Reviews in Anthropology, Vol. 33, pp.

243–261
Copyright # 2004 Taylor & Francis Inc.
ISSN: 0093-8157 print
DOI: 10.1080=00938150490486418

Imagining Anthropology’s History

Herbert S. Lewis

Pels, Peter, and Oscar Salemink (Eds.). Colonial Subjects: Essays on the
Practical History of Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2000. vii þ 364 pp. including chapter references and list of contri-
butors and index. $29.95, paper.

Patterson, Thomas C. A Social History of Anthropology in the United

States. Oxford & New York: Berg, 2001. x þ 212 pp. including biblio-
graphy and index. $24.95, paper.

In 1968, when so much happened that began to reshape the academic world,
Kathleen Gough published her article on anthropology as the child and
handmaiden of colonialism (1968a, 1968b). It was the beginning of more
than one discourse that has flourished over the decades, in conjunction with
the wider projects of Marxist anthropology, deconstruction, critical and
cultural studies, and ‘‘the posts’’ in general. The two works reviewed in this
essay about the history of anthropology are very different from each other,
both in spirit and in what they tell us about the state of the historiography
of anthropology.
Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology is
a follow-up (almost a reprise) of an earlier collection (Pels & Salemink,
1994a) in which Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink set out to prove the case
for a fundamental and indissoluable association between colonialism and

HERBERT S. LEWIS (Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Ph.D. Columbia

University, 1963) has carried out field research in the West Indies, Ethiopia, and Israel. His
interests include political anthropology, African culture history, ethnicity, cultural change,
and the history of anthropology. His publications include A Galla Monarchy (University of
Wisconsin Press, 1965), After the Eagles Landed: The Yemenites of Israel (Waveland Press,
1989), ‘‘The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and Its Consequences’’ (American Anthro-
pologist 100(3), 716–731, 1998), ‘‘Boas, Darwin, Science, and Anthropology’’ (Current
Anthropology 42(3), 381–406, 2001), and the forthcoming book Oneida Lives.
Address correspondence to Herbert S. Lewis, Department of Anthropology, 1180 Obser-
vatory Drive, 5240 Social Science Building, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706. E-mail:
hslewis@wisc.edu

243
244 H. S. Lewis

anthropology by collecting a series of essays about ‘‘ethnography’’ in areas

under colonial rule.1 Their warrant is derived from Talal Asad, who con-
ceded that ‘‘it is a mistake to view social anthropology in the colonial era
as primarily an aid to colonial administration, or as the simple reflection
of colonial ideology’’ (1973, p. 18) and, furthermore, that ‘‘[t]he role of
anthropologists in maintaining structures of imperial domination has,
despite slogans to the contrary, usually been trivial’’ (Asad, 1991, p. 315).
But, Asad contends, this does not mean that anthropology may be excul-
pated of the charge; there is still an inescapable relationship: ‘‘The process
of European global power has been central to the anthropological task of
recording and analyzing the ways of life of subject populations’’ (1991,
p. 315). Pels and Salemink have taken up the task of demonstrating this.
They have a problem, however, because ‘‘disciplinary histories’’ of the
modern profession, of what professional anthropologists have actually done
and written, do not provide the requisite evidence of complicity. The editors
blame the histories: ‘‘Disciplinary history obscures the way in which
academic ethnography was linked to the construction of colonial and
neo-colonial societies through ethnographic practice’’ (Pels & Salemink,
1994b, p. 1). Therefore, ‘‘[I]n order to understand the historical relationship
between anthropology and colonialism, it is better to regard academic
anthropology as a specific instance of ethnographic practice than the other
way around’’ (Pels & Salemink, 1994b, p. 5). By considering everything that
colonial officials, travelers, missionaries, and other nonprofessionals wrote
about other people to be ‘‘ethnography,’’ they believe they can claim that
the practices of modern ethnographers must be derived from those of their
preprofessional predecessors.2 As Pels put it elsewhere, ‘‘The study of colo-
nialism erases the boundaries between anthropology and history or literary
studies, and between the postcolonial present and the colonial past. From
the standpoint of anthropology, it is also reflexive, addressing the colonial
use and formation of ethnography and its supporting practices of travel’’
(Pels, 1997, p. 163).
In other words, if they ignore the differences in all genres and erase all
differences of time, place, intent, and results, they can indict anthropology
through putative association with the actions and writings of very different
people, with very different backgrounds, aims, motivations, raisons d’etre,
understandings, and powers. If they conflate the practice of writing by a
slave trader in West Africa in 1709, a British administrator in India, a U.S.
army Indian fighter in Arizona in 1886, an anatomist in Central Australia
in 1896, and an anticolonial, antiracist, Boasian anthropologist in 1950,
they can connect the last one with the sins of all the former ones. And this
they attempt to do, calling their practice ‘‘historiography,’’ a discourse they
 Anthropology’s History 245

believe can and should be substituted for ‘‘ethnography’’ (Pels & Salemink,
1994b, pp. 19–26; after Thomas, 1991).3
They tell us that ‘‘knowledges arise from practice,’’ and the case studies
in this volume are intended to demonstrate ‘‘the colonial situations in which
anthropological knowledge was made,’’ as Nicholas Thomas says in an
encomium on the back of the book. ‘‘Colonial subjects’’ in the title refers,
not to those subjected to colonialism, but to the subjects that interested
colonial authorities, and the editors intend ‘‘to provide genealogies of
present-day anthropological practices, tracing them back to the subjects of
colonial ethnography’’ (back cover).
The book opens with a rambling, dense, and pretentious 52-page intro-
duction, very similar in intent and content to the introduction to their 1994
collection. Nine case studies, most of which have appeared elsewhere in the
same or very similar form—once, twice, or even three times—follow. The
first essay is by William Pietz, ‘‘The Fetish of Civilization: Sacrificial Blood
and Monetary Debt’’:

