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Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia and Oceania. Edited by JAN VAN BREMAN and AKITOSHI SHIMIZU. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999. xi, 409 pp. 40.00.
The growing concern with the varied and complex relationships between anthropology and colonialism, starting with Talal Asad's Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), is rooted in the self critical and reflexive moves of the discipline as well as in the impetus from postcolonial studies. This has resulted in richly detailed studies of how anthropological theory and methods may be utilized to study interactions in colonial settings (e.g., the work of Ann Stoler; specifically, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995)) and how anthropology itself was and remains imbricated in the colonial project (e.g., Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: the Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London and New York: Cassell, 1999). The timely volume under review falls into this second category and uncovers the multiple ties between anthropology and colonialism in Asia and Oceania. These, it is argued, can be reduced neither to a mere aid to colonial administration nor seen solely as a mirror of colonial ideology. Indeed, the relationship was "characteristically ambiguous" (p. 7).
Containing papers originally presented at a 1995 University of Leiden workshop on "Colonial Anthropology in East and South-East Asia: a comparative view," the multiple aims of the two editors, Jan van Bremen from the Centre for Japanese Studies at Leiden and Akitoshi Shimizu at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, are presented in an introductory chapter. They note how much of the inspiration for the research comes from Asad's pathbreaking work...