The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

352 critical reflections
for recording and understanding human and cultural difference. His sympathies
were initially aligned with the values of his own European civilization. In a wry and,
one hopes, ironic entry to his diary, Malinowski repeats the words of the savage
colonizer, Kurtz, from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “My feelings toward the
natives are [on the whole] decidedly tending to ‘exterminate the brutes’ ” (1967:69).
Here the anthropologist and racist imperialist seem one in spirit. But Malinowski
was profoundly homesick and morbidly depressed while “captive” in the field, and
his fevered diary musings might best be understood as just that: the nightmarish daydreams
of a diseased, hyperactive, and hypochondriacal imagination. Surely the
true measure of Malinowski’s anthropological genius lay not in his private musings
but in his public writings and in his method of “participant observation,” which required
an empathic identification with “the native.”
After the traumas of fieldwork, when Malinowski sat down to reflect on the
moral underpinnings of his discipline, he concluded: “The duty of the anthropologist
is to be a fair and true interpreter of the Native and...to register that Europeans
in the past sometimes exterminated whole island peoples; that they expropriated
most of the patrimony of savage races; that they introduced slavery in a
specially cruel and pernicious form” (1945:3–4, cited by James 1973:66). Malinowski
noted that while Europeans were generous in distributing their spiritual gifts to
the colonized, they were stingy in circulating the cultural and material instruments
of power and self-mastery. Europeans did not, he wrote (1945:57), give African peoples
“firearms, bombing planes, poison gas, and all that makes effective self-defense
or aggression possible.” In the end Malinowski argued passionately against the anthropologist
as a neutral and objective “by-stander” to the contemporary history
of colonial and postcolonial genocides and ethnocides. But these later writings were
largely discredited by his profession as the irresponsible babbling of an old man
past his intellectual prime.
KROEBER AND ISHI: LAST OF THEIR TRIBES
Alfred Kroeber died before he could imagine a radically different role for the anthropologist
as an engaged witness rather than disinterested spectator to the scenes
of human suffering, cultural destruction, and genocide even then being visited on
the native peoples of Northern California. When Kroeber arrived in San Francisco
in 1901 to take up the post of museum anthropologist at the University of California,
it was at the tail end of a terrible, wanton, and officially sanctioned extermination
of northern California Indians that had begun during the Gold Rush and
continued through the turn of the twentieth century.
In the coldly objective words of a historian of the period (Cook 1978:91): “Like
all native people in the Western Hemisphere, the Indians of California underwent
a very severe decline in numbers following the entrance of White civilization. From
the beginning to the end of the process the native population experienced a fall
from 310,000 to approximately 20,000, a decline of over 90% of the original num-