Anthropology as a discipline has always been rooted in imperialism.
My review of Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East by Lara Deeb and Jessica Winega (Stanford University Press) was just published in Electronic Intifada.
We have learned a tremendous amount about the world due to anthropology’s concerns with studying people and objects in their habitats. But the field’s biggest problem has been its historic inability to distinguish between people and objects, often treating the former like the latter and assuming a right to ownership over them.