Empires, Nations, and Natives

Benoit de L'Estoile; Federico Neiburg; and Lygia Sigaud

Description

Empires, Nations, and Natives is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the interplay between the practice of anthropology and the politics of empires and nation-states in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It brings together essays that demonstrate how the production of social-science knowledge about the "other" has been inextricably linked to the crafting of government policies. Subverting established boundaries between national and imperial anthropologies, the contributors explore the role of anthropology in the shifting categorizations of race in southern Africa, the identification of Indians in Brazil, the implementation of development plans in Africa and Latin America, the construction of Mexican and Portuguese nationalism, the genesis of "national character" studies in the United States during World War II, the modernizing efforts of the French colonial administration in Africa, and postcolonial architecture.The contributors-social and cultural anthropologists from the Americas and Europe-report on both historical and contemporary processes. Moving beyond controversies that cast the relationship between scholarship and politics in binary terms of complicity or autonomy, they bring into focus a dynamic process in which states, anthropological knowledge, and population groups themselves are mutually constructed. Such a reflexive endeavor is an essential contribution to a critical anthropological understanding of a changing world.Contributors: Alban Bensa, Marcio Goldman, Adam Kuper, Benoit de L'Estoile, Claudio Lomnitz, David Mills, Federico Neiburg, Joao Pacheco de Oliveira, Jorge Pantaleon, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Lygia Sigaud, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Florence Weber

Sujets

• Modern history

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 22 septembre 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822387107
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Empires, Nations, and Natives

BenoîtdeL’Estoile,FedericoNeiburg,

andLygiaSigaud,editors

E M P I R E S , N AT I O N S , A N D N AT I V E S

Anthropology and State-Making

DukeUniversityPress

Durham&London

2005

∫2005 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper$

Designed by C. H. Westmoreland

Typeset in Minion by Keystone

Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the last

printed page of this book.

vii

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C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

BenoîtdeL’Estoile,FedericoNeiburg,andLygiaSigaud Introduction: Anthropology and the Government of ‘‘Natives,’’ a Comparative Approach

BenoîtdeL’Estoile Rationalizing Colonial Domination? Anthropology and Native Policy in French-Ruled Africa

OmarRibeiroThomaz ‘‘The Good-Hearted Portuguese People’’: Anthropology of Nation, Anthropology of Empire

FlorenceWeber Vichy France and the End of Scientific Folklore (1937–1954)

FedericoNeiburgandMarcioGoldman From Nation to Empire: War and National Character Studies in the United States

DavidMills Anthropology at the End of Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Colonial Social Sciences Research Council, 1944–1962

ClaudioLomnitz Bordering on Anthropology: Dialectics of a National Tradition in Mexico

AntonioCarlosdeSouzaLima Indigenism in Brazil: The International Migration of State Policies

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223

248

263

277

301

327

331

JoãoPachecodeOliveira The Anthropologist as Expert: Brazilian Ethnology between Indianism and Indigenism

JorgeF.Pantaleón Anthropology, Development, and Nongovernmental Organizations in Latin America

AlbanBensa The Ethnologist and the Architect: A Postcolonial Experiment in the French Pacific

AdamKuper ‘‘Today We Have Naming of Parts’’: The Work of Anthropologists in Southern Africa

References

Contributors

Index

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

This volume is the outcome of an intense process of international coop- eration. In September 1997, the Museu Nacional (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) hosted the French-Brazilian workshop Social Sciences, State and Society, organized by the institution’s Postgraduate Program in Social An- thropology and by the Department of Social Sciences of the École Normale Supérieure (Paris). Also participating in the event were researchers from the Centre for the Sociology of Education and Culture and the Contemporary Brazil Studies Centre, both at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). In observing a convergence of perspectives in our analyses of the complex links between the practices of social scientists and other social practices, we were stimulated to pursue a systematic analysis on the relations between the construction of anthropological knowledges and the building of states. The starting point for this analysis was the application of the same set of questions to a universe of diverse situations and processes, distributed in time and space. After the Rio de Janeiro workshop we invited other colleges to take part in the project so as to widen the scope of the comparison. The result was the publication of a special issue of thevueReynthèdseeSin 2000, which was titled ‘‘Anthropologies, États et populations.’’ This issue con- tained six new articles, three essays, and an introduction in which for the first time we formulated the implications of the systematic comparison between the analyzed cases. The present publication is based on this issue of thedeveeuntSRysehèand the volumeériosegia,impanicnoiasEatods,sortnolopApublished in Brazil in 2002. Nearly all of the chapters, including the introductory one, have been revised, with some considerably reworked for this edition, and three new chapters have been included (on North American anthropology, on Por- tuguese anthropology, and on British anthropology). An earlier version of

