Critique of Colonial Anthropology
By Fadi A. Bardawil
Emergent Conversation 18
This essay is part of the series Remnants of Empire, PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 18
I
Remnants of Empire’s call urges us to move beyond geopolitical understandings of imperialism focusing on military interventions and histories of foreign policy. It nudges us to stretch our understanding of empire in multiple directions. We are called upon to leave the hyper-securitized closed rooms in which the game of nations gets played, and exceptional decisions are made, to apprehend empire in the ordinariness of everyday life. Stretching also entails re-considering empire from its peripheries which are reincorporated as vantage points of investigation instead of being relegated to an imputed outside. This conceptual stretching beyond a focus on grand military schemes, exceptional policies, central locations, and metropolitan categories, as I read it, is a call to de-center hegemonic understandings of empire by centering ethnographic examinations of it. “What does it mean to examine empire ethnographically?” the series curator asks, and “How has anthropology constructed its ‘imperial objects?’” These questions are not as straightforward as they may seem at first instance, since the discipline, as they allude to, has a history of intimate entanglement with empire.
“Anthropology,” Kathleen Gough (1968) asserted more than half a century ago, during the high tides of anti-colonial struggles, “is a child of Western imperialism” (12). Anthropology’s critical investigation of colonial and imperial structures which we are summoned to comment on today was preceded by a reflexive reckoning of the discipline’s own entanglements with those powers. When I say preceded, I do not mean that the task has been accomplished once and for all. In fact, this reflexive task has accrued more momentum with the global debates today, both in Metropolitan centers and the Global South, around decolonizing disciplines of inquiry, museums, and the university at large. In the North American context, they have been accompanied by much needed “renewed calls for a racial reckoning in U.S. anthropology.” (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, 779)
I heed the series’ call for a de-centered understanding of empire which is attentive to the discipline’s entanglements with imperial powers via revisiting different moments of the trailblazing oeuvre of Talal Asad. But why so? How is Asad’s oeuvre tied to the central call of Remnants of empire? Asad’s work was paradigm-shifting in the anthropology of Islam, and religion more generally, and so was his work on secularism. This is all true. Yet, my contention is that Asad’s body of work can be also read as a continuous, and evolving, engagement with the question of imperial hegemony. A central thread connects much of Asad’s work from the 1970s till today, and that is an investigation of colonial and imperial powers. His work is exemplary of the double movement I mentioned above of thinking anthropology as both constructed by empire and constructing it as an object of investigation; a child of Western imperialism which can help us shed light on its workings. Talal Asad’s early work, which I will discuss in the first part of this essay, is a sustained critical engagement with the question of how anthropological concepts refract colonial power relations. In his later work, which I discuss in the essay’s second part, Asad articulates a singular anthropological conceptualization of empire. Asad’s understanding of imperial powers resonates with much of the series’ proposals for de-centering of investigations of empire, while also significantly departing from them in his articulation of an anthropological yet non-ethnographic conceptualization of empire.
II
Asad’s distinctive approach to articulating the relationship of anthropology to colonialism, which was developed in the early 1970s in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973), was not the first to broach the subject. It came in the wake of a disciplinary moment of reckoning and in conversation with it. The successive waves of decolonization in the Third World and continuous imperial interventions economically and militarily, such as the U.S. war on Vietnam, shook the discipline. Kathleen Gough (1968) opened her paper, “Anthropology and Imperialism,” originally presented at the southwestern branch of the American Anthropological Association in March 1967, with a statement which sounds uncannily contemporaneous today: “Recently,” Gough relates, “a number of anthropologists and anthropology students have complained that cultural and social anthropology have failed to tackle significant problems of the modern world” (12). Even though anthropologists have worked in “conquered societies,” for more than a century, Gough adds, “we have virtually failed to study Western imperialism as a social system, or even adequately to explore the effects of imperialism on the societies we studied” (19).
Anthropology’s successive inward turns to home in on its multiple modes of entanglement with imperial and colonial power have a long history, which seek to negotiate the tension between the discipline’s authoritative knowledge claims about the world and the unfolding events in the world. We have to remind ourselves Asad wrote, a few years after Gough and from his disciplinary location in Britain, that “Anthropology does not merely apprehend the world in which it is located, but that the world also determines how anthropology will apprehend it” (12). Notwithstanding the distinct inflections of the question of anthropology and empire in the UK and the US at the time, these different works were part and parcel of a critical current against the ethos of disciplinary professionalism and political detachment from the affairs of the world in the name of a value-free social science. Asad’s pithy remark to remember to dialectically relate discipline and world still rings true today.
