Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge

This volume is an effort to initiate a critical historical consideration of the varying colonial situations in which (and out of which) ethnographic knowledge essential to anthropology has been produced. The essays comment on ethnographic work from the middle of the 19th century to nearly the end of the 20th, in regions from Oceania through southeast Asia, the Andaman Islands, and southern Africa to North and South America. The colonial situations also cover a broad range, from first contact through the establishment of colonial power, from District Officer administrations through white settler regimes, from internal colonialism to international mandates, from early pacification to wars of colonial liberation, from the expropriation of land to the defence of ecology. The motivations and responses of the anthropologists discussed include the romantic resistance of Maclay and the complicity of Kubary in early colonialism; Malinowski's salesmanship of academic anthropology; Speck's advocacy of Indian land rights; Schneider's grappling with the ambiguities of rapport; and Turner's facilitation of Kaiapo cinematic activism.