Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 27

Early anthropology has many roots, and some were in the efforts of Western civilization to better understand the lands and peoples it was colonizing. This isn’t revisionist history or Western-civilization bashing — it’s just plain fact.

For example, in 1902 the Report of the Philippine Commission stated that “Since the first arrival of the Portuguese in Eastern waters, the mind of the Malay has appeared to the European as a closed book. Both races have ever misunderstood and mistrusted each other. Out of mutual ignorance and fear have followed hatred, oppression, and retaliation … this government is attempting to rear a new standard of relationship between the white man and the Malay. The success … will depend … on our correct understanding and scientific grasp of the peoples whose problems we are facing.”

The problems the report refers to were Western problems revolving around how to make better workers of the Malaysians, and the solution was a scientific understanding of these folk to be achieved through the new science of anthropology. Specifically, this new science would use one of its principal tools, ethnography, to help the colonial effort. Ethnography is the direct observation of a group of people by living near or among them, and making records of what one observes.