Anti-Colonial Science: A Course Journal. Vol. 2, 2024. https://ojs.library.dal.ca/acs/

Reflections of a Fledgling Anthropologist: Exploring Anthropology Through the Lens of Anti-colonial Science

Chloë Nevin

Dalhousie University

When people ask me “what is anthropology?” I often draw a blank, the easiest way to explain it would be the basic definition of “the study of humanity and culture.” Which to the person who is probably just asking to be polite is a good enough answer. But for myself, I am still learning what anthropology is and how to practice it in a way that feels right. I am yet not sure who I want to be as an anthropologist, but what I do know is that I have always wanted to bring home whatever skills and knowledge I acquire at university to help support my community. And by skills and knowledge I mean the ability to critically think about the world around me, how I can be interacting with it and what I can do to continue learning about the systems and social forces that govern our society. However, I cannot do that without engaging in anti-colonial methods of anthropology. This essay will primarily engage with Max Liboiron's Pollution is Colonialism, and although their book focuses on how themself and the Civic Laboratory for Environment Action Research (CLEAR) employs anti-colonial and feminist methodologies to environmental science in an academic setting, I think the methods outlined in this book can be applied to scientific disciplines such as social anthropology as well.

First off, I think positionality is essential. I feel that it is important to acknowledge that I am a white-settler or qallunaat living on Inuit Nunangat, more specifically Iqaluit, Nunavut is where I call home. This fact is not changed by the reality that I am away from home attending university roughly eight months of the year, because I have a home in Iqaluit, I have relations in Iqaluit, and I have a history, a present, and a future in Iqaluit; I am shaped by the Land, and a part of my being is always there. I feel this is important to acknowledge because as Liboiron points out in their footnotes, introducing and positioning oneself allows the reader to understand where an author is coming from, their obligations, and what privilege the settler state has or has not afforded them.1 They practice this method by introducing themself in the Acknowledgements of Pollution is Colonialism, and further emphasizes the importance of positionality throughout the book by including any relevant affiliations of the everyone they cite in parathesis, not just Indigenous authors, effectively re-centring “white settlers and whiteness as an unexceptional norm.”2 Thus going forward in this paper, I will try my best to acknowledge where my ideas come from and how that knowledge was born.

In saying that a goal of mine is to bring home with me skills and knowledge, I have learned at school to help my community, I also have to acknowledge that those Western academic forms of knowledge are not above, more powerful, or more healing, than Traditional Knowledge. Leanne Simpson discusses how Traditional Indigenous Knowledge (IK) and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) often co-opt and are depoliticized by western scientists in order to apply these frameworks to for their own research consequently enabling engagement with “the knowledge and not the people who own and live that knowledge.”3 If I want to engage in anthropological methods of study while respecting and upholding traditional knowledge, I have to do more than just acknowledge that it exists. There is more than just that there are impacts of colonialism to be acknowledged, but also what they are, and how it was carried out, and what it means to decolonize. I came to school with the broad purpose of getting an education to be able to return home and contribute to my community in a range of ways; what I hope to be able to accomplish now is apply what I have learned in practical ways that can facilitate positive action in my community.

Fieldwork is often a term used in anthropology to describe when an anthropologist goes out into the `field' to study subjects. There are a few assumptions happening here that if anti-colonial methodologies were applied it could improve the quality of research and relationship of the anthropologist with the people they are studying as well as the land. Liboiron discusses how CLEAR lab does not like to use the words “fieldwork” or “field site” because it implies that these places are other and outside the scope of science, and it ignores the fact that “these places are homes, homelands, and houses."4 Further it brings into question where scientific, or in my case social scientific, work starts and begins. A common practice among anthropological research is that of the anthropologist going off to some foreign (to them) land to gather data on the people and culture whose homelands they are on; this method is often called ethnographic fieldwork. Fieldwork is not exclusive to just distant places, it can also be done on a smaller scale like an office building, lab, a city, as long as there are people you can conduct ethnographic work. But the point I believe Liboiron is trying to make is that no matter where the “field” is, to the people who inhabit, work, care for, and live in said “field,” to them it is not a field it is their home. As Liboiron calls into question the use words like “fieldwork” to reference the homelands where scientific research is being done, I think that this method can be brought over into anthropology too. Fieldwork in social anthropology is ultimately a method used to describe how work and where data is being collected, I'm not suggesting that has to change, but I think it can be important for anthropologists to be careful about the words they use to describe place. Personally this means that I will have to think carefully about the vocabulary I use to describe work, data, knowledge, place, etc., if I were ever to conduct ethnographic work in Nunavut.

Both Simpson and Lee Maracle argue that documenting Traditional Knowledge and Stories can be harmful to those systems of knowledge, and transforms said knowledge into property and confines it to western concepts of knowledge.5 I think in practicing anthropology, and more specifically doing ethnographic work, easily toes the line of this boundary. Ethnographic research often involves fieldwork, participant-observation and fieldnotes that would outline what the anthropologist is seeing and doing so that later they can connect these experiences to other scholarly work. In Pollution is Colonialism Liboiron makes a point to tell the story of a young anthropologist doing ethnographic work at CLEAR; this young academic began to gather data before she had been given explicit consent to do so by the team. Ultimately she was asked to write and apology and this even was used as a learning moment for everyone involved.6 This story elucidates that the idea of what property is entrenched in colonial ideologies and extends beyond Land but can also encapsulate Knowledge. This not only illustrates how anthropologists should learn to understand what knowledge is, who it belongs to, and where it comes from, but also how accountability can make you a better anthropologist. I also think this story raises questions about how far does written consent to collect data go, and how anthropologists should go about discussing consent with the individuals they are researching.

While grappling with the question of what Social Anthropology means to me, I have come to understand it as a tool for me to think critically about society and as a means to support and empower my community. Through engaging with Liboiron's I have deepened my understanding of the importance of acknowledging my own positionality as well as the positionality of others I may be writing about. Additionally, I was able to re-evaluate my understanding of terms such as “fieldwork” and “the field” and the ethical considerations surrounding knowledge acquisition have illuminated the complexities of conducting anthropology responsibly. As I continue to navigate my path in anthropology, I am committed to incorporating these anti-colonial methods into my practice, striving for accountability, respect, and positive action within my community and beyond.

Bibliography

Leanne R. Simpson. “Anticolonial Strategies for the Recovery and Maintenance of Indigenous Knowledge.” American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 3/4 (2004): 373–84.

Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

Maracle, Lee. My Conversations with Canadians. Essais; Number 4. Toronto, Ontario: BookThug, 2017.

Endnotes

  1. Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), n. 10, pp. 3-4.↩︎

  2. Liboiron.↩︎

  3. Leanne R. Simpson, “Anticolonial Strategies for the Recovery and Maintenance of Indigenous Knowledge,” American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 3/4 (2004): 376.↩︎

  4. Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism, 68.↩︎

  5. Lee Maracle, My Conversations with Canadians, Essais; Number 4 (Toronto, [Ontario: BookThug, 2017), 111; Leanne R. Simpson, “Anticolonial Strategies for the Recovery and Maintenance of Indigenous Knowledge,” 380.↩︎

  6. Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism, 68–69.↩︎

Copyright (c) 2024 Chloë Nevin

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