Abstract
All forms of colonialism leave their marks not only on social and cultural processes. They also shape the construction of knowledge about them. Therefore it is necessary to complete the accustomed ‘internalist’ histories of science with the research on its sociopolitical contexts, and specially, the past and actual North-South divide. The intensification of contacts among Latin American anthropological traditions since the nineties is producing comparative visions of anthropological science and foster ‘decolonial’ perspectives (a specific Latin American version of Postcoloniality). The model of ‘cultural control’, which combines the analysis of symbolic processes with that of power relations may constitute a way out of the long during invisibility of Latin American anthropologies and empower them as parts of a diverse and multipolar world anthropology.
…the rising cycles of ethnology coincide, principally, with the phases of expansion of Occidental civilization.
Ángel Palerm (1918–1980; Mexican anthropologist)
The West is not in the West. It is a project, not a place.
Édouard Glissant (1928–2011; Martinican ethnologist)
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Notes
- 1.
Though this chapter refers specifically to sociocultural anthropology, many of its considerations can also be applied to the remaining three anthropological sub-disciplines prehistoric-historical anthropology (archaeology), linguistic anthropology (anthropological linguistics), and physical or biological anthropology.
- 2.
According to these two types of colonial transformation, in Central Europe, and especially in the German speaking countries, the so-called Völkerkunde (now almost always called social and cultural anthropology or ethnology) was concerned with non-European cultures and societies in past and present, whereas the so-called Volkskunde (now almost always called European ethnology) concentrated on sociocultural diversity inside European nation-states.
- 3.
As usual, the term ‘Latin America’ includes the Caribbean, but we cannot state here similarities or differences between the Latin American continent and that area which, by the way, actually still constitutes the broadest colonial region in the world.
- 4.
Therefore, the first general history of anthropology published in Latin America by Ángel Palerm ([1974] 2006) dedicates almost half of its first volume (“los precursores”) to explorers, missionaries, and colonial administrators in Latin America, considering them forerunners of scientific anthropology.
- 5.
Perhaps the earliest and best-known antecedent is the Escuela Internacional de Arqueología y Etnología Americana, founded shortly before the Mexican Revolution of 1910. A century later, in 2010, undergraduate programs in social anthropology and archaeology were set up in one of the few continental countries that still had none, in Honduras, almost sixty years after the establishment of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia in 1952.
- 6.
The Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil called the dependency school of the 1960s and 1970s “one of Latin America’s most significant contributions to postcolonial thought within this period, auguring the postcolonial critique of historicism, and providing conceptual tools for a much needed postcolonial critique of contemporary imperialism” (2004, 223).
- 7.
The Brazilian economist Theotonio Dos Santos, one of the founders of dependency theory, has published interesting reflections on the characteristics and the ongoing validity of dependency theory; see Dos Santos (2007) and Sader and Dos Santos (2009). In a new foreword to his famous book on liberation theology Gustavo Gutiérrez (1988) explains its origins and some of the changes that it has undergone since then. The pedagogical ideas and the related criticism of so-called modernization and development of the Brazilian Paulo Freire and of Iván Illich during his years in Mexico, regarding production and reproduction of knowledge, are still being discussed in many parts of the world; see McLaren and Leonard (1993), Bhattacharya (2011), and Hartch (2015). The recently edited volume by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2014) also shows the continuity and the inspiration of these ideas demonstrating its combination with the actual discussion about the idea of ‘good living’ which has emerged in several Latin American countries with high percentages of Indian population.
- 8.