As my title indicates, this opposition between savage fetishism’s medium of sacrificial blood and
modern civilization’s one of monetary debt is the theoretical subject of this essay. By examining
certain historical concepts of fetishism and of debt, I want to explore the issue thematized by
this contrast: the value of human life. My approach is to ground the abstract idea of a fundamen-
tal ‘‘right to life’’ in different cultures’ concrete procedures for determining the material value of
a human life. (p. 56)

Pietz begins with a compressed and generalized account of late eighteenth

and subsequent nineteenth century European notions of ‘‘fetishism’’ (a
broad and slippery term), in order to demonstrate how and why mission-
aries, traders, and early colonial administrators came to identify ‘‘African
fetishism with slavery and human sacrifice’’ (p. 55). According to the editors,
‘‘[Pietz’s] essay sets the stage within which much of the subsequent develop-
ment of anthropology and ethnography needs to be seen’’ (p. 42), but the
author makes no such claim. He never suggests that these ideas, definitions,
and concerns carried over into professional anthropology or ethnography.
The reader may or may not find Pietz’s historical account and his compari-
son of sacrificial blood in West Africa and monetary debt in capitalist coun-
tries interesting and convincing, but if his paper has any connection at all to
‘‘the emergence of British ethnology’’ it is precisely because the early profes-
sionals in both Britain and the United States repudiated the ideas of E. B.
Tylor and J. G. Frazer and others who wrote of ‘‘fetishism’’ and ‘‘animism.’’
(Pietz never mentions them.) Nor do the editors make any effort to tie Pietz’s
reconstruction of ideas about ‘‘fetishism’’ and ‘‘the material value of human
life’’ to anything professional anthropologists actually did. All they claim is
that ‘‘this ideological distance between civilization and savagery’’ was
246 H. S. Lewis

‘‘intimately . . . connected to the emergence of British ethnology’’ (p. 42)—an

empty and meaningless generalization that they make no effort to explain or
substantiate. The approaches of American and British anthropologists to
such questions, after Boas and Malinowski, were very different from those
of slave-trading factors in 1690 or missionaries in 1900, but the editors seem
unaware of this fundamental fact.
The next three essays, by Peter Pels, Gloria Raheja, and Nicolas Dirks,
all deal with the writings of colonial administrators in nineteenth century
India. Pel’s ‘‘The Rise and Fall of the Indian Aborigines’’ is an expanded ren-
dition of a revised version of an original article (cf. Pels, 1999) that tells of a
shift in ‘‘colonial intelligence’’ as certain British intellectuals and function-
aries begin to look at living people (‘‘bodies’’) and count them, measure
them, record their languages, and see what they do, rather than depend
on written texts for their information about the people they rule, as had
been the general practice previously. At that point some colonial investiga-
tors began to stress the significance of the so-called ‘‘aboriginal’’ peoples,
those not part of the Hindu tradition, in contrast to the earlier ‘‘orientalist’’
reliance on the texts of the Sanskrit and Hindu great traditions. ‘‘The concept
of Indian ‘aborigines’ broke up the unitary conceptions of ‘Hindu civiliza-
tion’’’ (p. 110). Pels discusses the political, practical, and ethnological impli-
cations he believes this development had for colonial ‘‘ethnography,’’ but he
makes no attempt to connect these works with modern professional prac-
tice, the sort done by anthropologists trained at Oxford, Cambridge, SOAS,
LSE, University of London, Berkeley, Chicago, Cornell, Columbia, etc.
Gloria Raheja’s essay considers the ‘‘entextualization of proverbial
speech’’ by colonial official and folklorists who collected and published pro-
verbs in India. She contends that the colonial rulers of India attempted to
‘‘control the flow of discourse about the colonized society and about its
relation to the colonizing power,’’ and she discusses a number of nineteenth
century administrators and collections in an effort to support her contention
that colonial officers systematically appropriated ‘‘the speech of the colo-
nized in the form of oral folklore, especially proverbial speech, to construct
a discourse about the supposedly consensual nature of caste ideology, and
to create the illusion the disciplinary control of specific castes and of the
Indian population as a whole was carried out with the consent of colonized’’
(p. 119). According to Raheja, they directed their efforts toward finding pro-
verbs that would reify caste categories and make them appear both natural
and inescapable. Lest this be thought a recondite problem that is long since
behind us, we are told that, ‘‘The discursive reifications of caste, intimately
tied at their genesis to the politics of colonial rule, became later the foun-
dation of much anthropological and historical writing on Indian society’’
(p. 147). But she makes no more attempt than Pietz or Pels to show us
 Anthropology’s History 247

how this was manifest in the practice of professional anthropologist or why

this is a bad thing, if true.
Nicholas Dirks has published variations on his chapter a number of
times (see Dirks, 1992, 1997, 2001). This article stands out for the preten-
tious prose of his prologue (pp. 153–157) and the fierceness of his hatred
for the field in which he holds its most honored chair—the Franz Boas Pro-
fessor of (History [sic!] and) Anthropology at Columbia University. Dirks
writes of the ‘‘horror’’ and the ‘‘crime’’ at the heart of anthropology, and
once again sings his theme of ‘‘culture’’ as a crime and a ‘‘violent imposition’’
(p. 158). (In part this is a play on the fact that British administrators in India
were concerned with criminality as they took censuses and classified peo-
ples; see Dirks, 1997, p. 205 ff.)
In a wonderful display of erudition Dirks does a riff on Žižek doing a
paraphrase of Kant, to argue that culture ‘‘itself is a ‘crime which can never
be effaced’’’ (p. 158).4 Apparently Dirks doesn’t mean only that the anthro-
pological concept of culture is a colonial invention, necessitated by the exi-
gencies of rule over others, but he also claims that ‘‘much of what we now
recognize as culture was produced by the colonial encounter’’ (Dirks, 1992,
p. 3). ‘‘Culture was imbricated both in the means and the ends of colonial
conquest, and culture was invented in relationship to a variety of internal
colonialisms’’ (1992, p. 4). This seems to mean that human behavior and
practices (in general, not just in India), what anthropologists have called
‘‘culture’’ or ‘‘the products of culture,’’ are all derived from colonial produc-
tions and crimes. Does that mean that there is no ‘‘culture’’ in noncolonial
social groups, or that all ‘‘culture’’ is a crime? This is an extraordinary state-
ment, showing breathtaking lack of understanding of the ‘‘nature’’ and the
concept of culture—a notion he seems intent on annihilating root and branch
(see Dirks, 1998).
Furthermore, he tells us, anthropologists can never escape this crime,
‘‘never totally rupture the colonial genealogy of our enterprise’’ (p. 159),
and that ‘‘[It] is through reading the texts that constitute the pretexts of
fieldwork that we learn how the conditions of anthropological knowledge
really were constituted historically; our exploration of the quotidian features
of this history take us to the heart of darkness, the crime at the beginning of
anthropology, the horror that undermines but also undergirds the heterolo-
gical task of reading culture’’ (pp. 177–178; my emphasis). And, if that were
not enough, ‘‘[I]ndeed, I would suggest that we need to hold onto the un-
canny character of the relationship, for fear that we might forget the crime,
and then repeat it all over again’’ (p. 159).
But, like those who precede him, Dirks makes not the slightest attempt
to demonstrate a connection between the colonial and the modern exem-
plars of this evil. No more than the others does he feel obliged to give
248 H. S. Lewis

