In the Predator’s Shadow: On the Impossibility of Decolonizing Anthropology (and Why Critique Was Never Enough)

Abstract (English)

In more-than-human domains, ecosystems cannot evolve without predation (depending, of course, on the definition of predation). The same does not hold for human systems, however. While “discipline is empire” (McKittrick 2018) and professionalization is predicated on neglect (Moten and Harney 2013), such effects are neither inevitable nor manifested through abstract, immaterial forces. Instead, neglect and imperial oppression are effects of situated ideological work (Gal and Irvine 2019) at actually existing and locatable—if irreducibly historical and ideologically continuous—sites. This presentation uses approaches from the interdisciplinary field of abolitionist university studies (Boggs et al. 2019) together with raciolinguistic perspectives on the semiotics of interaction (Rosa and Flores 2020; Silverstein 2023; Smalls 2024) to analyze autoethnographic and mediatized data collected between 2020 and 2024. It focuses on reportage about spectacular cases of sexual predation in elite, U.S.-American academic institutions as well as my own experience as a member of a group working to organize a transformative justice process in the aftermath of a case of predation involving my then-current institution that gave a strong sense of urgency to our collective response. Rather than treating these cases as instances of individual “bad actors,” I consider how the modern university-as-form is structured by multiple, intersecting dynamics of subordination and surveillance that make predation a design feature of inhabitable institutional roles even if no one actively inhabits them in a given moment. I explore the relational co-constitution of predator-prey roles in North American academic institutions to reflect on the recurrent failures of calls to “recapture” (Fox 1991) and “decolonize” (Harrison 1997; Jobson 2020) anthropology. I take case studies involving U.S.-American anthropology as my main focus, but the roles I analyze are endemic to the hierarchical organization of colonial-modern, corporate-neoliberal, carceral-capitalist institutions across distinct, but densely-interconnected racial geographies (Gilmore 2002). I conclude by offering a meditation on relational accountability (Whyte 2020) as a restorative ground for shifting the reproductive labor of imagination away from exploitative, carceral logics (Shange 2019; Gilmore 2022) and toward a radical ethics of care.