Colonial-era anthropologists treated colonialism as a natural given rather than a social process

Evidence

Such scholars as Mair, to generalize Magubane’s observation, were hardly possessed with the mind-set to “see colonialism as a force and a social process, [rather than] as given, as an existential reality like a landscape.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 822

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to histories of anthropology’s colonial entanglements, e.g. critiques of functionalism and the ‘village’ focus. — connects to: Colonialists freeze sociological differences into fixed biological natures to bar change — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 210