evidence of this guilt, to actually trace these genealogies of which they are
speaking. He, too, is satisfied to refer to an imagined, totalized, and essen-
tialized ‘‘anthropology,’’ and to hold all of ‘‘it’’ guilty by decree.
Next, Curtis Hinsley takes us back to the American Southwest in the late
nineteenth century. Using excerpts of two works as his text, he packs quite a
bit of information and a number of weighty claims into relatively few pages.
The authors of these works are: John G. Bourke, a military man who served
as aide-de-camp to General Crook, a leading ‘‘Indian fighter,’’ and turned to
writing accounts of his experiences and recording what he saw of the ways
of Indian groups; and Frank H. Cushing, who won fame as a pioneer field-
worker, participant-observer, and author of works about the Zuni, among
whom he lived for more than four years.
Hinsley writes of the influence of ‘‘the ethnographic writings of mis-
sionaries, military men, political administrators, and land speculators’’ on
the ‘‘imaginative domestication’’ of the Southwest (p. 181). The invocation
of Fredric Jameson and Edward Said alerts us to expect dark interpretations
and we are not disappointed. Above all, he writes, ‘‘[e]thnography has been
predominant among those ideological formations and the allied knowledge
forms that have functioned to ‘mak[e] preparations for’ the idea of maintain-
ing imperial dominion and=or colonial possession as ongoing enterprise’’
(p. 181; internal fragment from Said).
To demonstrate this he takes a few passages from Bourke’s book, The
Snake-Dance of the Moquis (1884), and subjects them to the tough, deter-
minedly negative textual treatment to which we have grown accustomed,
ignoring alternative but less hostile evaluations. For example, Hinsley inter-
prets Bourke’s attempts at humor as a distancing mechanism, rather than
consider the fact that Bourke saw himself as a storyteller in the Irish
tradition, in which humor played an important role. He holds Cushing to
account for writing in a romantic and poetic vein about how the Zunis
process corn and make ‘‘breadstuff.’’ According to Hinsley, ‘‘They helped
to shape public perceptions of a region that had been, as Bourke noted,
unknown territory only a few years previously’’ (p. 193). It is unclear why
Hinsley needs to give these works such negative readings. Wouldn’t his
thesis of ‘‘domestication’’ be served equally well by ‘‘good’’ books? But
‘‘post’’ discourse permits only negative readings.
In the concluding section the two authors are convicted of writing
in 1884 rather than 1984. According to Hinsley, Bourke and Cushing only
wrote about what they represented as the unchanging ways of Indians
rather than about poverty, change, ‘‘war, alcohol, greed, and deprivation’’
(p. 195). This despite the fact that Bourke published several books about
what he saw during the Indian wars. On the Border with Crook, for instance,
offers 500 pages filled with history, wars, and greed aplenty. Here are a few
 Anthropology’s History 249

subheadings from two chapters: ‘‘Wiping Out the Cheyenne Village,’’ ‘‘Four-
teen Cheyenne Babies Frozen to Death in their Mothers’ Arms,’’ and, ‘‘The
Management of the Indian Agencies.’’ It is true, however, that these two
(especially the more professional Cushing) were more interested in descri-
bing Hopi and Zuni rituals, dances, religious beliefs and practices, stories,
manufactures, agriculture, social life, and language than they were in wri-
ting about their poverty. Perhaps that is because they were unusually well
placed to inquire into these things and because, according to Hinsley,
Bourke and Cushing ‘‘could not help seeing that the Indian world as they
experienced it directly must inevitably (and soon) disappear; thus their
strong salvage efforts’’ (p.193). In the light of what had happened and
has happened subsequently to the culture of the American Indian groups
they saw, was it so far-fetched of them to believe that the ‘‘old ways of life’’
would not survive? Was it unworthy of them to want to record the ways of
these people?5
Cushing did not publish very much and his usually short and highly
technical publications appeared mainly in arcane scholarly series with piti-
fully small audiences (Green, 1979, p. 22). Although he was well known to
early anthropologists, he did not have much influence on the general devel-
opment of the discipline. But Cushing did accomplish something important.
By learning and recording the language of the Zuni, living with the people
and participating in their lives, he preserved a record of the Zuni ways, for
‘‘science,’’ history, comparative literature, and for the descendants of the
people he lived among. What he recorded will be there for anyone who
cares about the ways of mankind, and the visions and poetry and spirituality
of other peoples. As Alan Beals wrote in this journal, ‘‘[w]e must think hard
before we consign ethnography and culture—the history of the peoples
without history—to the rubbish heap. We need to question the motives of
those who would would burn the books’’ (2002, p. 225), And ‘‘[i]n the
end, the trashing of ethnography is immoral and an unethical climaxing
of the destruction of peoples by the destruction of the record of their exist-
ence. Studies of the Andaman Islanders by Radcliffe-Brown and Man are not
very good, but they are just about all that we will ever know of a people
who were hunted down and exterminated by British convicts’’ (p. 226).
The single-minded and simple-minded trashing of everything written about
other peoples by ‘‘Westerners’’ is unworthy and a loss to humanity.6 And
that brings us to the next author, who would ban all writing about ‘‘aborigi-
nes’’ and permit only writing about the writers about aborigines (Wolfe,
1999, pp. 213–214).
Partrick Wolfe’s chapter, ‘‘White Man’s Flour: The Politics and Poetics of
an Anthropological Discovery,’’ appears here for the third time (see Wolfe,
1999). The author takes seriously the editors’ and Talal Asad’s exhortation to
250 H. S. Lewis

