Does a decolonized anthropology require reinterpreting the past?

Decolonizing US Anthropology," by Akhil Gupta and Jessie Stoolman, is motivated by the "renewed calls for a racial reckoning in US anthropology" by members of a younger generation of anthropologists.After an exercise of counterfactual history, the authors write, "We therefore cannot decolonize the discipline today without reinterpreting and rethinking the past."But is this really necessary?I suggest, on the contrary, that today's anthropologists can stand on the basis of the newer discipline that has developed over the preceding several generations, and it is not necessary to expend so much labor on reinterpreting and rethinking US anthropology's past.Gupta and Stoolman's piece caused concern among a number of anthropologists who feel that their work and world have not been adequately understood and represented.Today, as in the past, there is great variation within the US anthropological community, based on differences in outlook and interest and on concatenations of individual background, personality, ideology, motivation, training, and experience.Nevertheless, it is possible to speak of two distinctly different US anthropologies: the "classical"(?)or "pre-postmodern"(?) and the current one.The anthropology into which the most senior of us were enculturated was an ambitious field whose members believed that their endeavor to view all human groups, from pre-human origins through the earliest manifestations of culture and human social behavior until today, was distinctive and important.It was a strategy for understanding what makes us all human despite the remarkable range of cultural behaviors we are capable of."The encompassing human science, the comparative study of the human condition," Marshall Sahlins (2017) called it.Our discipline grew out of lively curiosity about the world's peoples, as well an appreciation for scientific method.We thought that our intimate, first-hand engagement with members of other communities, where they live, gave us unique appreciation for different ways of being and doing.We did research with as many different living peoples as possible and tried to get information about ways from the past that were known only through archeology.In early days, US ethnographers and linguists worked with groups whose distinctive languages, beliefs, and ways of life were in imminent danger of dying with their carriers or being abandoned in the face of overwhelming outside forces.These researchers believed it was their duty to save this knowledge for the future of their descendants as well as for humanity's knowledge of itself.This humane pursuit, known as "salvage," is being increasingly caricatured as harmful, paradoxically as "erasure," despite the vast library of ethnographic, linguistic, artistic, and musical records available today for their heirs and all of us.While some descendants deeply resent that ancestral objects in museums are inaccessible to them, and demand their return, this should not be true of the mass of written and recorded materials that are readily available today, increasingly online.US anthropology was not restricted to a "savage slot" (Trouillot 1991).Franz Boas made clear from his earliest days at Columbia University that the aim of anthropology was to study all peoples of every type of culture.We were engaged in communities of all sizes and complexity, especially with those ignored by other disciplines.The only other people interested in those folks were missionaries who wanted to change them and government officials determined to control them.We only wanted to know and learn from them.US anthropologists have been opponents of racial determinism for more than a century; our discipline was the only one whose central mission was to argue against it.As Baker (1998, 167) writes, "Boas and several of his students at Columbia joined activists in an effort to liberate African Americans from the grip of claims of inferiority and to establish a more rigorous academic discourse to explain race and culture.The change in the social sciences followed, and sometimes led, slow changes and arduous political and social struggles that would eventually topple Plessy in 1954."Gupta and Stoolman's history could have noted that many US anthropologists were active on behalf of the peoples they worked with.Franz Boas protested the outlawing of potlatch by the Canadian government, others supported the use of peyote in rituals, and Sol Tax and Nancy Lurie

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