Idioms of Vernacular Humanism: The West and the East

Abstract

The Sri Lankan‐born anthropologist, Chandra Jayawardena, is a post‐colonial scholar whose work helped shape the direction of Australian anthropology. His passionate concern for social justice is reflected in his scholarly interest in the question of inequality. His initial field research was in the plantations of (then) British Guyana, and his work stands as a landmark in studies of the West Indies, in that it did not fall back on racial and cultural explanations to explore the social dynamics of plantation culture but, rather, drew on the analysis of inequality in classical European social theory. His interest in what would now be called global inequalities led him to plantations in Fiji, and then to the independent pepper cultivators of Aceh, in Indonesia, for further fieldwork. This paper takes up Jayawardena's exploration of what I term ‘vernacular humanism’, through a comparison of his best‐known paper on the West Indies (on the ‘eye‐pass’ dispute) with his unpublished paper on Acehnese rebellion. The Acehnese had been the most resistant of all Indies populations to the imposition of Dutch rule, and presented a different set of colonial relations from that of the West Indies. The paper explores the way in which the differing kinds of unequal relations in the two archipelagoes, which were forged in their relationship to mercantile capitalist expansion, were significant in the development of Jayawardena's theorising of inequality.