Anthropology’s White Innocence
[caption id="attachment_58" align="alignnone" width="665"] Nuba wrestlers, by George Rodger[/caption]
Anthropology was born from colonialism. There is no way around it. Its very roots are entangled with power, ethnocentrism, and the urge to classify and dissect (also literally) the racialized Other. And yet, students and scholars - no matter how critical, no matter how antiracist and "postcolonial" - still defend its potential. They emphasize its ethnographic method as a way to capture lived culture. But in practice, it keeps circling back to the same object: the non-Western Other. If it can’t step outside its own colonial framework, why cling to it?
Stuart Hall’s reading of fetishism in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices shows just how deep this goes. He revisits Leni Riefenstahl’s fascination with George Rodger’s photograph of Nubian wrestlers. She confessed: “Though it is forbidden, I can look at the wrestler’s genitals because they are no longer as they were. Their place has been taken by the head of his wrestling companion.” As Kobena Mercer notes, Riefenstahl's so-called anthropological interest was nothing but an alibi for erotic obsession It is “the secondary elaboration, and rationalization of the primal wish to see this lost image again and again.”
I recognize this logic in my own circles. Classmates and colleagues, anthropoligical undertakers, tell me stories of fieldwork that looked more like missions. Never, ever without a sexual escapade with a local. Or an exclusive desire (at times fulfilled) to share one's romantic life with someone who (partially) embodies the academic subject. I.e.: To study Congo, means having a Congolese partner, too.
Suggesting they research whiteness at home is met with disinterest. The “authentic” Africa will always be far more enticing, free from diasporic critique. Anthropology becomes a cover; a way to repeat old fantasies under the guise of science. That logic is recognizably embedded in Anthropology itself. It fetishizes the Other, while exempting whiteness from being studied at all. It makes whiteness the unblemished reference point, reinforcing superiority at the very foundation of the field.
And yet, Gloria Wekker did something radical. In White Innocence, she used ethnographic tools to study Dutch whiteness, turning the anthropological gaze back on those who usually hold it. That move was bold, but refreshing. It shows what Anthropology could be if we truly seek to free it from its colonial shackles. As was predictable, such work tends to get dismissed as "unscientific," mere “personal experience.” Because apparently, white people can be studied through Sociology or Cultural Studies—but never Anthropology. Whiteness is universal, not socially construed through history, culture, and the predicament of race... And when studies on whiteness do appear, their findings are often naturalized into human nature itself: (“all humans are xenophobic”). Wekker punctured that illusion, and for that she was cast out of the fold. What does that say about the way whiteness continues to shield itself from scrutiny?