t was only in 1957, during the decolonization period, that one finds such signs (although weak). For example, Peter Worsely (1957) placed at the very centre of his ethnography in New Guinea the oppression of local people (which found expression in millenarianisms). According to Worsely, the “great truth” was that anthropologists had not been studying backward and primitive peoples but colonial peoples, and that the only characteristic that states like those of the barotse and baganda and societies like those of the bushmen and veddas had in common is that they were all subjected to colonial domination (Worsely 1957). This was the finding, not, as I already said, of political anthropology, a field of study that Evans-Pritchard and Fortes had already inaugurated (Evans-Pritchard and Fortes 1940), but of “politics within anthropology,” the recognition that anthropology cannot be a neutral “science” in the sign of objectivity, but is an engaged “knowledge” because of the subjectivity and temporality that pervades it (Fabian 2000).
Matera V (2021). Politics Within Anthropology. Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave - McMillan [10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_8].
Politics Within Anthropology
Matera V
2021
Abstract
t was only in 1957, during the decolonization period, that one finds such signs (although weak). For example, Peter Worsely (1957) placed at the very centre of his ethnography in New Guinea the oppression of local people (which found expression in millenarianisms). According to Worsely, the “great truth” was that anthropologists had not been studying backward and primitive peoples but colonial peoples, and that the only characteristic that states like those of the barotse and baganda and societies like those of the bushmen and veddas had in common is that they were all subjected to colonial domination (Worsely 1957). This was the finding, not, as I already said, of political anthropology, a field of study that Evans-Pritchard and Fortes had already inaugurated (Evans-Pritchard and Fortes 1940), but of “politics within anthropology,” the recognition that anthropology cannot be a neutral “science” in the sign of objectivity, but is an engaged “knowledge” because of the subjectivity and temporality that pervades it (Fabian 2000).I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
