Settler agnosia in the field: Indigenous action, functional ignorance, and the origins of ethnographic entrapment
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The American Indian Studies Program (AISP) is the oldest ethnic studies program at Iowa State University and currently boasts an enrollment of over 500 students, and the active participation of 8 academic departments. Since 1972, this cross-disciplinary program has offered students opportunities to learn more about the rich cultural heritage of American Indians, their historical relationship to each other and to other societies, their role and influence in contemporary American society, and their legal and political status.
The Department of Anthropology seeks to teach students what it means to be human by examining the four sub-disciplines of anthropology: cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and biological anthropology. This prepares students for work in academia, research, or with government agencies, development organizations, museums, or private businesses and corporations.
History
The Department of Anthropology was formed in 1991 as a result of the division of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.
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1991-present
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- College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (parent college)
- Department of Sociology and Anthropology (predecessor)
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Abstract
In the late 1930s a novice fieldworker from the University of Chicago wrote in his field notes that his collaboration with a Ho-Chunk interpreter had failed because of the interpreter's “aggressions” in the struggle for “white class status.” The notes exhibit a pattern of perceptual failure that I call “settler agnosia,” elements of which have been noted in research on the obstacles facing Indigenous activists. The case shows that the tendency of older anthropological accounts of contemporary American Indian life to obscure evidence of both colonial oppression and Indigenous action may have originated as consequences of a form of functional ignorance triggered by interpersonal struggles over position in the everyday relations of settler society. An ethnographic investigation of the links between settler agnosia and the practice of settlerness connects perception in everyday interactions to larger issues of knowledge production in and of settler societies.
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This article is from American Ethnologist 43 (2016): 465–474, doi:10.1111/amet.12339. Posted with permission.