For a more detailed explanation of these different though convergent concepts, see Krotz (2008). The term ‘indigenous anthropology’ was used for years as equivalent of local or national anthropologies in Africa and Asia, but not in Latin America, where it refers to the knowledge produced by anthropologists who belong to indigenous peoples in Latin American countries; see Mott (1982, 112). In an early attempt to visualize the beginnings of the anthropologies in the South, Kenyan born anthropologist Simeon Chilungu suggested the use of the term “Non-European-American” (“Nicht-Euro-Amerika”) anthropology (1984, 314), because the notion of Third World anthropology seemed to exclude certain Southern regions, diasporas from the South in the North, and also the original populations of America. Interestingly, he considered one of the first tasks of the proposed alternative anthropology of the future—a real universal anthropology studying all societies and cultures of the planet and perhaps even of other galaxies—the strict avoidance of anthropological concepts that are seen as false, distorting, and even insulting, such as ‘primitive’, ‘tribe’, ‘savage’, or ‘pagan’ (ibid., 321). Some years earlier, the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro on the occasion of the XLII International Congress of Americanists in 1976 had explained (1979, 280) that the dominant anthropological theories have alienated several generations of Latin American intellectuals so strongly that they had become unable to understand the indigenous peoples of their own countries.
- 9.
The idea of different styles of the same disciplinary matrix has been discussed especially by Brazilian anthropologists Cardoso de Oliveira and Raul Ruben (1995).
- 10.
This does not imply an absence of tensions, so one has heard the derogatory terms ‘native Latin Americanists’ or ‘branch anthropologists’ applied to representatives of the first type, and ‘folklorists’ or ‘ideologists’ to representatives of the second type.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
The Colombian anthropologist Myriam Jimeno (2000) and the Brazilian anthropologist Otávio Velho (2006) have studied the differences in focuses that derive from being a foreign or national researcher while the Guatemalan anthropologist Sergio Mendizábal (2007) has described and analyzed the modification of ethnic-cultural options among anthropology students through their involvement in a certain kind of participatory or engaged research.
- 14.
This special aspect is shown and discussed by Adas (1989).
- 15.
Referring to Catherine Walsh (2009), Gabriela Veronelli explains that “to say decolonial, suppressing the ‘s’ is not to promote this Anglicism, but to mark the difference from what ‘des’ [means] in Castilian. It is not about discarding or reversing the colonial and transiting from a colonial to a non-colonial moment, as if the traces of the former could magically cease to exist. Rather, it refers to a positioning, an attitude of thought, of living, doing, visibilizing and encouraging places of exteriority and alternative constructions” (2015, 37).
- 16.
- 17.
Here we refer to the classical study of Ivan Illich (1973), one of the pioneers of this kind of civilizational criticism. Recently, Jafari Allen and Ryan Jobson have tried to identify a “decolonization generation – the cohort of Black, allied antiracist, feminist, and political economy-oriented scholars” (2016, 129), that gave rise to the landmark volume of Faye Harrison ([1991] 1997) on liberation anthropology. A few years before, Susan Almy had pointed out that what is understood in North America as academic freedom “is becoming known in the developing countries as ‘academic imperialism’” (1977, 287).
- 18.
We cannot examine here the later inclusion of anthropologies from the European Southern and Eastern periphery and of anthropologies of regions and cultures that are parts of nation-states, like Catalan anthropology in Spain or Scottish anthropology in Great Britain.
- 19.
The South American anthropologist Rita Segato (2015) has shown the obstacles for indigenous and black students in Brazilian universities.
- 20.
The Mexican philosopher León Olivé (2009) has tried to establish the idea of real intercultural relations on the recognition of epistemic pluralism.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
Accordingly, Isabel Castro Henriques states correctly that colonization means always “the elimination of the autonomy of the colonized” (2014, 49).
- 24.
Edmundo Gordon in a recent study on Nicaragua explains the situation as follows: “The social purpose of education is to discipline and train the citizenry. To train them to play the role of local citizens and workers, and to occupy the positions assigned to them in the society. This is highly problematic when the society operates under unequal conditions. In these cases, the majority, education tends to reproduce this inequality. The powers control knowledge and, with this, society” (2013, 6). The educational system has also been criticized from an African perspective as alienating and even as an important driving force behind emigration to Europe; see Kinhoun (2016).
- 25.
- 26.
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Krotz, S. (2019). Overseas, Continental, and Internal Colonialism: Responses from Latin American Anthropologies. In: Schorkowitz, D., Chávez, J.R., Schröder, I.W. (eds) Shifting Forms of Continental Colonialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9817-9_3
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