Settler colonialism, George Grey and the politics of ethnography

摘要

This article suggests that the spaces of British settler colonialism and metropolitan science were interconnected, under-examined, grounds upon which both ethnography and colonial governance developed. Focusing on the governmental and ethnographic activities of Sir George Grey, governor of South Australia, New Zealand and the Cape Colony during the mid-nineteenth century it argues that the origins of ethnography and the specifically humanitarian governance of spaces invaded by settlers were co-constituted. Although anthropologists have long recognised the complicity of ethnography in modern colonialism, the relationship thus runs far deeper and extends far more broadly, than has been appreciated in even the most incisive critiques. That relationship was also located in violent settler colonial spaces that have been relatively neglected in the anthropological historiography. The article concludes that Grey’s governmental practices, and his representations of them, established the terms upon which cultural genocide could be posited as an humane alternative to racial extermination. On behalf of the British Empire as a whole, he thus reconciled settler colonialism and humanitarian governance.