Before fieldwork became the sine qua non of anthropological research, text-based scholars initiated cross-cultural comparison as a method of writing the universal history of human progress.[7] Reflecting a non-conformist heritage of engagement with the abolitionist cause, champions of the method postulated the “psychic unity of man” as the ground for considering all peoples candidates for fruitful comparison. This “psychic unity” postulate pitted the comparativists against polygeneticists, who argued for the existence of distinct human races. As post-colonial critics have been quick to point out, however, the comparativists, by ranking peoples on a scale from savagery to civility, also contributed an intellectual justification for ideologies of difference and contempt for non-Europeans. According to the critical tradition, the evolutionists defeated the polygeneticists only to establish a more insidious paradigm for racism, substituting “culture” for “race” on the evolutionary scale, eventually succumbing to a pessimistic belief that cultural divides could not be bridged through the agencies of education and enlightenment.[8]
Like their intellectual forebears and actual teachers, survey anthropologists have left an ambiguous legacy, as champions of causes progressive for their time who also took part in a generalized apparatus of oppression. Survey anthropologists form a sort of historical “missing link” between armchair theoreticians and post-Malinowskian participant-observers. Admired for their stamina, ingenuity and encyclopaedic knowledge of world ethnology, they also find themselves excluded from the intellectual lineage of anthropology’s exemplary scholars. At the same time, like the comparativists, they remain interesting to historians as shapers and emblems of intellectual life in colonies, metropoles and the places in-between during the period of high imperialism. Unlike the armchair anthropologist, however, survey anthropologists physically confronted cultural variation in its environmental setting. They saw, heard, touched and smelled material and non-material artefacts in situ. Field experience, according to some, allowed survey anthropologists to conceptualize practices and objects as integrated ensembles, as components of particular cultures. In other words, their research methods lent themselves to a pluralist outlook. Their comparativist predecessors, in contrast, regarded implements and institutions as decontextualized data from which to distil a speculative history of the whole human race, instead of subdivisions thereof.
Because they ultimately relied upon the existence of a Latourian “center of calculation” to consolidate their findings, this essay considers survey anthropology as an extension and modification of the comparativist tradition, rather than as a precursor to participant-observation. Unlike their descendents, survey anthropologists never sought to view the world through the eyes of the peoples they studied; empathy was never the goal. Rather, survey anthropologists divided populations into intellectually and administratively digestible numbers of sub-units (tribes, races, ethnic groups) to answer questions or solve problems generated in colonial metropoles. For our purposes, the colonial metropole, where “notes and queries” are authored, sent out from and ultimately collated, are equivalent to Latour’s “center of calculation”, the privileged place from which a totality of local situations can be viewed, abstracted and reduced to system.
Lastly, a word on the term “pluralism”. Nicholas Thomas argues that the modern pluralistic view of culture/ethnicity that informed and was elaborated by survey anthropology should be viewed as the successor of Christian and Enlightenment world-views that considered “heathens”, “infidels” and “primitives” as fundamentally incomplete human beings, either in need of salvation/education or expendable on the chopping block of history. Their negative traits — ignorance, illiteracy, etc. — defined the Other in the eyes of the observer. Building on the work of Johannes Fabian, Thomas argues that the discursive construction of tribes, races and ethnic groups as internally coherent collectivities which can be known, compared and ranked by recourse to study of “ideal types” ushered in the age of anthropological typification. His elegant formulation bears quotation in full:
What I seek to extrapolate from [Fabian] is an argument that in premodern European discourses, non-Western peoples tend to be characterized not in any anthropologically specific terms, but as a lack or poorer form of the values of the centre…My analytical fiction, then, tells of a shift from an absence of ‘the Other’ (as a being accorded any singular character) to a worldview that imagines a plurality of different races or peoples. The distinctively modern and anthropological imagining projects natural differences among people that may be rendered at one time as different ‘nations’, at another as distinct ‘races’ or ‘cultures’. The underlying epistemic operation — of partitioning the human species — makes possible a variety of political and ethnographic projects: particular populations may be visible as objects of government; they may serve as ethnological illustrations or subversive counter-examples in comparative social argument; and these reified characters may be available for appropriation in anti-colonialist, nationalist narratives.[9]
This “distinctively modern and anthropological imagining” received much of its impetus, and exerted its influence, in the dialectical circulation of images, goods and people between colonial settings and metropolitan publics. Fortuitously, Thomas’s admittedly simplistic historical sketch, or “analytical fiction”, well describes the rupture in consciousness that Japanese survey ethnologists hoped to bring about in Taiwan. For this essay, the term “pluralism” is defined, following Thomas, as “a worldview that imagines a plurality of different races or peoples” in contradistinction to a worldview that conceptualizes different peoples “as a lack or poorer form of the values of the centre”.