1) Introduction

In today’s lecture I would like to look at the politics of anthropology, rather than at the anthropology of politics.  In specific, I shall approach my topic via a discussion of post-colonial theory.  As is clear by now, knowledge is not only a source of enlightenment, but also a source of power.  Hence it entails both the potential to harm and to benefit those studied and written about.  Far from being an independent and objective science, anthropological theories and practices are not only subjective, but they are also embedded in and constitutive of relations of power, domination and exploitation.

2) Anthropology and colonialism

Some might argue that such an involvement in relations of power is inherent in anthropology, given that the discipline's development was heavily indebted to colonialism.  Nevertheless, the practical involvement of anthropologists with colonial rule was not as frequent and significant as it may appear at first.  Apart from a few individuals, the majority of anthropologists in the field were tolerated rather than encouraged by colonial governments.  Relations between colonial district commissioners and anthropologists were often strained and full of suspicion and in those cases where anthropologists were meant to provide advice, their advice was more often than not ignored.
 Although courses in anthropology were set up to provide training for colonial officials, these courses did not prove popular with the Colonial Office and hence never became compulsory.  The relationship between anthropology and colonialism, then, is not to be found at the level of practice, that is, of a practical involvement with the business of colonial administration.  Instead, the relationship between anthropology and colonialism is to be found above all at the level of discourse, in specific, discourses of domination.
 In the literature on colonialism and imperialism, hence, there are two principle approaches the nature of colonial domination.
 One approach consists of various theories of how colonialism oppresses others through direct political, social and economic control, that is, colonial oppression is seen primarily as being rooted in brute force and economic exploitation.
 Another approach, however, argues that colonialism is not best understood primarily as a political or economic relationship, even if it is seen as being legitimised or justified through ideologies of racism or progress.  Rather, colonialism has always, equally importantly and deeply, been a cultural process.  That is, colonialism is imagined and energised through signs, metaphors and narratives.  Even during what would appear to have been colonialism’s purest moments of exploitation and violence, these moments have been mediated and framed by structures of meaning.
 Hence, the second approach to colonial domination focuses on the ideological regulation of colonial subjects, that is, on the creation of consent.  Particular attention has therefore been paid to the apparent readiness by the colonised to take on the culture of the coloniser, even if only in part.  One of the notable dynamics in the colonial situation has been the deep internalisation by the colonised of the discourse of the domination.  These theories propose that power manages social contradiction through the production of specific ideas of people’s ‘selves’.  That is, power constitutes individuals in a way that suits its own ends, but individuals see this constitution as ‘real’.
 In consequence, these theories focus on the constitutive power of state apparatuses, such as education, and other professional fields of knowledge, such as anthropology.  They can also focus on the way colonial relations are reproduced through the deployment of a vast semiotic field of representation, such as works of literature, advertising, travelogues, government reports, and so forth.

