Showing papers in "Comparative Studies in Society and History in 2015"

Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste

Abstract: The politics of meritocracy at the Indian Institutes of Technology illuminates the social life of caste in contemporary India. I argue that the IIT graduate's status depends on the transformation of privilege into merit, or the conversion of caste capital into modern capital. Analysis of this process calls for a relational approach to merit. My ethnographic research on the southeastern state of Tamilnadu, and on IIT Madras located in the state capital of Chennai, illuminates claims to merit, not simply as the transformation of capital but also as responses to subaltern assertion. Analyzing meritocracy in relation to subaltern politics allows us to see the contextual specificity of such claims: at one moment, they are articulated through the disavowal of caste, at another, through caste affiliation. This marking and unmarking of caste suggests a rethinking of meritocracy, typically assumed to be a modernist ideal that disclaims social embeddedness and disdains the particularisms of caste and race. I show instead that claims to collective belonging and to merit are eminently commensurable, and become more so when subaltern assertion forces privilege into the foreground. Rather than the progressive erasure of ascribed identities in favor of putatively universal ones, we are witnessing the re-articulation of caste as an explicit basis for merit and the generation of newly consolidated forms of upper-casteness.

The Dark Side of Empathy: Mimesis, Deception, and the Magic of Alterity

Abstract: This article challenges the tendency, both academic and popular, to assign empathy the status of a virtue. The widespread inclination to associate empathy with the morally and socially “good”—with compassion, understanding, cultural bonding, and non-violent sociality—ignores what we propose to call the “dark side of empathy”: that is, the multiple ways in which empathy is routinely deployed to manipulate, seduce, deceive, and dehumanize others by means of vicariousness. Two diverse ethnographic cases, of hunting in Siberia and political violence in Indonesia, provide the empirical background for a discussion of the complex relationship of empathy to mimesis, deception, violence, and sociality.

The criminal tribe in India before the British

Abstract: This paper challenges the broad consensus in current historiography that holds the Indian stereotype of criminal tribe to be a myth of colonial making. Drawing on a selection of precolonial descriptions of robber castes—ancient legal texts and folktales; Jain, Buddhist and Brahmanic narratives; Mughal sources; and Early Modern European travel accounts—I show that the idea of castes of congenital robbers was not a British import, but instead a label of much older vintage on the subcontinent. Enjoying pride of place in the postcolonial critics' pageant of “colonial stereotypes,” the case of criminal tribes is representative and it bears on broader questions about colonial knowledge and its relation to power. The study contributes to the literature that challenges the still widespread tendency to view colonial social categories, and indeed the bulk of colonial knowledge, as the imaginative residue of imperial politics. I argue that while colonial uses of the idea of a criminal tribe comprises a lurid history of violence against communities branded as born criminals in British law, the stereotype itself has indigenous roots. The case is representative and it bears on larger problems of method and analysis in “post-Orientalist” historiography.

Toward a Critical Hauntology: Bare Afterlife and the Ghosts of Ba Chúc

Abstract: While cross-disciplinary analysis of ghosts and haunting has burgeoned in recent decades, much of this scholarship presumes the figure of the ghost as a less than literal apparition. We propose that writers such as Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon, who make use of the ghostly as a trope, are in fact describing a phenomenon we term secondary haunting, distinct from accounts of unquiet spirits who address the living directly with specific demands for redress: a visceral and often frightening experience we term primary haunting. Drawing on a contemporary account of the ghosts of a massacre in a Vietnamese village, we explore the complex interaction of primary and secondary haunting, the different kinds of memory work they engage in and the different moral communities they mobilize.

Sovereign Violence: Temple Destruction in India and Shrine Desecration in Iran and Central Asia

Abstract: Was the destruction of Sufi and ‘Alid saint shrines as a rite of conquest in Iran and Central Asia a phenomenon comparable to the desecration of temples in war in India? With this question in mind, this essay examines the changing nature of Islamic kingship in premodern Iran and Central Asia and compares it to developments in Indic kingship. It begins with the thesis that the decline of the caliphate and the rise of Muslim saints and shrines in thirteenth-century Iran and Central Asia led to a new form of “shrine-centered” sovereignty practiced by the rulers of these regions. This development, in turn, gave rise to a notable pattern in which Muslim kings threatened or attacked the shrines of their enemies’ patron saints in times of war. A focus on this ritual violence, which remains neglected in the studies of Islamic iconoclasm and jihad, reveals how the protocols of violence and accommodation that governed these Muslim milieus became analogous to those enacted by Indic kings who also sacked temples of rival sovereigns in times of war. With the spread of Muslim shrines and the related belief that the “real” sovereign was not the caliph but the enshrined saint, Islam and Hinduism developed comparable grammars of “gifting” and “looting.” This argument allows for a new, transcultural perspective to examine the premodern history of India, Iran, and Central Asia, connected by the rise of Muslim saints and their shrines.

