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

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