I’ve been thinking about Malinoski’s legacy more than usual, and about his indictment with all our other forebears in anthropology. Like the other humanities in academia, anthropology seems to be deeply engaged in the cannibalization of its own legacy. One part of that sustained indictment of anthropology’s past is the conviction that anthropologists were simply the handmaidens of colonialist regimes. This week, I encountered Rachel Smith’s chapter in 2024’s book One Hundred Years of Argonauts: Malinowski, Ethnography and Economic Anthropology. Consider this:
As she conveys, in 1916, amidst his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski delivered a deposition in Melbourne to the “Commission on British and Australian Trade in the South Pacific.” His deposition concerned the potential of the native peoples’ service as a labor force. Might they prove to be productive workers, and might not their service as laborers be in their best interests, Malinowski was asked?
Malinowski argued that the Trobriander was better left alone to pursue “work which is not exactly of a purely economical description, but which for him makes life worth living” (Rachel Smith, One Hundred Years of Argonauts, page 140). Here, Malinowski was pushing back against the interests of the colonial government, and arguing for a more considered and respectful relationship between the state and the indigenous peoples that now fell into its territorial ambit.
Keep in mind that two decades earlier, the anthropologists who led the Cambridge expedition to the Torres Strait were accused by the colonial administration of fomenting unrest amongst the native peoples of the islands visited by the research team (Herle and Rouse 1998: 13).
Both drawn from the earliest historical chapters of the discipline’s development, these two examples are clear evidence that the discipline’s practitioners were NOT the content bedfellows to colonial administrators they are often portrayed to have been. Even at this early date, anthropological practitioners esteemed cultural difference and had the interests of the cultural others they studies at the front of their concerns. I think the strong convictions that many today have about anthropology’s supportive stance toward colonialism, and their purportedly dismissive attitude about the people anthropologists studied in the earliest period of the discipline, need more evidence to be convincing to me.
ijustneedsomething 