IN'DEFENSE

of

An Investigation of the
Critique of Anthropology

Herbert S. Lewis

•
Transaction Publishers
New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.)
 4
Was Anthropology the Child,
the Tool, or the Handmaiden
of Colonialism?

There is a general belief that anthropology was complicit with and

deeply implicated, even imbricated, in European colonialism. This is
the starting point for much of critical anthropology and postcolonial
writirig. Anthropologists are said to have provided the underlying
discourses of racial domination and cultural superiority that paved
the way for colonialism while supplying techniques and tools for
rule over peoples as well. The issue is taken for granted; it is obvious:
anthropologists went out to the tropics to study the natives who were
under colonial domination. Res ipsa loquitur-"the thing speaks for
itself"-no further proof is needed. Here is a presumably authorita-
tive statement because it comes from Ihe Dictionary ofAnthropology:

Anthropology is inseparable from the history and practices of colo-

nialism in a double sense: on th~ one hand, anthropologists were
frequently in the employ of the colonial state itself, and on the other,
the science of RACE and of races was an integral part of the ways in
which colonial powers represented themselves and non-European
Others in the nineteenth-and twl'ntieth-century modernist project
(see also DEVELOPMENT, MODERNIZATION). (Watts 1997: 72)

In fact, however, Talal Asad, the scholar whose edited volume

Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter is most often cited as the
proof for this claim, concluded, in that volume, "it is a mistake to view
social anthropology in the colonial era as primarily an aid to colonial
administration, or as the simple reflection of colonial ideology" (Asad
1973: 18), and two decades later, referring to "some vulgar miscon-
ceptions on this subject" Asad writes, "the role of anthropologists in
maintaining structures of imperial domination has, despite slogans to

