Empires, Nations, and Natives

Empires, Nations, and Natives

Anthropology and State-Making

  • Author: de L'Estoile, Benoît; Neiburg, Federico; Sigaud, Lygia Maria
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822336280
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822387107
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2005
  • Month: September
  • Pages: 344
  • DDC: 306.2
  • Language: English
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, Benoît de L’Estoile, Claudio Lomnitz, David Mills, Federico Neiburg, João Pacheco de Oliveira, Jorge Pantaleón, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Lygia Sigaud, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Florence Weber

  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Benoit de L'Estoile, Federico Neiburg, and Lygia Sigaud: Introduction: Anthropology and the Government of "Natives," a Comparative Approach
  • Benoit de L'Esoile: 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
  • Joao Pacheco de Oliveria: The Anthropologist as Expert: Brazilian Ethnology between Indianism and Indigenism
  • Jorge F. Pantaleon: 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 Antrhopologists in Southern Africa
  • References
  • Contributors
  • Index

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