‘Stealing With the Eyes’: a Post-Modern Assault on Anthropology

Many anthropologists now falsely view their field as a threat to the dignity and well-being of tribal societies, and a continuation of colonial oppression.

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About the Author

Christopher Hallpike is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University, Canada. He studied anthropology at Oxford under Evans-Pritchard and Rodney Needham, and then carried out extensive fieldwork among the Konso of Ethiopia and the Tauade of Papua New Guinea. He is the author of many books not only on the Konso and the Tauade but on the major topics of anthropology, such as The Foundations of Primitive Thought and The Principles of Social Evolution. You can find out more about his work on his website.

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In an age when Western science is condemned as an expression of colonialism and white supremacy, it’s not surprising that these feelings of moral outrage have extended to anthropology. Traditionally, anthropology has had a special interest in studying tribal or “primitive” societies. These are small, face-to-face communities with subsistence economies and simple technologies, without writing, money, or centralized governance. They have a very limited division of labour and are organised primarily on the basis of kinship, age, and sex. Far from being isolated or insignificant oddities, they have, for most of history, represented the predominant type of human society across the globe. However, they have been increasingly dominated by the great empires of the ancient world and, in more modern times, subjected primarily to European colonisation.

While there were occasional descriptions of these societies by government officials, missionaries, and assorted travellers, the absence of writing in tribal societies meant that a detailed examination of them required professional anthropologists to live among them for one or two years of fieldwork. These anthropologists had to learn the unwritten indigenous languages and compare their findings with those of their peers to develop a general theoretical understanding of how such societies functioned. This was a vital contribution to our understanding of what it means to be human, and for a hundred years or so anthropological fieldworkers, mainly from Europe and America, accumulated a vast store of ethnographic data. This work not only greatly contributed to our knowledge but also served as a priceless record of these societies in their traditional states before they were radically transformed by the various forces of modernization.

In the nature of things, anthropologists were only able to carry out fieldwork in these societies when law and order had been imposed by colonial governments, which has led many contemporary academics in our highly politicized landscape to accuse anthropology of being a colonialist enterprise. The Pitt Rivers Museum recently proclaimed, “Coloniality divides the world up into ‘the West and the rest,’ and assigns racial, intellectual and cultural superiority to the West.” The very obvious fact that human societies exhibit differing degrees of complexity was described as the creation of “Racialised hierarchies linked to intelligence.” Instead, it argues, modern anthropology’s goal should be to foster “an inclusive space welcoming to all” (cited in Hallpike 2024).

Consequently, traditional anthropology is now viewed as a threat to the dignity and well-being of tribal societies, and a continuation of colonial oppression of the powerless. For example, an American anthropologist recently criticized the practice of making audio recordings during fieldwork, even when the indigenes themselves have sold these recordings, as perpetuating an “extraction mindset” akin to mining companies extracting mineral resources from the land. As a result, she decided not to record any of the interviews she obtained in her fieldwork to avoid continuing “the legacy of extraction” (cited in Weiss 2022).

This “extraction mindset” has, rather more graphically, been described as “stealing with the eyes.”