Colonial Appropriation Research Articles

Engaging with Ethnographic Museum Objects from Erstwhile Naga Hills: From Imperial, Colonial and Postcolonial Eras to Contemporary Reimagining

The colonial monographs on Naga peoples and the colonial appropriation of artefacts in north-east India enhanced anthropological knowledge in Europe. This paper asks how far the ‘decolonising the museum’ approach can be applied in studying Naga collections in European museums and in facilitating critical engagement with ethnographic objects from Naga communities in both Western and Indian museums. There has been a regeneration of interest in the colonial history of Naga collections among European/New World academics and in ethnographic museums in the late 1980s, mid 2000s and currently in Humboldt Lab (2015) and Forum (2022), and among Naga communities themselves. The paper examines how the contrasting historical trajectories, positions and modern consequences play out 1 .

Cinema, the Settler

While the history and technology of cinema are considered for the purpose of achieving decolonial ends, this paper suggests that ‘classic’ cinema may be considered a quintessentially settler colonial medium. However, the moving image is now delivered in new ways and through new devices, and streaming has transformed global patterns of cinema production and consumption. Thus, two developments are considered in relation to this transformation. On the one hand, there are signs that mainstream cinema may be genuinely addressing its implication with colonialism, and this paper focuses on a formal apology and on a big budget movie that adopted a radically innovative approach to representing Indigenous peoples: Prey (2022). On the other hand, streaming has made cinema portable and has made consumption in personally deliberated instalments possible. The ‘digital natives’ consume cinema in fragmented and noncollective patterns, and their activity is subjected to unprecedented modalities of surveillance and appropriation. This paper concludes that a form of digital colonialism supported by streaming operates in ways that are homologous with modes of settler colonial appropriation.

Black and White Comedy: Trade and Race in Bredero's Moortje (1617)

Moortje ( Little Moor, 1617) is an adaptation of Terence’s The Eunuch, in which the Dutch playwright Gerbrand Adriaensz Bredero replaced the castrate with a ‘Moor’. Scholars have demonstrated how Moortje renders an early modern discourse of race that, at the threshold of Dutch participation in colonial trade, facilitated the enslavement and trafficking of African people. This article aims to do justice to the polyphonic discussion on colonial trade in the seventeenth-century Republic, arguing that Moortje can also be read as a foreshadowing of postcolonial shame and ‘white innocence’. It does so through an analysis of race at the intersections with gender, focusing on the distinct processes through which two women in the play – one black and one white – are commodified on the market and appropriated by their new owner. It also analyses two paratexts in which Bredero compares the cultural appropriation of classical comedy to colonial appropriation. Together, the analyses indicate that racial thinking, although closely intertwined with the discourse on trade, does not in all respects facilitate the commodification and appropriation of the black woman. Rather blackness in Moortje represents the unknown, both in terms of colonial trade and its effects for the conscience of the white merchant.

Coloniality as Appropriation of Indigenous Ontologies: Insights From South Africa and Ethiopia

The purpose of this investigation is to frame Global North colonialism in southern and eastern Africa as ontological appropriation. In the article’s conceptual framework, ontological appropriation is colonial claims to aspects of African realities without acknowledgment of their original sources and creators. In the case of southern Africa, Global North appropriation of Khoi and San agriculturalist ontologies is illustrated. Additionally, attempts by the Global North to claim origination of Ethiopia’s ancient ontologies are cited as evidence of colonial appropriation. In accordance, the methods of the investigation involved a review of scholarship related to indigenous ontologies in South and East Africa. Moreover, scholarly voices speaking to epistemic encounters between the Global North with Africans are observed. Thus, a thesis of ontological appropriation is generated. Results of the investigation indicate sustained Global North warfare, and epistemic assaults led to the fall of Khoi, San, hunter-gather, and pastoral ontologies in the South. In contrast, in the East Ethiopia’s ancient theocracy, and monarchies prevented Global North acquisition of land, and ontic dominance. The article concludes colonialism was a deliberate attempt to modify, and control African ontologies. As a result, in southern Africa Khoi San ontologies transformed from hunter-gatherers, and pastoralists to colonial servitude. In Ethiopia, however, monarchical, and theocratic ontologies are vibrant to the present age. Hence, this article’s contribution to new knowledge is its accentuation of divergent hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and monarchical responses to colonialism in ways that enabled, and resisted colonial appropriation of indigenous ontologies.