demonstrate ‘‘the cultural logic [that] rendered ethnography organic to the

settler-colonial project in a manner at once more subtle and more thorough-
going than can be expressed by ‘handmaiden of colonialism’-style analyses
in which anthropology figures as inertly determined by colonizing imp-
eratives’’ (p. 199). Wolfe’s thesis builds on the 1896 discovery by the
anatomist-turned-cultural-evolutionist ethnographer, Baldwin Spencer, and
his collaborator, F. J. Gillen, ‘‘a Justice of the Peace,’’ that men of the ‘‘Arunta
tribe’’ hold firmly to the idea ‘‘that the child is not the direct result of inter-
course, that it may come without this’’ (p. 196). This is the doctrine of
‘‘nescience.’’
Wolfe narrates two ‘‘genealogies’’: the first, the idea of ‘‘nescience’’ in
cultural evolutionary theory, and the second, the genocide and displace-
ment of the native peoples of Australia, including the twentieth century pol-
icy of ethnocide through the removal of ‘‘half-caste’’ children from their
families and communities (which was shown powerfully in the film Rabbit-
Proof Fence [2002]; Spencer was apparently the instigator of this policy as a
government functionary in charge of ‘‘Aborigines’’). The author gives a
brief, clear account of the assaults upon the aboriginal peoples and their
lands, and then presents what must be a highly oversimplified picture of
the background to the ethnocide through assimilation policy. He tries to
demonstrate that the ‘‘logic of evolutionist ethnography’’ has ‘‘an identity
with the logic of assimilationism.’’ ‘‘How can we know that this logical struc-
ture . . . is not simply an imposition of my own making but was active in the
minds of historical actors?’’ asks Wolfe (p. 228), and he proceeds to try to
demonstrate the connection in an extraordinarily tortuous and unconvinc-
ing manner. His logic is rather hard to follow; to do so we must try to make
sense of such sentences as, ‘‘As a symptom, Spencer’s pidgin text is intrin-
sically empty. A form of historical parapraxis, it signifies extrinsically—its
content is its context’’ (p. 230).
The notion that a policy of genocide and expropriation of the indigen-
ous peoples of Australia, which began almost from the first moment of white
settlement in 1788, somehow suddenly got a ‘‘warrant’’ from the discovery
that the Arunta maintained that they were ignorant of physiological pa-
ternity, discovered almost by accident in 1896, strains credulity. As for the
policy of removing half-caste aboriginal children from their families, evolu-
tionism was the reigning intellectual paradigm for people who thought
about world history in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but its iron
logic doesn’t seem to have necessitated a similar result anywhere else.
Whatever the unpleasant accompaniments to evolutionary theory, it is a
powerful idea with origins in classical antiquity. A strain of it runs through
Western thought through the millennia, as Robert A. Nisbet (1969) has
shown. In the late nineteenth century the notion held great attraction for
 Anthropology’s History 251

progressives, feminists, socialists, and Marxists as well as reactionaries (it

remained the only acceptable basis for anthropology in the Soviet Union
and all other Marxist regimes under their control—until the fall, about
1990). It had a revival among some ‘‘politically progressive’’ and Marxist
American anthropologists in the 1940s through the 1960s, and it became
popular again with some feminist writers in the 1960s. Clearly, an idea of
such power deserves more than the simple-minded trashing that it receives
in the current discourse. Indeed, there is a terrible hypocrisy in the assault
on cultural evolutionary thought (including modernization theory) by scho-
lars who come from (and perhaps still invoke) a Marxist background–or is it
just ignorance of their own genealogy?
Ironically, it was the boast of modern American anthropology, led by
Boas and his students, that cultural evolutionism, with the negative implica-
tions it held for ‘‘primitive’’ peoples, had been shown to be untenable and
unacceptable. In the world of British anthropology, the antihistoriographical
attitudes of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown were responsible for the end of
the evolutionary paradigm in their version of the discipline. Wolfe and the
editors ignore the fact that the ideas they hold in contempt were also
rejected by the majority of professional anthropologists. Is it possible
that these many years of the practice of American anthropology—say
from 1900 to 1968—could have escaped the notice of these critical
historiographers?
Pels and Salemink reprint Henk Schulte Nordholt’s account of Dutch
colonial practice and ethnography in Bali that appeared in their first collec-
tion. He brings the story up to the period just before Indonesian indepen-
dence and offers an interesting and recrimination-free analysis of the
ideas of a number of generations of Dutch administrators and hired analysts
of native life. According to Schulte Nordholt, because these writers pub-
lished in Dutch, their work doesn’t seem to have had much impact on the
(mostly) American anthropologists who came along in the 1930s and after
the war. Apparently Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Jane Belo were
influenced more by a group of Dutch artists, art aficionados, and members
of the male homosexual community who had discovered the island and its
arts and artists, and the freedom it allowed them for the pursuance of their
lifestyles. Mead and company may (or may not) have gotten Bali all wrong,
but it wasn’t because of the preterrain that the colonial administrators
prepared for them.
Oscar Salemink contributes another version of his many papers on
French ethnography and the peoples of the Central Highlands of Vietnam
(‘‘Montagnards’’).7 His contribution to this book is (almost) unique because
it refers to several semiprofessional and professional twentieth century
French and American anthropologists.
252 H. S. Lewis

