I'm glad someone finally said it. Anthopology has too long been an arm
of the imperialist process, and the vast bulk of anthropological
theory and literature is usless at best. As a body of written works it
mostly justifies separating non-europeans from 'right-thinking
people,' and hold them up for display and judgement. Most of this is
done, implicitly or explicitly, in order to find 'solutions' to the
problems of western societies.
Very little has ever addressed the real problems, and only recently
have a few authors attempted to come to grips with how the profession
itself contributes to, and help generate, many of these problems.
In my opinion, tribes and individuals MUST begin to hold anthropology
and its practitioners accountable for what they do. If a common ground
cannot be reached, then it should be the prying ethnographers, and not
the people themselves, that should ultimately suffer.
Anthropology is not a self-regulated dicipline, As such there are
no internal forces to keep us 'honest,' or even concerned with the
consequences of our words and actions. This is obviously an
intolerable situation, but I suspect it will only change when a
significant number of tribes tell anthropologists to either work FOR
tribal interests or work elsewhere.
Debbie Conner
dconner@triton.unm
dconner@nmsu.edu