Empires, Nations, and Natives is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the interplay between the practice of anthropology and the politics of empires and nation-states in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It brings together essays that demonstrate how the production of social scientific knowledge about the 'other' has been inextricably linked to the crafting of government policies. Subverting established boundaries between national and imperial anthropologies, the contributors explore the role of anthropology in the shifting categorization of race in Southern Africa, the identification of Indians in Brazil, the implementation of development plans in Africa and Latin America, the modernizing efforts of the French African colonial administration, the construction of Mexican and Portuguese nationalism, the genesis of "national character" studies in the United States during World War II, and postcolonial architecture. From Argentina, Brazil, France, Great Britain, Mexico, South Africa, and the United States, the contributors are all social or cultural anthropologists. They report on both historical and contemporary processes.
Moving beyond controversies that cast the relationship between scholarship and politics in binary terms of complicity or autonomy, they bring into focus a dynamic process in which states, anthropological knowledge, and population groups themselves are mutually constructed. Such a reflexive endeavour is an essential contribution to a critical anthropological understanding of the world. Contributors: Alban Bensa, Marcio Goldman, Adam Kuper, Benoit de L'Estoile, Claudio Lomnitz, David Mills, Federico Neiburg, Joao Pacheco de Oliveira, Jorge Pantaleon, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Lygia Sigaud, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Florence Weber Benoit de L'Estoile teaches at the Ecole normale superieure and in the Post-Graduate Programme of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, both in Paris. Federico Neiburg and Lygia Sigaud are Professors of Social Anthropology at the National Museum, Rio de Janeiro.