Rekinning the homeland: Rurality, gender-based genocide, and Indigenous sovereignty in colonial Canada

In the colonial state of Canada, rurality is quintessentially necropolitical, a technology of colonial nation building that has forcibly displaced hundreds of sovereign Indigenous nations to accommodate white occupation. Throughout vast rural social geographies that remain conservative political strongholds, Indigenous peoples living in their ancestral homelands are positioned as contaminants of dignified white rural life and obstacles to food and resource exploitation, agri-industrial expansion, and growing multicultural diversity. Under colonial rural logics, Indigenous bodies are disposable and ungrievable, in deeply gendered and sexualized ways. In this paper, I draw on Achille Mbembé’s concept of necropolitics to examine rural genocide as a form of colonial and neocolonial settler placemaking, with a specific focus on gender-based violence as one form of enacted necropolitics. I examine how stark racial rural inequities precipitate racialized-gendered death by enabling incessant white entitlement to Indigenous lands and bodies, allowing what the United Nations has called the gender-based genocide of Indigenous girls, women, and 2Spirit people to occur with impunity. I then consider the imperial logics of homesteading as a new/old settler tactic emerging under new anthropogenic and pandemic-related pressures, where urbanites seeking rural escapes fuel the colonial appropriation and commodification of sacred Indigenous land-based knowledges while eroding already precarious Indigenous territories. I conclude by exploring how reimplicating increasingly mobile and urbanized Indigenous young people in kinscapes—mobile, temporal circles of relations with their kin and homelands—might fortify vital Indigenous land and body sovereignties and unsettle colonial necropolitical rural ontologies.

Colonial and Anticolonial Credit: The Native Lands Acts and Te Peeke o Aotearoa

In the 1860s and 1870s the Native Lands Acts facilitated the colonial appropriation of huge amounts of Māori land. The acts, as is commonly known, were explicitly implemented to destroy the ‘communism’ identified as foundational to Māori society, and sought to achieve this by ‘individualising’ Māori land title. However, in addition to this movement of individualisation, the acts fundamentally enacted and relied upon the financialisation of Māori lands, their transformation into securities against debts. This paper examines the colonial weaponisation of credit as a means of division and seizure and contrasts this with the anticolonial deployment of credit by Māori in the form of Te Peeke o Aotearoa. Founded in 1885, and situated within a broader politics of unification and the defence of land, Te Peeke o Aotearoa was an exclusively Māori alternative to prevailing colonial financial institutions that not only reasserted Māori economic autonomy but threatened to weaken the fabric of the colonial project.

Review: Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization, by Rosalind Galt

Review: <i>Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization</i>, by Rosalind Galt

The Leontocephaline from the Villa Albani: Material Documentation for Religious Entanglement

In this article, I place the Leontocephaline from the Villa Albani on the axis of time of the Mithraic Saturn/Kronos prototype. Entangled in that prototype are astrology, concepts of death, and time perceptions. As a symbolic choice, its style reflects politico-religious and cultural colonial appropriation by Rome’s elite of the Severan period and demonstrates a syncretistic complexity adapted to Roman esthetic values. By surveying these issues and identifying the iconographic changes the statue has undergone, I reveal the elements of that colonial appropriation. The movement of the serpents and the astrological reliefs on the body depict Western philosophical concepts of the movement of the soul between the constellations after death and the unbounded (circular) nature of Aionic time entangled with Eastern concepts of the procession of time and Leontocephalic divinities.

The Era of Endless Repatriation: Respectful Relationality and the Reconfiguration of Colonial Authority

Originally given in the form of two lectures at the Musée du quai Branly, this essay explores the often fraught politica of repatriation in a Canadian context. It suggests that we have moved into an era in which repatriation, understood in this alternate sense as the decentring of settler museum authority and the recognition of Indigenous sovereign rights, is simply unavoidable. This is not just about a “reckoning” with prior histories of colonial appropriation. Rather, it is a recognition of the fact that the structures of settler colonialism themselves are shifting (cf: Kauanui 2016), and museums in such contexts will need to engage with the idea of repatriation as such, as a social phenomenon that entails transformation over the longue durée instead of a set of individual, case by case incidents. Drawing on the author’s experiences as an anthropologist and a curator working with Indigenous Nations on the Northwest Coast of what is now called Canada, the essay ultimately argues that museums will arrive at stronger, more productive relationships with First Peoples by accepting the ongoing reality of repatriations. Indeed, it suggests that it is only through collaboration that genuinely decentres museum authority and foregrounds Indigenous sovereignty that museums will be able to develop genuinely future-oriented and responsible practices.

