1. Consistencies and Contradictions: Anthropological Anti-Imperialism and Frederick Starr's Letter to Baron Ishii

University of Chicago founding anthropologist Frederick Starr (1858–1933), among American anthropology's "excluded ancestors" (Handler 2000), has often been noted for an anti-imperialism that is in turn usually described as inconsistent, even contradictory. His involvement in the early 1900s with Erving Winslow's Anti-Imperialist League and related organizations (Stocking 1979b), which included tenure as a league vice president from 1907 until 1921 (Zwick 2004), as well as his sometimes flamboyant public advocacy of Philippine independence, U.S. noninterference in Mexican affairs, and other often unpopular causes, can be set against his equally full-throated defense of Belgian activities in the Congo (Starr 1969) and the extension of Japanese control over Korea and Manchuria. Moreover, Starr's own practices of field research, while hardly unique in their employment of local police and other officials to corral subjects for anthropometric measurement and other study, were marked in the blithe enthusiasm they evinced for such uses of authority. They have themselves been taken as belying his more abstract commitments (McVicker 1989a: 219; 1989b: 119). With regard to Starr's relation to colonial governments and imperialist projects, one of the more interesting documents to be found in the collection of Starr's papers archived at the University of Chicago is the draft of a letter he sent in December 1911 to a Baron Ishii, Japanese Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, shortly after the completion of his first stint of fieldwork in Korea.¹ The twelve pages of the letter sought to offer advice on a wide range of issues connected with the governance of Japan's new colony, which had been made a protectorate in 1905 and formally annexed in 1910. Both the very existence of this document and some of its more incendiary suggestions at first glance redouble the apparent contradictions of Starr's life and anti-imperialism. Yet I would argue that the letter also represents a locus classicus, a meeting point of some unconsidered consistencies of Starr's political and anthropological positions, particularly during the second half of his four-decade career.² Though I can only sketch this contention here, at issue, I would further suggest, is not only our understanding of Starr himself but our understanding of a brand of anti-imperial politics of which Starr was representative, which in turn might open a vista onto one of the (several) places that American anthropology was coming from at the beginning of the 20th century. With the Ishii letter as a basis, I will turn to these larger concerns in the latter part of this essay.

Starr's interest in working in Korea had been piqued in April 1909, during a research trip to Japan. A rumor of impending annexation passed on by a foreign resident, indeed of de facto takeover, corresponded with Starr's previous observations.

He whispers that Japan has annexed Korea—a matter of perhaps fifteen days back! This perhaps explains the 50000 men working day and night in the Osaka arsenal and the trains of soldiers being hurried to Yokohama, and even the armed soldiers on the street corners in Yokohama? Crafty old secret politics? What will happen when it is really known?

[FSP B15 Japan 1909 NB8:12]

Starr's initial plan was to leave for Japan and Korea in January 1911 and spend most of the six-month duration of the journey in Korea. At the last minute, the financing for the trip fell through, and he instead undertook research in Mexico "to cover [his] disappointment." In June, in his weekly letter to "my dear mother," he announced his new intention to undertake a shorter, four-month trip, to commence in late August. Her response is not recorded but was apparently negative—Starr wrote back, the next week, "I am sorry the Korea plan does not amuse you" (FSP B6 F12 Starr to MDM June 20, 1911 and June 27, 1911). But of course, he went anyway, accompanied as usual by that point by his photographer and assistant, Manuel Gonzales.³ The comparative study of Japanese...