Dear Ken: I usually find your posts interesting, and appreciate the way that you take the time to document your sources. However, in the post attached below, among other things you commented: "The charge was that anthropology as a discipline or field is driven by colonial impulses. That is a way of saying that every anthropologist and the entire field serve[s] the geopolitical strategy of colonialism and that the field is therefore an extension or form of imperialism." (See full text below.) And "The issue of colonization in the notes on anthropology was not a matter of disciplines colonizing one another, but a question of whether anthropology as a field was corrupted and driven by colonial impulses. Anyone who knows the history of colonialism and its imperialist priorities must see this as a harsh indictment." While it is clear that your intention is to protect the virtue of anthropology as a field, I believe that, at least on the University of Wisconsin campus, it would be a simple task to find many scholars spread across disciplines that strongly disagree with you. Colonialism as a driving force in the focus of 19th and 20th century scholarly activity and practice is a major research area in the humanities here, and cuts across traditional disciplinary lines. In this environment, the idea that academia was/is corrupted and driven by colonial impulses is accepted as a given, and the focus is more on trying to figure out what this means for us as scholars. Just one random example which supports my assertion, from the "GLOBALIZING THE UNCONSCIOUS: Histories of Colonialism & Psychoanalysis" research circle Web site (affiliated with the department of medical history and bioethics): "For most of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis was a tool both of empire and of anti-imperialism. Insights from psychoanalysis shaped European ideas about the colonial world, the character and potential of "native" cultures, and the anxieties and alienation of displaced white colonizers and sojourners. Moreover, this intense and intimate engagement with empire came to shape the global psychoanalytic subjectivities that emerged in the twentieth century, whether European or non-European." http://www.internationalresearch.wisc.edu/GlobalUnconscious/ As examples of others with similar interests, the UW International Institute Web site hosts a number of Research Circles, made up of researchers with overlapping interests, and colonialism and its latent effects on scholarly disciplines is an important part of that research. Other Research Circles are at http://www.internationalresearch.wisc.edu/ . These are only a few of the groups on campus that incorporate colonialism and its legacies within academic disciplines as a topic. Others include the Visual Culture Cluster and Women's Studies. Closer to the design world, other scholars actually focus on areas that overlap with design, using colonialism as a lens to look at how designers and their designs were tools of colonialism, both consciously and unconsciously. Their work may not directly critique fields such as anthropology, but that critique is implicit in their methodology. One colleague whose work I enjoy because of its implications for design is Jill Casid, (http://www.wisc.edu/arth/bio/casidbio.html) She is finishing up a book that addresses this type of issue, looking at projection devices in the 19th century and their use as tools of colonialism and power: Shadows of Enlightenment: Reason, Magic, and Technologies of Projection (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). She has also published a book that addresses landscape and colonization, also of interest to designers because of its implications for "innocent" designers who do not have colonial impulses themselves. As another example, in my own academic department, we have a Material Culture program, and one of many subtexts is the relationship between designers, designed objects and colonialism. Anthropological source material related to material culture includes colonial biases and filters, and ignoring this can be a problem. (And this is different from saying we all have biases, just live with it. Some issues overshadow most others, and colonialism is one of those issues in this context.) Most disciplines these days in the humanities have people who spend a lot of time looking at their own fields and thinking critically about the assumptions that shapes those disciplines. Many researchers would agree that anthropology was and is shaped by colonialism and often finds itself as a tool for gaining power; this applies even when anthropologists are not actively engaged in creating colonial tools. However, rather than seeing this as a negative it could be seen an opportunity to learn something. Perhaps design research could use a bit more of this self-critique from within, because others outside of the field are already doing so, sometimes without the insights into the finer points of what it means to design. So, I feel a bit like someone who is criticizing the good deed of a helpful citizen who just assisted an infirm person across a busy street corner. I applaud the good-hearted interest and intent, but am suggesting that the infirm person may not really have intended to cross that street in the first place. Regards, MSC PS: So, as long as I am on the verge of sermonizing, I might as well go ahead and say that what I would propose is that as design researchers we need to look more closely at our own field and think a lot about issues such as embedded patterns of gender, colonialism and power. I believe that this is something that can best come from academia rather than from practice, and design could use a bit of naval gazing about its role in things such as subjugating oppressed people. This includes not just the obvious things such as children working in sweat shops but less obvious things such as the use of Modernist architectural theory to erase indigenous culture design traditions. This research is already being done by scholars outside of the design field. M.S.C. Nelson Assistant Professor Environment, Textiles and Design University of Wisconsin-Madison Room 235 1300 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 608-261-1003 -----Original Message----- From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken Friedman Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 5:02 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Colonialism -- a Carefully Delimited Response Dear Johann, Thanks for your note. This really addresses the main thread -- and I have not entered it (yet). Since you ask me, though I would argue that we have not actually had quite this debate