In the Greco-European lineage, it is possible to trace the first anthropological narratives back to antiquity, to Herodotus, for example. We see these narratives renewed by the experience of the New World, by authors such as Jean de Léry. However, if we consider “anthropology” in terms of a discipline, as a way of organizing knowledge in the enactment of a shared method, then the first attempts are instead found toward the end of the eighteenth century. In France, La Société des Observateurs de l’Homme, created in 1799, regulates the practice of collecting information about human beings through the writing of dissertations. Léon-François Jauffret specifies five directions for the discipline: the study of the “physiognomy of the diverse inhabitants of the Earth” (qtd. in Copans and Jamin, Aux origines 54); their differences from place to place (56); “comparative anthropology,” or the relation between “customs” and “practice” (68); the examination of “natural man” (61–62); and the analysis of the “mechanical formation of languages” (63). The very term anthropology conforms here to the long philosophical tradition of which Kant, with his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, during this same period, will be one of the last representatives. The knowledge of the character of nations and peoples was a lesser branch of (post)Aristotelian science that sought, above all, to establish the existence of invariable moral “types.” The new “observation of Man” utilizes comparison and links the description of ways and customs to indexes of physical forms. The last directions that Jauffret mentions concern man in his raw state, who would grow up outside of society, an ancient figure that Victor of Aveyron (aka “the wild boy of Aveyron”) helped to revive.1
This discipline trying to establish itself bears a direct relation to exploration and colonization, as the libido sciendi (Augustine’s famous “desire for knowledge”) is at the very least increased by the discovery of “other people.” Joseph-Marie Gérando writes the Considérations sur les diverses méthodes à suivre dans l’observation des peuples sauvages (The Observation of Savage Peoples) in order to compensate for the faulty tradition of unorganized and biased travel narratives. It is time, he assures his readers, to “observe” man and to be satisfied no longer with dilettantism or prejudice. By means of the professionalism of the narrative, a field of knowledge will be constructed that will piece together the mosaic of the human species. For the dawning of scientific desire to occur, the first shock of encountering the savage was thus necessary, followed by the frustration with a literature that has too narrow a focus. This rather schematic history of the need for disciplinary organization is what is presupposed at the outset of this quest for knowledge. In the aftermath of these proclamations, the “observation” in question will progressively relativize and marginalize the problem of “natural man.” It goes without saying, however, that the term “savage,” applied both to distant tribes and to the wild boy of Aveyron, signals the potential (and altogether logical) inclusion of the “natural” in the “primitive.” As for languages, their history and function will be brought back into the vast pattern of anthropological description. These internal displacements will then allow two essential branches of the field to appear, which mark the development of the discipline in France and elsewhere. On one side, there is the study of physical traits (heredity, races, inherent capacities); on the other, we have the analysis of what is produced by people (objects, customs, practices).
Throughout the nineteenth century, “anthropology” often designates the first path, whereas “ethnography” or “ethnology” most frequently refers to the second. It is true that in France scholars often assembled around the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle and its collections. It is Paul Broca who founded the Société d’Ethnographie. If the emphasis is on comparative anatomy and hereditary systems, then the understanding of human systems still remains to be seen. One member of this group, Clémence Royer, the high priestess of “Aryan” superiority, uses human remains, artifacts, and even linguistic changes to reveal the migration of populations.2 This method of comparing physical objects and elements (or practices and languages) is still active today in paleoanthropology, an area into which almost all of Broca’s former discipline from the nineteenth century has now withdrawn. The Revue d’anthropologie, at first an emanation of the society founded by Broca, has appeared continuously since 1890. Without an explicit critical return to its past, it has generally engineered this relocation in the direction of prehistory, where it prolongs procedures that have become suspect when applied to more recent periods.