Language as a problem

The term “language” is used for at least three distinct purposes. The first supports inquiry into coded message exchange. This has occupied most of the debate within the discipline of linguistics. Only here can we use notions of information and translation. The second use tries to speak to the profound change that happened to one species and that seems to be foundational in creating the human world, with all attendant problems. This is an entirely different sense, and it cannot be addressed with the technical terms developed in pursuit of the first sense. Finally, language has always played a central role in the definition of a people, however one might cash out that term. Like other globalising concepts such as “human,” “natural,” and “race,” the first sense of language-as-system carries with it a history of colonial appropriation and obliteration, of Christian universalization, and of a distinctly European ideology. The hegemony of English appears in this light to be a technological development rather than a linguistic fact, and a need arises to separate the valuable sense of a language as a defining characteristic of a people, from the technical sense of language as a mode of message exchange. Consequences for the boundaries and concerns of the discipline of linguistics are unavoidable.

Transporting cultural sites/scripts: performing surfing, re-examining he’e nalu, and shaping/riding an alaia

ABSTRACT The practice of riding waves develops on the Hawaiian Islands. The practice remains marked by an ethos that often actively searches out alternative ways to ride waves, particularly the unearthing of past practices. I argue that this desire to return to a real and imagined past stems from a longing to enter into dialog with the complicated narratives of colonial appropriation and the continued obfuscation of an Indigenous practice. Through a performance lens, I examine surfing and its precursor, riding waves or he'e nalu, by fabricating, shaping, and riding an ancient Hawaiian alaia.

Speculating on vacancy

AbstractProperty speculation has long served a role in the settler colonial appropriation of land and the racialised uneven development of contemporary cities. This future‐oriented approach to property acquisition and management is underpinned by notions of vacancy that erase past and present forms of possession and associate racialised spaces with lack and risk. Efforts to define, represent, and manage the speculative value of “vacant” properties through predictive mapping work to colonise the future in ways that erase the present and past. In this paper, I reflect on the role of speculative cartographies of property in both reifying and undermining normative urban property regimes. Specifically, I examine the city of Philadelphia’s use of cartographic tools to identify “likely” property vacancy and how they relate to ongoing racialised dispossession. I then turn to consider the potential of speculative (counter) cartographies of property to contribute to new political realities, not just prevailing geographies. To do so, I engage with the work of artists and activists who are using mapmaking grounded in Afrofuturism to reclaim and reimagine the space‐times of properties deemed by city officials and developers to be “empty” or “wasted.” I suggest that while speculative cartographies of property facilitate the consolidation of liberal property regimes, they also allow for their disruption by revealing their situatedness and contingency – and by facilitating alternative visions of urban futures.

World War II, Global Food Crisis and the Grow-More-Food Campaign in Malawi, 1939–1959

ABSTRACT The outbreak of World War II in 1939 altered the trajectory of food production in Malawi in the last two decades of colonialism. This paper examines the extent to which the World War II and the World Food Crisis that followed shaped peasants’ food production in Malawi between 1939 and 1957. It argues that, while the war caused food shortages through the dislocation of labour and foodstuffs, it also altered the production of surplus foodstuffs. Despite its merits, the paper observes, however, that colonial campaign for the peasants to grow more foodstuffs was a ‘marriage of convenience’ rather than an attempt to improve the food welfare of the peasants. As soon as the food crisis ended, the colonial authority resorted to its old policy of prioritising on cash crops at the expense of food crops. This history sheds new light to rethink ‘the second colonial occupation’ thesis by arguing that colonial appropriation of African resources in the 1940s and 1950s was complex, dynamic and contested. Foodstuffs laid at the core of rural life such that the colonial state could hardly expropriate them or discourage their excessive production without challenges from the peasants.

