Colonial anthropology mystified colonialism by studying villages and ignoring its structure

Evidence

One of the several consequences of this habit and the intent behind it was to produce a companion academic literature that acted, as B. Magubane asserts, “as a powerful mystification of the real social forces at work.” No “image of the colonial social structure” emerged in the literature, Magubane maintains. Lucy Mair, speaking in behalf of her anthropologist colleagues who mined the British colonial fields, thought the reason quite obvious: “I think one has to answer the comment that we concentrated on ‘the village’ or ‘the people’ and took for granted the external sources of the changes that we documented. I think the reason is simply that one cannot do both at once.” However, she also admitted: “None of us, it is true, held that colonial rule ought to come to an immediate end. Who did in those days?” For Mair, the hub of the District Commissioner’s job was “securing an adequate labour supply” for European employers and preservation of the peace: “Lest it be thought that ‘the preservation of peace’ means the suppression of rebellion, it was much more concerned with the assaults of Africans on one another.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 822

Categorization

• XREF: Part of the epistemological-exclusion argument that Robinson develops against Western academic frameworks throughout Black Marxism.
• DEEPTHINKING: The admission that the discipline could not study village and colonial structure simultaneously—‘one cannot do both at once’—raises deep questions about what framing produces knowledge.