Ottoman Infrastructures of the Saudi Hydro-State: The Technopolitics of Pilgrimage and Potable Water in the Hijaz

Abstract: The provisioning of potable water was a microcosm of the Ottoman state's incomplete projects of technopolitical modernization on the Arab frontier. Water questions sat at the intersection between international pressures surrounding cholera, drought, Wahhabi and Bedouin disorder, and the inability of the state to impose its will on the semi-autonomous Amirate of Mecca. To be sure, Ottoman public health reforms and increased attention to water infrastructure were partly a product of the intense international attention generated by the hajj's role in the globalization of cholera. However, like other projects with more overt military and strategic implications, most notably the Hijaz telegraph and railway, the Ottoman state also saw an opportunity to harness the increasing medicalization of the hajj to serve a broader set of efforts to consolidate the empire's most vulnerable frontier provinces. Through the lens of the technopolitical frontier this essay seeks to tell a larger story about the evolution of state building and development in Arabia, one that would otherwise be obscured without reference to both its late Ottoman and Saudi histories. By viewing the evolution of hydraulic management in the Hijaz as a continuous process unfolding across the long nineteenth century, we gain a new perspective on the role that Ottoman technopolitics played in shaping the Saudi state that eventually succeeded it. We find that the quest for water security in the Hijaz, particularly in Jidda, played a critical role in setting the stage for the discovery of the Saudi Arabia's massive petroleum reserves.

Internal Violence: The “Police Action” in Hyderabad

Abstract: Through an examination of the September 1948 event known as the “Police Action,” this article argues that “internal violence” was an important engine of state formation in India in the period following independence in 1947. The mid-century ruptures in the subcontinent were neither incidental to nor undermining of the nascent Indian nation-state project—they were constitutive events through which a new state and regime of sovereignty emerged. A dispersal and mobilization of violence in and around the princely state of Hyderabad culminated in an event of violence directed primarily at Hyderabad's Muslims during and just after the Police Action. This violent mediation of the incorporation of India's Muslims into the postcolonial order left significant legacies in subsequent decades. These events in the heart of peninsular India, and the processes behind them, have remained largely invisible or obscured in the historical record. Here I substantially revise the historiography of what happened in Hyderabad, and draw on my findings to offer an alternative perspective on decolonization in India.

A Curious Trade: The Recovery and Repatriation of U.S. Missing In Action from the Vietnam War

Abstract: Amid its human and material tolls, the Vietnam War has given rise to a curious enterprise—the complex process of recovering and repatriating the remains of U.S. service members Missing In Action (MIA) and presumed dead. In this trade, the bones that “count” are American and the aims underwriting the forensic efforts to return them are rooted in an ideology of national belonging.The resultant exchange of both knowledge and physical remains has developed through two historically intertwined ventures: state-sponsored casualty resolution efforts; and the much smaller, informal trafficking of skeletal remains, identification media, and information about American MIAs. This article examines how these sought-after bones tack between roles as objects of recovery, sale, or barter, scientific study, ritual burial, and public commemoration. Through their mutable worth, MIA remains illustrate the dynamic symbolism of war dead that evokes differing sensibilities about familiar or foreign soil, about care and belonging. Like the reliquiae of medieval Christianity, remains of missing service members, even in the most fragmentary form, are replete with the suggestion of power. Their pursuit depends on reciprocity. Indeed, more than just powerful symbols, these bones manifest and confer power itself, as caring for war dead demonstrates authority, and such authority falls to those who control access to the desired object, whether through formal or informal channels. Furthermore, power requires authentication, and the remains of missing American war dead become, in this system of circulation and exchange, a means to demonstrate knowledge, perform certainty, or exploit ambiguity.