III
The viability and relevance of the discipline, as an imperial offspring in a decolonizing world, and the responsibility of anthropologists in times of imperial wars, and their roles, were also vigorously debated. The question of colonialism and empire was multi-pronged. What exactly was the nature of discipline’s relationship to colonialism? How can anthropology apprehend empire and colonialism? What would a decolonized discipline look like? And what roles should anthropologists play in their respective societies in the ages of decolonization and development? Talal Asad’s distinctive take on some of these questions was articulated in different publications throughout the 1970s, which were primarily, but not exclusively, the result of collective endeavors he played a key role in steering.[1]
One of Asad’s signature, and at first glance counter-intuitive, interventions in this debate is to separate the question of colonialism from the ideological beliefs, political positions, and personal motives of the anthropologist (Asad, 1973). The expected consequence of Asad’s analytical dissociation of colonialism from the anthropological subject is to steer the conversation away from reducing the question to whether or not anthropologists acted as agents of empire. The more counter-intuitive upshot of this move is that the anthropologist’s anti-imperialist political commitments and their national/ethnic filiation do not constitute a guarantee against their work reproducing colonial assumptions. Anthropology’s colonial encounter in Asad’s conceptualization is less about the political views of anthropologists, their identities, and the instrumental use their work may have been put to, and more about how they crafted their own objects of inquiry. Who you are, what you believe in, and what motivates you, per Asad’s perspective, do not vouch for the kind of work you will end up producing. Focusing on them is not an analytically generative path to embark on to address anthropology’s colonial entanglements.
IV
Asad’s alignment of colonialism away from the subject (the anthropologist) and alongside the object (anthropological concepts) called for “a detailed critical analyses of specific representative work” (Asad 1975, 251). At a time when Palestine was absent in the critical disciplinary landscape which decried anthropology as a handmaiden to colonialism and the child of imperialism, Asad chose to analyze Abner Cohen’s ethnography of Palestinian villages in Israel (1965). Asad took Cohen’s monograph as representative, in Durkheim’s sense of a statistical average, of the discipline’s colonial encounter (Scott 2006, 268). His essay “Anthropological Texts and Ideological Problems: An Analysis of Cohen on Arab Villages in Israel,” (1975) was “the first to point at functionalist anthropology’s disregard for the colonial dimension of the Palestinian predicament” (Furani and Rabinowitz 2011, 481).
To grasp the distinctive character of Asad’s critique, it is worthwhile to take a small detour by way of the laudatory preface that Max Gluckman, the famous founder of the Manchester school of Anthropology, wrote to Cohen’s book,
Dr. Cohen’s field research for this book was undertaken in a very difficult situation for social-anthropological enquiry. The border region of Israel with any Arab state is full of tension and suspicion, and those feelings must affect relationships between people, either of the Arab community itself, or of that community and others. Cohen does not in his book discuss the problems he thus met in the field; but the richness of the data he deploys in his analysis testifies to the skill and delicacy of his basic work. I had the privilege of watching him at work in these Arab villages, and I can vouch for the sureness with which he moved among their inhabitants (Gluckman 1965, vii).
Cohen’s fieldwork was conducted in Palestinian villages under Israeli military rule less than two decades after the Palestinian Nakba (1948). The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and their dispossession are not explicitly mentioned by Gluckman, who had inaugurated his own research projects in Israel in 1963 (Shokeid 2004). Rather, he counterposes the Nakba’s aftermath, described as a situation saturated with tension and suspicion with the personal skill, delicacy, and sureness of the fieldworker. Gluckman’s observation of the observer, his own experience, is marshaled to attest to the ethnographer’s scientific credentials in this “very difficult situation” (v). “His [Cohen’s] command of Arabic, his knowledge of Islamic culture, and his skill in personal relations,” Gluckman writes, “obviously made him a welcome guest” (v). “Moreover,” Gluckman adds, “he filled this role while maintaining the same detached objectivity over delicate matters which he shows in his analysis of problems in this disturbed region” (v).
