Colonialism / Postcolonialism

The giant composite field of colonialism and postcolonialism studies has had a transforming effect on modern anthropology. Anthropologists have been innovative users of its multidisciplinary perspectives, and key contributors to its challenging accounts of past and contemporary global life and experience. The call to prioritise colonial and postcolonial perspectives in the framing of anthropology's central research questions has greatly extended the field's range and scope, including its distinctive approaches to the issue of whether it is colonialism that should be seen as modernity's most important progenitor, and the source of its most toxic forms of subjugation and disempowerment. This entry notes the sophistication with which anthropology has both embraced and challenged the forms of cultural and social analysis through which the epistemic and material transformations of global empire and its afterlife have been documented and theorised. And it argues that studies of colonialism and postcolonialism still have a strong and productive future in a world now widely thought to require the multidimensional framings provided by today's high-profile theorists of globalisation and cosmopolitanism.