“We've toiled without end”: Publicity, Crisis, and the Suicide “Epidemic” in Greece

Abstract: This paper addresses the rising suicide rate in Greece since the economic crisis began in 2008. By 2011, Greek and international media were reporting the Greek suicide rate as the fastest rising in Europe; dozens of “spectacular” public suicides were taken as symptoms of an “epidemic.” In this paper, I explore different accounts of this “epidemic”: statistical studies and press reports on suicide since the crisis; notes written by people who committed or attempted suicide in public during the crisis; and narratives of suicidality from psychiatric patients before the crisis, in dialogue with local psychiatric epidemiologies. These accounts summon three axes of comparison around suicide in Greece: historical difference, defined by the economic crisis and the time before; locale, contrasting the public sphere of media coverage and consumption with a particular region distinguished by its “suicidogenic” features; and evidence, moving from the public discourse on suicide to clinical ethnographic research that I conducted in northeastern Greece a decade ago. I show that each way of accounting for suicide challenges the epistemologies and evidence at work in the others; the tensions and the interactions among them are signs of indeterminacy in suicide itself, taken as an object of inquiry. In the public discourse on the Greek crisis, the many meanings of suicide have been condensed and fixed as a politics of protest. Yet, I argue, comparison among epistemologies of suicide and recognition of its indeterminacy generate a space for thinking about suicide beyond the publicity of the crisis.

Backwardness revisited: time, space, and civilization in rural Eastern Europe

Abstract: Anthropology, the relativizing countercurrent to Enlightenment notions of civilization and progress, has long challenged notions of backwardness. By contrast, Marxist-Leninist regimes had no doubts about the world-historical backwardness of the largely agrarian societies in which they came to power, which they sought to transform through rapid industrialization. According to some indicators, this socialist civilizing mission was rather successful. Yet memories are mixed, and complicated by the reappearance of typical features of backwardness in the postsocialist era. This article explores changing political economies and the spatiotemporal imaginaries of elites and villagers in Hungary. Historical and theoretical insight is drawn from Ferenc Erdei (1910–1971), a left-leaning populist whose analysis of rural Hungary has more general relevance. Case materials are presented from a region of the Great Plain that in the longue duree exemplifies the “development of underdevelopment” on the margins of Western capitalism. Civilizational transformations were instigated from the east in the socialist decades, but their vehicle was a collectivist ideology that remained alien. The politics and economics of time now render villagers susceptible to populist imaginaries entirely different from those of Erdei.

Performativity, Performance, and Indigenous Activism in Ecuador and the Andes

Abstract: To explain causality between ethnic consciousness and indigenous political activism in the Andes, scholars have proposed two perspectives. Some argue that ethnic consciousness was pre-existing; others claim that it was the product of political organizational processes. In this study, I demonstrate that the ethnic consciousness of Ecuadorian indigenous Andeans has been a dialogical work-in-progress that has hinged significantly on the emergence of self-conscious cultural performance. I analyze the trajectory from submission to assertiveness of Ecuadorian indigenous Andeans and compare it with the Peruvian and Bolivian cases, focusing on the ways in which performance and performativity have constructed indigeneity as a social reality. Performance implies a bounded act done by a subject who consciously performs, whereas performativity refers to the construction of the subject by the reiteration of norms. The research investigates three interrelated fields that are crucial in the constitution of indigeneity: the performativity of racial and ethnic hierarchies, the performance of indigenous culture during protest, and the performance of indigenous festivities. Considering that social hierarchies are iteratively constructed and that cultural performance is part and parcel of the political redress of cultural difference, I argue that through cultural performance Ecuadorian and Bolivian indigenous Andeans have been able to undermine the ways in which performativity has constituted them as subaltern subjects. This transformation has not happened in the Peru, where indigenous Andeans still feel that indigeneity is a stigmatized condition.

“Fak Germani”: Materialities of Nationhood and Transgression in the Greek Crisis

Abstract: This essay explores Greek responses to the debt crisis, particularly middle-class Greeks and their current experiences of Greece's putative subordination to Germany in particular, and IMF and EU monitoring generally. I focus on the sphere of materiality and embodiment, while also exploring the role of desire and pleasure in Greeks’ responses to their growing sense of subordination. Graffiti, popular protests, hip-hop expressive culture, and sexual joking are lenses through which I examine these themes. I also scrutinize my own positionality as a way of understanding the bitterness and ambiguity entailed in Greek reactions to the crisis. The essay illuminates how Greeks experience subjugation and respond to it through explosive resort to historical comparisons, sexual metaphors, and ill-mannered jokes.