3) Power and discourse

The nature of this semiotic field of colonial representations, or colonial discourse in brief, has principally been explored within the field of 'post-colonial studies', an interdisciplinary field drawing on work in literary criticism, history and anthropology primarily.
 The overall challenge posed by 'post-colonial' writers is that they are writing with a view to restructuring European 'realities' in post-colonial terms, not simply by reversing the hierarchical order, but by interrogating the philosophical assumptions on which that order was based.  Hence, the project of post-colonial writing has been to interrogate European discourse and discursive strategies and to investigate them as the means by which Europe imposed and maintained its codes in its colonial domination of so much of the rest of the world.  This critical dimension is post-colonialism most defining feature. There is no reason however why the exploration of European discursive strategies ahs to constitute a critique.  It is quite possible for both analysis and theory to aim at a heightened level of understanding, but critique need not been an explicit part of this process, although it may well be an inevitable consequence.
 The emphasis of post-colonial theory, hence, is on the texts of empire, rather than its material foundations.  Colonial discourse analysis and post-colonial theory are thus critiques of the process of production of knowledge about the Other.  Neither imperialism nor colonialism are simple acts of accumulation and acquisition.  Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and request domination.
 Post-colonialism's focus on these forms of knowledge is explained by the view that the writer is the original and ultimate colonizer, conquering the space of consciousness with divisive structure of representations.  In fact the structures of writing and those of power can never be wholly distinguished from one another.
 Hence, the concern of post-colonial theory (or colonial discourse theory, as it is also called) is not with the economic and political structures of colonial domination.  Rather, its concern is with colonialism as an ideological or discursive formation.  Its main subject matter are the wide range and large number of texts produced during the colonial period, that is, travellers' journals, administrative records, imperial novels, images, and so forth.  In this respect, postcolonial theory is heavily indebted to Foucault’s writings on discourse, although surprisingly, Foucault himself never discussed colonialism at any length.
 A central debate in colonial discourse analysis today relates to the historical specificity of colonialism.  This debate revolves around the inconclusive relationship between actual historical moments in the colonial enterprise and its larger, trans-historical discursive formations.
 That is, can one only look at ‘colonial discourse’ by examining specific moments within colonial history?  Can one extrapolate a general modality of ‘colonial discourse’ which is valid from one specific moment to the next?  Does colonial discourse always look structurally the same?  Does colonial discourse function in an extremely similar way in lots of different circumstances and cultural settings?  Overall then, is colonial discourse historically specific?
 Unfortunately, post colonial studies has been constructed as a field of inquiry less with reference to historical processes (colonization) than with reference to a unitary phenomenon or entity (colonialism; the Empire).  Many of the problems within post-colonial studies can be traced to this orientation.  Such a mis-representation and mis-interpretation of imperial and colonial experiences, however, is in part due to the strength of some of the self-presentations of empire.
 The imperial discourse of the late 19th century in particular, is about an empire that is united not by force, but by information.  The British empire in particular, was the most data-intensive empire in history.
 It was much easier to unify an archive made up of texts, than to unify an empire made up of territories.  But not even this imperial archive could be unified as easily as its collectors would have liked.  This unification of the imperial archive, the control over information, gives an impression of unity and control which does not correspond to realities on the ground.
 Post-colonial theorists may well have been taken in by the misleading self-representation of empire provided by colonial discourses themselves.  Never free of the threat of destabilization, colonial power had to produce and illusion of permanence.  That permanence and consistency, however, was a strategic mis-representation of the unstable and fragmented realities of colonial rule.
 Some believe that there is a certain contradiction between the need to theorise and discuss colonialism and the resulting risk of assuming 'colonialism' to constitute a meaningful category or totality.  Some see a danger of imposing an order on the colonial experience that it would not posses, had it not been made a distinct field of inquiry.
 This is a problem noted by other writers who lament the fact that the term 'post-colonial' is rarely used to denote multiplicity.  Rather, the term ‘post-colonial’ signals a reluctance to surrender the privilege of seeing the world in singular and a-historical abstraction.
 Rather than falling for the colonial self-representation of totality, analysts must opt for localised theories and historically specific accounts.  Only these can provide much insight into the varied articulations of colonising and counter-colonial representations and practices.
