Book and Film Reviews Review of Decolonizing Anthropology: An Introduction, by Soumhya Venkatesan, Cambridge: Polity, 2024 Epistemic Justice and Anthropological Practice: A Book Review Interview Matthew Raj Webb Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology, New York University, New York, New York 10003, USA (mrw435@nyu .edu). 27 II 25 Decolonizing Anthropology: An Introduction. By Soumhya Venkatesan. Cambridge: Polity, 2024. The following is an interview of Soumhya Venkatesan, author of Decolonizing Anthropology: An Introduction, conducted by Matthew Raj Webb. MRW: Decolonizing Anthropology argues for main- taining a critical distance between anthropologi- cal scholarship and activism. What led you to this emphasis, and how does this perspective shape the book’s overall approach to understanding decolonization? SV: One of my main arguments in the book is that anthropologists approach calls to decolonize sym- pathetically but critically, asking how the term is mobilized in different places with different colo- nial histories and legacies. This includes the acad- emy. As Francis Nyamnjoh (2016:129) argues, “Decolonization cannot be articulated in abstrac- tion. What is the context in which current clamors for decolonization are inserted?” (also see Rouse 2023:365). Further, given that the term “decolo- nization” can be mobilized in oppressive or re- gressive ways (as in contemporary India; see Ba- viskar 2023) as much as in a liberatory mode, I argue that an ethnographic approach to how the term is used—where, whence, and wherefore—is imperative. This is where my argument for reti- cence and dissidence originates. My plea to better maintain a distinction between activism and scholarship stems from the fact that calls to decolonize often go beyond setting the an- thropological house in order and seek to promote assistive work and activist approaches to knowl- edge generation in a liberatory mode. I think there are some issues here. First, working only with peo- ple the anthropologist feels able to support or assist means the discipline is denuded of its ex- planatory power. I want to affirm anthropology’s core discipline of suspending judgment to under- stand, describe, and analyze. Second, even where research participants and the anthropologist’s goals are broadly aligned, I take Mattingly’s (2014) point that people are the researchers of and experi- menters with their social worlds. They might need the anthropologist less than we might hope. The anthropologist’s capacity or, indeed, competence to make a meaningful difference may also be lim- ited. Finally, the anthropologist’s commitment to egalitarianism, racial equality, or liberation from bondage may not be shared by research partici- pants, who might seek other ways to build a more livable world. The anthropologist has to pay an- alytical attention to these, however discomfited (see Haruyama 2024). Guilt, a savior complex, or assumptions of shared universal goals do not make for good anthropology. Careful scholarship is a contribution in and of itself both within the discipline and beyond. MRW: The book’s first chapters offer intellectual genealogies and theoretical framings that articu- late your critical defense of anthropology, tracing the diversity of uses of “decolonization” and “de- coloniality” as concepts (chap. 2), exploring an- thropologists’ entanglements with colonialism and decolonization (chap. 3), and developing a frame- work of “epistemological and epistemic justice”— for which you draw from the writing of Camer- oonian political theorist Achille Mbembe, amongst others (chap. 4). In approaching these diverse and often heteroglossic conceptual worlds anthropo- logically, what surprised you most about the ways scholars have engaged with colonial and decolonial thought? SV: I am a product of a formerly colonized nation, with a BA in history from an Indian university. Through these routes, I acquired both experiential and academic knowledge of the colonization and formal decolonization of India. My doctoral work on artisanal production and the Indian nation- state’s developmentalist imagination gave me fur- ther insights into colonial legacies and their af- terlives from an anthropological perspective. But working on this book taught me so much about colonization and decolonization in other parts of Current Anthropology, volume 66, number 3, June 2025. q 2025 The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact journalpermissions@press.uchicago.edu.