Las colonias francesas dentro de la ecología-mundo (1830-1962): el caso de los combustibles fósiles, los bosques y las plantaciones tropicales en Argelia y Vietnam

Los imperios coloniales jugaron un papel importante en la historia del Capitaloceno a través de la apropiación y explotación de los recursos naturales baratos, de la mano de obra y las energías baratas del mundo extraeuropeo, pero también por su producción de las naturalezas capitalizadas dentro de él, y, más ampliamente su coproducción de un mundo ecológico caracterizado por intercambios económicos y ecológicos desiguales a escala global. Basado en una problemática resultante del trabajo de Jason Moore, una reinterpretación de la historiografía existente y un trabajo de archivo, este artículo muestra que, si bien es esclarecedor comprender la historia de los combustibles fósiles, los bosques y las plantaciones de Argelia (1830-1962) y de Vietnam (1858-1954) en términos de ecología-mundo, su contribución al desarrollo de la ecología-mundo debe examinarse a la luz de las especificidades de cada colonia y de cada sector. En primer lugar, hay que matizar la hipótesis de una producción colonial de combustibles fósiles que sería sistemáticamente barata y destinada a los centros capitalistas occidentales de la ecología-mundo, no correspondiendo esta hipótesis ni al carbón argelino (caro y usado localmente) ni a los hidrocarburos argelinos (caros y exportados principalmente a Francia) ni al carbón vietnamita (barato pero exportado al sudeste asiático). Entonces, la historia conjunta de las plantaciones de caucho vietnamitas y la agricultura colonial argelina revela una capacidad desigual y nunca absoluta de los colonizadores franceses, siempre dependientes de las condiciones ecológicas locales, para crear naturalezas capitalizadas que generen productos tropicales baratos. Finalmente, el estudio combinado de la explotación colonial de los recursos forestales en Argelia y Vietnam permite mostrar hasta qué punto el ecologismo manifestado por los colonizadores franceses, en particular el de las administraciones forestales coloniales, no obstaculizó la producción. Para la ecología-mundo, este análisis, evidentemente, merecería ser profundizado por nuevos estudios de caso, pero constituye, sin embargo, un primer vistazo a la compleja inserción histórica de las colonias francesas en el mundo ecológico.

Extractivismo marino-colonial. Apropiación asimétrica de recursos marinos en el golfo de California (México) siglos XVI-XXI

En la península y en el golfo de California, el proceso de conquista colonial impuso un proceso de antropización-colonización de la relación sociedad-naturaleza a lo largo del tiempo moderno y contemporáneo. Desde el siglo XVI, este cambio se implementó mediante la inserción de los recursos naturales terrestres y marinos disponibles en el territorio sudcaliforniano en el marco de la Economía Mundo. La península y el golfo de California se vieron sometidos a un proceso, a largo plazo, de saqueo y despojo territorial que denomino “Apropiación Asimétrica” (que se traduce en una línea temporal de cuatro momentos históricos, algunos coetáneos, desde el siglo XVI al siglo XXI). En el primer momento de esta línea temporal, se describe en el texto cómo la Corona transfirió, mediante diversos sistemas de cesión territorial, el control de recursos (perlas, acuacultura, guano, sal, etc.) hacia empresarios privados encargados de extraer el capital natural para comercializarlo en mercados globales entre el siglo XVI y el siglo XX. Esta capitalización/privatización de recursos costeros-marinos a lo largo del siglo XX se evidenció en un proceso de especulación financiero territorial, orientado al desarrollo del turismo de masas como eje del modelo de desarrollo económico (tercer y cuarto momento histórico de la Apropiación Asimétrica que se analiza en el texto. La propuesta de metodología de investigación parte del trabajo que desarrollamos en el campo de la Historia Ambiental, entendida como estudio sobre las relaciones entre sociedad y naturaleza a lo largo del mundo moderno y contemporáneo, estudiado mediante el análisis de los documentos archivísticos y bibliografía de coetáneos, viajeros o documentos institucionales. Esta propuesta metodológica supone el estudio de los cambios territoriales, ambientales y socioeconómicos junto al impacto de los mismos en el capital natural del territorio sudcaliforniano, procesos que generan conflictos y luchas contra el extractivismo y despojo como modelo económico. Desde el campo de la Historia Ambiental, el concepto de extractivismo es definido como transferencia de bienes naturales de manejo comunitario hacia la esfera del mercado, enajenados los pueblos y beneficiados sectores empresariales con este proceso de privatización. De igual manera, el concepto de apropiación asimétrica implica la identificación de cómo la transferencia verificada mediante el extractivismo y despojo territorial impacta sobre la arquitectura del modelo de desarrollo económico generando episodios y realidades de injusticia ambiental, dando lugar a importantes desequilibrios territoriales. Estos desequilibrios territoriales tienen una matriz histórica que la Historia Ambiental permite narrar como un contínuum, pero que como práctica de colonización del territorio llega hasta inicios del siglo XXI como demuestra el estudio del impacto del capitalismo financiero en Baja California.

