ABSTRACT
The colonial situation poses problems for a conquered people – who respond to these problems to the degree that a certain latitude is granted to them – problems for the administration representing the so-called protective power, problems for the newly-created state on which still rests the burden of colonial liabilities. Colonialism, in establishing itself, imposed on subject peoples a very special type of situation. It not only conditioned the reactions of ‘dependent’ peoples, but is still responsible for certain reactions of peoples recently emancipated. And yet it is only now and then that anthropologists have taken into consideration this specific context inherent in the colonial situation. Such a situation as that created by the colonial expansion of European states during the last century can be examined from different points of view. Colonialism appears as a trial, a kind of test imposed on certain societies or, if we may call it such, as a crude sociological experiment.
