Empires, Nations, and Natives: Anthropology and State-Making - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822336170 ISBN 13: 9780822336174

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2005

Synopsis

Empires, Nations, and Natives is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the interplay between the practice of anthropology and the politics of empires and nation-states in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It brings together essays that demonstrate how the production of social-science knowledge about the “other” has been inextricably linked to the crafting of government policies. Subverting established boundaries between national and imperial anthropologies, the contributors explore the role of anthropology in the shifting categorizations of race in southern Africa, the identification of Indians in Brazil, the implementation of development plans in Africa and Latin America, the construction of Mexican and Portuguese nationalism, the genesis of “national character” studies in the United States during World War II, the modernizing efforts of the French colonial administration in Africa, and postcolonial architecture.

The contributors—social and cultural anthropologists from the Americas and Europe—report on both historical and contemporary processes. Moving beyond controversies that cast the relationship between scholarship and politics in binary terms of complicity or autonomy, they bring into focus a dynamic process in which states, anthropological knowledge, and population groups themselves are mutually constructed. Such a reflexive endeavor is an essential contribution to a critical anthropological understanding of a changing world.

Contributors: Alban Bensa, Marcio Goldman, Adam Kuper, Benoît de L’Estoile, Claudio Lomnitz, David Mills, Federico Neiburg, João Pacheco de Oliveira, Jorge Pantaleón, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Lygia Sigaud, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Florence Weber

About this title

From the Publisher:

"Empires, Nations, and Natives will move anthropology’s intellectual debates to a new level of sophistication. The authors’ attention to the ways anthropology comes to be caught up in—or (for better or for worse) left out of—the dynamics of political upheaval makes this volume far more than a meditation on the so-called crisis of representation. It is also a valuable critical supplement to state theory."— [RR; PP] Carol Greenhouse, coeditor of Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change

From the Back Cover:

""Empires, Nations, and Natives" is a refreshing collection, notable for the quality and depth of research into different 'national anthropologies' in Europe, the Americas, and South Africa, and for the ability of the authors and editors to bring out the linkages among such intellectual traditions. The book provokes important reflections on questions of empire, colonialism, cultural difference, democratic government, and the possibilities and constraints of the nation-state."--Frederick Cooper, Professor of History, New York University, and author of "Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History"

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0822336170
• ISBN 13: 9780822336174
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344
• Editor: De L'Estoile Benoît, Neiburg Federico, Sigaud Lygia Maria