Colonies and Colonialism A colony is a political and administrative unit that is under the political control of another, usually geographically distant, entity. The controlling entity has been called several names over time, including colonizer,...

What counts as a disciplinary scandal usually exposes revealing fault-lines in its sense of collective *identity. So it is with anthropological scandals which periodically bring the discipline’s collective anxieties to the attention of a wider...

When most of the world’s colonial dependencies attained independence as sovereign nation-states in the middle of the twentieth century, it seemed that an epoch had ended logically as well as historically. Colonies had been particular forms of...

Anthropological studies, which have now been going on for more than fifty years, in *Africa, the *Pacific, *Southeast and *South Asia, and in Amerindian societies have considerably modified the terms of the debate. Researchers are now more interested...

Colonialism is the holding and ownership of colonies, or the treating of another country as though it was in fact a colony. Indeed recently the concept has been extended to refer to ‘internal’ colonialism, where the capital or economically...

Control by one power over a dependent area or people. The purposes of colonialism include economic exploitation of the colony's natural resources, creation of new markets for the colonizer, and extension of the colonizer's way of life beyond its...

Colonialism is significant for anthropology in three senses: (1) anthropology’s alleged collaboration with colonial government and broader complicity in the culture of imperialism has been extensively debated; (2) colonial processes have had...

See colony and colonization for examples of colonialism which do not refer to Western colonialism. The Pith helmet (in this case, of the Second French Empire) is an iconic representation of colonialism. Colonialism is the extension of a nation's...