Independence

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.”

-Frederick Douglass, 1852  - Independence Day Speech at Rochester, New York

via (notes on) politics, theory, and photography

Colonial-Style

“Under the colonial regime, anything may be done for a loaf of bread or a miserable sheep.  The relations of man with matter, withing the world outside and with history are in the colonial period simply relations with food.  For a colonized man, in a contest of oppresion like that of Algeria, living does not mean embodying moral values or taking his place in the coherent and fruitful development of the world.  To live means to keep on existing.  Every date is a victory: not the result of work, but a victory felt as a triumph of life.”

-Frantz Fanon, 1963 (The Wretched of the Earth.  Middelsex, UK: Penguin.  Pg. 249)

The Price is right

“our colonization of each other’s minds in the price we pay for thought”

-Mary Douglas, 1975 (via A Social History of Truth.  Steven Shapin.  1994.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  Pg 28.)

A passionate science, then?

“Anthropology is not a dispassionate science like astronomy, which springs from the contemplation of things at a distance. It is the outcome of an historical process, which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent human beings have had their resources plundered, their institutions and beliefs destroyed while they themselves were ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage, and contaminated by diseases they were unable to resist. Anthropology is the daughter to this era of violence. Its capacity to assess more objectively the facts pertaining to the human condition reflects, on the epistemological level, a state of affairs in which one part of mankind treats the other as an object.”

-Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1966 (“Anthropology: Its Achievement and Future,” Current Anthropology, vol. 7, 1966, p. 126.) via Open Anthropology

Moral (vs. Cultural?) Relativism

“Consider for example the doctrine of moral relativism.  By this I mean the doctrine that, starting from the (entirely reasonable) premise that one cannot fully understand any action except in the context of the actor’s cultural universe, concludes that as a consequence, no one has the right to stand in judgment over any action committed by someone with a fundamentally different world view…this is a doctrine that could only really emerge as a product of imperialism.  It could only have been produced by members of an elite population whose dominance over the world was so complete and so reliable that they could live their lives in full confidence that no one with a fundamentally different world view would ever be in a position of power over them…Pretenses to some kind of moral superiority, based on their unwillingness to morally condemn ‘the Other’, it seems to me, are often entirely underpinned by tacit support for real walls to shut real other people out…what basis would we have to criticize the structures of power  in the world, unless we at least admit that everyone in the world shares certain things in common?”

-David Graeber’s ‘Anti-Relativist Diatribe’, 2007 (Lost People.  Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.  Pg 386-7)

Rupture Ready

“What if we accepted that the people who Columbus or Vasco da Gama “discovered” on their expeditions were just us? Or certainly, just as much “us” as Columbus and Vasco da Gama ever were? I’m not arguing that nothing important has changed over the last five hundred years, any more than I’m arguing that cultural differences are unimportant. In one sense everyone, every community, every individual for that matter, lives in their own unique universe….

By “blowing up walls,” I mean most of all, blowing up the arrogant, unreflecting assumptions which tell us we have nothing in common with 98% of people who ever lived, so we don’t really have to think about them. Since, after all, if you assume the fundamental break, the only theoretical question you can ask is some variation on “what makes us so special?” Once we get rid of those assumptions, decide to at least entertain the notion we aren’t quite so special as we might like to think, we can also begin to think about what really has changed and what hasn’t.”

-David Graeber, 2004 (Fragments on an Anarchist Anthropology.  Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.  Pg 47)

The English Malady

“Since our wealth has increas’d, we have ransak’d all the parts of the globe to bring together its whole stock of materials for riot, luxury, and to provoke excess…Is it any wonder, then, that the diseases which proceed from idleness and fullness of bread, should increase in proportion, and keep equal pace with those improvements of the matter and cause of disease?”

-George Cheyne, early advocate of vegetarianism, 1733

(via Stuffed & Starved. Raj Patel. Brooklyn NY: Melville House. 2007. pg 77.)