Colonial ethnography reduces African rites to obscene primitive spectacle

Evidence

Black magic! Orgies, witches’ sabbaths, heathen ceremonies, amulets. Coitus is an occasion to call on the gods of the clan. It is a sacred act, pure, absolute, bringing invisible forces into action. What is one to think of all these manifestations, all these initiations, all these acts? From very direction I am assaulted by the obscenity of dances and of words. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 473 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

It was the colonialist’s frenzy to unveil the Algerian woman, it was his gamble on winning the battle of the veil at whatever cost, that were to provoke the native’s bristling resistance. The deliberately aggressive intentions of the colonialist with respect to the haïk gave a new life to this dead element of the Algerian cultural stock—dead because stabilized, without any progressive change in form or color. We here recognize one of the laws of the psychology of colonization. In an initial phase, it is the action, the plans of the occupier that determine the centers of resistance around which a people’s will to survive becomes organized. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 164 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial violence destroyed traditional mourning rites by making every death colonial; Depicting Africans as primitive legitimized colonial invasion and plunder.; Black identity is reduced to a catalog of stereotyping colonial caricatures (+4 more)

Related

• Colonial anthropology reduced African rites to obscene black magic (similarity 0.93)
• Depicting Africans as primitive legitimized colonial invasion and plunder. (similarity 0.84)
• Black identity is reduced to a catalog of stereotyping colonial caricatures (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial attacks on a cultural practice determine where resistance crystallizes (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial violence destroyed traditional mourning rites by making every death colonial (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial violence created a spiritual void more powerful than class conflict. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonialist attacks on a custom create the native resistance that sustains it (similarity 0.81)
• The colonial image of Africa forced blacks into self-contempt (similarity 0.81)
• The colonized turn a passive cultural element into a taboo weapon of resistance (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial oppression transforms the colonized psyche wholesale rather than adding to it (similarity 0.79)
• Colonized cultures became conscripts of modernity, not fixed essences. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial discourse manufactures silence around colonized peoples’ precolonial civilizations. (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial violence was driven by officials’ fantasies and anticipatory fears. (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial conquest destroyed pre-colonial reciprocal governance traditions in Africa (similarity 0.78)
• Colonized revolt springs from suffocation, not from rediscovered culture (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial anthropology reduced African rites to obscene black magic #corroborates (0.90) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 473
• Colonial caricature of Africa shaped both Tempels and Oruka as intellectual revolt #expands (0.50)
• Colonial attacks on a cultural practice determine where resistance crystallizes #exemplifies (0.40) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 164
• Colonial officials used language hierarchy to justify claims of Indigenous mental inferiority #complicates (0.35)