Assembling an Anthropological Actor: Anthropological Assemblage and Colonial Government (original) (raw)
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Introduction: Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities
Tony Bennett, Ben Dibley & Rodney Harrison (2014) Introduction: Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities, History and Anthropology, 25(2): 137-149. DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2014.882838, 2014
This special issue contributes to an emerging literature on the materialities of colonial government by considering the changing relations between practices of data collecting, styles of anthropological knowing and modes of governing which target the conduct of colonial and metropolitan populations. Drawing on comparative studies from Australia; the Australian administered territory of Papua; France; French Indo-China; New Zealand; North America and the UK; the papers consider the implications of different forms of knowledge associated with practices of collecting—anthropology, archaeology, folklore studies, demography—in apparatuses of rule in various late nineteenth and early twentieth-century contexts. This introduction outlines the rationale for the volume and elaborates the concept of “anthropological assemblage” which helps focus the authors' explorations of the socio-technical agencements which connected museum, field, metropolis and colony during this period. In doing so, it points towards a series of broader themes—the relationship between pastoral power and ethnographic expertise; the Antipodean career of the Americanist culture concept; and the role of colonial centres of calculation in the circulation of knowledge, practices of collecting and regimes of governing—which suggest productive future lines of inquiry for “practical histories” of anthropology.
Australian Anthropology in Its Colonial Context
Histories of Anthropology, 2023
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND The Australian continent and the island of New Guinea played a major role in the development of the discipline of anthropology and ethnographic practice well before their professionalization. 1 It was after the British Crown had a solid footing on the coastal areas of Australia that the 1 When the term 'New Guinea' is used in this essay without any further quali er, I refer to the territories of the contemporary nation-state of Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian province of West Papua. Given the complex history of colonial domination of New Guinea, in this chapter I use the historically appropriate names when referring to the various colonial territories. A previous Italian version of this chapter was co-authored with Franca Tamisari in a volume in press. I acknowledge this initial collaboration with Franca, whose expertise on Australian Aboriginal ethnography has informed some of the views I express here. I am solely responsible for any shortcomings.
Anthropology in Papua New Guinea: History and Continuities
2010
The aim of this paper is to explore the history of anthropology in Melanesia with a particular attention to the territory of the current independent state of Papua New Guinea. Author analyzes the history of the anthropological research in Papua from the late 19th century until the sixties. The author distinguishes three phases of history of anthropology in Papua: a phase of the first anthropological contact in the late 19th century, a phase of the nidation until the middle of twentieth century and a phase of the gold age of the anthropology in Papua, from the middle to the sixties of the twentieth century. Author argues that the fieldworks conducted in Papua changed the face of anthropology in a profound way. In the last part of the paper author summarizes main achievements and progress in anthropology of Melanesia in the framework of anthropology as such.
Before the Field: Colonial Anthropology Reassessed
The introduction to this special issue argues for a reappraisal of colonial anthropology in the broader historiography of British anthropology. It challenges the continuation of the centre–periphery model that has positioned colonial ethnographers and their Indigenous authorities as awkward, peripheral figures in the history of the discipline, and posits that, while the evolutionist tomes of the 19th century are now of purely historical value, the colonial texts, permeated as they are with Indigenous presence, remain relevant for Aboriginal people and current anthropology. In particular the introduction suggests that the impetus for British scholars to set out for 'the field', subsequently defined as the proper site of anthropological endeavour, came from the challenges to evolutionism by colonial ethnogra-phers and Indigenous authorities working in situ and in close contact. This special issue was born from a two day seminar at Deakin University in 2013 titled 'Before the Field'. It brought together a number of historians working in Australia on colonial anthropology prior to the Federation of the Australian colonies in 1901 and, in most instances, prior to the foundation of anthropology as a university based discipline. Therefore our research was based before 'field-work' and the affiliated journeying of the specialised researcher to 'the field' became the principal form of anthropological endeavour. Through this periodisation and lens we sought to understand both the specificity of colonial ethnogra-phy and its place in the historiography of British anthropology. We examined the traffic in queries, evidence and ideas between Britain and its colonies and the problems of the centre-periphery model of science that had been applied to these histories, rendering Britain the dominant partner and the peripheral colonies therefore subservient to the parent state, the metropole – an issue first identified in relation to Australian anthropology by Howard Mor-phy (1998: 26–27). We heard how theories from Britain were tested, ignored, expanded on, or found wanting in the colonies, and how field practices developed in colonial sites were largely ignored in the metropole. We explored how claims of authenticity and authority from colonial practitioners, based on their experience of Aboriginal people in various conditions of contact with explorers, settlers, missionaries and government agents, were sent as challenges to both British theorists and colonial competitors. Finally, we historicised the very notion of 'the field' in the history of British anthropology and explored the power relations of site and centre in British theorising. Throughout the seminar, paper after paper claimed colonial anthropology challenged and disrupted British theories of Indigenous This special issue is dedicated to the memory of John Mulvaney, a remarkable and pioneering scholar in the history of anthropology in Australia whose work has inspired each of the following contributors.