This essay is ostensibly about war as an ‘‘ethnographic occasion’’ but he

rambles over much wider terrain. The bulk of the work involves the politics
of French rule in Vietnam and the prominent role of military and govern-
ment ethnographers in the creation of ‘‘tribalization and ethnicization.’’
Unfortunately Salemink fails to consider the voices or the agency of the peo-
ples he is concerned about—although he does dismiss some of their leaders
as stooges (p. 300). Two of his other themes are ‘‘the politics of ethno-
graphic professionalization’’ in France, and what he calls ‘‘cultural relativism
as martial art.’’
A major point that runs through his works is this: colonialists and others
who favored ruling the Central Highlands as part of an integrated admini-
stration with lowland Vietnam, followed the ‘‘evolutionist’’ perspective.
On the other hand, those who considered the highland peoples to be
separate and distinct from the lowlanders, with their own identities and
customs, who wanted to divide the administration of their regions from
those of the lowland ‘‘Annamese’’ (or ‘‘Kinh’’) followed the ‘‘cultural relati-
vist’’ perspective. Following this logic, Salemink sees those Americans who
favored conventional warfare in Vietnam as evolutionists, and those who
favored guerilla warfare during the U.S. intervention as cultural
relativists—a peculiar usage indeed. In his telling, not only is anthropology
inextricably implicated in colonial rule, but cultural relativism itself is seem
as a historical product of warfare and missionary and colonial practice.
Salemink claims that because ‘‘missionary ethnographers like Father
Guerlach made ‘holistic’ statements, while administrative ethnographers
such as Sabatier were cultural relativists ‘avant la letter,’ ’’ it follows that ‘‘eth-
nographic holism and cultural relativism were as much products of colonial
practice as they are theoretical innovations of academic anthropology. . .’’
(Salemink, 2003, p. 291; emphasis mine; Pels and Salemink, singly and
together, present this idea repeatedly: loc. cit.; ibid., p. 14; Pels and
Salemink, 1994b, p. 11). What Salemink and Pels call ‘‘holism’’ and ‘‘relativ-
ism’’—without further identification or definition—are ‘‘bad things.’’
Salemink agrees with his compatriot Ton Lemaire, ‘‘that there is a direct
connection between cultural relativism and an established colonial rule;
cultural relativists tended to be conservative in their protection of indigen-
ous values and traditions, thereby accepting existing inequalities and
legitimizing colonial rule’’ (Salemink, 1991, p. 254).
In 1991 Salemink characterized a ‘‘relativist’’ position as ‘‘recognizing
the values set up by every society to guide its own life, [it] lays stress on
the dignity inherent in every body of custom’’ (Salemink, 1991, p. 254).
Now some people might think that this is not such a bad thing, but he leaves
us reeling in our understanding as he distorts the notion of cultural relativ-
ism beyond any meaning as he uses it for his own ‘‘critical’’ purposes.
 Anthropology’s History 253

For example, the remarkable notion that it would be worthwhile to find out
about a people through ‘‘human contact [and] observations and personal
conversations’’ is ascribed to cultural relativism and is written off as a ‘‘con-
vincing perspective to bolster [political] . . . claims’’ (p. 307).
In a mockery of the concept, he calls it ‘‘cultural relativism’’ when
French or American politicians or military men argue that the ‘‘Montag-
nards’’ would be useful military allies in their wars against the Japanese,
the Viet Minh, or the National Liberation Front. In an extraordinary passage,
Salemink writes, ‘‘cultural relativism becomes an act of appropriation, as
with the Special Forces veteran who tells his Montagnard interlocutor at a
party in North Carolina, ‘‘ ‘I don’t care whether you’re Jarai or Bahnar; you’re
my Yard!’ [slang for Montagnard]’’ (Salemink, 2003, pp. 290–291; Salemink
likes this story so much he offers it twice in the book). It would be difficult
to imagine more preposterous and insulting misunderstandings and misre-
presentations of the history, definition, and uses of the idea of cultural
relativism.8
The doctrine of cultural relativism grew out of American anthropology
and the ideas and teachings of Franz Boas, which were then adopted by his
students, and insofar as it had to do with colonialism it was a direct conse-
quence of opposition to colonialism, cultural arrogance, and ethnocentrism!
Johann Gottfried von Herder, and his predecessor Michel de Montaigne,
were outraged by European overseas adventures and deeply troubled by
ethnocentrism, and Franz Boas’s genealogy includes these thinkers.
The last chapter, Lyn Schumaker’s ‘‘Constructing Racial Landscapes:
Africans, Administrators, and Anthropologists in Northern Rhodesia’’ is the
only one that deals primarily with professional anthropologists, those
who did research under the auspices of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute
in the 1950s and 1960s, including Max Gluckman, Audrey Richards, Godfrey
Wilson, Elizabeth Colson, A. L. Epstein, J. Clyde Mitchell, J. A. Barnes, Ian
Cunnison, William Watson, and Max Marwick. (It feels good to mention a
few actual anthropologists in connection with this book). A spinoff from
her interesting book, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks,
and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (2001), this essay
is nonjudgmental in its consideration of the ways in which both Africans (as
field assistants) and colonial administrators influenced anthropologists in
that era in Northern Rhodesia (called Zambia today) and how anthropolo-
gists influenced them. Dr. Schumaker is interested in the way ‘‘field
sciences’’ are influenced by their settings, the landscapes, the material con-
text, the infrastructure, etc.: ‘‘What a field science perspective brings to the
history of anthropology, as a colonial science in Africa, is the ability to
round it in its African context and thus to understand what is African about
anthropology in Africa’’ (p. 327).
254 H. S. Lewis

