A failing anthropology of colonial failure: following a driver's uniform found at Amani research station, Tanzania

• Published in: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2023-04, Vol.29 (S1), p.167-189
• Main Author: Geissler, P. Wenzel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acquisition; Ambiguity; Anthropologists; Anthropology; Colonialism; Confessions; Epistemology; Ethnography; Knowledge; Performativity; Reflexivity; Scholarship; Writing
• ISSN: 1359-0987; 1467-9655
• DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.13908

The remains of Amani, a century‐old scientific laboratory in Tanzania, are quintessential modern relics. When anthropologists turn to such infrastructures of, originally colonial, knowledge‐making, their own implication with the object of their study – and with its epistemological and political‐economic origins and order – becomes part of the ethnographic pursuit. This entanglement between researcher and research material should challenge familiar realist modes of ethnographic writing ‘about’ such places that elude the anthropologists’ own, compromised position within them. Matters are complicated further when the studied knowledge‐making sites already are broken, having failed their purpose – as in the case of the vestiges of an abandoned colonial institution. In this essay, I wonder how such ruins of knowledge‐making might transform the knowledge made by anthropologists working within them. Instead of just adding ‘reflexive’ confessions to realist accounts, could writing take part in the defeat that the scientific station's remains seem to embody – writing not ‘after/beyond’ but ‘going along with’ failure? Drawing on non‐representational ethnography, and poet‐anthropologist Hubert Fichte's embrace of epistemic defeat as anticolonial method, I trace my engagements with just one fragment of the scientific station – a driver's uniform. In doing so, I experiment with an object ethnography that ‘fails’ to detach author and object, or settle the question of failure, and instead foregrounds performativity, ambiguity, and mirth as starting points for an ethnography of, and in, our modern ruins. Abstrait L'anthropologie défaillante d'un échec colonial : sur les traces d'un uniforme de chauffeur découvert à la station de recherche d'Amani, en Tanzanie Résumé À Amani en Tanzanie, les vestiges d'un laboratoire scientifique vieux d'un siècle constituent la quintessence des reliques modernes. Quand les anthropologues s'intéressent à de telles infrastructures servant à l'acquisition de connaissances initialement coloniales, leur propre implication dans l'objet de l’étude, comme dans ses origines et son ordre épistémologiques et politico‐économiques, devient une composante du processus ethnographique. Cet enchevêtrement entre chercheur et matériel de recherche devrait remettre en question les modes réalistes habituels de rédaction ethnographique « à propos » de ces lieux, qui échappent à la position compromise de l'anthropologue en leur milieu. Tout se complique encore