Turning Postcolonial Historians into White Men?

I want to use this author-meets-critic forum to think about what happens to postcolonial ethical commitments when they are worked through the genre of the adventure tale—those stories of brave white men on far-flung travels in search of mysteries. Warwick Anderson's The Collectors of Lost Souls risks this move, offering us a page-turning, globe-trotting romp sprinkled with explicit references to Joseph Conrad. Conrad's novels have long generated debate among postcolonial critics: does his work merely maintain racist colonial ideology? Or is it more liminal, tentatively bearing witness to the violence of colonialism and yet nonetheless symptomatic of the frame of empire? Literary critics have struggled to name Conrad's style, his romanticism tinged with irony and self-deprecation. Anderson's book—a work of thick, multisited research, energized with clever and sharp prose—is crafted through some of the same ethical ambiguities that mark Conrad's work. Critical of past scientific styles of appropriation and noncommodified forms of exchange, it is, at the same time, a work infused with nostalgia for the intimacies of past fieldwork and animated by attention to the ghoulish details of science.

Anderson's book has been lauded by many reviewers and has won numerous awards, and its virtues—gripping narrative and dense empiricism—are amply and justly praised. I would like instead to use the book to help frame a much-needed debate about the stakes of postcolonial science and technology studies. To be frank, STS has been a field slow to engage postcolonial studies, sometimes stubbornly so. Anderson's work has helped to define the postcolonial turn in STS over the previous decade, and his latest book, written in a dramatically different genre than his previous contributions, offers one more prompt to engage hard questions about the stakes of postcolonial critique in STS—this time perhaps not quite in the manner he intended.

In The Collectors of Lost Souls, Anderson has chosen to write a trade book, a "ripping yarn," for a larger audience. Reviews in prominent public health and medical journals signal the success of this strategy; but the decision is not without its price. Without the scaffolding of postcolonial critique, the book knowingly courts romanticism and all its troubles. Colleagues who already understand the political stakes of transnational and postcolonial accounts of science can discern the critical thought that animates the book's narrative. But in terms of the wider audience, those reading this book without the context of postcolonial theory, the book leaves itself open to a voyeuristic gaze. This raises important questions about the political and intellectual work postcolonial critique does and what is lost (and even what reemerges) in its explicit removal.

This point is further complicated by the book's primary narrative thread. It is largely written around the controversial and colorful figure of Carl Gajdusek, described as not only a voracious researcher but also a "gatherer" of people. The book's central argument is to turn the tables on the story of kuru—scientists like Gajdusek, not the Fore, are the cannibals who harvest and appropriate the bodies that make possible biomedical research. The "table turned" here is literal: researchers examined their specimens on their dining table. To conduct his own research, Anderson follows in the footsteps of Gajdusek and other scientists; like Gajdusek, he goes to Papua New Guinea (PNG) to rework the question of kuru among the Fore. The book is dotted with grainy pictures of white scientists visiting and revisiting the PNG highlands, joined on page 213 with a picture of Anderson himself reiterating the same itinerary. Can this repetition turn the tables? On the one hand, Anderson can be read as frankly putting himself on the hook of the complicity inevitable within this project. Historians too are harvesting from this place. There may be something about the historical project of looking backward—of following actors in the past—that leaves it particularly vulnerable to animating nostalgic relations. On the other hand, now, with the twentieth century behind us, its layered histories open for interpretation, the reader is left asking if postcolonial-influenced STS should...