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ANTHROPOLOGY ON THE PERIPHERY OF THE CENTER Practitioners of a peripheral discipline, anthropologists have long centered their efforts in the conceptual territory stretching between the terms “center” and “periphery.” At the turn of the last century, anthropologists looked outward from their newly secured locations at central institutions (museums, universities , and government bureaus in a few globally dominant nation-states in Europe and North America) to the peripheral, “primitive” cultures the discipline had taken as its objects of study. Some anthropologists then (as today) took too literally the distinction between primitive others and civilized selves. Certainly, the racial ideology of those dominant nation-states had uses for (and continues to have use for) a science of primitive (or otherwise inferior) others. But anthropology’s countervailing tendency, as articulated at that moment by Boas and his students—to locate the unity of the human species in the inevitably particular cultural experience that constitutes life for all people—reminded practitioners that there are no primitive human beings and that any periphery can be defined only relative to an arbitrarily demarcated center. Anthropology was nonetheless, then (as now), a peripheral discipline compared to other human sciences that had constituted themselves in terms of objects of study that modern common sense considered central: economics, politics, history, even sociology. This disciplinary configuration is historically specific, of course, as is the conceptual division of reality into objects of study. That anthropology had constituted itself as a discipline was, as Boas suggested, an historical accident: The special task that is actually assigned at the present time to the anthropologist is the investigation of the primitive tribes of the world that have no written history, that of pre-historic remains and of the types of man inhabiting the world at present and in past times. It will be recognized that this limitation of the field of work of the anthropologist is more or less accidental, and originated because other sciences occupied part of the ground before the development of modern anthropology. (1908:269) 3 The emergence of those other sciences was also historically accidental. Anthropology ’s peripheral peoples had “dropped through the boundary spaces between the gradually separating disciplines” of the human sciences during the nineteenth century (Stocking 2001:311). Thus the “work” of studying them fell to anthropologists only because, as Boas put it, “no one else cares for it” (1904:35; cf. Bunzl 2004:437). Or, to put it another way, anthropology created itself as a discipline out of materials that fell into other disciplines’ residual categories (if they were noticed at all). Anthropologists have always been masters at generating intellectual capital from such unwanted raw materials. The discipline remains at once central and peripheral in the academy: central because the empirical knowledge it controls, and the theoretical play such knowledge enables, can be used to challenge many of the commonsense truths of other disciplines; but peripheral because, in the end, empowered natives in dominant nation-states have a way of ignoring any knowledge that does not allow them to rationalize their commonsense assumptions and practices. (As the Iraq war demonstrates, such natives do not pay attention even to their own history, let alone the history of others.) Anthropologists have made places for themselves, therefore, within hegemonic institutions , where they are respected but ignored. Centrally peripheral, we might say, or peripherally central. The anthropological relativism that allows us to play conceptual games with terms like “center” and “periphery” has trouble, however, negotiating “power.” We can, after all, count undergraduate enrollments, doctoral degrees, research dollars, and faculty positions; and when we do, we find that anthropology has “less” or “fewer” than other disciplines in the human sciences. To be institutionally peripheral in our society is to be “really” peripheral, and anthropologists ’ understanding that their marginality is a cultural phenomenon does not by itself allow them to effect economic and political change. In any case, a good deal of the more recent theorizing about centers and peripheries has been grounded not in a relativizing project but in a generalizing one: to understand the “world system” that has developed in the last five hundred years. In these models there really are centers and peripheries, defined in terms of control over economic and political processes. The work of Frank (1967), Wallerstein (1974), and Wolf (1982), to name only the best known, took aim at spurious entities; it relativized the notion of “a” society or culture, objectively bounded. Their work saw “the local” enmeshed in a global system, and although localities, in...

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