Phatic rituals of the liberal democratic polity: Hearing voices in the hearings of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples

Abstract: The truth and reconciliation commissions of Latin America and Africa are paradigms of transitional justice, often regarded as part of the process of transitioning from authoritarian to democratic rule. But truth commissions are also common in first-world settler states, which raises the question of what “transition” such commissions effectuate in Canada, Australia, and the United States. This paper examines the efforts of Canada's Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples to resolve a controversy over a government relocation of Inuit families in the 1950s for which the relocatees were demanding compensation. Concurrent with historical controversies in the Canadian courts concerning Aboriginal rights and title, the historical controversy over the relocation raised questions about the Canadian state's ability to “hear the voices” of First Nations people, who objected that their accounts of the past had been disregarded by government-contracted historians and courts alike. I argue that the Royal Commission's efforts to hear the voices of Inuit relocatees, showcased in nationally televised hearings, was a phatic ritual in which communicative contact between marginalized citizens and the state was ritually established. The ritual was presented as a remedy for failures to achieve phatic communion among citizens and state—a condition of communicative contact held up as essential to the realization of liberal democratic ideals. The work of the Royal Commission and other truth commissions highlights the growing prominence of communication, particularly liberal communicative events construed as “open,” “equal,” and “free,” as a concern of both theory and practice in liberal democratic polities.

Subaltern Bureaucrats and Postcolonial Rule: Indigenous Professional Registers of Engagement with the Chilean State

Abstract: What is the experience of a racial subaltern on becoming an employee of a postcolonial state? Latin America has undertaken widespread multicultural state reform, often in response to pressure from nation-wide social movements and transnational human rights activism. This provides us with a window into ways in which subaltern individuals negotiate their place in a historically exclusionary state with norms of whiteness, European codes, and literal and metaphoric distance from marginal populations. Previous research has emphasized the cooptation of subaltern actors by neoliberal postcolonial states, but we argue that a close reading of subaltern accounts yields important insights into their experiences of ambivalence, ambiguity, and agency. Neoliberal state restructuring entrained a parallel, and in many cases interconnected process that generated ambivalence among civil servants. We draw on interviews with state employees associated with multicultural educational reforms in Chile to document the registers through which indigenous subalterns position themselves regarding the politics of interculturalism and the costs of serving the state.

Beyond Jurisdictions: Native Agency in the Making of Colonial Legal Cultures. A Review Essay

Abstract: Colonial law as an arena for cultural contestation and hegemonic process has displaced an older view of law as a tool of imperial domination. Rich studies based on archival work in local judicial and notarial archives in Africa and the Americas, complemented by a wide range of sources from colonial and metropolitan archives, emphasize the role of indigenous peoples in shaping legal institutions, practices, bodies of law, and ideas about justice. We now understand that colonial legal culture was forged in diverse configurations of conflict and alliance that played out in remote village tribunals and metropolitan courts of appeal. However, the tyranny of the archives persists in that the written evidence favors—in descending order—the perspective of European legal thinkers and reformers, the functionaries of intermediate institutions like the magistrates and lawyers who operated in district courts, and litigants who included European settlers and native people. In colonial courts, the voices of native litigants and witnesses tend to be highly mediated through translation and transcription.

Hunting Indians: Globally Circulating Ideas and Frontier Practices in the Colombian Llanos

Abstract: In the mid-twentieth century, renewed colonization of the Llanos region of Colombia brought escalated violence to the closely related Guahibo and Cuiva peoples. This violence was made public by two dramatic episodes that became international scandals: a December 1967 massacre of sixteen Cuivas at La Rubiera Ranch, and a 1970 military crackdown on an uprising by members of a Guahibo agricultural cooperative in Planas. The scandals exposed both particular human rights abuses and the regional tradition of literally hunting indigenous people, and provoked widespread outrage. While contemporaries treated these events as aberrations, they can best be explained as the consequence of policies that organize and manage frontiers. Both events took place in a region undergoing rapid settlement by migrants, affected by cattle and oil interests, missionaries, the Colombian military, and U.S. counterinsurgency trainers. This paper draws on archival research to trace the events involved and explains their relation to globally circulating policies, practices, and ideas of frontier making. It illustrates how Colombians eager to expand their frontier in the Llanos emulated and adapted ideas of human inequality, moral geographies that make violence acceptable in frontier areas, economic policies that dispossess native peoples, and strategies of counterinsurgency warfare from distant sources. Ironically, their quest for modernity through frontier expansion licensed new deployments of “archaic” violence. The Llanos frontier was thus enmeshed in an interchange of frontier-making techniques that crisscrosses the world, but particularly unites Latin America and the United States.