73
 In Defense of Anthropology
the contrary, usually been trivial" (Asad 1991: 314). If Asad is correct,
how is it possible that anthropology should not have played the impor-
tant role imagined for it, and why is it so widely believed that it did?
While Asad did not mean to exonerate British social anthropology
from other forms of political and intellectual derivation from and
implication in colonialism, ,his clear, and repeated, declaration that
anthropologists did not contribute in a substantial way to "maintain-
ing structures of imperial domination" sounds so definite that it seems
remarkable that it has been generally unnoticed or ignored. Asad's
other points are too complex and debatable to deal with here, but in
this chapter I want to focus on the question of anthropology's role in
colonial rule. I hope the historical background presented here will add
some reality to a discourse that is usually carried on as a gloss on the
writings of famous postmodern and postcolonial thinkers. 1
"Colonialism" is not just any misrule, inequality, domination, but
generally refers to the conquest and acquisition of foreign territory by
a state and the subsequent rule over that land and its peoples to the
advantage of the population of the controlling country. Above all the
label is applied to the overseas imperial adventures of Spain, Portugal,
the Netherlands, France, Britain, and, rather late in the day, Belgium,
Germany, and Italy. European rule over the peoples of Asia, Africa,
and the Pacific from the eighteenth century until the ending of colonial
rule in the mid-to-late twentieth century has been the focus of much
Marxist, postcolonial, and similar theorizing. Of course imperial
ventures in the New World began with the overseas adventures of
the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch, to be followed
by colonizations from those countries that have left the indigenous
population, in most cases, as a very small minority. But, to reiterate a
general point of this book: the association of colonialism and anthro-
pology, as with most critique of anthropology is directed primarily at
Anglophone anthropology. Because these are the preferred targets of
the grand critiques, we will concentrate our counter-argument on the
American and British traditions. 2
It is important to note that the literature and the general under-
standing do not distinguish between the Bad Old Days when there
were no professional anthropologists but only amateur enthusiasts
and observers (missionaries, government officials, adventurers, folk-
lore collectors, and pioneer scientific observers and speculators) and
a later professional period that might have been quite different. The
point of the trope is to implicate the modern or modernist discipline.
74
Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, or the Handmaiden of Colonialism?
As we shall see in the next chapter, there is a genre of critical literature
that explicitly aims to find anthropologists guilty of the sins of their
pre-modern predecessors. Writers with this approach delight in dwell-
ing on the evil origins of anthropology, its "heart of darkness" (Apter
1999) and the horror and crimes at the discipline's birth (Dirks 1999
[See the next chapter.]). Thus the whole discipline is under the clou,d
of both descent from and complicity with colonialism.
The Relation of American Anthropology to Colonialism
The origins of American anthropology as a professional discipline can
be dated to the years after 1896, when Fl'anz Boas founded a one-man
department at Columbia University and began turning out students
with PhDs. 3 Before Franz Boas established this new field, with its credos
and credentials, there was a very small group of devoted and variously
talented amateurs, educated in other fidds, who recorded American
Indian languages and cultures (Bieder 1986; Darnell: 1998, 2001;
Hinsley 1981; Patterson 2001), but it was Boas's methods, approaches,
theoretical perspectives, and ethical precepts that rapidly won scholarly
acceptance among those interested in this field (Darnell 1998; and
chapter 7). The numbers of cultural anthropologists with doctoral
degrees in the United States grew slowlv; there were about a dozen by
1915, almost all from Columbia or otherwise directly influenced by
Boas. His students, in turn, spread anthropology across the land as far
west as Berkeley, but there were only about fifty cultural anthropolo-
gists with doctorates in the United States by 1932.
Until the eve of World War II the gn·at majority of the research by
American anthropologists was carried out in the United States, mostly
among American Indians. The list of doctoral dissertations (Yearbook
ofAnthropology, 1955) and of the articles in American Anthropologist
demonstrates the overwhelming focus on native American culture
and society. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, some anthro-
pologists eked out livings by doing research in American farming
communities, in cities, and among European immigrant populations
in the United States (see chapter 1). rlhus whatever else American
anthropologists may have done wrong, they can be exculpated of the
crime of complicity with colonial rule in European overseas colonies,
at least until after World War II, shortly before those colonies gained
their independence.
The few American anthropologists who carried out research abroad
included Ralph Linton, Margaret Mead, and Reo Fortune, who did
75
 In Defense of Anthropology
fieldwork in Polynesia and Melanesia, and four others who carried out
research in the Philippines. The Philippines were an American colony
at that time but William Jones, Laura Benedict, Fay-Cooper Cole, and
Roy Barton were not working for the US government. The research of
the first three was largely directed to museum and basic ethnographic
survey work, and Barton, an independent spirit, was intensely devoted
to the study oflfugao and Kalinga cultural and social systems (Kroeber
1949; Stanyukovic 2004).4
Several Americans did research in Africa in the last years before
World War II: Melville Herskovits, William Bascom, Joseph Greenberg,
Horace Miner, and Jack Sargent Harris. Only Harris, then a confirmed
Marxist, was in the employ of a colonial power; he did studies of the
agricultural cycle for the Nigerian colonial government (see chapter 8).
And a few Americans worked in other countries that were not under
colonial rule: Japan, Irish Free State, Sicily, Mexico, Brazil, and Guate-
mala. Considering how few they were, the timing of their appearance
on the scene, and the nature of their research, it is difficult to see how
American anthropologists could have played a role in overseas colo-
nialism. But what about colonialism in the United States?
The current states of the New World originated in colonialism and
colonization. The case has been made that the American Indians are
still victims of colonial domination, or "internal colonialism:' What
has the role of anthropologists been with respect to colonial rule over
Native Americans?
Before the professionalization of anthropology and its move to
the universities, the Bureau of American Ethnology supported most
of the ethnographic and archeological research in the United States.
The BAE was established by an act of Congress in 1879 as a result of
the vision and lobbying of Colonel John Wesley Powell ("Powell of the
Colorado"), a dynamic geologist and explorer who was very popular
and influential after the Civil War (Hinsley 1981: 147). Powell's ambi-
tious plans were to carry out a survey of all the Indian languages and
study the cultures of all of the Indian groups for historical purposes
and to record rapidly disappearing customs and culture. He also hoped
that the linguists and ethnographers who worked for the bureau would
contribute to an understanding of Indian ways in order to be able to
promote plans for the betterment of Indian conditions-indeed, as he
saw it, for their very survival. This was a period when most of those
who cared about the native peoples believed that their choice was
either to adapt to white "civilization" or die out. "Powell's organization
76
Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, or the Handmaiden of Colonialism?
of anthropological research ... would help to surmount the barriers of
ignorance and prejudice, those unnatural impediments to progress, that
separated America's native race from the rest of America's citizenry"
(Moses 1984: 223).
While the funds came from the government, the researchers were
not engaged to take any part in governing or even to advise directly-
only to do research. None of the ethnographers had been trained in
anthropology; there.was nowhere they could have been, in America at
least, but these students of Indian languages and cultures were deeply
dedicated to their missions-"impassioned by their commitment to
truth" (Moses 1984: 223). They worked for years with no career lad-
der to climb. And, as Moses points out, encouraged by Powell's notion
that people of talent and commitment had to be free to follow her
or his genius, "each of the ethnologists pursued his particular muse"
(1984: 223). James Mooney, an American-born Irish nationalist with
sympathies for the downtrodden everywhere, produced an extensive
and remarkable body of material on the Cherokees, Kiowas, and other
tribes, invaluable for the people themselves today, for study and cultural
revival. His book, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of
1890, is a powerful contemporary account of a major cultural develop-
ment and historical occurrence. It features heartbreaking descriptions
of the "broken promises and starvation" that led to the "outbreak" and
of the massacre at Wounded Knee.
Alice C. Fletcher, with the aid ofF rancis La Flesche, a member of the
Omaha nation, produced one of the best ethnographies, The Omaha
Tribe. 5 Frank Cushing distinguished himself by living at Zuni pueblo
from 1879 to 1884, engaging with the people and culture as deeply
as possible, providing an early example of a participant-observer;
his insights into Zuni culture were distinctive (Mark 1980). Matilda
Stevenson, Washington Matthews, Frances Densmore (our library
catalogue lists sixty-nine entries for Densmore!), and J. N. B. Hewitt
(a member of the Iroquois Nation [Tuscarora]) were others who stand
out for their devotion to the cause of recording Indian languages and
cultures "before it is too late"-the constant theme of those days, as
it would be for the early Boasians as well. They were witnessing rapid
changes-losses oflanguages and cui tural practices-decade by decade.
Robert Bieder writes,
Nearly all of the ethnologists h('re examined couched the importance
of their work in terms of its value to government Indian policy or to
77
 In Defense of Anthropology
the 'civilization' of Indians in general ... [and] several sought funds
from the government to further their research goals. The contributions
of ethnographic research to government Indian policy were, however,
indirect and minimal. Most probably both government and church
policy would have remained the same in the absence of a science of
ethnology. (1986: 249; my emphasis)
The ethnographic accounts-of Zuni's esoteric fraternities, ethno-
botany, and bread making; of the Omaha buffalo hunt organization
(by then no longer functioning); of myths of the Cherokee; the music
of the Cheyenne and Arapaho-and the material on Indian languages,
were hardly useful for government purposes, as important as these
may be for Indians and anthropologists. These works were usually
published in the Bureau's bulletins (two hundred of them) and annual
reports (eighty-one), found only on the shelves oflarge libraries where
they would normally languish in obscurity. Except in the most trivial
sense these are not the products of colonialism but careful accounts of
the lives of fellow human beings whose ways, different from those
of the ethnographers, deserve recording, both for their own sake and
for the study of the ways, thoughts, and history of humankind.
Fittingly, today the Native American Library is reprinting material
from the Bureau of American Ethnology publications and making them
accessible to Indian tribes. According to Herman J. Viola, then direc-
tor of the National Anthropological Archives, "In this way, we hope
to assist in the wider dissemination to and by Indians of information
on their heritage, which is also a significant part of the heritage of all ·
other Americans" (Viola 2009: xv).
When the students of Boas arrived on the scene at the turn of the
century, several were funded by the BAE for ethnographic and (mostly)
linguistic research. For the most part, however, the pitiful pittances
professional anthropologists received for their research during Boas's
years came from whatever he was able to scrape together for them,
sometimes from museums, sometimes from private foundations, and
sometimes from his wealthy friend and sociologist-anthropologist-
folklorist colleague, Elsie Clews Parsons. The new anthropologists
were not working for any government but for their new science, and
the government wouldn't have been interested in any case.
Perusal of the American Anthropo~logist and library bookshelves
will show that until at least the mid -1920s these modern scholars were
concerned with describing American Indian languages and whatever
they could still find out about "the old ways" -ways of subsistence and
78
Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, or the Handmaiden of Colonialism?
exchange, technology and arts, marriage, the family, and larger social
organizations, child rearing, warfare, ritual and belief, etc. Most of
their efforts were spent trying to understand the many Indian cultures
and their dynamics and, frequently, to reconstruct the history of the
peoples and the development and spread of their cultures. There has
been much superficial and unjust criticism of the attempt to recon-
struct "the ethnographic present;' but "salvage anthropology" was in the
service of a deeper knowledge of humankind and its ways, for a com-
parative study of human behavior and cultural dynamics. As with the
devoted amateurs who preceded them (and in some cases overlapped
with them) their work was conducted in order to add these peoples to
the roster of the world's cultures and languages before all was lost in
the face of oppression, poverty, and th~ onrush of acculturation. The
researchers could not have realized thl' extent and the ways in which
the descendants of their informants might use this information today. 6
It would be a mistake, however, to leave the impression that the
early professional anthropologists wert' only interested in description,
in ethnographic and linguistic salvage Cor their own sake. Franz Boas,
A. L. Kroeber, Robert H. Lowie, Edward Sapir, Alexander Goldenweiser,
Paul Radin, leading anthropologists of the first decades, were widely
read in science, philosophy, and the humanities. Their general works,
texts, and theoretical pieces were aimed at the understanding of human
behavior, of the dynamics of society and culture, and the workings of the
human mind. Their concerns, both theoretical and ethnological, were
directed to very different ends than control over subject populations.
Ironically, their lack of concern for political matters in their research
and theory became one of the charges against them in the critique.
In the late 1920s and 1930s American anthropologists turned to
questions of change, acculturation, and the economic and social prob-
lems of American Indians. This work was not in the service of govern-
ment or "keeping the natives down:' On the contrary, anthropologists
often explicitly opposed the policies of government administrators
and told them so, exemplified by Franz Boas's opposition to the ban-
.ning of the potlatch by the Canadian g( wernment and his objection to
the refusal to teach Indian languages and cultures in the government
boarding schools (see chapter 6).
It was during the Great Depression and the period of the New
Deal, in the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that some
anthropologists became involved in l ndian political and economic
affairs, especially with respect to education, economic development
79
 In Defense ofAnthropology
and land use, and to the "Indian Reorganization Act:' Congress passed
the Wheeler-Howard Act of 1934 with the aim of slowing further loss
of Indian land and the erosion of their local political situation "in ways
consistent with their indigenous organization" (Trencher 2002). Of
course these projects were far less successful than hoped for as a result
of multiple conflicting interests, widely varying understandings, many
different Indian factions and existential situations, political and legal
manipulations by congress, courts, and local white interests (Kennard
and Macgregor 1953: 832-833). Nevertheless these programs did have
some beneficial results, especially for tribes that were in a position
to organize themselves politically, like the Wisconsin Oneidas who
benefitted from both the tribal reorganization and the grants of land,
funds, and materials for building homes (Hauptman 1981: 84-85).
Other anthropologists were engaged by the Department of Agricul-
ture to work with farmers and rural people of all backgrounds, especially
in the American South and Southwest, on problems of soil conserva-
tion and community development during the Dust Bowl years. Applied
anthropology under the New Deal was intended for the improvement
of economic and living conditions-not colonial rule.
During the Second World War perhaps half of the small but growing
community of American anthropologists signed up to use their knowl-
edge in the war against the forces of fascism, Nazism, and Japanese
imperialism (Price 2008). A number of experts on the cultures of the
Pacific served as administrators on "trust territory" islands that were
newly liberated from Japanese control (Kennard & Macgregor 1953).7
By the time American anthropologists were let loose in larger
numbers upon the rest of the world after the Second World War, the
decolonization process had begun. It started with India, Pakistan,
Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Malaya, Indonesia, and the Sudan, from 1945 to
1957, and it continued until most African nations had become indepen-
dent between 1958 and 1963. It was almost too late for the Americans
to guide the imperialists in their misrule.
The Empire of Ethiopia, where I did research in 1958-1960 and
1965-66, had remained independent except for the uneasy and short-
lived rule of Italy between 1935 and 1940. However, the people I
worked with in Ethiopia, the Oromo, were under the domination of
their African neighbors from the North of the empire-domination
considered tb be colonial by the Oromos (Lewis 1996). Those who
ruled the Oromos, as well as many other peoples, had no desire for
80
Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, or the Handmaiden of Colonialism?
my advice-which would, of course, have been in opposition to almost
everything that African regime was doing with respect to its Others.
The point is, neither in location, timing, opportunity, intellectual
interests, values, nor in the substance of their work did professional
American anthropologists fit the profile of tools of colonialism.
Furthermore, the ideas that guided American anthropologists were not
those that are usually cited as products of, or facilitating, colonialism.
A central element in the Boas ian revolution was the overthrow of the
hegemony of cultural evolutionary theory and scientific racism. Boas
and his followers were the great opponents of these prevailing concepts
and the source of the overthrow of these two grand narratives that
dominated American, British, and European thinking about others until
that time. Socialists and Marxists were at least as convinced of Morgan's
evolutionary narrative of cultural development, as were the boosters
of free enterprise and Social Darwinism (Pittenger 1993). American
anthropologists after Boas did more to discredit these doctrines than
any other contemporary scholars. 8
The Boasians promulgated a modified doctrine of cultural relativ-
ism that-while not denying their own liberal values-was dedicated
to the proposition that all cultures were of value and should be treated
with respect and that all human beings should be considered to be
of equal potential. If today's American anthropologists feel that they
bear the ignominy of colonial complicity it can only be due to the
unexamined acceptance of a trope found everywhere since the 1960s.
They have been gravely misled. They may be troubled by relations of
unequal power between ethnographl'r and "subject;' or by "the crisis
of representation;' but the burden of "tools of colonialism" should be
lifted from their shoulders. But what about the British?
British Anthropology and Colonialism
The relationship of British anthropology to colonialism is more com-
plicated than that of American anthropology. At the beginning of the
twentieth century Great Britain had the most far-flung empire, in every
part of the world, controlling territories as vast as the Indian subcon-
tinent and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and as teeny as the Maldives
and the British Virgin Islands. The empire ruled over many millions of
people of the most diverse cultures and societies. It is undeniable that
professional British-trained anthropologists carried out research in
these colonial possessions, primarily in Africa and Oceania. However,
there were no professional anthropologists in Britain before about 1930,
81
 In Defense ofAnthropology
and when they did come upon the scene they were not supported by
grants from colonial treasuries, nor, with rare exceptions, were they
employed by colonial governments.
British colonialism is very old, but British anthropology is very
young. As a profession, with training, standards, and guiding visions
and perspectives, it was not established until the 1920s, with the first
PhD degree in England granted in 1927-three decades later than in
the United States. The British Empire had been lording it over the
"natives" of their many possessions for centuries by this time. Could
two dozen anthropologists have contributed much to such far-flung
colonial rule at this late date?
This topic is one of the most popular in the literature of the past four
decades, and this chapter cannot begin to do justice to the variety, vol-
ume, and variations of the literature. (For histories of this era see Goody
1995; Kuper 1996; Stocking 1995. For a compact and useful summary
of the literature on anthropology and colonialism see Vermeulen 1999:
14-17.) What we can do is state, in the boldest terms, what seem to be
some fundamental facts about British anthropology and its ambiguous
relation to colonialism. Perhaps these will lead some readers to begin
to doubt the received wisdom.
Ihe Birth and Growth ofAnthropology in Great Britain
There were stirrings of academic anthropology in England at the turn
of the twentieth century at the universities of London, Oxford, and
Cambridge. The towering figures of Victorian evolutionism, Sir Edward
B. Tylor and Sir James G. Frazer, were still on the scene but no longer
very effective, when several self-taught converts to anthropology
determined to develop their pursuit as an organized discipline based
on fieldwork. These included two physicians (Charles G. Seligman and
W. H. R. Rivers) and a biologist (A. C. Haddon), who had taken part
in the important Torres Straits Expedition (Stocking 1995; Herle and
Rouse 1998). Haddon and Rivers won positions at Cambridge Uni-
versity, and Seligman was hired at the University of London's London
School of Economics (LSE). R. R. Marett, a popular teacher and late
evolutionist armchair theorist, was much in evidence at Oxford, while
the Fipnish scholar Edward Westermarck also taught anthropology
at the LSE. A. M. Hocart, who did fieldwork in Fiji and elsewhere
and wrote ethnography and comparative works, was among several
other figures who contributed to the growing sense that anthropol-
ogy could be a discipline. Their ideas and teaching set the stage for
82
Was Anthropology the ChUd, the Tool, or the } landmaiden of Colonialism?
the developments in the 1920s. Bronislaw Malinowski, who already
had a degree in physics from Poland, was granted a DSci in 1916 by
the LSE for his library dissertation, The Family Among the Australian
Aborigines. Malinowski was under the patronage of Seligman, while
Radcliffe-Brown studied at Cambridge under the tutelage of Rivers
and Haddon (Langham 1981).
The only anthropological organization at that time in Great Britain,
the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI),
was firmly in the hands of amateurs representing physical anthropol-
ogy, archeology, and ethnography, well into the 1940s. Records of the
meetings of the RAI in the late 1920s reveal that Haddon, Seligman,
and Mrs. Brenda Seligman were much in evidence at their meetings,
as was Dr. G. Elliot Smith, the anatomist who became the leading
proponent of an extreme version of diffusionist thinking, deriving all
cultural advances from Egypt. (Dr. Rivers, who contributed to diffusion-
ism as well as to the study of kinship, psychological anthropology, and
ethnography, died in 1922 [See Langham 1981].) On the membership
rolls of the RIA were a number of men, some bearing military titles,
who were apparently either retirees from, or on active service in, the
colonies. Their numbers included Douglas Newbold, of the Sudan
Political Service, and Captain R. S. Rattray, a colonial official and early
anthropologist in the Gold Coast. There were "corresponding mem-
bers" who lived in the colonies, some of them administrators, but also
some "natives" of those countries. By 1930 there were also a number
of American anthropologists on the rolls.
It wasn't until Bronislaw Malinowski published Argonauts ofthe West-
ern Pacific in 1922 and became dominant in anthropology at the LSE
(he was named professor in 1927), and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown
published The Andaman Islanders, also in 1922, and took his brand
of "comparative sociology" on the road to Cape Town (1921-1926)
and then Sydney (1926-1931), that British social anthropology began
to take shape as a profession. Radcliffe-Bmwn and Malinowski had dif-
ferent visions of their new science: the former called for a "science of
society" through structural-functionalism, while Malinowski's sCience
focused more on culture and the functional requisites for the main-
tenance of individuals and systems ("pure functionalism"). However
much they disagreed with each other theoretically and personally,
however, they and their students believed they were together creat-
ing a new discipline with definite principles, theories, methods, data,
standards, and credentials.
83
 In Defense of Anthropology
Audrey I. Richards, a member of Malinowski's first cohort of students
(PhD 1930), summarized three developments that marked the establish-
ment of the modern discipline of British social anthropology (Richards
1944: 290). First, they broke free-emphatically-from the reigning
RAI view of anthropology by declaring their utter lack of concern for
physical anthropology, archaeology, folklore, the study of technology,
etc., to focus only on living cultures and societies. They would turn
their collective backs on attempts to speculate on the historical devel-
opment of cultures, whether through the conjectural reconstructions
of evolutionary thinking or the efforts to trace the history and growth
of cultures through diffusion. 9
Secondly, following Malinowski's teaching and the example of his
"heroic" fieldwork and remarkable ethnography of the Trobriand
Islanders, his students went to do their research with greatly improved
field techniques (Stocking 1983). They did moreintensive research
during longer stays in the field, had new standards of observation and
new methods that called for more direct involvement with the lives
of the people they were studying than had been the case with earlier
ethnographers. "They are thus able to tackle the study of modern social
and economic problems in Africa in a way which would have been
impossible with the field-techniques of twenty years ago" (Richards
1944: 290).
And finally, according to Richards, "there has been an almost
revolutionary change in the focus of the anthropologist's interests" .
since 1928. "In those days Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown had to
defend, with some violence, their right to study societies as actually
functioning at the present day" (Richards 1944: 291). They attacked
the "antiquarianism" of
the student of earlier days [who] had felt it his duty to visit primitive
communities which were rapidly becoming extinct under modern
conditions. Most of Malinowski's pupils, however, worked among
the larger African tribes of the greatest political importance and
where European contact had often been at its maximum. In fact ...
many of them were specifically engaged on the study of changing
African societies.... Articles were published on particular effects
of the impact of Europeanism em primitive peasant communities.
Anthropologists became students of colonial administration-but
from a particular point of view, that of its disintegrating effect on
certain African societies under investigation. They began to study
the behaviour and view-points of the European members of the
community as well as of the African, and to look at white and black
84
Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, or tlte Handmaiden of Colonialism?
society as part of one 'total contact situation; to use Malinowski's
phrase. (Richards 1944: 291)
After he spent some time in Africa in the 1930s, Malinowski's
writings increasingly focused on the total colonial situation and the
exploitation of native peoples by settlers and the colonial government
(Malinowski 1945; James 1973). Max Cluckman, coming from South
Africa with a left-wing political approach, aimed "to study the total
social situation, so that he deliberately included Whites as part of that
totality;' and he took that perspective when he became the director
of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in 1938 (Goody 1995: 106-107).
There were many examples of British-trained anthropologists criticiz-
ing colonialism, contradicting the claim that they were complicit by
their silence about change and the realities of colonial rule.
The first modern PhD in anthropology in the British realm was
granted at the LSE in 1927 to Raymond Firth (a New Zealander, trained
in economics). Malinowski and Firth would soon be joined by Meyer
Fortes, a South African Jew with a degree in psychology-a convert
to anthropology-and several other new LSE doctoral students:
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Hortense Powdermaker, Isaac Schapera, and
Audrey I. Richards (Yearbook: 744-7 45). Their names and lectures begin
to appear in the records of the meetings of the Royal Anthropological
Institute in the late 1920s. Between 1927 and 1938 Malinowski's
program had granted twenty-one PhDs.
Radcliffe-Brown influenced young anthropologists during his
tenures in Cape Town (1920-26), Sydney (1926-31) and Chicago
(1931-37) (see Barth 2005: 27), and his theoretical writings had greater
influence on British social anthropology in the late 1940s and 1950s
than Malinowski's, but he did not produce doctoral students the way
the latter· did. It wasn't until his years at Oxford (1937-1946) that he
had his own coterie of doctoral students. The first two were awarded
their degrees in social anthropology in 1947; they were M. N. Srinivas,
from India (later "the doyen oflndian anthropology"), and K. A. Busia,
an Ashanti from the Gold Coast who would become prime minister of
Ghana in 1969. (According to the Yearbook [1955], Cambridge didn't
officially grant its first doctoral degree in social anthropology until
1948-to Kathleen Gough-but see the case of Monica Hunter, below.)
The reader may have noticed that many of these first professional
anthropologists weren't from Britain, and some weren't men. Malinowski's
first five PhDs and his converted psychologist follower consisted of a
85
 In Defense ofAnthropology
New Zealander, an American, two South African Jews; two of the six
were women, three were Jews, and Malinowski himself was a Polish
Catholic. Evans-Pritchard was the lone British male. Not only did
Malinowski continue to attract such "outsiders" -more women (Phyllis
Kaberry, Margaret Read, Camilla Wedgwood, and Edith Clarke from
Jamaica); Ian Hogbin and Reo Fortune from New Zealand; Go~don
Brown from Canada; A. Aiyappan from India; Fei Hsiao-Tung and
Francis L. K. Hsu from China; Siegfried F. Nadel and Paul Kirchhoff,
Jews from Vienna and Germany; John Peristiany from Cyprus-but
he welcomed to his seminars short-term sojourners in Britain. These
included Zachariah Keodirelang (Z. K.) Matthews of South Africa
(a Sotho, he was a defendant in the 1956 Treason Trial in South Africa,
along with Nelson Mandela and 154 others), Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya
(see Berman and Lonsdale 2007), Ralph Bunche, and Paul Robeson
and his wife, Eslanda (Essie).
One might think that Radcliffe-Brown's clientele at Oxford would be
purer English than those at the LSE, but the photo of him surrounded
by his eight research students in 1946 shows only two who might be
British, while the others hail from India, Jamaica, the Gold Coast, and
Greece. (Max Gluckman, yet another Jew from South Africa, received
a DPhil at Oxford in the mid-1930s with Marett and Evans-Pritchard.)
H. S. Morris comments that "In 1945 the only unambiguously native
(sic) professional anthropologists were Radcliffe-Brown, Audrey
Richards, and Margaret Read" (1973: 66)-and Evans-Pritchard.
According to Jack Goody, those from abroad "were attracted to anthro-
pology partly because of their concern for native peoples, and that in
itself was seen as a threat by some colonial authorities" (1995: 155). In
any case the prevailing political attitudes at the LSE in the 1930s were
left wing, Marx and Freud were "dominant figures;' and a number of
anthropologists "contributed to radical journals such as the Fabian
bulletin on colonial affairs" (p. 155).
One of those non-English students-a "colonial" in fact-was Monica
Hunter (later Wilson). From South Africa and the daughter of a mission-
ary, she went to Cambridge at the end of the 1920s. Arriving at Girton
College as a "deeply committed Christian liberal" (Bank 2009: 43),
she befriended a "rabid nationalist" from British-ruled Egypt, joined
a Labour Study Circle led by a South African communist friend, and
discovered anthropology as taught by two former colonial adminis-
trators, Jack Driberg and T. C. Hodson. She received a grant from the
university, carried out research in South Africa, and was awarded a
86
Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, or the Handmaiden of Colonialism?
Cambridge PhD in 1934. The dissertation became her important book
about change-especially amongwo1nen-Reaction to Conquest: Effects
ofContact with Europeans on the PoJido ofSouth Africa (1936). Accord-
ing to SAHo (South African History Online), "Wilson is regarded as
one of the heroines of South Africa's intellectual history. Her name
appears in the African National Congress's list of 100 foremost heroes/
heroines of the Eastern Cape alongside legendary figures such as Nelson
Mandela, Steve Biko, Oliver Tambo, and Govan Mbeki:' She was also
a mentor and colleague of Archie Mafeje (1976).
In July 1946 the social anthropol< >gical community of Great Britain
and the Commonwealth asserted itself and established the Associa-
tion of Social Anthropologists (ASA) as a body independent of the
Royal Anthropological Institute (Ardener and Ardener 1965; Mills
2008). At first numbering fewer than twenty, by 1949 they had grown
to thirty-six-at least half of them trained in the 1940s! Is it likely that
this happy few, this band of brothers and sisters, could have supplied
the tools or the rationale for colonial control for the venerable and
far-flung British empire-an empire already in dissolution?
Anthropology in the Service ofthe British Empire before 1930
According to Helen Tilley, "Anthropologists were rarely direct employ-
ees of colonial states: fewer than ten unthropologists had been appointed
in British tropical Africa between 1900 and 1940, and their studies only
occasionally had a direct impact on policy making" (2011: 282, my
emphasis). Out of the thousands of British colonial administrators and
officers c:;mly a few took courses in ~mthropology, although at certain
times and places (e.g., the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan ca. 1910, Northern
Nigeria ca. 1914-18) they were encouraged to do so (Jones 1974;
Kirk-Greene 1982; Johnson 2007: 314). In fact, in those days there
wasn't a great deal of anthropology to take, and the historian Douglas
Johnson indicates that the programs for trainees were desultory and
not very successful (p. 314).
At Oxford in 1908 instruction was given largely by an Egyptologist,
who lectured on the ethnology of the Sudan; by Henry Balfour, the
museum curator, who gave eight lectures on comparative technology;
and by Marett, who lectured on "primitive social institutions:' The next
year, instruction was at Cambridge, directed by Haddon, and was "far
less ambitious:' ("One year, probationers ceased to attend [Haddon's]
lectures when they found he had mislaid his Sudan notes and lectured
exclusively on New Guinea instead" IJohnson 2007: 314].) This training .
87
 In Defense ofAnthropology Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, or the Handmaiden of Colonialism?

