#sjsci

This week, we're thinking postcolonial thoughts with Kavita Philip (Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India).

Philip writes that practices and institutions that set up a mutually reinforcing dyad between colonialism and nineteenth century science have, in many instances, been carried over by postcolonial states, 'along with the foundational assumptions of scientific modernity', into structures of post-independence government and popular culture (pp 2-4). 

Challenged to think about my own approach to 'postcoloniality' as a South African, a white woman, and a scholar grappling with notions of the sexed body, 'other' bodies, in spaces thought of as 'other' (e.g. Africa), I came across this site: http://zeroanthropology.net/about/

Zero Anthropology is about interrogating what is arguably one of the 'colonial' sciences. In its most basic sense, it is

a project of decolonization, growing out of a discipline with a long history and a deep epistemological connection to colonialism. The aim is to transform anthropology into something that is neither Eurocentric nor elitist. 

It is about 'unthinking' anthropology, and 'opening up' anthropology. 

If anthropology claimed the world for study by Europeans and Americans, ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY is (also) about “the world” reclaiming anthropological knowledge for its own self-understanding, self-expression, and self-identification, or better yet, recognizing that it always had “anthropological” knowledge of its own.

Here is an approach, by a group of diverse scholars and thinkers, which does not try to dismantle, but interrogate colonial epistemological foundations and find what radical possibilities these offer for generative, productive and transformative outcomes today. It is an interesting approach, which works at while recognizing, rather than only critiquing and shutting down, the challenges inherent in any of our approaches to knowledge and/or representation. 

It’s About Neocolonialism

We all struggle with these overlapping, mutually complementing cognate terms that refer to mutually reinforcing processes, terms such as imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism. We’ve been through this already, in the first part of the Zero Series (to be continued, I promise). The sense one gets of neocolonialism from all of the above, scattered across blogs, YouTube, and Twitter, and spread among commentators and repeaters from Canada, Trinidad,  Curaçao, Afghanistan, and Australia–is that neocolonialism is internalized and localized, a variant and complement of global imperialism. It’s what makes imperialism work, at the local level, a way of articulating two distinct arenas and fields of interest. The prime actors in the neocolonial setting are not necessarily foreign (though they can be, in the case of imported experts, visiting IMF delegations, and over-sized foreign embassies), nor are the nation-states in question any longer formal political colonies (in terms of tissue thin charters and conventions). They are now post-independent, in more ways than one. The critique of neocolonialism is about a vision of self-rule that is more like management of locals on behalf of foreign interests, with some locals of course benefiting immensely from such arrangements. Ultimately it is about the continuation of colonialism by other means, a force felt, observed, and spoken about worldwide.

This week, an article in Science Daily discusses further evidence that our socio-economic realities have material impacts on our health as adults. As we saw in the film Unnatural Causes, findings like these unravel the mythic notions of racial difference in health, pointing to the myriad interwoven social environment which impacts on our overall wellbeing.

Read more here: Science Daily

Image: Childhood poverty impacted how much the two regions of the prefrontal cortex (as shown in orange circles) were engaged during emotion regulation. (Credit: University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine)

This article also reminded me about work by a colleague in South Africa. Prof Mark Tomlinson develops a theory of 'toxic poverty' which has a range of implications during pregnancy: for the fetus, the child after birth, as well as the pregnant woman. Prof Tomlinson's work shows the social causation pathways of mental distress among pregnant women (that is, 'toxic' poverty) and the impacts of this particular cause of mental distress. Depression or anxiety can lead to compromised caregiving capacity, which in turn has repercussions for the child. 

The image below shows the brain sizes of 2 different 3-year-old children. The one on the left is an average sized brain for a 3 year old. The image on the right is of a child who had experienced extreme neglect. This is another example of how socio-economic experiences can shape biological difference. 

The other day we discussed the colonial project of naming and how that project was part of larger goal of determining the difference between men and animals.  For European colonizers, that line of distinction often fell on the bodies of people of color, sometimes thought to be a kind of "missing link" in the chain between animal and man.  This understanding resulted in people of color being treated like animals, examined, measured, displayed, etc.  One prominent case of this was "the Hottentot Venus" - Saartje Baartman.  Baartman was essentially captured, measured, and displayed around Europe and after her death her body was cut up and put on show in a museum in Paris until as recently as 1974, when her body was repatriated.

Association for Molecular Pathology et al v. Myriad Genetics Inc et al, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 12-398

"[W]e can see an immediate relationship between commodity fetishism and stranger fetishism.  First, the object comes to be valued (is 'enigmatic') only through a prior act of detachment from the social relationships of labour and production that produced it.  Second, the object is invested with meaning by being associated with the figure of the stranger: indeed, the object becomes the stranger; it is consumed as that which contains the 'truth' of the strange or exotic.  The fetishism of the commodity becomes displaced onto the fetishism of cultural difference: we calue the lost object by assuming it contains differece in its own form (a containment which is enabled by a double concealment of the history of its production and the history of determination that allows the stranger to appear). - Sara Ahmed, Strange Encouters, (from chapter 6, "Going Strange, Going Native")

In her book Strange Encounters, Sara Ahmed engages the allure of the Oriental to explain the relationship between the consuming colonizers and the producing colonized.  Products that promise us the allure of the strange, that conjure the tropes Edward Said illuminates, are desirable by foreign markets because they allow for a safe engagement with the "strange" or unknown.  This safety is produced by the active alienation of production processes, such that the consumer does not need to acknowledge the bodily fact of the other.