Putting Habib Abdurrahim in His Place: Genealogy, Scale, and Islamization in Seunagan, Indonesia

Abstract: In this paper I argue that the ways in which a genealogical idiom brings together multiple scales of space and time is as important to its social, political, or religious efficacy as the particular people, places, and events it incorporates. To illustrate this point, I turn to the unusual patrilineal genealogy of Habib Abdurrahim, a nineteenth-century descendant of the Prophet Muhammad buried in the Indonesian region of Seunagan. Since the late 1950s, Habib Abdurrahim's descendants have cultivated a version of his patriline emphasizing five prominent figures. This constellation of figures, together with the relationships Muslims in Seunagan foster with each of the five, produce configurations of spatial-temporal scale through which local Muslims inscribe themselves as participants in several Islamic pasts: the establishment of Seunagan's customary practice, the Islamization of the Indonesian nation, and Islam's cosmic history. Narrative, social, and ritual practices surrounding Habib Abdurahim's patriline link Muslims in Seunagan to the multiple scales that inhere in the genealogy, encouraging them to see themselves as actors within entwined and unfolding histories of Islamization.

Fleeting Glory in a Wasteland: Wealth, Politics and Autonomy in Northern Chad

Abstract: In January 2012, a new derde (traditional leader) of the Teda in northern Chad was officially appointed. Held in the Tibesti, a remote, notoriously unruly but strategically important part of the Sahara, the investiture ceremony was attended by Teda from throughout the country and neighboring Libya and Niger, as well as by an impressive number of Chadian civil servants and international diplomats. Yet the ceremony itself was short and messy. Similarly, the historical underpinnings of the institution of the derde and the selection process were unclear, leaving much room for debate. This uncertainty appears to lie at the heart of the institution of the derde. Far from a resurgence of 'traditional authority' to make up for 'state failure' or to partake in the restructuring of postcolonial states—as observed elsewhere on the African continent—the investiture ceremony confirmed the decentralised nature of Teda social organisation and the absence of even attempted governance, both with regards to the Chadian state and local political institutions. What mattered from a local point of view were not long-term strategies of power and control, but rather the immediate and gloriously wasteful distribution of wealth. Admiring eyes were turned not toward the derde or the state officials who appointed him, but instead toward high-ranking military officers, well-dressed urban Libyan Teda, and trans-border smugglers, models of rapid but often short-lived success. This provides a counterexample to the current emphasis on governance and power in the analysis of African states and politics.

Anti Anti-Colonialism: Vernacular Press and Emergent Possibilities in Colonial Zambia

Abstract: African newspapers published in vernacular languages, particularly papers sponsored by colonial governments, have been understudied. A close reading of their contents and related archival sources provides insights into diverse ways in which the colonized framed and made claims. New kinds of claims were mediated by the government-sponsored vernacular press no less than by nationalists. Just as vernacularism was not nativism, African aspirations that posed no direct challenge to the colonial order did not necessarily entail mimicry. I show also how Europeans who debated a newspaper for Africans in the 1930s Zambia voiced diverse approaches to print culture, addressing a variety of objectives. The newspaper that emerged, Mutende, was replaced by provincial newspapers in the 1950s, and I focus on one of these: the Chinyanja-language Nkhani za kum'mawa, published under African editorship in Eastern Province between 1958 and 1965. Its modes of addressing African publics were neither nationalist nor colonial in any straightforward senses. Its editors and readers deliberated on what it meant to be from the province in an era of labor migration, how African advancement and dependence on Europeans were to be envisaged, and how relationships between women and men should be reconfigured. To hold divergent views on a world in flux, they had to keep something constant, and the order of governance itself remained beyond dispute. But this did not preclude emergent possibilities. The newspaper's columns and letters to the editor reveal claims on novel opportunities and constraints of a sort that mainstream nationalist historiography, with its meta-narrative of anti-colonialism, has rendered invisible.