program in anthropology petered out over the next few years, though government grant myself and do not remember that any of us ever
apparently others sprung up here and there. But here is the response of considered an application to the Colonial Office as one of our pos-
a colonial official in London declining to have anthropology included sibilities in this early period. (Richards 1977: 34, my italics)
in training programs as proposed by Haddon, Marett, and Balfour:
Given the great numbers of administrators throughout the empire,
"They had no interest in 'having our officers delivered to be prey of wild
it is significant how few actually contributed to the ethnographic litera-
enthusiasts ... [Y]ou could not make every man, or one in a hundred,
ture. Many officials did surveys, took censuses, and wrote intelligence
into an enthusiastic ethnologist.... As far as we are concerned ethnol-
reports, but with no anthropological pretense, nor were these reports
ogy is a side issue"' (Tilley 2011: 265).
normally published. There were, however, a few pre-professional eth-
Although the administration of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan showed
nographers in the colonial service who wrote for an audience of fellow
a greater interest in anthropology than most, and a relatively large
devotees of anthropology at least as much as for their government
number of officials in that country wrote books and articles about the
employers (Kuklick 1991: 203).
peoples they governed (e.g., Harold MacMichael1912; L. F. Nalder;
The pioneer in West African government anthropology was
J. H. Driberg-later of Cambridge), very little of the administration
Northcote Whitridge Thomas, a prolific writer of ethnography and
of the Sudan was actually influenced by anthropology (Johnson 2007;
linguistics of Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Thomas was a follower of
Kirk-Greene 1982). According to Kirk-Greene (1982: 38), "In general
Andrew Lang, a folklorist, Victorian armchair anthropologist, and a
terms, it may be said that the Sudan made anthropologists and not the
prodigious author with a fashionable interest in psychical research
other way round" because two members of the Sudan colonial service,
(Stocking 1995: 50-61). Under the influence of Lang, Thomas wrote
A. B. Lewis and P. P. Howell, returned to university to get degrees in the
Crystal Gazing: Its History and Practice, with a Discussion on the
subject. Janice Boddy writes (following Kirk-Greene 1982), "Despite
Evidence for Telepathic Scrying, and he was responsible for editing
the alleged utility of anthropology, few SPS [Sudan Political Service]
Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor (1907). (Lang wrote the
officials read the subject at university, only six in the entire cohort of
appreciation of Tylor, and the whole volume is a wonderful repre-
393 men over fifty-odd years of rule" (Boddy 2008). Apparently sports
sentation of the people and the subjects of interest to the field at that
and athletic prowess were much more important to the Sudan Political
·time.) Unfortunately for the immediate future of anthropology in
Service than anthropology (Kirk-Greene 1982).
government service, the Cambridge-educated Thomas threw himself
Until Malinowski and his students appeared on the scene there were
into his work too enthusiastically and not at all the way a gentle-
no trained and credentialed anthropologists in Britain even if there were
man would, and therefore his fellow colonial civil servants thought
government officers who had an intellectual interest in the customs,
he was a nutter, not a team player, and an all-around bad influence
institutions, and beliefs of peoples whom they were ruling. They were
(Kuklick 1991: 201). He insisted on doing ethnographic and linguistic
"amateurs" in the original sense of the word, lovers of the endeavor, and
research that was considered of no value for administration and was
several had taken courses (even diplomas) in anthropology at Oxford
sent home in 1915 after one tour of duty. "In the clubby atmosphere
and Cambridge. According to Audrey Richards,
of colonial bureaucracy, the experience of Thomas as 'government
There was an occasional appointment of a government anthro- anthropologist' reverberated for the next decade, confirming a pre-
pologist, generally owing to the individual wish of a governor of the vailing prejudice in favor of'practical' rather than 'scientific' men .. :'
moment or the appearance of a district officer specially interested in (Stocking 1995: 178).
ethnographical studies .... These were committed and knowledge- The colonial administrator turned anthropologist with the highest
able officers but without training in modern fieldwork methods. They
reputation among anthropologists (and probably among the people
produced valuable background material but not often direct answers
to government enquiries. ... But these government anthropologists he wrote about) is Captain Robert Sutherland Rattray (1881-1938),
were a mere handful of men, appointed quite intermittently. There M.B.E. (Of the Gold Coast Political Service; of Gray's Inn, Barrister-at-
was never a British colonial anthropological service .... I had no Law. Diplome in Anthropology [Oxon.]; Palmes d'Officier d'Academie