Physical anthropology, then, was not necessarily so distant from the social, although its determinism was immediately contested. In 1860 Broca will affirm that “people should stop believing that there is the least connection between the scientific question and the political question. The difference of origins in no way implies the idea of the subordination of the races” (Recherches sur l’hybridité 663). Moreoever, Clémence Royer is often taken to task for her attachment to causality in discussions and in her presentations. Anténor Firmin, a Haitian and a member of this very society, will write his essay De l’égalité des races humaines in 1855 as a “positive anthropology.” For him, races exist, but behavior does not proceed naturally from them. Nonetheless, despite all of Firmin’s efforts, the dominant tendency among the anthropologists who welcomed him was the declaration of a fundamental racial inferiority. Broca refutes the use of science by politics, in other words, the legitimating of exploitation (primarily slavery) by using supposedly objective data. He does this in the name of the independence of research. Yet this refusal does not mean that his discoveries are inimical to the notion of natural inferiority. On the contrary, it is the (political and scientific) dogma of “humankind” (Broca, Recherches sur l’hybridité 654) that authorizes him to promptly put the species into a hierarchy: “After this profession of faith, we will be able to say that the physical structure of the Negro is, in a certain sense, halfway between that of the European and that of the ape” (503).
It is not necessary here to keep examining the connections between racism and scientific discourses. I mentioned these encounters in the first part of this book, and there are many other works that detail this fact. I provide these examples here simply to mark a French specificity. Associated from the outset with comparative anatomy, and regularly solicited by it, the discipline of ethnography will nonetheless develop at a distance from it. In the tradition of Buffon, physical anthropology will pay close attention to the inherited differences that distinguish man from animal, as well as the species within each kingdom. This branch of the discipline will also show interest in monsters (teratology) and in corporeal deformations produced by society (for example, the museum’s collection of conical skulls). Colonization is neither the only origin nor the sole limit for these studies. However, they do accommodate colonization very well, as the racial hierarchies demonstrate. The gallery of comparative anatomy in Paris still displays, as of 2011—despite recent “corrections” that have been made—a series of four “cranial casts,” of decreasing size, presenting the cast of a “Tasmanian” skull between those of a “normal” white man and a “dwarf known by the name of Bébé,” followed by that of a “20-year-old idiot.”3 The implication is quite obvious. From this point of view—metrical—physical anthropology joins the colonial morality of enslavement and total domination. Broca was by no means naïve: if he prohibited an appropriation of the discipline as a tool of political legitimization, his ironic mention of a “profession of faith” proves that he also knows how to act in the political field.
Because it develops at a distance from the anthropology of the museum, French ethnography will for a time lose interest in Man in general. Gérando’s “savage peoples” will become the object of its obsession. Scientific documentation and scholarly expeditions are the tributaries of colonial expansion (of the nation or of other powers). Marcel Mauss, the great reformer of the discipline, takes stock of the situation in 1913, when France seems to be lagging behind the United States, Great Britain, Holland, and Germany. Among the English, “in every place they have colonized, there was at least one intelligent administrator, some zealous missionary, a colonist, voyager, or scholar who could collect, observe, publish” (Mauss, “L’ethnographie en France,” in Oeuvres 397). Monographs and objects are the products of colonization—who would be surprised by this? The “standstill” of anthropological knowledge in France is really a result of the loss of “colonies after Napoléon I” (404), difficulties encountered by the missions, the “decline of the spirit of adventure in our country”—in addition to the permanent “inertia” of the university (405). French ethnography should therefore be the science of the empire “extra muros,” and the reflection of “France, a great scientific power, and a great colonial power” (405). Mauss certainly wields the argument of greatness with skill when he asks the state to institutionalize ethnology. It is striking that Mauss, who took a political position on the socialist Left, never denounced the empire. In his work as a journalist, one finds instead the same comparison with England, where he reveals that “in terms of external politics and colonialism, the French bourgeoisie has been inferior to its task” (Ecrits politiques 239).4 Mauss, the central figure of the new ethnography in France, lodged his discipline in republican colonialism. He was directed to do this, not merely on the basis of an individual choice, but because “ethnography, the discipline of so-called primitive peoples” (395), had a duty to be an offspring of the colony.