Institutionalizing a Weak State: Law and Jurisdictional Conflict between Bureaucratic and Communal Institutions in the Albanian Highlands

Abstract: Why do some states fail to establish the capacity of legal regulation among significant sections of their population, and instead allow alternative norms of social order to take the place of those promoted by the state? Existing models of state building in the sociological literature treat the building of modern bureaucratic authority as a political process in which weak state authority results from a state's inability to defeat rival bases of power. On the other hand, neo-institutionalist theory highlights the significant effects that institutional environments have on organization building, but its elaborations of state building have mainly emphasized processes of the diffusion of world society models as central to the making of the modern nation-state. Both models fail to explain how limitations in new states' capacities to govern populations emerge in cases when states fulfill conditions specified by each model. I use the case of state building in the Albanian highlands to show that jurisdictional struggles and resistance that emerge out of distinct cultures of legality are key to understanding why organizationally capable states may fail to establish durable mechanisms of governance among marginal social groups.

Citizenship, Cowardice and Freedom of Conscience: British Pacifists in the Second World War

Abstract: Freedom of conscience is widely claimed as a central principle of liberal democracy, but what is conscience and how do we know what it looks like? Rather than treat conscience as a transcendent category, this paper examines claims of conscience as rooted in distinct cultural and political histories. I focus on debates about conscientious objection in Second World War Britain, and argue that, there, persuasive claims of conscience were widely associated with a form of “detached conviction.” Yet evidence of such “detached convictions” always verged on being interpreted as deliberate manipulation and calculation. More broadly, I argue that the protection of freedom of conscience is necessarily incomplete and unstable. The difficulties in recognizing individual conscience point to anxieties within liberal democracy. Not only strangers are suspect and mistrusted, but also those who claim to stand most strongly by the principles of liberal citizenship.

Tales from the Land of Magic Plants: Textual Ideologies and Fetishes of Indigeneity in Mexico's Sierra Mazateca

Abstract: Anthropology and other disciplines are engaged in an extended conversation about how to understand the dynamics of global interconnection. One dominant approach stresses political economies of global markets, exploring how commodity chains structure social relations and vice versa. I propose instead an emphasis on how semiotic mediation, specifically textual representation, shapes the circulation of material goods and surrounding social relations. I draw on ethnographic and archival research concerning the Mazatec region of Oaxaca, where psychedelic plants that local people have long used ritually have more recently become the subject of intense, socially violent consumer interest. I examine recent histories of interest in the region through texts written by outsiders, first “mushroom seekers,” and then Protestant missionary-linguists. Applying Keane's (2003) concept of “semiotic ideologies” to ideas about texts, I suggest that competing textual ideologies undergird conflicts between how outsiders have written about the region and local people have responded to their accounts. The nearly century-deep corpus of writings about the region tends to depict its people through reference to its hallucinogenic plants, a form of “semiotic collapse” wherein the commodities become fetishized proxies for people. Local people, particularly Mazatec authors, react by trying to manage this “representational hangover” from the history of outsider depictions. They adopt strategies to undo the power of the fetish by re-socializing the plants and re-embedding them in local social relations. This analysis offers a fruitful entry point for ethnographies of global connection while furthering the interdisciplinary project of attending jointly to materiality and semiotic representations.

Mimetic Governmentality and the Administration of Colonial Justice in East Timor, ca. 1860-1910

Abstract: This article explores the mimesis of indigenous “customs and law” as a theory of and strategy for colonial government in the period of late imperialism I draw on the case of colonial administration in the Portuguese colony of Timor during the second-half of the nineteenth century I introduce the concept of “mimetic governmentality”: the art of governing the Other through the productive inclusion of institutions, symbols, cultural materials, or social forms understood as other than one's own In Timor, the imperial establishment was characterized by fragility and isolation, and a pragmatic style of colonial action thrived In Europe, modern doctrines of colonial law rejected assimilationist policies and advocated “specialization” In this context, between 1860 and 1910, administrators on Timor devised a system of colonial justice that required the colonizers to slip into the indigenous world and govern others from the others' position and perspectives To efficiently govern the “natives” and apply colonial justice in courts—the so-called justicas—Europeans had to release themselves from European principles and embrace indigenous law, as they understood it The essay uses the case of Timor to assert the analytic importance and potential of mimesis for the comparative study of colonial administrations during the period of imperial expansion

Voices and Votes in the Fields of Settler Society: American Indian Media and Electoral Politics in 1930s Wisconsin

