Keith said, "Anthropology once had a unified perspective in that a few academics in the main imperial centres took on themselves to talk about humanity as a whole. Foucault, in the last chapter of The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses), argues that this 'human science' was the last dying gasp of a western pretension to universality reflected in the end of empire (rather like Hegel's owl of Minerva). In any case, the collapse of the European empires after 1945 did usher in a new era for anthropology, whether or not you buy F's thesis about the human sciences."
Keith is in good company in arguing that anthropology is the child of imperialism. But I think there are grounds for an alternative interpretation: that Western social science generally and anthropology in particular were primarily a reflection on the changes in European society. As I have tried to develop this argument in Understanding Culture: An Introduction to Anthropology Theory, I will not reherse it in detail here. But think, for example, of Durkheim's The Division of Labour in Society; it's all about the changes in Europe. Studies beyond Europe were primarily used to contextualize this focus of change in Europe. Eventually, of course, extra-European studies became of interest in their own right, one of the benefits of engagement with the broader world.
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