Gluckman’s preface authorizes the work, based on the witnessing of the anthropologist’s character, his credentials, and, perhaps more importantly, his detachment. Gluckman is implicitly saying to his potential readers: You may think that this work’s anthropological credentials are compromised by the fact that it has been conducted under military occupation but this is not the case.[2] The fieldworker’s character and credentials enabled him to carve out a space of hospitality amidst an atmosphere saturated by tension and suspicion, while his detached objectivity enabled him to rise above political polarizations. In a nutshell, the fieldworker manages to overcome the situation and produce a “fascinating sociological account of a sector of Arab life in Israel” (v).
True to his sidelining of the subject’s politics, Asad never mentions in his critique Cohen’s “personal role in the administration of Palestinian populations,” which he only discloses in an interview three decades later (Scott 2006, 259). In this critical review essay, Asad only alludes to the fact that its author “is very coy about the Military Administration, and attempts to minimize and obscure the degree of control exercised by it over the Arab village population. (Asad 1975, 271). We now know Max Gluckman’s “welcome guest” turned out to be more than a “detached” fieldworker. But regardless of the different hats Cohen may have worn in the occupied villages after the Nakba, what I would like to draw your attention to is the diametrically opposite strategies Gluckman and Asad adopt vis-à-vis respectively propping up Cohen’s ethnography and subverting it. Gluckman authorizes its anthropological credentials by marshaling the character traits of the fieldworker. He vouches for it based on his own eyewitness account of the skills of the fieldworker at work (the subject). On the other hand, Asad unmasks the work’s Zionist colonial assumptions by focusing exclusively on its conceptual architecture (the object), going so far as not to mention what he knew about the ethnographer’s political involvement with the Israeli forces of military rule.
Asad goes on to show how Cohen’s account rests on several omissions, silences, and simplifications of Palestinian history. For instance, he notes that there is “nothing on the massive flow of European Jews into the country, or the purchase of land by Zionist cultivators. . . There is silence on the paramilitary and economic support given by the Jewish settlers to the British Mandate Government in its suppression of the Arab peasant rebellion” (Asad 1975, 257). Having said that, Asad does not stop at underscoring the ideological distortions produced by Cohen’s silencing of the past. While revealing the erasures at work in a text is a noteworthy critical move, Asad goes beyond it. He convincingly shows how this selective history gains its coherence in Cohen’s work from the latter’s main preoccupation, “the definition of Arab ethnicity in Israel” (258). “Cohen’s history,” Asad writes, “is thus ideological history (not a history of ideology) in the sense that it reconstitutes elements of the Palestinian past in terms of the imputed cultural categories of the Israeli Arab present.” “It responds,” he adds “to the unspoken question: what is the political identity of Israeli Arabs? What gives them their sociological unity?” (258).
Ethnicity is the anthropological answer to Cohen’s ideological question. In this particular case, it takes the form of Cohen’s recourse to the concept of hamula (patrilineal clan) as “the traditional form,” of Israeli Arab organization. It posits, Asad notes, the ethnic group as an “autonomous subject” and postulates “the authority of a shared order as the ultimate form of social reality” (275). Anthropological theory qua ethnicity risks evacuating both conflict and historical transformations, especially “when it is used to assert an unmediated social unity where in reality there is merely a moment in the development of contradictory forces” (275). In this case, anthropological theory marshaled by the fieldworker erases the Palestinians, the Nakba and the settler colonial structure they came to inhabit by casting them as a transhistorical ethnic group subject to the anthropologist’s theories about continuity and change.
Asad’s characteristic distancing of the subject—consciousness, motives, experience, interpersonal skill—from his conceptualization of anthropology’s entanglement with colonial and imperial powers is also marshaled to underscore that an ideological critique is not synonymous with a moralizing one. “When I describe Abner Cohen’s attitude as ideological,” he writes, “I am not moralizing about his alleged lack of concern for the oppressed . . . I am simply pointing to his theoretical standpoint in its relation to a real confrontation of unequal power” (276). Cohen is therefore not accused of producing subjective, biased, knowledge. Rather, the ideological in Asad’s reading resides precisely in how the modes of anthropological objectivity, i.e. anthropological concepts and theory, erase the structures of domination and reproduce the categories of ideological, Zionist in this particular case, political practice.