In the United States, the approximately contemporary counterpart of Mauss is Franz Boas, who is inscribed in a different disciplinary formation. Metrical anthropology dominates to such a degree that it will morph into an invasive pseudo-scientific discourse on race. Knowing whether blacks—and more secondarily, Indians—are naturally inferior beings becomes an obsession in a country reconstructing itself after the Civil War and perfecting its modes of segregation. Boas vindicates a “general anthropology,” as he indicates in the title of the great manual he directs in 1938. The study of physical attributes enters this work without contestation, but in order to clearly establish that human societies are not determined by biological inheritance. In 1911, Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man is built on the recognition of race or fixed corporeal characteristics and the refusal to draw conclusions about the accomplishments of peoples. Race is distinct from culture. Anthropological thought must function to bring about the death of “race prejudice.” What the case of the primitive teaches us, and moreover prompts us to verify, is that the taste for “licentiousness,” “shiftless laziness,” the “lack of initiative” (Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man 253), all those faults with which black people have been rebuked, are themselves the “expression of social conditions” (271), and not of racial conditioning. Boas thus accepts physical anthropology in his method so that he may better focus on the study of cultures. Versus the move toward French autonomy, American anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth century will proceed through internal differentiation. Yet metrics are depreciated on principle. Once the evidence of the nondeterminism of race is established, mainstream American anthropological practice will no longer need to revive the biological in a grand gesture of conjuration and will devote itself exclusively to the examination of social practices.
Two figures will consequently haunt Boas’s work: the Native American and the African American. In this primitivist phase that marks ethnology, the “Indian” will become Boas’s somewhat unique “field” (the Kwiakutl, Dakota, Tlingit, and Inuit nations, in particular). Despite the modifications that the presence of Westerners made to Native American ways of life, it is rather the African American who will serve, for Boas, as the primary example of a former primitive transplanted into an external civilization. In both cases, the colonized person is anthropology’s other. This does not mean that the scholar must become the accomplice of domination, but that he can scarcely exist without domination already having been established.
Michel Foucault makes a rather tepid point when he remarks, in Les mots et les choses, that anthropology is linked to a temporal state of “our culture,” adding that “this is not to say, of course, that the colonial situation is indispensable to ethnology” (388). However, modern ethnology is a discipline whose birth was “allowed by colonization.” Allowed by historical possibility— in this case, a valid license was granted by a power that was happy to make use of statistics, documents, and interpretations: such is “the interest of the administration and that of science” (Mauss, Oeuvres 428). Recent studies have shown that scholarly practice in France and Germany inherited attitudes adopted from travel narratives, which they sometimes did not even admit.5 Yet we are not speaking about a legacy here; insistently, ethnology was formed and reformed in relation to the colony.
From the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme to Marcel Mauss, the discipline of anthropology finds its principal terrain in colonial territory. Later, as Benoît de l’Estoile has clearly shown, the height of colonial propaganda that was the Exposition of 1931 in Paris “plays an important role in the process of the crystallization” of knowledge (“Des races non pas inférieures,” 393, 455). Then in the wake of the wars for independence, French ethnology will become more critical. The discourse is cast into radical doubt by those who practice it. In the countries where the method had been formed from the reality of the colony, the 1960s and 1970s will initiate a great trial against the imperialism of Western science.6 At the same time, this virulent accusation has not, to my knowledge, sounded the death knell for anthropology. On the contrary, this crisis has given rise to attempts to make the discipline’s epistemology more complex. The scholar took hold of the history of her science and reinforced the reflective examination of her commentaries. At the same time, a more or less moderate skepticism spread. Relativist ethnology is in itself ambivalent. It tends to focus on the situation of the observer and move toward the narrative (or the documentary) of literary (or cinematographic) fiction. Or else it confounds the difference between societies with an absolute opacity existing between different groups. This last attitude is, alas, dominant in current French practice today (that of the CNRS in particular) and serves a technocratic politics of expertise, which recuses comparison in the name of the irreducible—even though one only ever compares the incomparable.7
Whatever we make of this contemporary intermediary state of the discipline, in one way or another anthropology did indeed accompany historical decolonization, discovering problems anew and burying old ideas, while maintaining many of its practices. Here again, the scholarly discourse experienced a renewal in the colonial experience (its fall, in this case). The collapse of a political system did not in fact bring about the demise of its consideration. And it might even be said that colonization has never been so explicitly present in ethnography as it has been since the end of the empires. Already an epistemic foundation and a condition of historical existence, colonialism has also become an entirely separate object of study. The anthropology of Java or of Cambodia practiced by James Siegel or Ashley Thompson sheds light on the colonial relations that these societies have deformed in a productive way. The names of the researchers testify to a larger will not to conceal the colonial trace, out of fear of heading back toward a complicit silence. The personal and collective positions, for and against, cannot obliterate even today the fact that anthropology has always been constitutively linked to the event of the colony.