Abstract: In 1939, Wisconsin readers of a weekly newspaper column by Mitchell Redcloud, a member of the Ho-Chunk Indian community settled within the rural township of Komensky, were greeted with a set of headlines from the imaginary “Komensky News” about an actual local event. The headlines reported that despite opposition from local whites, Ho-Chunk people had successfully elected a Ho-Chunk candidate to the township board. This article draws on studies of Indigenous media and recent efforts to develop field-theoretic accounts of social action to understand the interdependence of Redcloud's headlines and the Ho-Chunk vote as part of an incipient project of Indigenous political action. Using census records, I first describe the positions in the everyday field of race and class relations that Ho-Chunk people occupied in Komensky, based on their incomes, educations, and occupational statuses. I then draw on this description to understand Redcloud's position-taking strategies before the election. I next examine Redcloud's writing career in the newspaper to understand his strategy of self-positioning as a marked Indian voice within a print-based discursive field that denigrated other Ho-Chunk voices. I finish by examining new position-taking strategies manifest in the 1939 vote and in Redcloud's turn to headline register. I argue that both media and electoral mechanisms offered relatively autonomous fields that made these experiments with Indigenous action possible despite the absence of tribal political institutions necessary to transform the positions Ho-Chunk people occupied in their everyday lives. Together, the headlines and the election suggest the interdependence of activism carried out in media and in governmental structures in the production of transformative acts of political self-representation.

People of Adam: Divine Healing and Racial Cosmopolitanism in the Early Twentieth-Century Transvaal, South Africa

Abstract: This article analyses the intersection between cosmopolitanism and racist ideologies in the faith healing practices of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion. Originally from Illinois, USA, this organization was the period's most influential divine healing group. Black and white members, under the leadership of the charismatic John Alexander Dowie, eschewed medical assistance and proclaimed God's power to heal physical affliction. In affirming the deity's capacity to remake human bodies, church members also insisted that God could refashion biological race into a capacious spiritual ethnicity: a global human race they referred to as the “Adamic” race. Zionist universalist teachings were adopted by dispossessed and newly urbanized Boer ex-farmers in Johannesburg, Transvaal, before spreading to the soldiers of the British regiments recently arrived to fight the Boer states in the war of 1899–1902. Zionism equipped these estranged white “races” with a vocabulary to articulate political reconciliation and a precarious unity. But divine healing was most enthusiastically received among the Transvaal's rural Africans. Amidst the period's hardening segregation, Africans seized upon divine healing's innovative racial teachings, but both Boers and Africans found disappointment amid Zion's cosmopolitan promises. Boers were marginalized within the new racial regimes of the Edwardian empire in South Africa, and white South Africans had always been ambivalent about divine healing's incorporations of black Africans into a unitary race. This early history of Zionism in the Transvaal reveals the constriction of cosmopolitan aspirations amidst fast-narrowing horizons of race, nation, and empire in early twentieth-century South Africa.

Nationality Medicines in China: Institutional Rationality and Healing Charisma

Abstract: This article describes emergent Chinese regimes of knowledge about “minority nationality medicines.” We adopt Weberian terms of rational and charismatic authority to better understand ethnic healing as it is developing among minorities in southwestern China. In the course of uneven development among diverse ethnic groups over recent decades, modern information regimes and institutional models have started to transform the many forms of healing and heritage that can be found “on the ground” in minority areas. We delineate a shifting border between official (or rational) and wild (or charismatic) forms of medicine, and argue that every healing situation results from a dynamic and sometimes destructive relation between these forms of authority. We draw from research conducted among seven minority nationalities scattered in five provinces in China's south and southwest. After an overview of relevant scholarly work that circulates nationally, we discuss views and practices of three healers belonging to Zhuang, Tujia, and Yao groups, respectively. Ultimately we suggest that all healing, including that taking place in biomedical clinics, relies on some contact with “the wild,” and forges a relationship between rationality and charisma.

“Provincial Cosmopolitanism” in Late Ottoman Anatolia: An Armenian Shoemaker's Memoir

Abstract: This paper examines the nature of late Ottoman provincial intercommunal interactions and affiliations as they appear in the memoir of Hovhannes Cherishian (1886–1967), a shoemaker from late Ottoman Marash (present-day Kahramanmaras, in southeastern Turkey). The paper is situated within the larger discourse of “untold histories” that historians have begun to address in revising the deeply ingrained post-Ottoman nationalist historiographies that dominate both academic and popular discourses. Conventional historiographies have represented former late Ottoman subject communities (e.g., Greek, Jewish, Armenian) as insulated and homogenous proto-nation-states. In the revisionist historiography, the late Ottoman Armenian voice, especially the provincial one, has been noticeably absent. Here I utilize Cherishian's memoir to examine the life and thoughts of one late Ottoman Armenian provincial subject. I focus especially on his treatment of intercommunal interactions in Anatolia and present-day Syria between 1897 and 1922. His accounts of these often extended intercommunal interactions, affiliations, and networks are characterized by intercommunal and interpersonal openness, sympathy, intimacy, and pleasure, even as he presents them side-by-side with descriptions of deportation and death at the hands of the late Ottoman state. I develop the idea of what I call “provincial cosmopolitanism” to conceptualize and represent the disposition, affinity, and process of identity formation that enabled Cherishian to create and operate these interpersonal relationships and networks that propelled his life, a historical condition to which we are not currently privy in most historiographical accounts of the late Ottoman period.

