Anthropology Has One Job (On Genocide in the United States)

Abstract

In an introductory anthropology course, the instructor might provide a definition of anthropology similar to this: “Anthropology is the most scientific of the humanities, and it is the most humanistic of the sciences.” If something like that is said, it stems from a statement in Anthropology, a 1964 book by famed anthropologist eric Wolf in which he attempted to define the discipline. Wolf ’s approach came at a time when many anthropologists were attempting to intervene in the historical telling of the world.1 In particular, Wolf argued that non-europeans were also participants in global, colonial processes. The value of Wolf ’s voice—indeed, the value of most anthropology at the time—was that it offered a wide-scale view of human events for which the anthropologist was merely an observer, hence not responsible. on that note, the instructor might explain that anthropology is a discipline that is global and universal in nature, yet personal. Though anthropologists describe the world, they also describe everything in the human body, all the way down to the level of the chromosome. Anthropology is about everything and does everything. However, I would argue that anthropology’s breadth—its ability to say that it studies everything—distracts us all from its roots in bad behaviors and policies. What Wolf never explained—what anthropology’s leaders haven’t properly dealt with over the decades—is that anthropology practiced in the United States began in processes to disempower and dehumanize American Indian (native American, Indigenous) peoples. While churches and the U.S. federal government spent stolen resources to build boarding schools where they forced American Indian people to cut their hair and stop speaking their languages, anthropologists such as Franz Boas, edward Sapir and Alfred Kroeber collected recordings of their Indigenous languages before they disappeared under the weight of these educational policies.2 At best, anthropology in the United States was funded by the residual profits of genocide.