Surrender to the Market: Thoughts on Anthropology, The Body Shop, and Intellectuals¹

Abstract

The direction of anthropology over the last century is tied to the shifts from colonialism to postcolonialism and from modernism to postmodernism. These shifts have seen the thoroughgoing incorporation of the world population into the economic, political and juridical domain established through the last throes of colonialism and the transmutations of capitalism and the State. Anthropology, a discipline whose history shows close and regular links with colonial government, also transforms in association with the world it describes and partly creates. Two dominant trends in contemporary anthropology—applied consultancy and historicist self‐reflexivity—are compared for the ways they represent the transmutation, which is characterised, following Fredric Jameson as ‘the surrender to the market’. In this way it is asserted that just as the discipline had hitherto revealed its links to colonialism, it now reveals its links to globalisation through a form of commodified self‐obsession. To illustrate this quality the paper considers the global chain of cosmetics stores, The Body Shop, as an example of ‘late capitalism’ and the moral juridical framework of globalisation. Finally, it treats these developments in anthropology as more generally affecting intellectuals and knowledge production through the promotion of intellectual ‘silence’.

Contested identities of indigenous people: Indigenization or integration of the Veddas in Sri Lanka

“…The Veddas in Sri Lanka have been perceived as the ‘others’ since colonial times. In their search for ‘true Veddas’ in Ceylon, anthropologists Charles Gabriel and Brenda Zara Seligmann came across ‘professional primitive men’ who presented themselves as Veddas (Bastin, ). Recently, wealthy people's desire to experience exotic places and people, authentic cultures, and search for adventure have increased the demand for indigenous culture; hence, indigenousness has obtained a market value.…”

“…When traditional artefacts and access to the practices of everyday life of people are sold, indigenous identity is produced and consumed as a commodity (Guneratne, ; Hunter, ; Yang, ). As professional primitivism has become a way to earn a living, indigenous people continue to live as ‘primitive’, ‘backward’ and ‘exotic’ (Bastin, ; Yang, ).…”

“…The Veddas in Sri Lanka fit the World Bank's () definition of indigenous people. The existence of the Veddas as indigenous people was documented as early as the seventeenth century (Knox, ), and identified as Veddas by the Sinhalese people and as Vedainam by the Tamil people (Bastin, ). Until the 1990s, academic and popular literature and official documents used the term Vedda.…”

“…Recently, a discourse has emerged on how ‘indigenous’ has become a marker of strategic importance for people to justify their claims to their rights, as well as claiming an identity with a new strategic meaning (Bijoy, ; Rao, ; Bauer, ; Idrus, ; Bolanos, ; Lund & Panda, ). Some scholars have termed the ability of indigenous people to strategize on their ethnicity ‘professional primitivism’ (Bastin, ), referring to activities whereby they make a living from their cultural identity, such as through tourism. This generally happens in areas where indigenous people have been denied their access to ancestral lands and resources, as has been documented for all continents (Bauer, ; Erazo, ).…”

Responses to David Trigger's Article Anthropology Pure and Profane: The Politics of Applied Research in Aboriginal Australia (previous issue)

“…He cites Barry Morris and my (2004) introduction to our co-edited work Expert knowledge, as well as a journal article 'Surrender to the Market: Thoughts on Anthropology, the Body Shop, and Intellectuals' (Bastin 2003), to illustrate my involvement in this critique, while supporting his argument against the critique by citing an unpublished paper by Lee Sackett. Sackett is also cited for asserting that the intellectual rigor of legal testimony is greater than that which is required for academic scholarship.…”