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Why are some accounts by European traders and colonial administrators considered unreliable sources about non-European peoples?

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Svante Paabo stands smiling with one hand on a Neanderthal skeleton model in front of a blue Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology banner. — Anthropology Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology director Svante Pӓӓbo posing with a model of a Neanderthal skeleton.

Accounts by European traders and colonial administrators are often considered unreliable in anthropology because they were frequently produced to serve the political and economic interests of colonial powers rather than to provide objective ethnographic data.1

These records were often written by civil servants, military personnel, or missionaries with the explicit goal of gaining the knowledge necessary to achieve social and political control over indigenous regions. Furthermore, 19th-century social science was deeply intertwined with colonial endeavors, leading to the use of biased terminology. Labels such as "savage" or "barbarous" were employed to categorize cultures into a hierarchy of cultural evolution, which served to justify colonial policies by framing them as a moral mission to "civilize" indigenous peoples.1

Because these observers interpreted indigenous societies through their own cultural expectations and the lens of racist ideologies, their accounts often obscured the complex realities of the Native American and other non-European peoples they documented.12