On Oct.20, 2007, a Guardian story was headlined this way: “Can we, together, lift one village out of the Middle Ages?” Beneath the headline is a statement about traveling “a few hours from London — and 700 years back in time.”
What do these words signal but that the villagers need to be brought forward in time, into civilization?
That’s dangerous thinking, Engelke says — and through the lens of anthropology, we can see why. From his book, published Tuesday:
“It prevents us from seeing that the lives of Katine villagers are not trapped in the fourteenth century but lived out in a twenty-first-century world shaped by a host of colonial and postcolonial economic and political dynamics… If we can place the African Other in an earlier age, we don’t have to face up fully to the reasons why their lives don’t look like ours.”
In other words, it prevents us from seeing other people’s humanity — and how Western colonization has impacted that humanity.
