Anthropology, like the majority of social sciences, developed in European universities in the 19th century.e century, in a context of rapid colonial expansion. Empires were engaged in a heated struggle for world domination, “progress” and “civilization”: it was therefore urgent to develop knowledge useful for the administration of new territories.
Learned men therefore left their metropolis of origin to live immersed for a while among “primitive peoples”, to better understand their language, their morals, their customs, their religion, their political organization. Their research made it possible to better govern the populations thus colonized. To install local potentates as relays of the authority of the metropolis in local communities, to manipulate religious messages in order to establish respect for Europeans as a virtue which will lead to the grace of God, to destabilize the traditional communication networks which escape the power in place, after all a detailed understanding of the population to be controlled is required.
Right here in Canada, anthropologists who became federal civil servants played an important role in the colonization of the Arctic, in particular. While Ottawa was pushing the Inuit to settle down, in the 1950s and 1960s, the police began killing hundreds of sled dogs that allowed them to travel across the territory, particularly for hunting and fishing activities. To understand the role of these animals in the traditional Inuit way of life, academics and bureaucrats had to spend time with them.
Even before the development of modern social sciences, scholars already accompanied armed men in the conquest of territories and the destabilization of peoples. The missionaries who sought to learn indigenous languages and describe their customs also ultimately served the purpose of forced evangelization and the submission of peoples to the authority of their conqueror. Even if several of them advocated for a more “humane” colonization, using less brute force, they were still at the service of colonization.
This pair formed by the interpreter, the scholar “close to the ground” on one side and the armed arm of the State on the other, emerged in a colonial context, of course, but was also used by States to better control their own poor. If modern policing developed in an urban context, particularly to control the poor, social work was born at the beginning of the 20th century.e century to bring the State into the privacy of precarious families and enforce morality, public hygiene and the method of educating children that the bourgeois common sense of the time recommended. The police beat and threw people in prison, while social work used empathy and trust (then police coercion if necessary) to modify human behavior. But both, at their core, were created to monitor and control the margin.
However, anthropology, social work and many other social and applied sciences have evolved greatly since their founding. Today, the departments that teach them are thinking critically about their origins and attempting to use the same knowledge, empathy, interpretive skills, and skills of building relationships of trust to offer their graduates the opportunity to serve well. things other than violence or the control ambitions of States. Because knowledge, in the end, is neither fundamentally bad nor fundamentally good: everything depends on how we use it, and above all in the service of what and who we decide to use it for. That said, we cannot get rid of such a heavy heritage by snapping our fingers, and much remains to be done to remove many social disciplines from the colonial and classist context from which they came.
This week, a report published by the Support Network for Single and Homeless People of Montreal (RAPSIM) told us that the SPVM’s mixed squads, made up of pairs combining police officers and social workers, do nothing to help people in distressed situations. homelessness — often also indigenous people. On the contrary, these mixed squads would constitute an “obstruction” to the work of the workers, who are employed by community organizations. Basically, we are told that people experiencing homelessness no longer know who to trust, because we no longer know exactly who collaborates with the police, who still have a repressive function.
The police always serve to protect merchants, the so-called middle class and good people from those poor and indigenous people who disturb public order. When it joins forces with social workers, it can certainly do it more intelligently. In a way, we are creating a class of state agents capable of moving you, arresting you or controlling you by calling you by your first name. But the control objective remains the same. If the function of the criminal justice system, when dealing with the poor, remains to monitor and punish, we now combine it with professionals better equipped to monitor and smile.
If we are surprised that the SPVM mixed squads give such poor results, it is because we do not know its history. We can only have a human approach to social issues by investing in organizations whose primary mission is not to control and repress.
Historically, even the most empathetic missionaries, anthropologists and social workers could not fully serve the interests of the populations they encountered, unless they betrayed their employers, or even the social order. Even today, the fundamental problem of the social workers of the SPVM and its “gentler” police officers is not one of competence, or good intention, but of institutional loyalty.