Water as wahkohtowin in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves

Water as wahkohtowin in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves Christina Turner (bio) Water is vital to works of Indigenous literature. This is true not only because water is a central site of colonial appropriation, subject to theft and pollution by states and corporations in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere, but because water is also the substance of connection, facilitating kinship between human beings and their other-than-human relations.1 Water’s connective capacities are especially prominent in Metis author Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 book The Marrow Thieves.2 In that text, the devastation of the world’s waterways robs most of humanity, save Indigenous peoples, of the ability to dream, triggering the reopening of residential schools. Dimaline’s characters—including her protagonist, French—spend the novel travelling north, seeking fresh water as they flee so-called school “Recruiters.” But water in this text also facilitates relationships: just as rivers link disparate places and just as freshwater lakes sustain a variety of lifeforms, waterways in Dimaline’s novel enable connections between human kin, between living beings, and between seemingly disconnected ideas. This element’s inherently connective quality means that, in Dimaline’s text, water informs the human imagination and therefore undergirds the ability to dream. Only when French understands this relationship can he help his human family defeat the Recruiters. Thus, in The Marrow Thieves, water is both the site of colonial conflict and the key to anticolonial Indigenous resurgence. In this article, I argue that water in The Marrow Thieves is best understood under the rubric of wahkohtowin, the Metis and Cree concept variably translated as “kinship,” “family,” or “relation.” This argument builds on Patrizia Zanella’s observation in a recent SAIL article that the novel’s “expansive kinship networks” and its protagonist’s “understanding of family” both resonate with the [End Page 98] concept of wahkohtowin (185). My understanding of this concept is primarily informed by scholarship in Metis studies. Within that field, wahkohtowin has been mobilized to describe the emergence of Metis collective identity: wahkohtowin frames Metis historian Brenda MacDougall’s study of the Metis community at Sakitawak in what is now northern Saskatchewan (3), and Metis scholar Adam Gaudry uses this term to describe buffalo hunt governance amongst the nascent Metis nation in the early nineteenth-century plains (78). Some of these same scholars look beyond interhuman relations to consider how wahkohtowin informs human relations with the land and its denizens. Gaudry, for example, argues that for nineteenth-century Metis, wahkohtowin encompassed “a familial connection to the environment and the sacred world . . . a sense of kinship to the land” (89). Like Gaudry, Metis anthropologist Zoë Todd focuses on wahkohtowin in the other-than-human world. But where Gaudry focuses on land, Todd looks to the waterways of the Lake Winnipeg watershed and the beings who inhabit those waterways, using wahkohtowin to articulate protocols for human–fish relations in this territory (2016, 48–49). Taken together, these analyses reveal that wahkohtowin is central to Metis collectivity writ large because wahkohtowin describes kinship between Metis people, where “people” denotes not only humans but bodies of water and the beings who subsist on or in those bodies of water. These insights suggest wahkohtowin is an apt framework for analyzing the role of water in a work of Metis literature, as I do here. Such a study is timely because, while Metis critics including Deanna Reder and Jennifer Adese have examined wahkohtowin in works of Metis literature,3 these analyses focus exclusively on interhuman relations, whereas my exploration of The Marrow Thieves will attend carefully to French’s relations with bodies of water and the other-than-human beings who rely on them. My decision to use wahkohtowin to analyze Dimaline’s novel comes from a desire to heed the call made by Adese, in a 2016 SAIL essay, to change how critics analyze works of Metis literatures. Drawing on her own biography, Adese describes “‘Métisness” as a “placeholder for a broad, meaningful, and very deep set of kinship ties, shared family and social (hi)stories, and shared geographic relations” (57), relations she also sees in Metis writing, including Herb Belcourt’s memoir Walking in the Woods...

