I recently wrote about the Mediterranean cruise my family took last summer and made a detour through my career in anthropology. This column continues that detour. As I was composing my last column, reflecting on relations between tourists and local residents, I could not help but reflect on similar dynamics from the practice of cultural anthropology.
When anthropology was invented over a century ago, the discipline was dominated by a theory known as cultural evolution, a belief that all humanity existed on a ladder with wealthy white European men on the top rung and everyone else down below, working their way up. Under that theory, the world’s cultures were divided into three stages: savagery, barbarism and civilization.
The idea that animated early ethnographic fieldwork – academic tourism — was that by studying contemporary savages and barbarians, anthropologists could learn what their ancestors were like before they became civilized. Study them to learn about us.
As you might imagine, studying — and intruding upon — savage and barbarian people was taken to be the inherent right of the civilized, and I have always wondered how much agency or self interest early ethnographic research subjects were allowed to exercise. Indeed, early ethnography may be understood as an extension of European colonialism and its decidedly unequal power relations.
When I taught introductory anthropology at Plymouth State, I addressed the imbalance of power in early ethnography — which might be called anthropology’s original sin — and I found corrective models in an unlikely place: Gene Roddenberry’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” I devoted a good chunk of class time to three episodes.
In “First Contact” (season 4, episode 15), Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise made contact with the inhabitants of Malcor 3, a society that was on the threshold of perfecting warp-drive technology. That is the point in a society’s technological development when the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet deemed it appropriate to make initial contact and offer assistance. In the Federation’s view, contact with a society before it was ready violated the Prime Directive by altering that society’s natural course of development.
After the crew of the Enterprise revealed themselves as space travelers, considerable discussion ensued on Malcor 3. One faction favored interaction with the Federation while another opposed it. In the end, Picard was persuaded by those who feared that their society was not ready for the changes that would result from contact with the Federation. The Enterprise flew away. Picard respected the right of the people of Malcor 3 to be left alone. There’s a lesson in that.
The right to be left alone was even more dramatically at issue in “Clues” (season 4, episode 14). In that episode, the Enterprise accidentally stumbled upon a planet that was home to the Paxons. The Paxons were so xenophobic that simply being known about by outsiders was intolerable. To keep from being known about, the Paxons erased the memories of anyone who discovered them and flung their ships many light years away.
The Paxons tried that with the Enterprise, but it did not work. After finding a handful of clues as to what had happened to them, Picard and the Enterprise discovered the Paxons a second time. That led the Paxons to threaten the destruction of the Enterprise, but everyone lived happily ever after when Picard was able to convince the Paxons of his goodwill, and laid out plans to do a better job of erasing the clues that had led them to the Paxons a second time.
A third cosmic cautionary tale about cross-cultural contact comes from “The Masterpiece Society” (season 5, episode 13). In that episode, the Enterprise detected a planet-destroying core fragment headed straight for Moab 4, home to a Federation colony with a genetically engineered society. On Moab 4, there was a person for every job and a job for every person.
Picard made contact and offered help to deflect the core fragment, which required interaction between some Enterprise crew members and some inhabitants of Moab 4. After being exposed to the Enterprise and the world beyond Moab 4, some of the colonists decided that they wanted to leave Moab 4. Picard recognized the holes that would be left in the social fabric of the colony, but felt that he could not deny the colonists the right to make their own decisions and travel freely.
When the Enterprise departed, it took 22 colonists. As the Enterprise was flying away, a crew member congratulated Picard for saving the colony. His response was one of the most poignant things I have ever seen on television — Picard wondered aloud whether he had done just as much damage as the core fragment would have done by leaving the society in tatters.
I can only wonder whether ethnography and anthropology would have developed differently if early anthropologists had been able to watch some Star Trek.