Anthropology and imperialism: Past, present, future

TL;DR

Steve Striffler’s afterword argues that anthropology’s engagement with imperialism has flowed through three broad currents—knowledge production, the political economy of empire, and anti-imperialist struggles—and that recent anthropology often addresses global inequality without explicitly theorizing imperialism. He calls for an anthropology against empire that studies imperial power and revolutionary agency.

Key findings

• The paper identifies three broad currents in anthropology’s engagement with imperialism: reflexive exploration of the discipline’s entanglement with empire and decolonization; political-economy analyses of colonialism and imperialism; and studies of anti-imperialist political struggles.
• It argues that although decolonial theory has focused attention on knowledge production, Campbell and Aung note that this can come at the expense of political economy and can marginalize earlier anti-imperialist intellectuals, activists, and militants from the Global South; despite a surge of writing on decolonization, “the focus on imperialism within anthropology remains minimal.”
• It observes that recent anthropology often examines an unequal global economy under the more neutral term “globalization” without explicitly theorizing or naming imperialism, citing Emma Banks’s work on foreign mining and indigenous communities in Colombia and Thomas McNamara’s work on imperial power co-opting domestic actors in South Africa around just transition and climate change.
• It calls for an anthropology against empire that studies imperial power based largely in the United States and Europe, asks where revolutionary agency lies, and grapples with how to form an effective radical working-class coalition amid surplus populations and catastrophic climate change.

Methods

• Design: an afterword/commentary that synthesizes and reflects on the collection’s themes and broader anthropological literature.
• Data or sample: Not stated in the paper; no empirical sample or dataset is presented.
• Main analysis: conceptual and historical argument organized around three currents of anthropological engagement with imperialism, followed by a proposal for an anthropology against empire, drawing on cited literature and examples from the collection.

Limitations

• The paper states no limitations.
• Evident from the text: it is an afterword/commentary rather than an empirical study, with no systematic data collection or analysis; its claims are the author’s synthesis and interpretation, limited to selected literature and examples.