This is a very different work in spirit from the rest of the book. It is
based on an investigation of the creative interaction among the anthropo-
logists and their African assistants, as well as their triangulated relations with
administrators and other colonial personnel. As a result of her research she
stresses that a good deal of the ‘‘preterrain’’ of anthropology in Africa was in
fact set by the Africans themselves: ‘‘In the rural areas, African agency and
the anthropologist’s vulnerability had already combined to bring about a
degree of Africanization to the discipline and its practices,’’ and ‘‘[p]artici-
pant observation made anthropologists more amenable to pressure to adopt
local practices and encouraged them to identify with local interests, whether
or not they managed to attain the ideal of a total immersion in and under-
standing of the local culture’’ (Schumaker, 2001, p. 197). Such an interesting
idea is not to be found in the rest of the book.
Colonial Subjects represents a curious approach to historiography:
presentism without the present. With minor exceptions the authors in this
book never even try to address the central problem that the editors proudly
proclaim as their aim. They don’t show in what ways these colonial ‘‘prac-
tices’’ actually carried over into the work of modern disciplinary anthro-
pology. They indict an entire discipline, essentializing and totalizing it,
accusing unnamed practitioners of guilt by association with ancestors they
disowned long before. Unfortunately, this irresponsible discourse will be
added, uncritically, to future bibliographies as further evidence of the guilt
of anthropology. The audience includes those who want to believe such
things and those who have never heard anything else and thus have no
basis on which to question this hegemonic discourse. A generation and a
half after 1968 there are fewer and fewer practicing anthropologists who re-
member, or have learned, the ‘‘disciplinary history’’ of anthropology that the
authors scorn. American anthropology seems to have vanished from courses
on the history of anthropology altogether—to be replaced by ‘‘nos ancêtres,
Marx, Weber, Durkheim—et Foucault.’’ It is a relief, therefore, to turn to
Thomas C. Patterson’s book, A Social History of Anthropology in the United
States. Patterson has heard of, and writes about, American anthropology.

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE UNITED STATES

Thomas C. Patterson lays out his theoretical perspective and political com-
mitments on the first page; he was ‘‘appalled by the racism, xenophobia,
and censorship rampant in the [United States]’’ from the mid-1950s, and
‘‘[l]ike many of my contemporaries, I began to read Mao Zedong, Amilcar
Cabral, Frantz Fanon and Jomo Kenyatta among others’’ (p. ix). His book
is a Marxist social history that ties the development of work and ideas in
 Anthropology’s History 255

American anthropology to the economic and political forces at the time of

their creation, in what the author calls a ‘‘dialectical process.’’ In practice,
however, there is less dialectic than counterpoint, as Patterson presents
two parallel histories. Unlike parallel lines, however, these two do some-
times meet, above all when the professional anthropologists Patterson
discusses wrote in opposition to the evils in their society, rather than in
complicity with them.
Each chapter and many sections begin with Patterson’s view of history, a
very bleak view of American political economy through the ages: from sla-
very and Jim Crow through unemployment and globalization (a new form
of American imperialism), excepting nothing, not even the New Deal, from
the charge of service to capitalism. Then he turns to the second history, that
of the discipline of American anthropology, which, mirabile dictu, seems to
have been pretty good, all things considered. He takes us from Peter Du
Ponceau, Albert Gallatin, and Benjamin Smith Barton through Lewis Henry
Morgan, Franz Boas, and Eric Wolf, all the way to his colleagues Christine
Gailey and Micheal Kearney; and they get rather favorable treatment. This
is refreshing. It is just the sort of disciplinary history Pels and Salemink hate.9
In Chapter 1 the author compresses the preprofessional period, 1776–
1879, into 26 pages (‘‘Anthropology in the New Republic’’): ‘‘It argues that
anthropological information was used to shed light on pressing issues—
forging a national identity, territorial expansion, and justifying slavery’’
(p. 3). Although he doesn’t address the question of why some protoanthro-
pologists favored monogenesis and others polygenesis, some slavery and
others emancipation, some the extermination of the Indians and others
humane treatment and aid to ‘‘progress,’’ both sides are represented.
Chapter 2, ‘‘Anthropology in the Liberal Age, 1879–1929,’’ takes us to ‘‘a
time of intense discrimination against people of color, immigrants, women,
and the poor’’ (p. 3), of ‘‘classism, racism, sexism, and xenophobia’’ (p. 36).
The political economic factors related to these are the ‘‘closing of the
frontier,’’ the search of big business for ‘‘access to and control over foreign
markets’’ (p. 35), industrialization, and the introduction of millions of immi-
grants to America. The professionalization of the discipline began in this
period, starting with the Smithsonian Institution, the Bureau of American
Ethnology and the great museums in Washington, Cambridge, Chicago,
and New York, then shifting to the universities and their graduate schools
after the turn of the century. Patterson stresses the ‘‘struggle over the identity
and direction of the field . . . between cultural determinists, eugenicists, and
those who emphasized the biological bases of human diversity’’ (p. 3).
He begins with Major John Wesley Powell and the organization of the
Bureau of American Ethnology, an institution devoted to the collection and
study of materials about the American Indians. Patterson appreciates
256 H. S. Lewis