The Pulse in the Machine: Automating Tibetan Diagnostic Palpation in Postsocialist Russia

Abstract: This article analyzes efforts by Soviet and present-day scientists in Russia to “rationalize” and ultimately automate the diagnostic techniques of Tibetan medicine. It tracks the institutional and conceptual histories of designing a pulse diagnostic system, a project that began in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. It has recently been re-enlivened in Buryatia, an ethnic minority region in Southeastern Siberia, in efforts to mobilize indigenous medical practices in response to local and national public health concerns. I focus on the translational ideologies that informed efforts to develop the pulsometer as a medical imaging technology, and analyze obstacles to these efforts found at the core of the device. Scientists working on the pulsometer have systematically tried to discern whether their measurements indicate sustained bodily pathologies, or instead reflect only technological white noise, and they still recruit and rely on the embodied expertise of practitioners of Tibetan medicine to validate their findings. In so doing they reaffirm claims that Tibetan medicine in Buryatia is inextricable from the forms of knowledge and practice that their projects work to standardize. I show how the apparent failures at perfect mechanization have made the pulsometer a surprisingly productive site for creating new kinds of expert communities and forms of knowledge making.

The Radiance of the Jewish National Home: Technocapitalism, Electrification, and the Making of Modern Palestine

Abstract: Contrary to conventional wisdom, the history of the Palestine mandate and its power relations were not determined solely by a series of legal measures, beginning with the 1917 Balfour Declaration and ending with the UNGA partition resolution of 1947. Rather, the emergence of modern Palestine was a process significantly guided by global technocapitalism. Palestine was constituted on the basis of a successful Zionist pitch for the area as an economically viable territory—as an area of production and consumption and crucially also as an entity locatable in the global circulation of capital and commodities. A central vehicle for this technocapitalist vision in Palestine—proposed by the Zionists, and enthusiastically adopted by the British—was a hydroelectrical megasystem in the Jordan Valley. Significant portions of the mandate's borders were mapped onto the station's technical blueprint, and conceiving of and building the powerhouse created not just borders, but also “Palestine,” a bounded entity with a distinct political and economic character. While the electrification, like Zionism in general, was justified in a language of egalitarian universalism, the power system and the “free-market” capitalist system it helped create in Palestine generated familiar kinds of political and economic inequality. Specifically, it conjured a political-economic order based on a Jewish national scale in which the Arabs were expected to supply the menial labor power in return for the economic development that was to lift all boats.

“Civilizing” the Colonial Subject: The Co-Evolution of State and Slavery in South Carolina, 1670–1739

Abstract: South Carolina was a staggeringly weak polity from its founding in 1670 until the 1730s. Nevertheless, in that time, and while facing significant opposition from powerful indigenous neighbors, the colony constructed a robust plantation system that boasted the highest slave-to-freeman ratio in mainland North America. Taking this fact as a point of departure, I examine the early management of unfree labor in South Carolina as an exemplary moment of settler-colonial state formation. Departing from the treatment of state formation as a process of centralizing “legitimate violence,” I investigate how the colonial state, and in particular the Commons House of Assembly, asserted an exclusive claim to authority by monopolizing the question of legitimacy itself. In managing unfree laborers, the colonial state extended its authority over supposedly private relations between master and slave and increasingly recast slavery in racial terms. This recasting of racial slavery rested, I argue, on a distinction, pervasive throughout English North America, which divided the world into spheres of savagery and civility. Beneath the racial reordering of colonial life, the institution of slavery was rooted in the same ideological distinction by which the colonial state's claims to authority were justified, with the putative “savagery” of the slave or of the Indian being counterpoised to the supposed civility of English settlers. This article contributes to the literatures on Atlantic slavery and American colonial history, and invites comparison with accounts of state formation and settler colonialism beyond Anglo-America.