88 89
 In Defense ofAnthropology
[France]). Captain Rattray was in a most unusual if not unique position
in Africa during the 1920s because the Gold Coast administration cre-
ated for him the Anthropological Department in Ashanti-ofwhich he
was the only member. In 1909 Rattray had taken leave from his gov-
ernment service to study for the diploma in anthropology at Oxford,
where he studied with R. R. Marett and was helped and advised by
the Seligmans. ("Mrs. Seligman first inspired me with enthusiasm for
the Classificatory System and its vital importance in the elucidation
of the problems of social anthropology" ([Rattray 1923: 13]). Since his
superiors apparently didn't think much of him as an administrator (Laue
1976: 35), they made the best of a bad job by creating the new position
for him-which didn't do much for administration in the Gold Coast
but did quite a lot for anthropology and the Ashanti.
Rattray begins his Preface to Ashanti (1923) with the proto-
anthropologist's mantra: "It must be remembered that the creation of
Departments of Anthropology in Colonies and Protectorates where
governments are dealing with peoples who are classed as 'backward'
or 'primitive' has been advocated long and earnestly by scientists.
They have not ceased to press for the application of Anthropology to
the work of practical administration among the 'native' races" (1923: 5
[his single quotation marks]). But the colonial officials did not listen
to these constant pleas, and a glance at Rattrays's corpus suggests why
that might be. As Laue points out, Rattray was in the romantic tradi-
tion of the folklorists, the Herderian lovers of diversity, "the intellectual
oppositions of the anti-rationalists, the romantics, the critics of western ·
civilization .. :· (Laue 1976: 42; see Berlin 1976). Before he published
his great work, Ashanti Law and Constitution (1929), he had published
three volumes of Chinyanja, Hausa, and Ashanti folklore, songs, stories,
and proverbs; Religion and Art in Ashanti (1927); and Ashanti (1923),
which consists of a grab-bag of pieces mostly describing in detail vari-
ous religious rituals, with a short piece on the "Ashanti Classificatory
System;' one on "Land Tenure and Alienation;' and two short pieces
dealing with the important Ashanti golden and silver stools.
Rattray was deeply involved with and committed to the Ashanti he
worked among for so many years, and he had romantic and philosophi-
cal ideas about the proper ways for Ashanti (and other Africans) to
develop in the modern world and in relation to the West and Chris-
tianity. He called himself a "seeker after truths" and was concerned
to understand and present Ashanti religion as complex, objecting to
the term "fetishism" being applied to it (Rattray 1929: viii-ix). This
90
Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, Of the Handmaiden of Colonialism?
is not the stuff that the "practical men" of the administration needed
to hear. But the importance of his work to later anthropologists and
historians-outsider and African (Ashanti, especially) has been very
great (Goody 1995: 205). Laue writes that "the folklorist bulk of his
work has even served as a persistent resource for Ashanti nationalism
and, in a larger sense, of African- and even black-nationalism" (1976:
54). Laue also claims that "He thereby provided an ideological and, to
a more dubious extent, an anthropological justification for the resto-
ration of the Ashanti Confederacy in 1935, the high point of Indirect
Rule on the Gold Coast" (1976: 52). After his retirement to England,
Rattray remained very active in the RAI and African studies; he was
fifty-seven when he was killed in a glider accident. 10
Charles Kingsley Meek (1885-1965) took the Oxford course with
Marett in 1913 and served in the Nigerian Administrative Service from
1912 to 1933, and was appointed government anthropologist. His con-
tributions to practical rule may have been greater than Rattray's, but
his early publications were directed to his peers in the anthropological
world. His earliest, The Northern Tribes ofNigeria (1925), "was cast in
terms of'survivals' of'totemism' and the change from 'mother-right' to
patrilineal institutions" (Stocking 199S: 388), and more, right from the
playbook of the Victorian evolutionists. A Sudanese Kingdom (1931)
combines evolutionism, especially the concern for the "divine king" so
beloved of Frazer and others, with diffusionism. Meek stressed what he
believed were striking similarities between the rites and practices of the
Ancient Egyptians and the Jukun of Northern Nigeria. This must have
pleased Grafton Elliot Smith and William Perry, the leading exponents
of the "heliocentric theory" deriving all civilization from Egypt and
should please Afrocentrists today, the followers of Cheikh Anta Diop
(1962), and devotees of Martin Bernal (1987, 1991).
Following extensive riots by Ibo women in Southeastern Nigeria in
1929, the government "embark[ed] on an intensive campaign of inquiry
into the indigenous social and political organization of the peoples of
Southeastern Nigeria, with a view to setting up Native Administrations
which would be more in accordance with the institutions and wishes of
the people than the bureaucratic system which had so signally failed"
(Meek 1937: xi). Meek was transferred from the north of Nigeria to
"deal with the Intelligence reports from the point of view of applied
anthropology, and at the same time con duct inquiries of my own among
the lbo of Onitsha and Owerri Provinces" (p. xi). He worked intensively
on the inquiries "on lines which appear to meet the needs and wishes
91
 In Defense of Anthropology
of the people" (xii), until he was forced by illness to retire in 1932. The
resulting Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe, not published until
1937, concentrates on social structure, law, and authority, and by this
time Meek cited Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and Durkheim as well
as Rattray and Rivers. After his retirement Meek lived long enough to
be able to lecture on anthropology in Oxford. Law and Authority in a
Nigerian Tribe had a late colonial and postcolonial life as an invaluable
source for the Igbo peoples-as Rattray's is for the Ashanti (see van
den Bersselaar 1998).
Frank H. Melland, another colonial officer and member of the RAI,
published In Witch-Bound Africa in 1923. Despite its scary title it is a
sympathetic account of what he learned of the society and culture of
the Kaonde of (what was) Northern Rhodesia during the eleven years
he served among them. "Meant to be a serious study of the ethnography
of the Bakaonde ... viewed in the light of comparative religion and
social science" (Melland 1923: 7), his central concern was with religion,
of which witches and witchcraft play a major role, but he set it in a
rounded description of the life cycle and aspects of social relations.
The author filled the book with asides-moral lessons and suggestions
for his white readers, including the idea of trying to understand "the
native's point of view:' In fact, in the 1930s he became an important
figure in the significant debate about what should be done about the
prevalence and importance of witches and witch doctors in Africa,
calling for an understanding from the "African's point of view;' a debate
that eventually led to the licensing of healers in parts of Africa (see
Tilley 2011: 263-309 passim). Critics of ethnography would consider
the study of witchcraft and spirit possession to be exoticizing; those
with experience among many peoples of the world know the profound
importance these practices may have even today.
Whatever other service the government anthropologists may have
performed, the theoretical concerns and the debates of their time, as
well as their appreciation of the people they wrote about, stimulated
much of their anthropological writing. Few of their publications were
directed to applied anthropology or the sociology of colonial rule. The
Colonial Office and other relevant British governmental sectors clearly
understood this gap between anthropological ambitions and colonial
imperatives.
Helen Lackner (1973: 140) was impressed that Professor John
Myres's 1929 presidential address to the RAI, "The Science of Man in
the Service of the State;' spoke of "the relationship of anthropology
92
Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, or the Handmaiden of Colonialism?
and government, the attempts at setting up various anthropological
institutions and the development-of the teaching of anthropology to
Colonial Office staff:' But his lecture was all about the utter failure of
the RAI to convince the government of the usefulness of anthropology,
detailing attempts that went as far back as 1896. And Sir John's 1944
address to the Royal Anthropological Institute, with the title "A Century
of Our Work;' reports that they were still begging! The Institute was
still making "representations" to the Colonial Office about the need for
ethnological training for civil servants. "More recently a Standing Com-
mittee on Applied Anthropology has suggested and supported propos-
als for more intensive study of native culture, especially in Africa, and
for more systematic training and opportunities for research for Colonial
officials" (Myres 1944: 6). If after a half-century of constant attempts
they still had not succeeded, it hardly seems like the government of
Imperial Britain saw anthropology as its indispensable handmaiden. 11
Colonialism and Anthropology after Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown
In 1908 the British government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan commis-
sioned those transitional figures of British anthropology, Charles G.
Seligman and his wife, Brenda, to carry out an expedition to the Upper
Nile provinces to collect anthropological information from the peoples
there. The Seligmans made a number of surveys until the early 1920s,
collecting material for a massive volume of old-style physical and cul-
tural anthropology, much of it through questionnaires responded to by
administrators and missionaries. Pag1zn Tribes ofthe Nilotic Sudan was
not published until1932-quite a long time after the work had been
commissioned-and was neither timely nor particularly useful. When
they could no longer go to the Sudan themselves, the Seligmans recom-
mended that E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who was studying with Seligman
and Malinowski at the LSE, be engaged to carry out more research in
the Southern provinces.
The government agreed to support Evans-Pritchard's research
although they had no particular pian or need for him, and he went
out on his own, found the Azande, and from 1926 to 1930 (on and
off) did the research that resulted in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic
Among the Azande (1937). (This greatly honored work in the canon
of British social anthropology offers a direct relativist rebuke to smug
Christian and colonial ethnocentrism [see, e.g., James 1973].) While
he was still working with the Azancle the authorities requested that
he turn his attention to the Nuer, who were rebellious and difficult for
93
 In Defense ofAnthropology
the government to deal with-as anyone who reads "Int:wductory" in
The Nuer knows. He began research with the Nuer in 1930-but his
books on the Nuer didn't appear until1940, 1951, and 1956. As he did
his research Evans-Pritchard encountered many problems with govern-
ment officials (with one in particular) and developed principled argu-
ments regarding anthropologists working with colonial governments
(Evans-Pritchard 1946; Johnson 1982). Despite the general notion
that £vans-Pritchard had a hand in the ruling of the Nuer, even had
he wanted to, the results of his work as an anthropologist were much
too scholarly ("scientific"), theoretical, irrelevant, and far too belated
to be of any use for governing (James 1973; Johnson 1982, 2007). In a
famous passage Evans-Pritchard claimed that neither he nor Professor
Seligman had ever been asked for advice on anything by anyone in the
Sudan government (Evans-Pritchard 1946: 97). More than that, Evans-
Pritchard rendered very harsh judgments on those whom he considered
to be doing government work rather than real anthropology-probably
very unjustly (see Goody 1995: 72-74).
From the late 1920s, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown did their best
to extract funds from the government to send their students to the field
for research-just as their predecessors in the Royal Anthropological
Institute had. In their desire to advance the new science of which they
were the prophets, and in their desperate need for funds to support
their students, they tried to convince the colonial bffice of the impera-
tive to employ anthropologists, of the practical value of anthropology
for the proper understanding of the native for the good of both the
government and the natives. Malinowski's article "Practical Anthropol-
ogy" (1929) is the key document in this struggle, but the government
officials were too smart for him; they knew better and never fell for the
arguments. Sir Philip Mitchell, later colonial governor of Uganda, Fiji,
and Kenya, responded to Malinowski's claims with great skepticism,
emphatically expressing a preference for the "practical man" rather
.than the scientist (1930).
At just the right moment, in 1926, support for early professional
anthropology in Britain came from the United States, from the Rockefeller
Foundation and its Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. The directors
of these funds were social scientists influenced by the "Progressive" era
in America and they were looking for worthy projects to support in
order to advance both social science and human well-being throughout
