Decolonizing US anthropology

Abstract

After Ferguson, Standing Rock, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the crisis of refugees at the US southern border, there have been renewed calls for a racial reckoning in US anthropology. Dissatisfaction on the domestic front runs parallel to an unease over US anthropology's failure to adequately address militarism, imperialism, and predatory capitalism abroad. Finally, there is the fraught question of US anthropology's oversized influence within world anthropologies. We propose that a reassessment of US anthropology might fruitfully begin with some counterfactual history. How would US anthropology been different had the founding generations conceptualized the discipline as a decolonizing project? What topics or themes might have become central to US anthropology? How might our methods have been different? To make anthropology departments more diverse, inclusive, and equitable, we need to do more than add faculty and students of color. Despite being a field whose central concept is "culture," we have paid far too little attention to the culture of anthropology departments. Do unexamined practices of "white-norming" that shape the everyday lives of faculty and students in anthropology departments persistently "Other"-marginalize and alienate-people of color?

What makes a “good” forensic anthropologist?

“…This may reflect the depth of experience among older anthropologists or changes in training practices and curriculum, corresponding with disciplinary shifts in anthropological theory away from positivism in favor of postmodern, postcolonial, and interpretive epistemologies. Indeed, this divide maps onto broader disciplinary fault lines that are routinely engaged and revisited, most recently with Akhil Gupta's 2021 AAA Presidential Address, “Decolonizing US Anthropology” (Gupta and Stoolman, 2022), and the ensuing debate over anthropology's past (see Lewis, 2021). As Gupta noted in a public lecture following the dustup, current work animating what “the younger generation of people are interested in” is antiracist and anticolonialist in focus, oriented toward issues of power, inequity, and oppression (Gupta, 2022).…”

“…In the context of current antiracist social movements, many forensic anthropologists have begun a process of intradisciplinary introspection and self‐critique, aligned with broader disciplinary reflections on “decolonizing US anthropology” (Gupta and Stoolman, 2022; see also Adams et al., 2022; Bethard and DiGangi, 2020; DiGangi and Bethard, 2021; McCrane, Hsiao, and Tallman, 2022; Rodriguez Almada et al., 2021; Ross and Pilloud, 2021; Ross and Williams, 2021; Tallman, Parr, and Winburn, 2021; Winburn and Clemmons, 2021a, 2021b). Recently, these conversations have spilled out onto the pages of The New York Times and Science (Imbler, 2021; Wade, 2021), publicly demonstrating conflicts within the subdiscipline and evolving ideas of ethical practice (Keane, 2015).…”

From decolonizing knowledge to postimperialism

“…In the US academic milieu, decolonization's state of the art is illustrated by the presidential address of the 2021 meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Gupta and Stoolman (2022) point to the failure of US anthropology “to develop a decolonizing project” and come to grips with US racism and white supremacy. They offer a list of things to study for a decolonizing agenda: genocides and mass killings; slavery and structural violence (from the plantation to the prison‐industrial complex); legal treaties and the political systems that enable their abrogation or enforcement; forced migration and internally displaced populations; the kinship of humans and other nonhuman animals; reparations, land‐back initiatives, truth and reconciliation, redistributive justice, and the redress of historical wrongs; borders, nationalisms, and citizenship; extractive industries, industrial agriculture, and monopoly capitalism.…”

Introduction

“…Calls for decolonizing the field have steadily increased since the 1990s, and decolonization remains a looming, unfinished project. As Akhil Gupta argued in his 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, anthropologists and anthropology do not function simply as handmaidens to colonialism, but when we do not acknowledge that race and location matter to the work that we do and that our very presence in a community can be a reminder (or an enactment) of colonialism, we stifle what anthropology could be (Gupta and Stoolman, 2021, 16–17; see also Fryer, 2020). A shared esteem for the archaeological record will never be enough to chart a productive way forward when whiteness continues to create barriers to effective research (see Hart, 2020).…”