This link has nothing to do with the situation of geography, history, or philosophy, disciplines that empire has sometimes passed through without serving as the sole resource. That the method established might contribute to the study of ancient societies, for example, is not contradictory. When Claude Calame and Florence Dupont or their local equivalents look at Greeks or Latins anthropologically, their objective is to counter the colonial West (from the Renaissance to the contemporary moment) by separating it from the classical age it had equipped itself with to establish its supremacy. The colony is there; the value granted to it varies.
I will not speculate about a future where anthropology would renew itself far from empire. I doubt that this is possible. Even the “anthropology of contemporary worlds” proposed in Marc Augé’s Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains, to which I will return shortly, starts from the assertion that “every individual today is aware that he belongs to the same planet” (dust jacket). This “today” refers to the phrase of globalization, which has been thousands of years in the making, and whose primary statements have been assembled by Laurent Ferri in his anthology.8 In the context of a rereading of the disciplinary past, this sentiment of unity, these difficult encounters also decidedly evoke the “discovery” of the “new” world by the old.
No futurology, then, but rather a question. In what way does the defining link between colony and ethnology allow the latter not only to speak the former, but to speak it better than all other scholarly discourses? This interrogation, let us immediately note, concerns a hypothetical discourse returned to life (un éventuel discours redivivus), after having demonstrated the validity of its critical method. What Lévy-Bruhl says about the primitive served the performative elaboration of the Western “we” at work in colonialism. Ultimately, interpreting possession (colonial or otherwise) ethnographically often seemed to fall short. I have indicated these difficulties, which are related to rationalist exposition. It is now clear that they take on a particular meaning in a discipline born from colonization. More is needed than a reversal of values, or the dogmas of cultural difference (which, we have seen in passing, have not always run counter to domination). The indispensable critical return to scholarly practices must occur, but not so that one may be easily exonerated. Likewise, to say that everyone was colonial in the past will not do, since ethnography was too closely linked to empire, and anticolonialism did not first appear just yesterday. I also have the impression that the rereading of the past by anthopologists often serves to establish the truth of the contemporary discourse: we recognize past errors, thus we will not commit them. However, historical knowledge must be activated in this case. Criticism fails when it is dogmatized. I welcome this precaution, preferring that criticism become frozen neither in the position of a prior principle (after which, all will be remade as in the past), nor as a moral doctrine (that would censor all comparison in advance).
In sum, anthropology, at least during the first part of its disciplinary history, spoke the colonial language all too often. By doing so, it did not say very much about a phenomenon its descriptions evaded. For Mauss, Michel Leiris, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, colonization is both what allows ethnology to take place and what, once brought to term, will prohibit it (in the dissolution of ancestral cultures). The colony as condition of possibility does not enter the field of study but instead remains outside the frame. As a deadly entity, the colony must be erased if one is to render the force of the primitive or the virtue of the savage—even if it means reintroducing it as a countermodel to the West—absolutely separated, absolutely opposed to it. Theoretical treatises have the task of reconstituting a civilization independent from the political situation that makes it visible (Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie structurale or Leiris’s La possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar). Narratives, on the other hand (Tristes tropiques, L’Afrique fantôme), take on the role of evoking the concerns and phantasms of the observer, the disappearance of the noble savage, and the antagonism of worlds. Through its primary practice (the treatise) and its secondary practice (the narrative), the discipline in its golden age is thus incapable of speaking the colony as copresence. This is only logical, inasmuch as ethnography was essentially formed for “savage” peoples. The work of Alfred Métraux in Haiti certainly represents one of the rare exceptions. The inhabitants of the island are in effect considered indigenous enough to enter into the disciplinary lens, without it being a question of completely obliterating the production of a (post)colonial meaning. The exceptions, however, are not the last word in this story.