Powell’s organizational skills, his heroic work surveying Indian languages,

and his sympathy towards the Indian peoples, even if aspects of Powell’s
evolutionary thought are troubling. He also credits James Mooney, an Irish
immigrant, with being a very important ethnographer, and a man ‘‘con-
cerned with peoples, mostly American Indian tribes, whose members had
been displaced, sold into slavery, and generally abused by the spread of
civilization and its agents’’ (p. 40). The next 11 pages are devoted to a brief
but useful summary of Franz Boas’s work and ideas as well as some of his
many organizational and political battles. Patterson, in contrast to many
today, understands Boasian relativism (pp. 46–47).
The third section of this chapter contains a detailed account of the
founding of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. It is the
story of the struggle of biological determinists, eugenicists, and outright
racists for control over the organization and funding of research and the
propagation of ideas about race, biology, immigration, and social policy.
It was a nasty business, but ‘‘During the 1920s, cultural determinists—Boas
and younger anthropologists, notably Ralph Linton . . . Melville J. Hersko-
vits . . . and Margaret Mead . . . reasserted the hegemony of their views within
the profession and challenged the hegemony of the eugenicists’ views in the
wider society when they attacked the methodology of racial intelligence
testing used by psychologists’’ (p. 61).10 The section ends with the triumph
of the culturalists, a return to Boas, and appreciation of two more of his stu-
dents, A. L. Kroeber and Edward Sapir. In the ‘‘Discussion’’ that ends the
chapter, Patterson notes that while ‘‘Anthropology was professionalized
during a period characterized by intense discrimination against people of
color, immigrants, women, and poor folks . . . Boas had trained a number
of individuals from these stigmatized groups—e.g., East [and Central] Eur-
opean Jews, women, and American Indians’’ (p. 65). These people were
‘‘not only members of stigmatized groups but also critics of the class struc-
ture and practices of American society’’ (p. 65).
Chapter 3, ‘‘Anthropology and the Search for Social Order, 1929–1945,’’
is set against the two great catastrophes, the Great Depression and World
War II. Patterson sums up these momentous 16 years as the growth of big
and intrusive government that ‘‘provided the foundation for the military-
industrial complex . . . Congress surrendered constitutional powers to the
executive branch of the government. Civil rights were trampled as the
Supreme Court upheld the incarceration of 110,000 Japanese-Americans in
concentration camps in the West. Companies that supplied products for
the government . . . made enormous profits . . . from the war’’ (pp. 71–72).
This may be, though one would think he might have mentioned quite a
few other developments during this period, such as the far-reaching reforms
and changes in American economic and social life wrought by the New Deal
 Anthropology’s History 257

and the successful prosecution of a war of worldwide scope against forces

generally recognized as destructive of human values and interests.
Patterson makes a great deal of the fact that the Rockefeller Foundation
funded much social science research in the 1920s and 1930s, claiming that
this was in the interests of social control on behalf of capitalism and
Rockefeller profits. Despite this sweeping generalization, the author seems
to approve of most of the work he writes about. These include the elaborate
Yankee City studies under the direction of W. Lloyd Warner that revealed
previously ignored class and ethnic differentiation in American society, as
did the work of the Lynds in Middletown. There were studies of class,
‘‘caste,’’ and racial oppression in the South and the North by Allison Davis,
Burleigh Gardner, and Mary Gardner (Deep South), and Hortense Powder-
maker; and African American intellectuals were supported for work in both
rural and urban communities (p. 89). There were both Marxist and non-
Marxist interpretations of class (p. 98). The author brushes off the New Deal
as little more than a trick to save capitalism—rather insensitive to the mil-
lions of desperate people these programs benefited (including unemployed
anthropologists, artists, and writers)—but then he points out that anthropol-
ogists worked through these projects to improve the lot of poor farmers and
rural communities as well as to aid education, health, agriculture, and
governance among American Indians. The New Deal funded both Indian
and Euro-American linguists to study Indian languages for their own sake
and for linguistic science. ‘‘Culture change’’ and ‘‘acculturation’’ came to
the fore in cultural anthropology, some anthropologists, like Alexander
Lesser, saw ‘‘the importance of power relations during episodes of cultural
change’’ (p. 87), and ‘‘some became outspoken critics of the racism and
classism of American society, while others spoke out against fascism in
Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United States’’ (p. 80).
Chapter 4, ‘‘Anthropology in the Postwar Era, 1945–1973,’’ covers two
quite distinct eras. The first is the immediate postwar years and the ‘‘Cold
War’’ until the horrors of the war in Vietnam became evident to alert and
concerned Americans, about 1965; the second era developed in the wake
of that war.
I have written a paper using Patterson’s ‘‘American Anthropology and
the Cold War, 1954–1964’’ as my foil (Lewis, 2003), so I will only say here
that I believe Patterson gives the wrong impression of this era. He begins
with an inadequate and blindly partisan one-phrase summary of the origins
and nature of the Cold War.11 Then he seems to argue that anthropologists
were either in the service of the American government during the Cold War,
or, alternatively, that they did trivial and irrelevant work. He also claims that
Marxist scholars were muzzled.12 On closer inspection this impression is
contradicted by the account he gives of actual work done during that era,
258 H. S. Lewis

one in which much research and publication was inspired by Morgan, ma-
terialism, and Marx. As usual, he focuses primarily on his heroes and he
hardly attempts to make the case for collaboration.13 It is not an easy case
to make, in fact.
In ‘‘American Anthropology in Crisis, 1965–1973,’’ Patterson notes the
direct connections between mainstream professional anthropology and
the powerful reaction against American policies and practices in the war
in Vietnam and, for many, their reaction against ‘‘the system’’ as a whole.
The misbegotten and stillborn ‘‘Project Camelot’’ came to light in June
1965 and caused consternation throughout the profession; anthropologists
played a leading role in organizing campus teach-ins that year, and by
1966 the first of many resolutions attacking the war was introduced at the
AAA meetings. Many anthropology students and their teachers grew increas-
ingly critical, then furious, and their disaffection from America, capitalism,
and ‘‘the West’’ was extended to anthropology as a part of these evil sys-
tems. And so we move into the era of ‘‘Anthropology: Child of Imperialism’’
(Gough, 1968a, 1968b), and Hymes (1974), Reinventing Anthropology, and
Asad (1973), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Once again Patter-
son returns to the writers on the Left: Marvin Harris, Eric Wolf, and Eleanor
Leacock (who ‘‘helped to establish . . . an explicitly Marxist-feminist per-
spective and practice,’’ p. 133).
Chapter 5, ‘‘Anthropology in the Neoliberal Era, 1974–2000,’’ begins
with the usual recitation of evils: ‘‘the breakdown of the unwritten postwar
compromise between capital and labor, the rise to prominence of finance
capital, economic reorganization, and implementation of neoliberal aus-
terity programs, immigration, the stalling out of the civil rights movement,
and the appearance of new social movements rooted in identity politics’’
(p. 135) that ‘‘fueled the culture wars of the last thirty years of the twentieth
century’’ (p. 136). Turning to the anthropology of the last quarter of the
twentieth century, he once again discusses various forms of Marxist, mate-
rialist, and economistic anthropologies (ecological systems approaches,
cultural materialism, dependency theory, structural Marxism, and Marxist-
feminist anthropology) after briefly dismissing symbolic anthropology
and ‘‘Geertz’s interpretive anthropology’’ (pp. 138–140). The hermeneutic,
linguistic, and textual turns and the posts receive almost no consideration
as the book ends with various approaches to the emerging world and
globalization, with glances at arguments of such writers as Marshall Sahlins,
Christine Gailey, Karen Brodkin Sacks, Brackette Williams, June Nash, a
soupcon of Clifford, some Marcus, Fischer, and finally ending with Michael
Kearney and Carole Nagengast, among others.
This is an unbalanced work. The great ‘‘political economic forces’’ are
portrayed in the starkest, most simplistic, and most one-sided Marxian terms
 Anthropology’s History 259

