Anthropology's Colonial Entanglements

In *Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter*, Asad argued anthropology was born of an "unequal power encounter" between the West and the Third World, which gave Europeans privileged access to information about colonized peoples.

Logistical (steamships, district officers, pacification made fieldwork possible), institutional (colonial states funded useful research), and intellectual (evolutionism, craniometry, salvage paradigm shaped by empire).

The urge to record cultures 'before they vanish' — which treated colonial destruction as a natural process rather than the result of policy.

The 19th-century scheme savagery → barbarism → civilization gave a scientific-sounding justification for conquest.

Colonial-funded bodies that paid for studies of lineage, chieftaincy, and customary law — scholarship often excellent, but also a tool of indirect rule.

Cold War and Iraq/Afghanistan-era projects that turned ethnographic skill toward counterinsurgency; the AAA formally condemned HTS in 2007.

Human remains and sacred objects taken from graves and shrines — e.g. Sarah Baartman, the Berlin Charité, the Penn Museum's Morton Collection — with repatriation still disputed.

Malinowski's student at the LSE who wrote the ethnography *Facing Mount Kenya* (1938) and later led Kenya to independence.

Boas (against scientific racism), Kenyatta, Zora Neale Hurston, Leiris and Balandier (against French rule), plus Fanon and Césaire as anti-colonial thinkers now read as foundational.

A 1980s critique of representation (Clifford, Marcus, Rosaldo) that exposed the authority and politics embedded in how ethnographers write about others.