 For some, however, the ambivalence of colonial representations means that resistance is always part of colonial representation.  Colonial representations never achieve total control.  If the colonised are not seen merely as the other, but as having a constitutive share in colonial discourse, they can be seen as both more empowered but also as more responsible.
 An approach to colonial experiences based on the continuous reconstitution or structuration of society may be more adept at exploring the extent to which the colonised may have played a constitutive rather than a reflective role in colonial and domestic imperial discourses and subjectivities.
 Colonial studies are inevitably set within a wider framework of socio-cultural theory.  There is therefore a need to relate colonial discourse to its function within wider socio-economic and political practices.  Colonialism must be seen as more than merely a set of linguistic and rhetorical features.  Any analysis of colonialism must also be an analysis of practice, not merely of discourse, although even discourse is, of course, a form of practice.
 Even though colonial discourse is primarily available in the form of text and images, aside from, for instance architecture, there is a lot more to colonial discourse than text alone.  While in most cases text is all that remains of the colonial experience, it is through these texts that an experience can be recovered that go beyond the text.   I consider it essential for a concept of authorship and truth to continue to form part of one's stock of analytical concepts. Behind discourse there was, after all, a real and lived colonial experience.
 Colonial discourse theory needs to remember that its referent in the real world is a form of political, economic, and discursive oppression.  The form of colonial power differs radically across cultural locations.  One needs also to remember that resistance to colonial power always finds material existence at a local level.
 Not only then is the production of colonial discourse involved in practice, but it relates and forms part of a practice that is not solely textual, but which can be only accessed through discourse only.  To isolate colonial discourse and to treat it independently of the wider practice of which it formed a necessary part, is likely to lead to partial and flawed understandings of the colonial experience.
 There is a particular danger in a naive reductionism which reduces the colonial experience to colonial discourse.  Explaining the object of study by reference to itself hardly seems productive.  If it is the colonial experience which is to be explained, then the explanations arrived at may be situated within practices not exclusively linked with colonialism.  Rather, the colonial experience may be the result of a coming together of a variety of existing practices and discourses, augmented by practices resulting from the colonial experience in particular, which although playing no part in its early days may have a decisive influence in its later stages.
 It is suggested by at least one writer, that a historically specific and localised 'anthropology of colonialism’ may provide an effective alternative to the many weakly contextualized analyses existing at present.  This however, brings its own problems, for it can be argued that both the anthropologist and the historian invent the culture he or she observes.
 Both the anthropologist and the historian will make that invention out of texted, rather than actual, experience.  For the anthropologist, the experience is mediated by memory-written-down in fieldnotes and all the systems of recording.  But the informant has already, as it were, invented the culture being mediated to the ethnographer -
 Perhaps the historian is better served than the anthropologist by the variability of the genres of texts of culture, and certainly he or she has more checks on the way in which culture is mediated.  The historian's ambition is to be exhaustive of all the texts available, knowing that in the end the return on all the lateral pursuits is a sense of balance and possibility.  There is the authenticity in that of having done all that can be done, of having confronted all there is to be confronted.  The anthropologists are forever left wondering in what way the mediating points of entry into another culture, namely their informants’ and their own experiences, are prejudiced by any number of selectivities, such as class, gender, personality, and age.
 The ambitions of historians and anthropologists about their ethnographic presents are the same.  The Past and the Other should be re-presented as they were.  But that representation is never a duplication or a copy.  Neither the Past nor the Other can recognize themselves in ethnography.  Both are transformed into something else.
 There are, however, attempts to address some of these problems.  History, like anthropology, is today confronted with the need to de-centre histories and to abandon attempts to represent history from a single synoptic viewpoint.  Generally until now, the historian in the text acts has acted as the single mediator of historical experience.  This, in the end, not only privileges that version's overall viewpoint above others, but also authorizes it as the best by doing so.  For new histories the challenge lies in the introduction of multiple viewpoints into historical discourse, rather than in the mere introduction of additional voices.  Polyvocality alone, in this opinion, does not produce a pluralistic or multi-cultural history.

