Liberal Government and the Practical History of Anthropology

Abstract

This paper explores the implications of Foucault's perspective of liberal government for approaches to the practical history of anthropology. It also draws on assemblage theory to consider the changing relations between field, museum and university in relation to a range of early twentieth-century anthropological practices. These focus mainly on the development of the Boasian paradigm in the USA during the inter-war years and on the anthropological practices clustered around the Musée de l'Homme in the 1930s. Key steps in the argument focus on the role of what Foucault called “transactional realities” in mediating the practical applications of anthropology in colonial contexts and in “anthropology at home” projects. Special consideration is also given to the increasingly archival properties of anthropological collections in the early twentieth century and the consequences of this for anthropology's relations to practices of governing.

Keywords:

• Assemblage
• Archive
• Transactional Reality
• Museum
• Governmental Rationality

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Fred Myers and to my co-editors, Ben Dibley and Rodney Harrison, for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1 I use the term “anthropology” as an umbrella term for practices that often went under different headings—ethnography and, in France, ethnology—in the different national contexts discussed here to avoid what would otherwise be a confusing variety of terms tailored to different national contexts and periods.

2 Boas' advice on the influence of culture on ethical norms is contained in a letter to Dewey dated 29 March 1913; Boas wrote to Dewey on the subject of freedom on 6 November 1939, Dewey replying on 12 November. See Boas Papers, B61, American Philosophical Society.

3 Conklin (1997) addresses anthropology's role in organizing such differentiations within the populations of France's overseas colonies, while Sherman (2004) discusses its role in organizing distinctions within France's rural populace during the 1930s and 1940s.

4 Williams (1986) presents the first sustained assessment of the role played by these conceptions in denying Aboriginal conceptions of property in the land.

5 Lamothe (2008) discusses the respects in which New York's liberal intelligentsia viewed African-Americans from the Southern states as immigrants in much the same way as overseas migrants.

6 As many commentators have noted (Zumwait 2008), Boas looked to the history of African-Americans in Africa, before their transportation to the USA, in order to demonstrate their capacity for creativity rather than to any of their cultural practices in America. Certainly, although his work influenced it significantly (Lamothe 2008), the Harlem Renaissance seems to have passed him by more-or-less completely.

7 I am concerned here with what became the dominant institutional conceptions of the Musée de l'Homme. There are, however, more complicated stories that would need to be told in order to fully disentangle the relations between these and the aesthetic conceptions informing both contemporary surrealist practices and the intellectual formation of France's main anthropological fieldworkers. Hollier and Ollman (1991) and Debaene (2010) discuss these questions.

8 From his initial appointment as Director of the Musée d'Ethnographie Trocadéro, in 1928, Paul Rivet, joined shortly thereafter by Georges Henri Rivière, launched a sustained critique of the principles of display which then prevailed at the Trocadéro. This critique was conducted in the name of a rationalizing modernism that would make the scientific ordering of the relations between different cultures publicly comprehensible. See Gorgus (2003) for further details of this muséographie claire.

9 See Boas' Correspondence, Department of Anthropology, Box 12, Folder 2, AMNH Anthropology Archives.

10 Jacknis (1996, 199) cites passages from Boas' diary describing participation in potlatch ceremonies as a nuisance, interrupting his work centred on the collection of texts, whereas, for reasons that Wolfe (1999) has argued, Spencer was centrally preoccupied with rituals.

11 See Jolly (2001/2002) for a discussion of related questions in connection with the archival legacies of Marcel Griaule's missions.

12 Boas wrote to Robert Lowie, also one of his students, to this effect in 1918. American Philosophical Society, Boas Papers, B61, Boas to Lowie, 8 March 1918.

13 Boas also collected oral testimony in order to access the subjective meanings informing the use and interpretation of artefacts as a means of deciphering the distinctive patterning of a culture. His famous instruction to George Hunt to forego the collection of objects if he could not also provide the stories accompanying them is often cited to this effect (see, for example, Jacknis 2002, 49).

14 Banner (2004) provides telling insights into this class formation, while Hannah (2000) discusses the connections between the emergence of the American university system and the forms of authority informing the development of post-bellum forms of governmentality in the USA.

15 For a discussion of the complex and divided relations between French anthropology and folklore studies and the Vichy regime see Weber (2000); for an assessment of the longer term trajectories of the forms of “anthropology at home” associated with the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, see Segalen (2001). And see Poulot (1994) on ecomuseums and regional cultural ecologies.

16 Robert Lynd's Knowledge for What?, also published in 1939, also drew on the anthropological concept of culture for the same purpose (see Lynd 1967).

17 See, though, Benoît de L'Estoile's (2005) helpful discussion of potential points of convergence between Weberian and Foucauldian approaches to such questions.