Influence of Colonization Politics on Modern Field-work…

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Influence of Colonization Politics on Modern Field-work…

Hell-bent on expansion, the British Empire insisted on the exhaustive domination of one people over another, and in doing so, fostered hatred and friction between cultures in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. Cultural friction has presented a large disruption in the anthropological relationship between observer and participant in historical fieldwork, and moreover, “the bulk of social and cultural anthropological field work has been done in colonial settings” (Cohn, 1). The colonization politics of the British Empire instilled severe prejudices among people and frustrated anthropological encounters of this time and still chase after our conceptions of anthropology today.

In its most basic sense, the Empire was a mouth with a home-country belly; the greed of many individuals concentrated in one unrelenting motion to consume. Hyde identifies this insatiable urge as consequence of hoarding in lieu of sharing wealth; “an empire needs its clerks with their ledgers and their clocks saving pennies in time. The problem is that wealth ceases to move freely when all things are counted and priced” (Hyde, 22). ‘Wealth’, comprising the resources, industry and people of a nation, as demonstrated in Cohn’s article detailing the British census of India, is determined to secure power.

Power is a warped motivation for anthropological fieldwork and produces warped observer-participant relationships. The census coolly objectified Indians; statistics replaced names and numbers rudely wrenched social understandings. Indians were angered at the forced classification of their community and how ignorant foreigners ranked them. As the all-consuming hunger of the Empire disrupt...

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...t. Early anthropology is by no means equivalent to modern fieldwork in terms of respect and understanding between differing cultures.

Even after substantial passages of time, prejudice remains. The hunger of an empire consumes itself and produces broken societies filled with non-cooperative tendencies as a result of discrimination. The ideas of ethnic hierarchy are renewed in practice generation after generation; cultural domination is addictive. Societies built on unjust domination refuse to yield to real progressive change and understanding between human beings. Yet the discipline of anthropology has grown beyond its arrogant racist beginnings, and today, exposes the multiple truths within human communities. By not moralizing cultural differences as uncivilized or wrong, anthropology opens a new vein of social understanding and dialog between different peoples.

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