4) A voice for the colonised?

As I have already said, colonial discourse analysis and post-colonial theory are critiques of the process of production of knowledge about other peoples.  As these knowledges usually portrait these people in opposition to Western characteristics and culture, post-colonial theorists tend to speak of such people in terms of ‘the Other’.
 Post-colonialisms concern with colonialism as a discursive formation, therefore is also a concern with colonialism as an apparatus for constituting subject positions, that is, colonialism employs specific forms of discourse for constituting individuals.
 One writer (Peter Hulme), for instance, defines colonial discourse as "an ensemble of linguistically based practices unified by their common deployment in the management of colonial relationships."
 Hence, another important debate in colonial discourse theory is one about agency.  This debate centres on the problem of intention in colonial discourse and on whether colonial discourse  is capable of creating the colonial subject.  That is, is the colonial subject a subject without agency, is the colonial subject completely determined by colonial discourse?
 Colonial discourse is seen as suppressing the essential and authentic nature and voice of the colonised. One of the implications of this is, that just as the colonised are constituted through colonial discourse, they speak only through speaking positions which imperial and other powers permit to their Others.  Under colonialism, the colonial subject cannot speak in an authentic voice.  As such, the colonised cannot resist a colonial power and oppression which is founded on the control of modes of discourse.
 Some, however, feel that there is a danger in such a legislation of authenticity.  The notion of authenticity appears to imply, that others are acceptable only in so far as they conform to their proper natures.  Others are degenerate and improper in 'acculturated' forms.  That is, if others speak through the modes of representation that the West has imposed on them, their expression is not considered authentic.  Any vestiges of Western modes of discourse are evidence of continued oppression.
 It would appear therefore, that with the rise and institutionalisation of multiculturalism, 'identity' is associated increasingly with authentic cultural difference.  Constructions of indigenous identities almost inevitably privilege particular fractions of the indigenous population who correspond best with whatever is idealised by Western observers and writers.
 However, it seems anything but liberating to prescribe to other peoples that they must have a discourse of their own, because they are so different from us in essence that they cannot express themselves through our forms of discourse.  The result of such a position is a merely a re-affirmation of the difference of the Other.  Post-colonial theory lacks evidence of its own post-coloniality.  As it is, some forms of post-colonial multiculturalism are racisms in disguise.
 This is particularly the case when post-colonial critics are concerned with retrieving the authentic history, experiences and discourses of the dominated.  That is, when they aim to rewrite the received account both of the colonizing academics and of the native ruling elites.  In other words, when they attempt to write a history of the excluded, the voiceless, of those who were previously at best only the object of colonial knowledge and fantasy.
 But even with the introduction of multiple viewpoints and the recovery of suppressed discourses, it can still be argued that through the act of writing, that is, through the production of a discourse about the Other, both anthropologists and historians perpetuate colonial systems of representation.
 Unlike historians, anthropologists in particular have to explain why still living subjects of their ethnographies do not represent themselves, even if their own voices are somehow represented in the text.  Anthropology as a discipline appears to depend on the existential absence of its subjects.  These others can only be represented by the anthropologist as long as they are absent, for if they were here, there would be no point in representing them, that is, to represent them and speak for them.  In effect, if anthropology allowed others to represent themselves, there would be no place left for ethnography.
 All representation hence constitutes colonial practices of domination.  In any case, it now appears naïve to think that post-colonial theorists could disassociate themselves from Western discursive practices as easily as they once thought.  The flawed fantasy of post-colonial cultural theory is that those in the Western academy at least have managed to free themselves from the discourse of colonialism, as from every other aspect of the colonial legacy.
 Hence, the anthropologist's dilemma is that if writing is part of a system of intellectual and political oppression of the Other, how can anthropologists avoid contributing to that oppression if they go on writing?  There are those who respond to a seemingly radical question with a radical answer; they give up writing about the Other and drop out, if not out of anthropology, than out of ethnography.  If one cannot accept the inevitably dominative aspects of one's own writings about 'Others', then perhaps the only reasonable alternative to writing about 'other' is to leave them, that is, these 'other' physically and conceptually alone.
 Just as individuals, their social relations and their culture can never exist outside the structuration of power, likewise no form of discourse can ever exist outside such a structuration.  To aim for a discourse that is free from power is futile.  The best that can be hoped for, is the establishment of a discourse that is as opaque as possible, that is, a discourse which shows an awareness of its structuration and which does not make a mis-placed claim for totality and authenticity.
 Some radical writers hold that postcolonial historiography, if it is to be politically meaningful, has to establish a link between past phenomena and present events.  Whether postcolonial studies do in fact have to be politically meaningful is debatable, although there would appear to be a political agenda behind must studies within the field.  For radical writers, however, it is not enough to display an interdisciplinary bent, historical consciousness, and anti-colonial rhetoric.  Rather, they claim, post-colonialism must also use its historical consciousness to offer criticisms of those cultural conditions which produce unequal relations of power today.  Without such historical consciousness, the postcolonial reading is at best an informative ethnographic representation of colonial violence, and, at worst, a displaced interpretation of archival materials.
 The danger of this is that without an understanding of the historical specificity of colonialism we run the risk of imposing our own categories and politics upon the past without noticing its difference. This, however, does not preclude an understanding of the continuity of colonial practices, including discourses, within human experiences.

Although anthropology continues to be constitutive of colonial discourses and practices, it is perhaps a little more aware of its own complicity than other branches of contemporary scholarship.