Honor, Shame, and European Definitions of MurderIn Honor of Fadime: Murder and Shame. Unni Wikan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Abstract

lurking behind what were oftentimes construed as counterfeit or misleading exteriors. Political reason did not exist in opposition to sentiment; rather, properly managed sympathies and attachments were crucial to the colonial project. The latent fear of revolt, resentment, and misplaced affections made colonial administrators’ anxieties real and spurred the implementation of colonial policies on the ground. Patricidal mixed-blood children, violence-prone plantation workers, and native nurse-maids made defining and harnessing the passions and sentiments of the colonized a principal preoccupation of colonial administrators. These epistemic anxieties and uncertainties are detailed in chapter 6. The murder of a Dutch planter and his family sparked a plethora of competing truth claims, rumors, and envisioned events surrounding counterinsurgent acts of violence. These divergent colonial narratives and rumors of “vengeful natives” and “rebel groups” delimit and subvert foundations of trust and hierarchies of credibility while distorting the margins between fiction and truth. One of Stoler’s greatest contributions in this book is her critique of Western “reason” as a founding principle of colonialist studies across the globe. Her critique of contemporary postcolonial analyses lies in the “assumption that the mastery of reason, rationality and the inflated claims made for Enlightenment principles have been at the foundation of colonial regimes” (p. 57) and should therefore be the center point of critical postcolonial studies. As Stoler states, “If reason was a hallmark of the colonial, it was neither pervasive nor persuasive” (p. 58). Throughout the book, Stoler challenges the claim that the application of European principles of reason and rationality to colonialist politics was the colonial state’s most prevailing and “insidious” form of knowledge production and technology of rule. Her criticisms belie two main points: that functional accounts of colonial reason and rationality exclude or overshadow the equal importance of sentiments and attachments and that colonialist political rationalities and epistemic paradigms were ambiguous, contingent, and highly uncertain. By attending to both the logos and the pathos of empire, Stoler underscores the ways in which “the politics of empire bleeds into the texture of the personal” (p. 278).