Africa, empire, and anthropology: A philological exploration of anthropology's heart of darkness

As an artifact of imperial culture, Africanist anthropology is historically associated with the colonization of Africa in ways that undermine the subd iscipline's claims of neutrality and objectivity. A critical literature on the ideological and discursive inventions of Africa by the West challenges I:he very possibility of Africanist anthropology, to which a variety of res ponses have emerged. These range from historical reexaminations of imperial discourses, colonial interactions, and fieldwork in Africa, including dial ogical engagements with the very production of ethnographic texts, to a mor e dialectical anthropology of colonial spectacle and culture as it was copr oduced and reciprocally determined in imperial centers and peripheries. Und erstood philologically, as an imperial palimpsest in ethnographic writing, the: colonial legacy in Africanist ethnography can never be negated, but mu st be acknowledged under the sign of its erasure.