scholarly journals Bronislaw Malinowski, “Indirect Rule,” and the Colonial Politics of Functionalist Anthropology, ca. 1925–1940

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Freddy Foks

AbstractFunctionalist anthropology has a contested legacy. Some scholars have praised functionalism as a contributor to the relativizing of civilizations and cultures while others have criticized it as a colonial science smoothing the interwar workings of indirect rule. This article argues that the colonial politics of functionalist anthropology can only be understood against the background of resurgent settler colonialism in British East Africa. Supporters of indirect rule increasingly relied on a language of scientific administration and welfarist policies associated with the League of Nations to bolster their position against the settlers in the 1920s and 1930s. Functionalism offered them some means of support on this count. The functionalists, meanwhile, co-opted the language of indirect rule to pursue their own intra-disciplinary ends. This combination of interests was pragmatic and flexible rather than ossified and ideological, marked more by what both opposed (settler colonialism) than a shared ideal towards which they aspired (indirect rule). Anthropologists and colonial administrators possessed very different ideas of indirect rule, with strikingly different implications for the future of Britain's African Empire.

Author(s):  
JACOB KRIPP

This paper argues that the idea of global peace in early twentieth-century liberal international order was sutured together by the threat of race war. This understanding of racial peace was institutionalized in the League of Nations mandate system through its philosophical architect: Jan Smuts. I argue that the League figured in Smuts’s thought as the culmination of the creative advance of the universe: white internationalist unification and settler colonialism was the cosmological destiny of humanity that enabled a racial peace. In Smuts’s imaginary, the twin prospect of race war and miscegenation serves as the dark underside that both necessitates and threatens to undo this project. By reframing the problem of race war through his metaphysics, Smuts resolves the challenge posed by race war by institutionalizing indirect rule and segregation as a project of pacification that ensured that settlement and the creative advance of the cosmos could proceed.


Author(s):  
Didier Fassin

In his 1926 essay, “Primitive Crime and Its Punishment,” often considered the foundational text of legal anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski recounts an episode that occurred during his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands and profoundly influenced his views on law and order in “savage society,” as he calls it....


Author(s):  
Anthony Kwame Harrison

This introductory chapter introduces ethnography as a distinct research and writing tradition. The author begins by historically contextualizing ethnography’s professionalization within the fields of anthropology and sociology. While highlighting the formidable influences of, for example, Bronislaw Malinowski and the Chicago school, the author complicates existing understandings by bringing significant, but less-recognized, influences and contributions to light. The chapter next outlines three principal research methods that most ethnographers utilize—namely, participant-observation, fieldnote writing, and ethnographic interviewing. The discussion then shifts from method to methodology to explain the primary qualities that separate ethnography from other forms of participant-observation-oriented research. This includes introducing a research disposition called ethnographic comportment, which serves as a standard for gauging ethnography throughout the remainder of the book. The author presents ethnographic comportment as reflecting both ethnographers’ awarenesses of and their accountabilities to the research tradition in which they participate.


2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Béatrice Godart-Wendling

Résumé Le but de cet article est d’évaluer l’hypothèse de John Rupert Firth (1890–1960) énonçant que l’article de l’anthropologue Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages” (1923), constituerait une des sources d’inspiration ayant conduit Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) à élaborer une nouvelle conception de la signification en termes d’‘usage’. S’appuyant sur certains passages des Philosophical Investigations (1953), Firth établit ainsi une filiation entre les deux grandes idées phares de Malinowski, à savoir l’importance de la notion de ‘contexte de situation’ et l’idée que le langage serait un ‘mode d’action’ et les principales thèses (la signification comme usage, l’acquisition du langage, le langage comme un ensemble de jeux) que développera Wittgenstein. L’examen du bien fondé de cette hypothèse conduira à préciser la synergie des idées qui eut lieu en matière de pragmatique dans l’Angleterre de la première moitié du XXe siècle.


Man ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 786
Author(s):  
B. A. L. Cranstone ◽  
William A. Shack

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 127-130
Author(s):  
Judith B. Cohen

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's, An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States, confronts the reality of settler-colonialism and genocide as foundational to the United States. It reconstructs and reframes the consensual narrative from the Native Indian perspective while exposing indoctrinated myths and stereotypes. This masterful and riveting journey provides truth and paths towards the future progress for all peoples. It is a must read and belongs in every classroom, home, library, and canon of genocide studies.


Author(s):  
Jørgen Leth

Om Malinowski -- fra Jørgen Leth, Mine Helte. Det uperfekte menneske / 4 (2015, 27-34). Optrykt med venlig tilladelse fra forfatter Jørgen Leth og forlagsredaktør ved Gyldendal Johannes Riis


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