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Postcolonial Critique of Anthropology

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CUNY Queensborough Community College

   

Postcolonial Critique of Anthropology (ANTH 101)

   

Added on  2020-03-04

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This document discusses the key points in the post-colonial critique of anthropology and what they mean for the discipline's development into the twenty-first century. It is also concerned with post-colonialism, post-structuralism, and Whig history. Anthropology is an academic discipline that has been criticized by various postcolonial authors.

Postcolonial Critique of Anthropology

   

CUNY Queensborough Community College

   

Postcolonial Critique of Anthropology (ANTH 101)

   Added on 2020-03-04

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POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUE OF ANTHROPOLOOGY 1Postcolonial Critic of AnthropologyNameName of the Class InstructorInstitutionCity and State Date
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POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUE OF ANTHROPOLOOGY 2IntroductionThis essay addresses the key points in the post colonial critique of anthropology and whatthese have meant to the development of the discipline into the 21st century. It focuses on post colonialism, post structuralism and the Whig history. Different scholars like Edward Said are also included in the excerpt to show their view on post colonialism and for a better understandingof post colonial critique of anthropology. Anthropology is an academic discipline that has received lots of criticism from different post colonial authors. Besides, it claims a deeper understanding of the most basic and marginal components of post colonialism. Although anthropology has reflected colonial as an ideology, academic modeling and governance has seen its disciplinary parameters reconstructed in the real politics of decolonization. Postcolonial Critic of AnthropologyPost colonialism is a discipline that analyses and responds to the cultural legacy of imperialism and colonialism (Young 2012).Although it is the same as cultural anthropology, it takes a different twist on politics as well as literature that allows a different discussion. In detail, postcolonial critique is all about the literature by colonial powers and works by those who were under the colony. According to Loomba (2015), postcolonial model looks at the aspects of power, politics, religion, culture, and economic, as well as how these facets work in relation to the colonizers controlling the colonized. Postcolonial theory looks at society and literature from two perspectives; how a cultural workers and his context reflects the colonial past and second how they survive as well as carve out means of understanding the world (Huggan and Tiffin 2015). Edward Said, a university professor of English and comparative literature, began his
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POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUE OF ANTHROPOLOOGY 3teaching career at the university of Colombia. In his book “Orientalism,” Said developed new ways of theorizing the past centuries, when the imperialists established the colonies as strange political and cultural objects, requiring the civilization efforts of the master's races, now what is called the postcolonial theory(Madsen 2003). Being a public intellectual, Said spoke boldly against Israeli colonialism in the occupied Palestine, the post colonial intellectual practice.Another scholar, Frantz Fanon analyzed and described the nature of colonialism as destructive. He wrote the ideological need of colonialism in a systematic denial of “all attributes of human kind” of the colonized nations. According to Fanon, such dehumanization can be achieved through mental and physical violence, through which colonialists implies “inculcate servile mentality on the native.” The scholar argues that natives should never allow colonial subjugation. Therefore describes refusal to colonialism being a “mentally cathartic discipline” that urges “colonial servility from the native psyche, as well as restores a sense of respect to the subjugated,” as Wallace (2002) puts it. Post structuralism is another critique that investigated how the impact of colonial powers transformed to the colonized cultures. The colonial powers whilst keeping the an important outward influence over the political and economic landscape of the nations they were in charge , transferred concepts about social customs which ranged food to class as well as social constructions (Msiska, 2010). However, post structuralism was concerned with how these powers impacted as well as characterized cultures hence looking at the power relations as multidimensional plus influential to every culture According to Wallace (2002) the “Whig history presents past as a progression towards the greater liberty and enlightenment culminating in the form of constitutional monarchy and liberal democracy.” It emphasizes on the emergence of scientific progress, personal freedom as
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