After the epistemological crisis linked to decolonization, anthropology has sometimes closed itself off into what I call its standard state. I do not want to insist too much on this point, but it is obvious that this supposedly reverential attitude is of the same order as the former ensauvagement, except that it abandons the comparison of differences, the very thing, despite everything else, that was the strong point of Franz Boas, Marcel Mauss, Ruth Benedict, even Leo Frobenius. Contrary to the Third-Worldist myth, the refutation of ethnocentrism is not something won during the struggles for independence. It is inherent to ethnography: Gérando was already bemoaning the excess of “analogies drawn from our own customs” (qtd. in Copans and Jamin, Aux origines 79); Mauss encourages the colonial administrators to write, for they are quite “free from prejudices” (Oeuvres 431). The critique of ethnocentrism is thus perfectly compatible with universalism, even with the acquiescence to domination. Lévi-Strauss, in his major text, evokes the “doubling of the observer” in relation to the “indigene”: by objectifying the latter, the former separates from himself, both as an individual mixed with the people he is studying, and as a man bearing the possibility of alternative cultures (“Introduction” XXVII-XXIX). The scholar participates and takes his distances; he recognizes himself in his object and must free himself from it. A “fragmentation” of anthropology results, which then is only equal to the “diversity of ways and customs” (XXIX-XXX). Thus does Lévi-Strauss sketch the outlines of a “new humanism” (XXIX). This quest is no longer fashionable for standard research, but its description nonetheless reminds us that fragmentation is no guarantee against unification. The classical ethnographers did not believe in the “immediate” unity of humankind, without which they would not have engaged in their profession. By prohibiting the bridging of differences, one certainly avoids doctrines that served as the armature of the duty to civilize. One also avoids asking troubling questions, while offering a sacrifice to the logic of research specialization, the most effective way to stifle thought. I am not attempting to take a position for humanism, old or new. I am simply pointing out that merely bypassing a problem is not defensible. And I would add, of course, that the dogma of the radical insularity of peoples can have no relation to the colonial encounter.
Fortunately, the discipline does not stop its babbling. We have just discussed the numerous reflexive attempts to look back at the scholarly tradition or elucidate the dynamics of modifications (whether or not they are part of the transfer of colonial power). Yet the specular return to the past most often relies on a history of fields of knowledge, which intersects with ethnography but does not limit itself to it. Studies that focus on the internal and external alterations of the discipline do in fact say something about the colony, despite possible reservations (such as my skepticism regarding the heuristic contribution of the category of métissage). The question, however, is whether these words come from the discipline in its organization or from individual positions. If we do not want to strike from the record the entire (ancient and contemporary) history of ethnology, the value of words can be gauged only within the particular discourse that made them heard in the first place. Today it would thus be strange to assign anthropology the task of speaking the colony. Real encounters will only ever be accidental. Marc Augé has perhaps laid the foundations for a new reformation. If this is the case, ethnology would once again need the colony in order to reinvent itself—but it would leave the colony outside the field of study for the most part. In Le sens des autres: Actualité de l’anthropologie (A Sense for the Other: The Timeliness and Relevance of Anthropology), Augé in effect rereads the anthropological passion for the discovery of alterity. He takes a position against the ordinary approach, which considers other people as identical—and against the synthetism that would find the same at the heart of the other. This reflexive homage to scholars from the past serves a methodical revival, where “different worlds” (des mondes) are recognized as being “contemporary.” This declared coexistence of universes that had been considered discrete up until now is postcolonial, in the chronological sense of the term. The ethnographer can take the metro or cross the Jardin du Luxembourg to do work there as one would in Black Africa, since colonization (as a historical phenomenon or catalyst for epistemic critiques) has created a shared tempo. Contemporaneity is due to the closing of the time of the colonies. A necessary past, a sign of the present, but surely not an object for the future of a discipline. Here, too—here finally—anthropology does not enjoy any natural facility of expression. Its fixation with colonization, and then with decolonization, does not make ethnology the privileged spectator of this double experience.