Archaeology and the collection: tracing material relationships in colonial Papua from 1875 to 1925
Journal of Australian Studies, 2011
Australia has had a long and entangled history of engagement with Papua New Guinea and its peoples from the time of the earliest British and Australian explorations in the nineteenth century, through the period of colonial administration from 1902 to 1975, and continuing into the present day. One lasting outcome from the early period of these colonial engagements are the collections of ethnographic objects made by explorers, miners, traders, missionaries and government administrators in the course of their interactions with indigenous Papuans. The collections housed in Australian museums provide a different sort of narrative to that found in written documents. In contrast, they are a material archive that records in its physical properties and composition, traces of the kinds of cross-cultural interactions that occurred in the early days of the colony. They form a tangible legacy which documents how Papuans and Westerners alike used the exchange of objects to negotiate and create social relationships in a time of flux and uncertainty. The collections, the objects and their materialities not only inform us about what shaped Western collecting desires but also about how Papuan artefact producers and traders responded strategically and creatively to new opportunities for trade and exchange.
In 1929, Āpirana Ngata published an article titled "Anthropology and the government of native races in the Pacific". This would appear to confirm the link between anthropology and the rule of indigenous populations in New Zealand and its Pacific empire, but the evidence presented in this article suggests a more complex situation. This paper examines the "empirical anthropology" of Ngata and Peter Buck and the ways in which their activities reshaped the policy and practice of the Department of Native Affairs between 1920 and 1935, particularly through the notion of cultural "adjustments" or "adaptation". Archival research reveals that behind the activities of the Dominion Museum, the Polynesian Society and its Journal was a Māori-led body, the Board of Māori Ethnological Research, which redirected government collecting, research and publication from salvage to the maintenance and revival of Māori cultural heritage in the service of tribal social and economic development. Seen through the theoretical framework of assemblage theory, we can see how a malleable idea of culture was employed in social governance in quite different ways to the colonial governmentality at work in other settler colonies at this time. The paper argues that this form of "anthropological governance" effectively de-territorialized state institutions, thereby creating a distinctive space for the native exterior to the nation.
“I was not consulted”: A. P. Elkin, Papua New Guinea and the Politics of Anthropology, 1942-1950*
Australian Journal of Politics & History, 2008
With the threat of Japanese invasion the loyalty of indigenous peoples under Australian jurisdiction and administrative control was brought into question. Adolphus Peter Elkin, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, claimed anthropologists would be able to assist in the "best use of Aborigines" in the fight against the Japanese, for "unless they were told to the contrary by men [anthropologists] whom they understood and trusted, [Aborigines] would not see why they should not guide and help the Japanese".l He was similarly concerned about the effects of the Japanese and Australian military occupation on the "native mind" in Papua and New Guinea; "we must not underestimate the effect of this change. .. for the sake of our administration in the future".2 Research on the effects of war on indigenous people would help in the training of administrative officers for a postwar Papua and New Guinea3 The role of the anthropologist and anthropological knowledge was, in his opinion, crucial. To J. D. Cleland, chairman of the University of Adelaide's Board for Anthropological Research, he wrote anthropologists are being used at present more and more in the war as anthropologists. The Army and the administration require them for direct dealings with the native peoples and with the problems of the dmbilitation of native life. The Army authorities have also agreed that research into problems arising out of war situations and the war contacts is necessary.
