Dear MSC,

Thanks for your thoughtful and challenging reply. Your careful 
response deserves a quick answer. I'll try a short comment, and then 
I plan to leave this issue behind to focus on the main thread 
stemming from Dori's original note and the rich conversation that 
followed, most recently with the dialogue between M P Ranjan and 
Thomas Rasmussen. (I've still be thinking through some issues dating 
back to G K van Patter's comments and I hope to marshal my thoughts 
well enough to post them by next week.)

Without agreeing with your position on the issue of colonialism, I am 
aware of the position you outline. This is the post-colonial 
position, as distinct from any specific post-colonial theory. If you 
take the position that "[c]olonialism [w]as a driving force in the 
focus of 19th and 20th century scholarly activity and practice" and 
that "academia was/is corrupted and driven by colonial impulses," 
then anthropology must surely suffer from the same illness that 
affects the other arts and sciences, and their allied professions. In 
this view, psychoanalysis, geography, history, philosophy, political 
science, sociology and all the rest are corrupted. For some, this 
even extends to physics, mathematics, and chemistry. If this view is 
correct, anthropology cannot be exempt.

I understand the logic of the view. I simply disagree.

In my view, this this line of discourse seems to be the product of 
two great driving forces. One is the genuine soul-searching and 
disciplinary or interdisciplinary inquiry that we are going through 
as the world of scholarship and academia struggles to find its way 
into the new millennium while dealing honestly with the problems of 
the past. The other force is academic fashion -- just as many 
scholars sought to be existential at one moment, post-modern at 
another, the current fashion involves the earnest (and often honest) 
drive to be post-colonial. This seems to be especially painful for 
North American scholars and American-born scholars around the world 
who see the force and power of the United States controlled by the 
neo-conservative authors of "Project for the New American Century." 
In this context, one would naturally be wary of colonialism and 
imperialism.

Where it comes to the arts and sciences, I am not as sure that the 
forces driving the Bush-Cheney regime have corrupted and driven all 
academic fields in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is no 
more an absolute fact than the idea that the religious or royal 
foundation of earlier universities necessarily corrupted and drove 
the scholarship of those who studied or taught in universities before 
the Humboldt reforms of 1805.

As I wrote, the malign drives and practices of some scholars and 
individuals does not necessarily corrupt the entire field. The fact 
that the founder of psychoanalysis was born in the Austro-Hungarian 
Empire does not mean that psychoanalysis is itself imperialist and 
colonial.

Nevertheless, the genuine challenge of the kinds of scholarly 
initiatives in places like Wisconsin -- and elsewhere -- mean that I 
may well be wrong. I have not followed the post-colonial debate 
closely enough to study all the claims and counter-claims.

My earlier argument was based on a charge brought against 
anthropology without any mention of other fields. I would argue that 
anthropology alone cannot be guilty of the charge of colonialism -- 
after all, no anthropologist ever ran any of the great empires or 
colonial powers. If I were to accept your premise, I would accept 
your logical conclusion: If all academic fields are corrupted by 
colonialism, then anthropology must be corrupt.

I want to posit a slightly different view.

I was born into a world in which the great colonial empires still 
held sway. India had gained independence, but it was not yet a 
republic. The same was true of Pakistan. Many African nations were 
still controlled by the colonial powers, the Apartheid laws of 1948 
were passed in South Africa the year before I was born, the Soviet 
Union dominated the unwilling nations of Eastern Europe, 
UN-sanctioned protectorates and governance arrangements covered many 
nations that are now independent of their former governors, 
Indonesian independence from the Netherlands had just been recognized 
by international law, Malaysia and Singapore were still part of the 
British Empire,  Algeria was as a French colony and the First 
Indo-China War was still in progress. The independent nations of this 
world were also shaped in great part by former colonial powers -- 
Iraq and Yugoslavia, for example, drawn on a map after World War I, 
Saudi Arabia declared and recognized, Syria gaining freedom from 
France. Geopolitical and economic colonialism enabled nations without 
formal colonies (such as the United States) to control other nations 
in different ways.

In this world, it seemed to many of us that scholarship and the 
advancement of free inquiry was an antidote to colonialism and 
imperialism. Whatever the personal politics or behavior of scholars, 
scientists, and artists, the slow push for knowledge and wisdom 
seemed to work some good in the world.

It may well be that we were all so thoroughly embedded in the world 
shaped by colonialism and imperialism that we were corrupted without 
knowing it, but I do not believe this to be so. I felt (and feel) 
myself to be part of a long line of human beings from many places and 
cultures struggling to move forward from a known past into an unknown 
future, making improvements along the way.

One thing is clear. I am not saying, "we all have biases, just live 
with it." This thread and the contributions from Norm, Danny, David, 
Dori, and others are significant. I disagree respectfully with some 
of the thoughts, and I've tried to state a reasonable basis for my 
disagreement.

It seems to me that in design, as in other disciplines and fields, we 
do "spend a lot of time looking at their own fields and thinking 
critically about the assumptions" that shape the disciplines and 
fields of design.

It is impossible to flat-out reject the post-colonial position that 
all fields are corrupt because they emerge from and are embedded in a 
civilization that produced the great colonial empires. This may be 
what Gandhi meant when a reporter asked him what he thought of 
Western civilization and he answered, "I think it would be a good 
idea!"

Starting with a challenge to one myth about a single anthropologist, 
this sub-thread has shifted to Danny's reasoned critique of 
anthropology as a field embroiled in colonialism and then to your 
challenge to all academic fields as necessarily embroiled in 
colonialism. While I'd have to disagree with a specific critique 
against anthropology as singularly colonial, I can't disagree with 
the general critique in the same way. I can only say that so far, I 
am not convinced that this is the case. If it is, then it is also the 
case for anthropology. Despite my view that neither case is so, I 
accept that a larger debate is in progress around the world. Since we 
will not settle it here, I am going to conclude my part in this 
sub-thread for now.

Thanks for your nicely articulated thoughts -- and thanks, again, to 
Norm, David, Danny, and Dori.

Warm wishes,

Ken



MSC Nelson wrote:

--snip--

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.

--snip--

...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.

--snip--