viiiAcknowledgments

the chapter by Federico Neiburg and Marcio Goldman was published in CulturalAnthropology13:1 (1998) and inórláoupnoArotinoAcig97 (1998). An earlier version of the chapter by Omar Ribeiro Thomaz was published in Mana:EstudosenAntropologiaSocial7:1 (2000). We have benefited from the support of various institutions throughout the period of creating this volume: the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvi- mento Científico e Tecnológico, the Fundação Universitária José Bonifácio, the Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology (Museu Nacional), the École Normale Supèrieure, the École des Hautes Études em Sciences Sociales, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, and the Ministère des A√aires Étrangères. The work was also made possible thanks to the project ‘‘Internationalization and Transformation of National States (Economy, Society, Culture),’’ developed as part of acapes-cofecubinter- national cooperation agreement. Among the many colleagues we wish to thank, we choose here for special mention those with whom we were able to discuss not only some of the essays included in the volume but also the general structure of the project: Eric Brian, Adam Kuper, Gerard Lenclud, and Sergio Miceli. Marcela Coelho de Souza helped us by coordinating the work of transla- tion and assuming the overall revision of the book. Translation of the chap- ters was undertaken by David Rodgers (the introduction and the essays by Thomaz, Souza Lima, Oliveira, and Pantaleón), Noal Mellott (the essay by L’Estoile; revised by David Rodgers), Kimberly Arkin (the essay by Weber), Janet Paweko and Leah Sophie Horowitz (the essay by Bensa; revised by David Rodgers), and Peter Gow (the essay by Neiburg and Goldman). We thank Judith Bovensiepen, Jack Murphy, Sarah Froning Deleporte, Alison Murray Levine, and John Tresch for their help in revising some of the chapters. We also thank Duke University Press’s anonymous reviewers for their very helpful editorial comments.

I N T RO D U C T I O N

BenoîtdeL’Estoile,FedericoNeiburg,

Anthropology and the Government

of ‘‘Natives,’’ a Comparative Approach

andLygiaSigaud

Two recent events help to illustrate some of the contrasting aspects of anthropology’s present predicaments, including the way these predicaments are embedded in complex power relationships. At the meeting of the Ameri- can Anthropological Association in San Francisco in November 2000, a large crowd of anthropologists packed into a conference room for a special session titled ‘‘Ethical Issues in Field Research among the Yanomami.’’ The session had been convened by the association’s ethics committee in the wake of the uneasiness stirred up by the publication of Patrick Tierney’s contro- versial book,lEDrodaenssinrkDao, which denounced the alleged mis- conduct by anthropologists among the indigenous Yanomami populations living on the borders of Brazil and Venezuela. The atmosphere in the con- ference room was dramatic. Beyond the troubling accusation of a grave breach of professional ethics lurked the potential damage to anthropology’s public image, perhaps putting at risk the discipline’s funding and even its access to the field: during the session, an anthropologist speaking on behalf of the Dirección de Assuntos Indigenas, the Venezuelan state agency in charge of indigenous populations, announced the agency’s decision to place a moratorium on all research in indigenous areas by local and foreign researchers. Less than three years later, during summer 2003, the prestigious Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art hosted an exhibition in Paris titled ‘‘Yanomami, the Spirit of the Forest.’’ The show displayed various works by contemporary artists invited to visit the Yanomami village of Watokiri in Brazil, through the mediation of French anthropologist Bruce Albert, along with the help of two nongovernmental organizations (ngos): Survival Inter- national and the (Brazilian) Pro-Yanomami Commission. The exhibition was presented by Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami shaman and leader, as a way