the world. As part of a consortium that established the Social Science
Research Council (SSRC) in the United States, they decided to fund
94
Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, or the Handmaiden of Colonialism?
. ----·---------------------
the establishment of the International Institute of African Languages
and Cultures (IIALC) in London, and to include researchers from
France, Germany, and other European countries as well. The IIALC
(later called the International African Institute [IAI]) supported much
of the research done by British anthropologists in Africa and Oceania
and elsewhere for the most important years at the very beginning of
professional social anthropology in Britain and its extensions. Other
anthropologists (Monica Hunter, Isaac Schapera, John Middleton)
reached the field through fellowships from universities and colleges, and
from foundations such as the Leverhulme (Evans-Pritchard), Fulbright
(Lloyd Fallers), Carnegie (Max Gluckman), SSRC (Paul Bohannan). It
was not the British government but funding from private sources that
sponsored new anthropological research.
Although the impetus for the founding and operations of the SSRC
was conceived and directed by academic social scientists who wanted
to have an influence in solving real-world social, economic, and health
problems, it was inevitable that after 1968 foundations like those of
Rockefeller and Ford would be considered just as colonial-in the inter-
est of the United States, the West, capitalism, hegemony, domination.
The verdict on these accusations thus far must be unproven, mixed,
and varying over time, place, and case. (See Feuchtwang 1973; Fisher
1986; Stocking 1985: 133-138; Goody 1995: 9-7-13; D. Mills 2002; and
chapter 8.)
With these funding sources, British and some other anthropologists
were able to carry out research in Africa, and the first one from the
LSE to do so was Audrey I. Richards (1899-1984). Before going to the
field, Richards had completed her doctorate with a library dissertation
(1930), but she was then able to go to Northern Rhodesia to work on a
similar problem. Her PhD thesis was built on the basics of Malinowski's
new functionalist science of culture, examining the ways in which the
fundamental animal need for food, for nutrition, is set into complex
webs of behavior in humans. Malinowski had focused on how the bio-
logical drive for reproduction-sex-in the Trobriands was regulated
by kinship, status, norms of etiquette, ideas of morality, emotions,
sentiments, magic, customs, and taboos (Sexual Life ofSavages 1929,
Sex and Repression in Savage Society 1927). Richards took a similar
approach to food and the many social and culture aspects surrounding
this vital aspect of life, basing it on available ethnographic literature
(Richards 1932). To this end she attempted a thorough account of every
aspect that feeds into nutrition, as Malinowski had with sex. Although
95
 In D~fense of Anthropology
the ethnographic information was based on people under colonialism
in Africa, the topic itself was a general theoretical one that could have
been written about any human society.
Her second book, based on fieldwork among the Bemba of Northern
Rhodesia (now Zambia), was directed to further problems of health
and nutrition. Though her first book shows no hint of a concern for
practical (applied) problems, this one grew directly out of the situa-
tion of deteriorating diets in Africa. In 1935 the International African
Institute established "a Diet Committee composed of anthropologists
and experts in nutrition ... :· The Colonial Economic Advisory Com-
mittee set up such a committee in 1937 "to consider food problems
in all British colonial territories;' as there was growing awareness of
serious health issues resulting from poor nutrition. Based on discus-
sions in these committees, Richards undertook research "intended to
show what anthropologists could contribute to the study of nutrition
in African society, by an analysis of the social and economic factors
affecting the intake of food in a particular tribe .. :· (Richards 1939:
vii; my emphasis).
The result of her research, Land, Labour and Diet in Northern
Rhodesia (1939), is a detailed study that shows the many ways that
diet, appetite, and nutrition are influenced by the culturally directed
patterns of producing, preparing, and dividing food. Her book details,
among other things, kinship and domestic groups: land tenure; culti-
vation and production of other edibles; food preparation, eating, and
feeding; attitudes, customs, and beliefs relating to food, exchange, diet,
budgeting, sharing, etc., very much on the pattern laid down in her
library thesis but now demonstrated on an actual case. Packed with
rich ethnographic and economic data, the book is oriented toward the
practical problem of understanding the causes for nutritional deficien-
cies, some of them apparently cultural and social. And among the many
problems, one in particular stands out for Richards: the effects on food
production of the absence of men from their communities. Richards
cannot be accused of ignoring the colonial situation and the fact that
men worked for wages in distant mines and cities. She concludes her
book with the familiar plea for recognition of the value of an anthro-
pological approach. Her work "has shown in every chapter the extent
to which a particular diet can be determined by purely culturaJ factors.
... [I]t is a study of these cultural determinants offood and feeding
that can and should be included in a nutritional survey at the present
time" (Richards 1939: 404)_12
96
Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, or the I Iandmaiden of Colonialism?
Aside from the attempt to promote anthropology, Richards's work
was directed to the real-world needs of human beings, especially
of women as the heads of families. Her study of food and work in
Central Africa, informed by the new "science" of functionalism, is
different in intent and style from most of the ethnographic work that
was produced before the functionalist revolution. Only those who
believe that amelioration of human misery merely postpones the
inevitable revolution of the masses could consider it a contribution
to colonial rule.
The late 1930s was the time when a veritable swarm of British
anthropologists-fewer than twenty, actually-was let loose on Africa
with funds from the IAI. Among those were Monica Hunter Wilson,
Hilda Beemer Kuper, Margaret Read, and Meyer Fortes. Although
they may have had various connections with colonial officials while
in the field, they spent most of their time on research for the good of
their science and their careers. Audrey Richards (she was everywhere)
published a leading statement in Africa in 1944, "Practical Anthropol-
ogy in the Lifetime of the International African Jnstitute:' After giv-
ing four examples of specific studies that were requested by colonial
governments, those by Isaac Schapera in Bechuanaland, Siegfried
Nadel in Northern Nigeria, Meyer Fortes in northern Gold Coast,
and Margaret Read in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Audrey
Richards continues,
In spite of these hopeful beginnings it must however be admitted that
the Institute's first objective 'to provide a closer association of scien-
tific knowledge and research with practical affairs' has achieved only
a very moderate success. Field-workl'rS have been used incidentally,
as indicated above, but they have newr been steadily or consistently
employed, and African Governments have rarely financed their
work. At the outbreak of war only the Governments of the Anglo-
Egyptian Sudan, the Gold Coast, and the Union of South Africa were
employing 'Government anthropologists: There were none in the
other territories. Nor were any employed as advisers or appointed to
the staffs of centres of higher education. Once their research grants
came to an end it was in fact impossible for any but a small number
to make a living, and University departments regularly discouraged
students without private means from taking up the subject as a
post-graduate course, so that the number of trained investigators
is now dangerously small. It looks as though the anthropologist had
been advertising his goods, often rat/zer clamorously, in a market in
which there was little demand for 1hem. (Richards 1944: 293; my
emphasis)l3
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 In Defense ofAnthropology
Note that from the vast British Empire, if there was any interest
at all in the potential use of academic anthropology, it came almost
exclusively from the colonies in Africa. Apparently the government of
India and other authorities in Asia cared even less for the wisdom of
the anthropological scientists.
Eventually, in 1944, not much more than a decade before the first
African colonies gained their independence (four years before India,
Pakistan, and Ceylon [Sri Lanka], and Burma achieved theirs), the British
government agreed to create a council to plan and carry out research
for the improvement of social conditions, welfare, and development
in the colonies. The new CSSRC (Colonial Social Science Research
Council) was directed by social scientists that decided on priorities
for research into social and economic problems. With their firsthand
experience in Africa and other colonies, Audrey Richards (as usual),
Raymond Firth, Isaac Schapera, and a new boy, Edmund Leach, carried
considerable weight on the councils and were able to greatly enhance
the numbers and the prestige of social anthropology in Britain. (See
Notes and News, AA, 1949 (51): 167-169; Mills 2002, 2006.)
The CSSRC supported the establishment of three research insti-
tutes, one in Jamaica, one in Nigeria at the University College of
Ibadan, and the third in Uganda at Makerere College. The ubiquitous
Audrey Richards was the first director of the East African Institute of
Social Research at Makerere-from which a great deal of significant
research and scholarship emerged over the next two decades. The
first center for the social science study of a region of Africa was the
Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia, established with
funds from a variety of sources, including some mining companies-
against their better judgment. Established in 1938, under its directors,
Godfrey Wilson, Max Gluckman, and Elizabeth Colson, a large number
of critical studies were conducted, investigating social issues arising
from industrial and wage labor, labor migration, urbanization, detrib-
alization, and ethnic identity and relations. The work emanating from
this institute was frequently very critical of colonialism, exploitative
capitalism, labor policies, etc. (See R. Brown 1973; Epstein 1992;
Schumaker 2001; review of Schumaker in chapter 5.)
When, in the 1950s, greater numbers of British anthropologists went
to Africa or other colonies for research, there was the expectation that
independence was only a few years away. Anthropologists by this time
assumed that their efforts might be directed toward aiding peoples as
the colonial yoke was removed. This was clearly the understanding
98
Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, or the Handmaiden of Colonialism?
at the three research institutes, and the projects that were funded by
the CSSRC-some of which involved cooperation with colonial
administration-were aimed at postcolonial development of economy,
agriculture, education, etc. Here is the testimony of one who worked
as an applied anthropologist. Philip Gulliver writes,
However, at least it has been gl'nerally acknowledged that many of us
in social anthropology then wE're critical of colonial regimes, both for
what they represented-an arm ofWestern metropolitan exploitation
and paternalism, tinged with racialism-and for their inequities and
inefficiencies and the downright oppression by particular regimes
in particular contexts. With such a critical attitude, it neverthe-
less seemed to me in 1952, wl1en I applied for the appointment in
Tanganyika, that colonialism was the going regime and it seemed
reasonable and attractive to try to work within it, to contribute
towards amelioration and improvement and, even just a little, to
hasten its end. (Gulliver 1985)
Although the major sources for funding anthropologists in the field
came from the International African Institute and later the CSSRC,
there were times and circumstances when it seemed appropriate for
anthropologists to work with particular local governments. And in any
case the anthropologist in the field would have to deal with officials,
missionaries, traders, and perhaps settlers. There is a considerable lit-
erature that demonstrates that these were not usually very successful
or happy relations.
Anthropologists and Administrators
The testimonies on this issue are quite clear. As much as Malinowski
and his predecessors insisted that their profession could be of service to
administrators, above all by teaching the rulers about the needs, wishes,
ways, feelings, etc., of the ruled, with rare exceptions the practical men
were not interested. Even when anthropologists were hired by an agency
of government, the results were usually uninspiring if not dispiriting.
There is overwhelming evidence that the administrators were simply
not interested in what the anthropologists had to say. Evans-Pritchard's
statement that neither he nor Seligman was asked even once for any
advice "on sociological problems" in the areas of the Sudan in which
they worked (Evans-Pritchard 1946: 97) can be multiplied many times.
Peter Lloyd reports, from a later date, "During these two tours of field-
work among the Yoruba I was free to study whatever I wanted; neither
university nor government suggested topics for research nor did they
99
 In Defense ofAnthropology Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, or the Handmaiden of Colonialism?

