Falling Through the ‘Savage Slot’: Postcolonial Critique and the Ethnographic Task
This paper observes that recent theoretical developments in anthropology present a challenge to ethnography understood as a holistic study involved in the task of translation. By addressing the critiques of postcolonial thinkers, and some postmodern thinkers, the paper seeks to re-formulate what the ethnographic task can and should involve at the end of the twentieth century. The discussion is premised on the view that a practice of ethnography is central to a continuing and distinctive identity for anthropology. It is argued, nonetheless, that this can be only an ethnography that has expanded the sites at which it is practised and escaped the classification of the world into ‘the West and the rest’.
Informed by evidence drawn from the British case this article assesses three competing explanations for how and why political elites in Western Europe lost control of postwar immigration and immigrant policy: the liberal thesis the political-historical perspective and the political institutional breakdown explanation. The British case casts doubt on the assumption that West European elites did lose control of policy although to the extent that perfect control was not exercised the political-historical argument best explains this phenomenon. (EXCERPT)