while the anthropologists Patterson has chosen to present are largely ones
of the Left or at least on the side of the angels. But the author offers sketches
of a lot of research and publication, and not merely the works of a few
‘‘great ancestors.’’ It would be a useful book for those who want to learn
something about American anthropology’s actual past—rather than its ima-
gined past. I wish the authors in Colonial Subjects would read it.14

NOTES

1. It is yet another product of the Dutch school of critical anthropology that gets its inspiration
from the late Bob Scholte and Johannes Fabian and the events of 1968.
2. In their discourse they speak only of ‘‘anthropology’’ and never say who and what they
mean to include: every anthropologist, every country, and every era? Until today?
3. Pels leaves no doubt as to his intention to indict anthropology at every opportunity (cf.
1991, 1994, 1997). For example: ‘‘My main worry is [that the Yanomamo case will be taken],
as Sponsel puts it, to be ‘the ugliest affair in the entire history of anthropology’. This erasure
of all the other instances of anthropology’s usually colonial and often ugly past can only be
based on a myopic understanding of our discipline, one that seduces itself with a narrow,
professionalistic self-understanding’’ (Pels, 2002, p. 151, emphasis in the original).
4. As one not so well acquainted with the works of Kant or Žižek, I wish Professor Dirks had
included citations so that I could look up the original quotations in order to see what they
actually said.
5. Hinsley continues, ‘‘blindness to historical agency on the part of metropolitan cultural
representatives proved to be immensely costly to the colonized landscapes and peoples
of the American Southwest’’ (p. 194). Could ‘‘Zuni Breadstuff,’’ Frank Cushing’s lovingly
detailed and poetic account of the processes by which the people of Zuni obtained their
bread, from starting a field through the etiquette of eating, published in brief installments
in Millstone, ‘‘an agricultural and milling trade journal,’’ really have had such a powerful,
world-altering influence on these ‘‘colonized landscapes and peoples’’? (For this and other
pieces by Cushing, see Green, 1979.)
6. Gloria Emerson, Dine (Navajo) artist and educator, has noted the great importance of the
work of Washington Matthews, another army man turned ethnographer, whose studies
of Navajo painting, music, dance, ceremonies, and mythology are of particular importance
now ‘‘that many modern Navajos do not have the wisdom of grandparents as primary
sources anymore’’ (Emerson, 1997, p. 129).
7. See Salemink’s bibliography in his book (2003). He employs the collective ethnonym,
‘‘Montagnards,’’ although its use is currently in dispute, if not disrepute.
8. It is ironic that the author, who focuses his critical gaze on ‘‘cultural relativists’’ who favor
the preservation of the ‘‘traditional cultures,’’ has himself been involved in such projects as
the representative of the Ford Foundation in Hanoi. Apparently the same debates are still
going on a century later, and our author adopts some of the same language of the ‘‘col-
onial’’ past, writing of ‘‘creating favourable occasions in everyday life to enable minority
people, while participating in modern life, to live their traditional culture’’ (2001, p. 211).
Nor is he as hard on Kinh anthropologists and the current Kinh-controlled government
for holding similar attitudes to those of the French ‘‘evolutionists’’ of old, or on the ‘‘Mon-
tagnard’’ anthropologists who seem to have attitudes very much like his French ‘‘relativists.’’
9. This is not ‘‘the first comprehensive history of American anthropology’’ as it says on the
back of the book. John J. Honigmann (1976) and Fred W. Voget (1976) each published
260 H. S. Lewis

far longer, more comprehensive, and detailed histories a quarter century ago. These are not
mentioned in Patterson’s bibliography, nor is the pioneering short history by Robert H.
Lowie (1937).
10. Patterson (p. 61) inserts a long statement by Boas about race that—if it were only under-
stood by today’s enthusiasts for the wonders of the genome and its medical applications
would save a great deal of misunderstanding. Here is a key passage: ‘‘The error of modern
theories is due largely to a faulty extension of the concept of individual heredity to that of
racial heredity. Heredity acts only in lines of direct descent’’ (Boas, 1930, p. 91)—not in
some imagined ‘‘geographical race.’’
11. ‘‘The Cold War, precipitated by the United States and England and adopted by the other
capitalist countries to halt the advance of socialism’’ (p. 103) is not an adequate introduction
to such a complex topic. Like any war, this one had another side. It is also an affront to
democratic socialists who also understood the threat to their values (and lives) from Stalin
and the expanding totalitarian Soviet empire.
12. This is certainly the interpretation of one reviewer, David A. Price (2002, p. 805).
13. Two of the few examples of putative collaboration that he cites—whether this is guilt or not
depends on your perspective—are the cases of Clyde Kluckhohn, Margaret Mead, and their
associates who participated in projects to study Russian and East European cultures and
national character ‘‘at a distance.’’
14. They might supplement Patterson’s book with Regna Darnell’s Invisible Genealogies (2001),
another ‘‘disciplinary history’’ from a very different perspective. Darnell’s heroes are the
linguists, the humanists, and the translators of culture rather than the political, economic,
and social comparativists and ‘‘social scientists’’ Patterson discusses. There is so little over-
lap that it is as if Darnell and Patterson are writing about two different worlds (Lewis, 2002,
p. 576).

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