prevent me from carrying out my plans" (Lloyd 1973: 218, 225), and fur- live in a native village and not in the nearest European settlement.
thermore "that the colonial administration not only placed no restraints They must share in the work and play of the people and attend their
upon my work but appeared very little interested in it" (p. 225). ceremonies. It would be difficult Jor Europeans occupying positions
of high authority, or closely idenLified with a particular Church, to
Moreover-as a social scientist should suspect-the relations attend beer drinks or magic ceremonies with the same freedom as
between government officials and the anthropologists were often quite the anthropologist does .... For Lhis reason it is inevitable that the
negative. Again we have a case of over determination, and from the anthropologist should quickly acquire the reputation of a 'wild man
beginning of professional anthropology in Britain observers and crit- of the woods~ .. There can be few who have not been described at
ics were quick to point this out. (For a summary see Kuper 1973; also one time or another as "dancing round a tom-tom in a loin cloth:'
(Richards 1944: 293-294)
Mitchell1929; Richards 1944; Hailey 1944, 1957; Goody 1995; Burton
1992; Epstein 1992; papers in Loizos 1977.)
The interests, the sentiments, and the aims of the two parties were
From the point of view of the colonial official, it is natural that he entirely different. The anthropologists considered themselves academ-
(and it would always be a he) would feel that the presence of a scientist, ics and scientists, propagating the new science of mankind. They were
an expert, perhaps a "do-gooder" (who might be a woman) looking
intellectuals, their reference group was fellow intellectuals, and their
over his shoulder would not be pleasant. For one thing, an administra-
success depended on bringing back excellent ethnographic work with
tor who had been among a people of a district for years (as they often
a convincing theoretical component. The colonial administrator was
were) would have to feel that he knew a hell of a lot more about "his
not their natural companion or ally, although there would have been
people" than the outsider could know in a year or two. Furthermore,
individual exceptions, of course.
the scientist might be seen as a muddle-head full of theory that was
This antagonism would be aggravated when the anthropologist was
irrelevant to the practical man. From the administrative point of view,
clearly anticolonial-and as we have seen many anthropologists were
the reports of the anthropologist were usually too late, too long, and
quite leftist in their politics. Even worse-perhaps the anthropologist
too anthropological for the administrator to use.
was a "Red:' For example, Peter Lloyd writes, "I left for Nigeria in 1949
And then there was the widespread notion that the anthropologist
a Marxist and, in spirit, a communist" (1977: 79). According to Jack
was a romantic, dead set against change for fear of destroying the
Goody, Meyer Fortes "was very much part of the pre-war group of
precious culture and traditions of "the native:' This was probably not
left-wing intellectuals associated with the Fabian Society who influ-
generally true, but anthropologists with a cultural relativist perspec- ·
enced the movement towards coloniaL independence that took place
tive were likely to counsel respect for feelings and traditions and the
in Britain in the decade and a half following the Second World War,
avoidance of unnecessary measures that set in motion unpredictable
affecting on the one hand the actions of politicians in the metropolis
changes with possible negative ramifications throughout the system.
and on the other giving some support to the growing pressure from
(Boas's warnings to the Canadian government of the possible rami-
the subject populations" (Goody 1995: 54, "Making it to the field as a
fications of outlawing the potlatch are a good example of this, as are
Jew and a Red"). Adam Kuper presents an important account of the
Evans-Pritchard's cautions to administrators and missionaries about
politics of anthropologists in South Africa through the years (Kuper
magic and sorcery [Evans-Pritchard 1931: 22].)
1999: 145-170), as does Jack Goody of his own intellectual and political
At the very least the anthropologist would probably stir up trouble
history (1995: 118-122).
by simply being there and doing what anthropologists must: have direct
Even without being anticolonial, the anthropologist would nor-
and personal involvement with the native-the basic element of the
mally be on the side of the people he or she worked with and not
whole enterprise. Noting that the behavior of Europeans in Africa "is
infrequently oppose policies of the g< >Vernment that they might see
very closely defined;' Audrey Richard writes,
both as destructive as well as stupid. Fredrik Barth writes, "It is ironic
yet anthropologists participate much more closely than do other cat- that the Polish freethinker Malinowski and his ragtag band of radical,
egories of Europeans living in the community. They must, for instance, largely nonestablishment, even foreign disciples should be faulted for

