{ 2008 02 28 }

From Post-Imperial Anthropology to Post-Anthropological Empire?

An American soldier, interviewed in the early days of the war on route to Baghdad, is asked what she most looked forward to. A Big Mac, large fries and a jumbo Diet Coke, she replied. A few days later, after Baghdad had been captured, I read in the British press an interview with another marine. What struck him most about Iraq? There were no malls, not one, on the road to Baghdad. As the resistance to American occupation gathered coherence and momentum, another was surprised that there were no throngs welcoming them, grateful to be rescued from tyranny; instead, they were dodging sniper bullets while patrolling the sullen, burning city.

Three questions emerge from these random responses:
What allows conquering people to have no knowledge about vanquished, subjugated populations?
What allows conquerors to believe that subjugated populations are like them?
What allows conquerors to entertain the fantasy that they will be welcomed as liberators?

When anthropology first emerged, its relations with imperial projects were intimate. Travel narratives and official documents, which one can say were proto-anthropological, were accounts of vanquished territories and subjugated populations. They became, over time, the training manuals for officials of the East India Company, and then of the civil services. Indeed, the trader and the administrator was partly also a gatherer of information, and the compiler of knowledge about the territory and population at the expanding frontiers of empire. Imperial power both made anthropological knowledge possible, and was partly constituted by that knowledge.

Even when that knowledge was sympathetic to its subjects, it insisted on difference between the researcher and the researched. True, many went native, identifying totally with the populations they studied. But even this – a rejection of their ‘own’ cultures and becoming one with those of ‘others’ – only re-enforced the very basis of imperial anthropology: the difference between the two.

There was a dynamic tension at the very heart of imperial anthropology: the very act of ethnography changed the ‘pure’ conditions of the other. Primitive-ness was both the marker of the essential difference of the other, and the very condition that imperial projects brought to an inevitable end. There was little question that the imperial project was for the benefit of the subjugated, who were themselves too primitive to recognise this.

Over time, of course, anthropology began to exceed its imperial beginnings to become perhaps the most self-aware discipline in the academy. Its engagement with geopolitical projects underwent radical transformation. On the one hand, it emerged as a site of critique of imperialism, and also of claims of European universality. It shed its evolutionary assumptions for co-evalness. On the other, the ambit of its interests well exceeded its traditional concerns to encompass everything. This has had a dual effect. It has allowed the more shrill voices on the rightwing fringes of politics to accuse it of complicity with ‘those who hate us’. At the same time, its retreat from complicity with imperial power and its use of continental theory has meant that even though it now makes more practices of more people legible, it no longer is a constitutive element of imperial projects in the way it was before. And such projects have themselves changed: new forms of knowledge are more key to it than anthropology.

Anthropology, consequently, has had little to do with the current imperial iteration. Deep knowledge has been replaced by ‘adequate’ knowledge. Rational choice theory dominated the American social sciences, and through it had travelled to the Israeli academy and the Israeli defence forces, who had used it to develop strategies of counter-insurgency in occupied Palestine with ‘success’. Stylized models of game theory, based on the assumption of a universal rationality of maximizing power and wealth, obviated the need to know subjugated populations in their complexity. Of course, the previous Gulf war and the embargo and the secretive nature of the Saddam regime had also made deep knowledge difficult to construct. Likewise, geo-positioning satellites and allegedly ‘smart’ bombs made intimate knowledge of terrain unnecessary. Through the entire occupation of Iraq, the lack of ‘human intelligence’ and even of Arabic speakers has been worried about by coalition forces.

Liberal imperialism is based on the assumptions of universalism. People everywhere are assumed to desire liberal democracy and free markets: a straight line can be drawn from Fukuyama to Rumsfeld, and indeed both were also signatories to the Project for the New American Century. But some of the old assumptions crept in: some places, like Pakistan, were not ready for democracy, so it was ok to have an enlightened dictator. Other places – Zimbabwe and Burma for example – had strong movements for democracy but lay outside the zone of interest of liberal interventionists. This created a tension at the centre of the liberal imperialist project: the universalism of the values on whose behalf it was waged always were a little less than universal, some places and some people were exempt from it. Oil and the security of some homelands at the expense of others compromised the universality of liberal democracy, and free markets do not need democracy to bring them about: Pinochet comes to mind. Security, energy, and free markets always are more important than democracy, though liberal imperialism fictitiously claims that they are all equally universal.

Finally, what of the liberal imperialist fantasy that the wars of conquest are wars of liberation? Liberal feminists of NOW and human rights crusaders such as Michael Ignatieff all argued that being occupied by coalition forces was progressive, and that, far from liberation being liberation from military occupation, such occupation was the precondition for liberation from political and social tyranny. Condoleezza Rice and George Bush argued that the war on Iraq was a continuation of the American civil rights movements and of a piece with movements in Eastern Europe against communist rule. On more than one occasion, Bush equated Osama with Lenin.

So the ignorance of the populations and territories being attacked and occupied ran from the top to the bottom of the American war machine. The analogies used to justify occupation failed the tests both of logic and of credulity. In fact, much as knowledge was a constituent element of the previous iterations of empire, ignorance is a constituent element of this current imperial project. Indeed, the internal critique offered by the British fell back on old imperialism, effectively stating that since Britain ‘knew Iraq better’, it should be heard more seriously about what to do. The fact that the Iraqis defeated British forces time and again in the 1920s, of course, was not brought up.

This puts anthropology in a state of profound crisis. On the one hand, it is an ethical position to disavow any truck with projects of imperialism. On the other it has ceded the field to merely adequate knowledge and ignorance, which have had a deep bearing on how this war is being fought, and the assumptions of soldiers, generals and ‘the American people’ alike. Now that anthropology has become post-imperial, has empire itself not become post-anthropological? If so, what are the implications?

Subir Sinha
SOAS, University of London

Posted by sinhas on Thursday, February 28th, 2008, at 2:07 am, and filed under Counterinsurgency.

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