V
Asad’s marshaling of history and political economy to criticize anthropological notions of culture and ethnicity in the 1970s came hand in hand with a critical stance towards the centrality of fieldwork in the discipline’s definition of itself, and with propping up the authority of its representations, as we just saw in Gluckman’s preface to Cohen’s monograph. As he was calling into question the undergirding assumptions of colonial anthropology, Asad criticized the fetishization of the fieldworker’s experience, highlighting the empiricist assumptions subtending them. Instead, he drew his readers’ attention to the fact that social life is not only a matter of social meanings that can be explored through fieldwork. For instance, modes of production, class structures, and historical structures, Asad noted, are not “slices of social reality. They are not ‘true objects’ of human experience”(Asad 1979, 618). To grasp their logic which is different from one of “specific human intentions, of specific human languages, and of specific forms of human understanding” (618), we would need to understand anthropology as a discipline of inquiry which is not reducible to ethnography.
This critique of the centrality of fieldwork will accompany Asad in the subsequent decades as he moved away from the critique of colonial anthropology and embarked on fashioning an anthropology of empire. In the mid-1990s, Asad reactivates his early critiques, noting that while fieldwork was initially justified on the basis that the societies anthropologists studied were “small,” and “simple,” it ended up limiting their “object of study” (Asad 1994, 57). This limited perspective resulted in the exclusion of “spatio-temporal complexities,” that could not be directly observed in the field. For instance, Asad adds, “The systematic force of European economic, military, and ideological powers in non-European regions was, and still is, often conceptualized as being external to locally observable discourse and behavior or as being an abstract system having little to do with the belief and conduct of people ’on the ground’” (58). An anthropology of empire in Asad’s understanding cannot equate the discipline to one of its methods—fieldwork. Sticking to the local and experiential character of ethnographic encounters is not enough to grasp the radical restructuring of the world by imperial powers.
Dr. Fadi A. Bardawil is Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Trained as a cultural anthropologist (Ph.D. Columbia University, 2010), his work also draws from, and engages questions arising from, critical theory, global intellectual history, and postcolonial theory. His research explores the different relationships cultural production (creating and thinking), political practice (acting) and generational dwelling (living) entertain in different sites (Global North/South). Bardawil has conducted most of his ethnographic and historical research in Lebanon. Having said that, in analyzing the archive of critical Arabic thought, which has been produced in multiple languages (predominantly Arabic, French, English), in different geographical sites, and in conversation with multiple intellectual traditions his research moves beyond methodological nationalism and monolingualism. His book Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation focuses on how the 1960s Arab New Left addressed the question of mediation between theory and practice. The book moves beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony and unidirectional notions of translation. It does so by engaging in ‘fieldwork in theory,’ which not only sheds light on how theory is produced, translated, and put to use, but also on how it seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. By excavating the long-lost archive of the Arab New Left the book also rethinks dominant topoi of contemporary Arab thought and stages a conversation between this tradition and postcolonial and western critical theories.
Notes
[1] Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973), which he edited and introduced, came out of a conference he organized at the University of Hull (1972). A few years later, he founded, alongside Roger Owen and the Hull reading group, Review of Middle East Studies (1975, 1976, 1978), which spearheaded the critique of Orientalist knowledges in the English-speaking academy.
[2] Gluckman writes,“For reasons of state security“their area has been under military rule” (vii).
Works Cited
Asad, Talal, ed. 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press.
—.1975. “Anthropological Texts and Ideological Problems: An Analysis of Cohen on Arab Villages in Israel.” Economy and Society 4(3): 251-282.
—. 1994. “Ethnographic Representation, Statistics and Modern Power.” Social Research 61(1): 55-88.
Furani, Khaled and Dan Rabinowitz. 2011. “The Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine.” Annual Review of Anthropology(40): 475–91.
Gluckman, Max. 1965. “Foreword.” In Arab Border Villages in Israel: A Study of Continuity and Change in Social Organization, Abner Cohen, v-vii. Manchester: Manchester, University Press.
Gough, Kathleen.1968. “Anthropology and Imperialism.” Monthly Review 19(11): 12-27.
Gupta, Akhil and Stoolman, Jessie. 2022. “Decolonizing US Anthropology.” American Ethnologist 124(4): 778-799.
Scott, David. 2006. “Appendix: The Trouble of Thinking: An Interview with Talal Asad.” In Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, edited by David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, 243-304. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Shokeid, Moshe. 2004. “Max Gluckman and the Making of Israeli Anthropology.” Ethnos 69(3): 387-410.