before, though we've addressed some of these issues in different ways. If I were to enter the thread, I'd agree that we draw on many fields -- this is necessarily the case for design as an interdisciplinary field. (Something that I have argued before.) I'd even argue that this is true of both the professional practice of design and of the research disciplines that support design. But that's not the way in which the question of colonialism came up. The post I answered criticized the field of anthropology not the field of design. The charge was that anthropology as a discipline or field is driven by colonial impulses. That is a way of saying that every anthropologist and the entire field serves the geopolitical strategy of colonialism and that the field is therefore an extension or form of imperialism. I did not write to address design issues at all -- my comments focused on anthropology, and I wrote to disagree with this, stating that anthropology is a field of processes and practices that examine all kinds of human beings and cultures rather than a field that serves colonial empires by examining and dominating third-world cultures from an imperialist first-world perspective. My own focal interest was cultural interaction and contemporary art practice in the United States and Europe, and I used anthropological concepts and methods to gain a great understanding of these issues. (I also found anthropology helpful in understanding other processes and practices in contemporary culture.) While I often change headers, I retained the header "Mythologies of anthropology and design" to relate my note to Dori's note on the four sub-fields of anthropology. I'd agree that colonists can become new citizens through a long and difficult process, but I was defending anthropology against the charge of colonialism in its original, political sense. I was not defending colonialism. The colonists who came to North America displaced and destroyed the lands and much of the culture of the native peoples. They also slaughtered many of the first people in the course of doing so. The Spanish in North America and Central America and the Spanish and Portuguese in Central and South America were guilty of equally dark deeds. Estimates suggest that European colonists and their descendents in the Americas killed more that 90% of the original population. While disease for which native Americans lacked immune defenses killed more people than warfare or the Inquisition, warriors, violent settlers, and the church killed many, ruthlessly and without conscience. The story of the colonial powers in Africa was nearly as bad, and when you add the slave trade to the conquest of territory, the murder of peoples, and the theft of resources, there is little good to be said. While it is true that British imperial rule was better, say, than the Mugabe government or the warlords of many destabilized nations, one must ask whether another, better history might have been possible colonialism and empire-building by the European powers. This includes the struggle over African territory and resources by the Boers and the British, one being a group of immigrant settlers who took the land they wanted from its prior residents, the other being loyal colonial subjects or military forces of a European kingdom. Then there's India and Pakistan, Australia, and the Pacific nations of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia. The one somewhat bright spot seems to be New Zealand Aotearoa where the first peoples and the nation signed a foundational treaty -- the Treaty of Waitangi -- that the government seems to honor, despite confusions and disputes in interpretation. Stuggling imperfectly to honor such a treaty is better than breaking and ignoring treaties as the government of the United States generally did, or simply expropriating the land and its resources, which was an even more common pattern. The history of colonialism is so bloody and bitter that I felt quite uncomfortable to see anthropology as a discipline blamed for the deeds of imperialists, conquistadores, slave traders, and practitioners of genocide. Your description of enrichment between and among disciplines is excellent. That belongs to the main thread. The issue of colonization in the notes on anthropology was not a matter of disciplines colonizing one another, but a question of whether anthropology as a field was corrupted and driven by colonial impulses. Anyone who knows the history of colonialism and its imperialist priorities must see this as a harsh indictment. Some individual anthropologists certainly further colonial goals. So did some dentists, some physicists, some geographers, some physicians, some schoolteachers -- and more than a few native collaborators among the colonized peoples. The fields as a whole, the professions as a whole, and the native peoples as a group are not responsible for those driven by colonial impulses. That was the very narrow and specific nature of my comment on anthropology and colonial impulses. Yours, Ken Johann van der Merwe wrote: >Dear Ken and List >Just a short guerrilla post ... >Hasn't this debate appeared before? What's yours cannot be mine, etc. >Design supreme. >We are unashamedly thieves, bricoleurs ... we are allowed to be because >good ideas do not belong to any single person or discipline. >And if a good idea could be tainted by some indiscretion of an author, I >would not be able to use Heidegger's work as I do. >I find it impossible to debate the merits or not of original work when >applied to design ... to me that borders on intellectual plagiarism >("above all be true to the source!" = nonsense), and it goes without >saying that any good idea must change when you, the design theorist, >brings it back from wherever you found it, and wish to use the idea >(behind the original work) as a design input. In doing so you confront >your ideas with this new upstart, and the "colonizer" becomes the >(blended) new citizen. > >Equally, design thinking does not belong to so-called "designers" alone >.... which is one of the many reasons I find the work of Maturana so >amazing (not to mention illuminating). Do I wish to colonize biology, or >think that "it" will colonize or somehow contaminate design? Enrich is >the real word, and that is renewal in design thinking ... "we" HAVE to >take/borrow from other disciplines, and as Wolfgang Jonas reminds us, >desig is a groundless field ... > >Johann -- Prof. Ken Friedman Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language Norwegian School of Management Oslo Center for Design Research Denmark's Design School Copenhagen +47 46.41.06.76 Tlf NSM +47 33.40.10.95 Tlf Privat email: [log in to unmask]