100 101
 In Defense ofAnthropology
serving and aligning with the empire. Since doing so would have been
counterproductive for their fieldwork efforts, it is not credible that this
would have been their general practice" (Barth 2005: 52).
From the heights of postcolonial and critical theory such ground-
level differences and conflicts probably don't matter. But for the history
of anthropology these interpersonal human and political dimensions
must be recognized as fundamental to the relationship between anthro-
pology and colonialism.
Conclusions Regarding British Anthropology and Colonialism
Thus, the evidence is overwhelming. Tala! Asad was right. The role
of British anthropology in maintaining colonialism has been trivial at
best. The same is even truer for American anthropology. Anthropology
as a discipline came into being too late to be of much use for the rule
of natives under colonialism-a process that began several thousand
years before Boas, Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown. (Even the Roman
Empire was a latecomer to the game.) And when anthropologists did
appear, presumed experts on those natives, the administrators were
not interested in what they had to say-especially about being nice. So
why is it so widely believed that anthropology played a significant role
in consolidating and maintaining colonial domination? For the answer
to this rarely posed question we must once again look to 1968-in this
case more literally than metaphorically.
The trope of anthropology as the child of colonialism sounded great
in 1968. It fit the zeitgeist perfectly. With the war in Vietnam, the con-.
tinuing colonial wars in Portuguese Africa and Rhodesia, Fidel Castro
in Cuba and Che Guevara executed in Bolivia, the excitement of Mao
Zedong's "cultural revolution" in China, the constant Cold War and
the growing popularity of Marxist approaches and slogans, this was a
perfect fit for young and old anthropologists who were really upset with
the world and their stodgy profession ("Is Anthropology Alive?" asked
Gerald Berreman [1968]). Suddenly there was Kathleen Gough's article
in the Marxist Monthly Review, "Anthropology and Imperialism" (1968:
12-27), heralded on the cover of the journal as "Anthropology: Child
of Imperialism:' It could not have been timelier or better presented
with that simple title and cover. No need to even read it. It doesn't
matter that Kathleen Gough made no effort to support or document
her celebrated title, devoting only one short and one long paragraph
to it. The actual aim of her paper was to appeal for anthropologists to
stu<iy communist societies and revolutions! 14
102
Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, or the Handmaiden of Colonialism?
Critique of anthropology was in the air, and there were a number of
other contemporary articles that made the claim with greater speci-
ficity (see Diane Lewis 1973; Bernard Magubane 1971, 1972; Jacques
Maquet 1964), to be topped off by the volume edited by Tala! Asad
(1973); see summary in Vermeulen (1999). These works set the tone
and supplied the license for writers of many sorts to jump in and pile
on. More than four decades have passed, however, and it is time for a
reconsideration of this cliche.
The idea of the culpability of anthropology in the project of colo-
nialism has served its function and its time. A discourse conceived in
rage and the political needs and passions of the late 1960s in America
should not be carried on indefinitely by inertia. It is time to move on.
Helen Tilley, in her recent volume about the sciences in colonial
Africa (1870-1950), concludes the chapter on anthropology as
follows:
Perhaps more significant, these projects [in the 1940s and 1950s]
increasingly drew attention to the effects of colonial rule. Develop-
ment funds were being used not just to grease the wheel of empire
but also to slowly erode its foundations. Anthropologists, who had
worked for so long to stake out a claim to be included among the
empire's experts, used their tools to chip away at it once on the inside.
(Tilley 2011: 311)
Maybe Asad was wrong after all. Maybe the role of anthropology in
British colonialism wasn't so trivial!
Let the final words come from the lirst student to be awarded the
PhD from Malinowski's school: "anthropology is not the bastard of colo-
nialism but the legitimate offspring of the Enlightenment" (Raymond
Firth 1972). 15
Notes
1. In 1973 Asad claimed, among other things, that colonialism and Western
domination distorted the relations bdween the anthropologist and the
peoples they were studying; that the knowledge generated by anthropologists
"gives the West access to cultural and historical information about the societ-
ies it has progressively dominated, and thus not only generates a certain kind
of universal understanding, but also reinforces the inequalities in capacity
between the European and the non-European worlds" (Asad 1973: 16). "We
then need to ask ourselves how this rdationship has affected the practical
pre-conditions of social anthropology; the uses to which its knowledge was
put; the theoretical treatment of particular topics; the mode of perceiving
and objectifying alien societies; and t/1e anthropologist's claim of political
neutrality" (Asad 1973: 17, emphasis added). The evidence suggests that
103
 In Defense ofAnthropology
"the anthropologist" (sic) did not always claim political neutrality (also see
chapter 6 on Franz Boas).
2. Asad and his collaborators wrote only about British social anthropology, but
the critique was seized upon gleefully and extended to American anthropol-
ogy as well.
3. From time to time Boas had the assistance of other teachers in the depart-
ment, but such aid was very irregular at first, and his department was never
large. The history of the earliest anthropology doctorates in the United States
is only slightly more complicated than this brief presentation and the details
do not alter the general picture. (The first doctorates awarded in linguistics
and ethnology at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania went to men
who had also studied with Boas.) See Bernstein (2002) and Jacknis (2002)
for detailed accounts.
4. An economist with a PhD from the University of Wisconsin (1896), Albert
E. Jenks, carried out ethnographic surveys on behalf of the US Department of
Interior from 1902-1905. He later turned to anthropology with pre-Boasian
racial biases.
5. Fletcher did not work for the BAE but had funds from a private source (Lurie
1966).
6. Here is an example I am personally acqdainted with. In 1937 Morris Swadesh
developed a plan to hire bilingual and literate Wisconsin Oneidas to record
their language both for linguistic analysis and-explicitly-so that the
Oneidas would have this material for teaching and preserving their language.
For the last seventy years the Oneidas have been using this material for this
purpose (Lewis 2005: xxxii-xxxiii).
7. To its shame, during World War II the government of the United States
carried out a policy of "removal" of Japanese-Americans to "relocation"
camps. Quite a few anthropologists participated in efforts to make the
process and life in the camps as painless as possible. For two different views
see Leighton 1945 and Starn 1986.
8. Thus Boas was the great demon for the promoters of a revived cultural evo-
lutionism, especially Leslie White, and later, Marvin Harris (see chapter 7).
9. The reader will be encountering Audrey Richards repeatedly in this chapter.
For more about her see '~udrey Richards: A Career in Anthropology" in
Kuper 1999; Jo Gladstone, '~udrey I. Richards (1899-1984): Africanist and
Humanist" (1992); and David Mills, "How Not to Be a 'Government House
Pet': Audrey Richards and the East African Institute for Social Research"
(2006).
10. Rattray published a novel, The Leopard Princess (1934), and dedicated it to
"Paul Robeson, athlete, singer, genius, who is proud to claim Africa as his
motherland and whom Africa is proud and very happy to welcome as a son"
(Laue 1976: 42). As well as a great singer and famous actor, Paul Robeson
was, of course, well known for his radical left and African nationalist senti-
ments. On Rattray's work in northern Ghana, see Lentz 1999, 2000.
11. Stocking discusses these abortive attempts in detail (1995: 375ff.). See also
Hailey 1944: 10; Stauder 1980:317ff.
12. In 1986 a British anthropologist, Henrietta Moore, and a historian, Megan
Vaughan, carried out an extensive restudy of Richards's work, going over
the same terrain and topics more than fifty years later. Their study was only
104
Was Anthropology the Child, the Tool, or the Handmaiden of Colonialism?
possible because of the richness and high quality of the original pioneering
work (Moore and Vaughan 1996).
13. Schapera worked on land tenure and nat1 ve law in Bechuanaland while Nadel
lo~ked into the possibility of establishing "pagan" courts in Nupe alongside
the Muslim ones. Read studied the effects of migratory labor on village life
in Nyasaland, and Fortes made a study of Tallensi marriage law and worked
on a new constitution for the native administration (Richards 1944: 292).
See also Hailey 1944: 14. James Faris ( 1973) published a denunciation of
S. F. Nadel's work with the Nuba for the government of the Sudan. H. A.
Taatgen more recently (1982) contributed a strong defense of Nadel's work
with both the Nuba and the Nupe.
14. In revisiting her paper twenty-five years later, Gough (1993) didn't even
mention the claim she made in those tw<) paragraphs-words that launched
the powerful slogan and trope. She conc,mtrated exclusively on the problem
of anthropologists studying revolutions, from a Marxian perspective.
15. For the Enlightenment origins of anthropology (ethnography and ethnology)
see Vermeulen 1995, 1996, 2006, 2008. 13ased on his studies of eighteenth-
century European expeditions and early ethnography, Vermeulen writes,
"My thesis is that anthropology was not horn out of imperialism or colonial-
ism ... but developed within its contexts. As far as I can see, anthropology
has had a symbiotic relation with colonialism but did not stem from it"
(1999: 18). And in a forthcoming book, confirming Firth's point about the
Enlightenment origins of anthropology Vermeulen concludes, "The colonial
context was conducive to the birth of ethnography because the authori-
ties sought inventories of the peoples in the Russian Empire, but the main
research questions derived from a schof,zrly agenda set by Leibniz, Lafitau,
and (later) Linnaeus" (forthcoming). Similarly, Lewis Henry Morgan-the
pre-Boasian father of American anthropology-built Ancient Society from
the foundation of Sketches of the History of Man (1778) by Henry Home,
Lord Kames, a prominent figure of the Scottish Enlightenment.
105