Colonial apologists attacked ethnography for destroying the cultural hierarchy doctrine

Evidence

It is this hierarchical relationship that the author of the article, a certain M. Piron, accuses ethnography of destroying. Like M. Caillois, he blames Michel Leiris and Claude Levi-Strauss. He reproaches the former for having written, in his pamphlet La Question raciale devant la science moderne: “It is childish to try to set up a hierarchy of culture.” The latter for having attacked “false evolutionism,” because it “tries to suppress the diversity of cultures, by considering them as stages in a single development which, starting from the same point, should make them converge toward the same goal.” — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 217

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘false evolutionism’ as the colonial doctrine treating cultures as stages on one converging line of development.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing Levi-Strauss’s own anti-evolutionism — he later drew fire from both colonial apologists and some anti-colonial critics.
• XREF: connects to: Anti-colonial ethnography reframed colonized peoples as dialogue partners rather than natives — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 217; Colonial archives should be treated as ethnographic sites not extraction sources; Colonialism systematically dispossesses the colonized of resources under a justifying discourse of hierarchy — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 246

Related

• Anti-colonial ethnography reframed colonized peoples as dialogue partners rather than natives (similarity 0.79)
• Colonialism systematically dispossesses the colonized of resources under a justifying discourse of hierarchy (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Anti-colonial ethnography reframed colonized peoples as dialogue partners rather than natives #corroborates (0.80) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 217
• Colonial archives should be treated as ethnographic sites not extraction sources #corroborates (0.75)