On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship

TL;DR: For instance, this article argued that the distribution in power and possibility that made Empire also made for the heuristic and documentary requirements of a metropolitan and administrative readership, hence the required accounts of the difference that “culture” stood in for in these “new” places.

Abstract: To speak of Indigeneity is to speak of colonialism and anthropology, as these are means through which Indigenous people have been known and sometimes are still known. In different moments, anthropology has imagined itself to be a voice, and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonised.1 This modern interlocutionary role was not self-ascribed by anthropologists, nor was it without a serious material and ideational context; it accorded with the imperatives of Empire and in this, specific technologies of rule that sought to obtain space and resources, to define and know the difference that it constructed in those spaces and to then govern those within.2 Knowing and representing the “voices” within those places required more than military might, it required the methods and modalities of knowing, in particular: categorisation, ethnological comparison, linguistic translation and ethnography. These techniques of knowing were predicated upon a profound need, as the distributions in power and possibility that made Empire also made for the heuristic and documentary requirements of a metropolitan and administrative readership, hence the required accounts of the difference that “culture” stood in for in these “new” places.3 These accounts were required for governance, but also so that those in the metropole might know themselves in a manner that accorded to the global processes underway. Like “race” in other contexts, “culture” was (and still is in some quarters) the conceptual and necessarily essentialised space that stood in for complicated bodily and exchange-based relationships that enabled and marked colonial situations in Empire: warfare, commerce, sex, trade, missionisation. “Culture” described the difference that was found in these places and marked the ontological end-game of each exchange: a difference that had been contained into neat, ethnically-defined territorial spaces that now needed to be made sense of, to be ordered, ranked, to be governed, to be possessed.4 This is a form of politics that is more than representational, as this was a governmental and disciplinary possession of bodies and territories, and in this were included existent forms of philosophy, history and social life that Empire sought to speak of and speak for. ARtIClE