О британских антропологии и колониализме

Этот и следующий тексты будут посвящены одному из выпусков журнала "Anthropological Forum" за 1977 г. Вошедшие в него статьи являются ответом некоторых* британских антропологов, работавших в колониях, на критику этой работы как служащей колониальным интересам. Из большого числа поднятых тем я сконцентрируюсь на одной - не связанной напрямую с исследовательской, побочной деятельности антропологов.

В частности, Edmund R. Leach, среди прочего известный этнографической работой в Бирме, описывает свою военную службу там же во время WW2.
"The Burma army of that time <1940> had British officers and local troops ... Perhaps not very surprisingly, attempts to recruit Burmese and Shans proved largely abortive ... because of my linguistic knowledge I found myself before long specially earmarked as a recruiting officer for the Kachin Hills. In this role, I visited many parts of the Kachin Hills area which otherwise I would have been very unlikely to see at all."
"Once the Japanese war started it was perfectly obvious ... that the British would get pushed out of Burma ... <the Governor was persuaded> to leave behind a network of spies and guerillas until such time as the British armed forces could return ... By January 1942 I had been seconded from my Burma Rifles Regiment to a mysterious 'X List', and soon found myself embroiled with various shady characters known by letters of the alphabet and numbers." E.L. не вдается в подробности** о своей службе в 1942-45 гг., т.е. примерно во время японской оккупации Бирмы.
Большее пространство отводится расуждениям о влиянии военной службы и колониального контекста вообще на работу E.L. как антрополога. Сводятся они примерно к следующему: "If I had not had my anthropological background I would not have got seconded into the peculiar cloak-and-dagger activities which were part of my destiny. But what the reader of this series wants to know, presumably, is whether my anthropological findings ... would have been different if my research had been conducted in a different sociological climate. I do not see how I or anyone else could possibly answer such a question."***

P.S. Несколько слов о других влияниях; в статье несколько раз упоминается некий Mr Stevenson - вместе c E.L. он был участником семинара Малиновского и "was engaged in writing a diploma thesis based on his work as an administrator in the Chin Hills of Burma"; "it was through him that I came to undertake fieldwork in the Kachin Hills on the borders of Burma and Yunnan."

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* Как сообщает во вступлении Peter Loizos, публикации предшествовал семинар с чуть большим числом участников - "One of the most lively papers presented in the seminar was that given by M. G. Smith who noted, scanning the list of participants, that he was the only 'coloured colonial' to give a paper ... Since he had made it a condition of his participation that he would not write anything, one can only comment regretfully on the interest his paper would have given to this collection. Smith's first publications, he informed the seminar, were Jamaican nationalist pamphlets, and certainly his perspective on colonial systems ... is quite different from that of the contributors here."
** "I was never actually a member of ... Force 136, nor was I later involved in either of the Wingate operations, or with 'V Force', but peripherally my war was muddled up with all these things as well as others ... I was in and out of Burma on many occasions and visited many parts of the Kachin Hills as well as other parts of Western Burma and Assam."
*** Замечу, что рассуждения E.L. о влиянии, например, социального класса антрополога на его работу кажутся более уверенными ["Glimpses of the Unmentionable ..."].

Loizos - "Personal Evidence: Comments on an Acrimonius Argument" (1977)
Leach - "In formative travail with Leviathan" (1977)