Does so-called indigenous anthropology change the lay of the land? Nothing could be less certain. First, we must come to terms regarding the name. If it is a question of admitting that a colonized person, or a descendant of colonized persons, who does ethnology is an indigenous anthropologist, then the expression would primarily have a descriptive value. In a given political field, one could convince a country to equip itself with indigenous ethnologists in order to encourage university research, stop the flow of brain drain, thus privileging the national elite, and so on. Yet in what way would the indigenous ethnologists be functionally practicing a different ethnology? Does the hypothetical rift between the socially demarcated origins of (colonized) participants and the historically majoritarian origins of the discourse (the colonial powers) suddenly create a new epistemological zone? Assuredly not, since we have recognized the possession at work in colonization, and in particular, its tendency to place surprising words in the mouths of the enchanted.
The interval opened by the indigenous population in anthropological practice becomes effective only through construction; it is absolutely not a given. No more so than is the apparent belonging of the autochthonous observer to his own terrain. His work decenters him, exiles him in advance. Let us try to imagine, however, an indigenous anthropology that would construct its speech—even if polemically or destructively—in relation to the collective organization of a discourse of knowledge, and which would move beyond simple ethnic or national identifications. The necessary critique of usages can be articulated with a reformulation of the disciplinary practice, in the direction of indigenous fields of knowledge that had been minimized, denied, or attacked. Linda Tuhiwai Smith similarly proposes, in Decolonizing Methodologies, an approach to the Maori people by themselves, after a critical acquisition of modes of understanding that she qualifies as Western. Even in this exemplary case of a double immersion in both colonial discourse and indigenous traditions, deliberately constructive and methodically interrogative, the goal remains to not speak the colony. It is even more important, for strategic reasons, to denounce the colony vehemently, in hopes of putting an end to it, and then to restore a supposedly native understanding—but which is spoken in a conceptually mixed apparatus. Which signifies, yet again, that reformation needs the colony, needs to not render its advent, in this case to benefit an indigenization, that is, a fiction of renaturalization, and the erection of a counterimage. After all, before becoming the dictator of haïtianité, Jean-François Duvalier wrote numerous essays of indigenous ethnography.9
We are a long way from any real displacement of the meaning of ethnology. Beginning in the 1970s, with L’autre face du royaume, V. Y. Mudimbé will seek to move beyond spontaneous equivalences and to generate a revolution of knowledge practices. It is symptomatic that as his research progressed, Mudimbe came to connect the parts of knowledge in different ways. In the beginning, he relativized the importance of ethnology as such, a “discourse mired in an order that founds it and explains it” (L’autre face 9). Mudimbé departed from a Marxist, schematic, and illusory orthodoxy, where “ideology” reveals the processes of alienation. Yet there was also something else, which the following reveals: “Ethnology is but a pretext used to launch an interrogation, namely how Africans might carry out, in their own land, a theoretical discourse that would produce a political practice” (10).
Ethnology has been a pre-text in that before the invention of francophonie, it gave us the first texts in French (or any other colonial language) about Africans. French also presented itself as the theoretical language for colonized peoples—history, geography, and economy did not enjoy the same conceptual reputation and counted fewer converted philosophers among their ranks. The attempt to transform scholarly practice might therefore be rightly said to begin with anthropology, and it had nothing to gain by stopping there. As his work developed, Mudimbé was led to traverse once again fields other than anthropology. “Interdisciplinarity,” a movement “opening up the contribution of other disciplines for us,” becomes a condition of divesting anthropology of the colonial, and also of ridding it of “the order of repression” in the disciplines (Mudimbé, L’odeur du père 171). If the objective is “to undo the norms of an epistemological universe inherited from colonization” (171), then the metamorphosis of anthropology is ineluctably the prelude to its disappearance. In which case, anthropology would have nothing more to say about the colonies than the extinction of its own voice.10