created through a series of highly productive satellites becoming increasingly interconnected through a system of emerging global trade. He develops an analytical account of the emergence of particular material relations of capitalist dependence between the capitalist West and 'the rest'. These concepts are viewed as historical processes which is where the strength of Wolf's argument can be found. He encourages people to see the emergence of a system being based on the inter-relation of groups; the five and a half thousand muskets supplied to Gold Coast enriched Birmingham gunsmiths, these weapons combined with the slave trade made and destroyed huge kingdoms in West Africa. Wolf therefore challenges what Pels has called an ontology of spatial discreteness (Pels, 2008:283) where cultures can be neatly bounded into individual groups and not conceived of as connected in any real way. There is, however, a problem with Wolf's account of historical change. Whilst he encourages anthropologists to look at the interrelationship of supposedly isolated groups, the interrelationship is still seen within the realms of Western expansion. In other words, whilst granting the Other a history, he only grants it on European terms of a history viewed through the lens of the world system and European expansion (Said, 1989). Another example of historically engaged anthropology is provided by Sahlins (1985). He extends the structures which Lévi-Strauss identified as crucial to understanding of society as essential to the way in which cultural change is wrought. The structures by which people order their lives do not lead people to the same conclusion, and indeed there can often be a dual nature between the cultural order constituted by the society and that which is lived by the people. Sahlins uses the idea of the structure of the conjuncture to explain how all events are structured (even if they do not seem to be). The structure is an expression of the realisation of cultural categories, in a certain context, expressed by historical agents. In this example the historical situation becomes a field site, such as the arrival of Captain Cook in Hawai'i, and the focus is on the ways in which different groups within a society understood events through cultural logic.