Introduction: Locating the Colonial Subjects of Anthropology
Despite the initiative of George Stocking Jr. and others in the 19605, and the impressive amount of historical scholarship that has developed since, the historiography of anthropology is still marked by a certain "whig" interpretation. Its "principle of abridgment" (Stocking 1982:3) is to project the self-image of twentieth-century academic anthropology onto all ethnographic activities that played a role in the formation of the discipline. The history of anthropology therefore still concentrates largely on ideas, on the formation and background of the theories and methods that are supposed to constitute anthropology's core. For a large number of its practitioners, the "real" history of anthropology commenced only at the time that theoretical and research expertise were fused in the person of the professional fieldworker. This implies, more often than not, that ethnographic practices by nonprofessionals are measured against anachronistic standards, insufficiently set within their historical contexts, or written out of the discipline's history altogether. As a result, important moments in the development of anthropology are ignored. The following collection of essays aims to question this distinction between academic anthropology and other ethnographic practices and thereby to unsettle the comfortable boundary of professionalism that this distinction maintains around the former. We hope to do this by providing a number of examples of ethnographic practices under colonial rule, practices that suggest alternative interpretations of anthropological commonplaces in past and present: different genealogies of "fetishism," "virgin birth," or "Balinese character"; different constructions of the "native point of view" or the "field"; other, nonacademic roles for linguistics or anthropometry; and, as a result, more room for indigenous authorities, gatekeepers, and informants, for middlemen, and for traders, settlers, missionaries, and 2 Colonial Subjects colonial administrators, than is usually allowed for within disciplinary history. Since "practice" and "history" have been welcomed as twin pillars of anthropological theory since the 19805 (Ormer 1984), it is remarkable that such an approach toward the history of anthropology has not yet been developed systematically; that, in other words, reflexive theorizing by anthropologists has made rather less use of the notions of "practice" and "history" than Ortner's diagnosis would lead one to expect. This can at least partly be explained by the hierarchical relationship between "pure" and "applied" anthropology that has dominated the discipline since World War II. The very use of the term applied suggested the existence of a "pure" disciplinary core that was relatively autonomous from historical circumstance or practical use. In a review of anthropology outside the academy, Susan Wright has criticized such implicit hierarchies of "pure," ' applied," and "no longer" anthropologists, the latter being those who are trained as anthropologists but find employment outside the academy (1995). The latter were for quite some time assumed to be "lost to the profession," implying that the anthropological discipline and its identity were thought to be exclusively located within the academy. However, from the 19705 onward more and more anthropologists work in nonacademic settings, and their demands for representation on professional platforms are increasingly heard (Fluehr-Lobban 1991; Goldschmidt 1979-Wright 1995). The academic disavowal of practical application is, of course, an odd strategy of professionalization when compared to other professions. Medical doctors, lawyers, or psychologists do not lose their professional credentials when, after their academic studies, they start to work as general practitioners or therapists. In Anthropologyland, however-as in allied disciplines like sociology-those who are not exclusively preoccupied with the construction of academic knowledge, but are involved with its "application," are often considered a lesser breed of scholars. The implicit and, as Wright argues, unfounded assumption is that "applied" work does not lead to the higher-rated achievement of formulating theory (Wright 1995:72)-showing again that theory-formulation from something like clinical or experimental practice, as in medical or psychological therapy, is assumed to be impossible. If one starts from such an assumption, the history of anthropology can, indeed, be nothing but a history of ideas and methods. A historical perspective shows that this hierarchy of "pure," "applied," and "no longer" anthropologists has only recently become hegemonic: Malinowski's definition of "the average'practical' mnn" as someone incapable of good ethnography (1922:5) only became influential i. The distinction between strategy (implying a "proper" locus, or subject position outside tin' l.irgeled group) mid tactic (a bricolage of political calculations in which subject and target arc coeval) is gleaned from de Cerleau (iqH^:xix; for an application to the history of ethnography, sec Byrnes uyj-}). In this particular case, it is congruent with Foucault's distim lion between "discourse" and "discursive practice" (l97-:-oo). 2. For the rest of the discussion, see Di.imond n>yq; Clluekman 1974; Leach 1^174; and Sfholte 147.).