Chiefly Succession and Democracy in South Africa: Why History Matters

This article examines the way in which disputes about the ranking of chiefdoms and succession to high chiefly office have been handled in the democratic era. It focuses particularly on the extent to which these processes have been in alignment with South Africa’s democratic Constitution. It discusses the prevalence of disputes about succession and their crippling impact on local development. It argues that the current rule-based approach to adjudicating succession claims is not rooted in pre-colonial practice and custom. Its genesis lies rather in the colonial appropriation of customary law, which reified rules rather than processes and ignored the critical role that popular support played in determining succession. The article examines two case studies concerning the Pedi kingship. The cases were first adjudicated by the Traditional Leadership Disputes Commission and then appealed to higher courts. They have the advantage of relatively rich historical sources and research. In both cases, the Commission and the courts largely adopted a rule-based approach, not considering historical evidence or the role of popular struggle or support. The democratising imperatives of the Constitution have been ignored in relation to the millions of South Africans who live under the system of traditional leadership, and the political and legal dualism that underpinned apartheid remains intact. The article concludes that undoing this violation of constitutional values requires a wide-ranging debate about democracy, constitutionalism, traditional leadership and the potential wellsprings of living customary law.

Nomad’s Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World. By Andrea E. Duffy (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2019) 336 pp. $55.00 cloth and e-book

A transnational study of Mediterranean pastoralism, Nomad’s Land is also an ambitiously multidisciplinary and comparative study built upon an impressive depth of both published and archival sources found in France, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. While asserting the usefulness of the Mediterranean as a unit of analysis, Duffy does not attempt to paint with too broad a brushstroke; on the contrary, she shows connections and convergences in the modern histories of mobile, pastoral populations across three case studies—Provence, Algeria, and southwestern Anatolia. Duffy draws upon the literature of forestry, ecology, geography, and archaeology to tease out the behaviors and fates of what are surely among history’s most elusive actors. Pastoralists in all three regions shared histories of reciprocity with farmers and the use of forests as intermediate pastures; the three regions are also bound by a French connection.Duffy begins by tracing the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European intellectual currents that cast all mobile pastoralists as barbaric and environmentally destructive. Declensionist narratives attributed the degradation of the entire Mediterranean basin to pastoralism, from putatively wholesale forest clearance to the damage wrought by goats and sheep. Colonial perspectives then differentiated some pastoralists from others; Duffy argues that the newly coined word transhumance was applied to European pastoralists in order to distinguish them from their non-European counterparts, whose practices would be described by the loaded term nomadism. A European critique of the Ottoman Empire took aim at both the Ottomans’ poor use and poor conservation of resources, namely, forests.These critiques and understandings became concretized in French scientific forestry and the Forest Code of 1827. If Duffy’s discussion of these developments and their application to Provençal pastoralists does not break new ground, her emphasis on the highly elastic definition given to forest in the Code and its implications for pastoralists is germane and interesting. Early attempts to apply French forestry and forest law to Algeria foundered on extreme ignorance of the Algerian environment and lack of personnel. Duffy’s Anatolian case study offers a fascinating linkage to developments in France’s metropole and colonies. During the Tanzimat era of reform, Ottoman officials invited well-known French foresters to promote a hierarchical and law-driven forestry administration. From 1857 to 1878, their efforts in the Ottoman Empire, in parallel with the Algerian case, confronted the lack of state funding and the entrenchment of customary rights to the land.Besides the “soft power” (not always so soft) of forest law, the privatization of land contributed greatly to the terminal decline of Mediterranean pastoralism. The parallels between the privatization of the commons in France, colonial appropriation in Algeria, and the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 are striking: Pastoralists either leased expensive private pastures or became sedentary, in both cases intensifying grazing practices. Nineteenth-century officialdom was thus quick to blame imprudent, “malevolent” pastoralists for floods and fires in Provence, and fires in Anatolia and Algeria, where fire suppression became an explicit tool of empire. Having argued differently, this reviewer would have liked to see more evidence that France’s alpine restoration law of 1882 “sealed the fate of an already diminishing mountain population” (146).1Duffy then highlights contrasting reasons for decline that led to similar ecological outcomes across the three regions. If the forest regime was most heavy-handed in France and Algeria, Anatolian pastoralism retreated in the face of sedentarization campaigns, modernization (mining, agriculture, and railroads), and influxes of refugees. Provençal pastoralists uniquely were rehabilitated by sympathetic forester-sociologists and literary figures, yet even in Provence only larger, sedentary sheep enterprises survived. A consistent environmental legacy of soil degradation due to forced intensification and sedentarization underpins the three stories. By contrast with sedentary livestock raising or agriculture, the environmental impact of pastoralism appears minor.Several errors mar the text slightly. Duffy erroneously depicts the Revolutionary decree of June 1793 as securing the commons as such, whereas it allowed for their division and privatization. She misinterprets a law of 1890 as outlawing communal grazing, whereas it forbade grazing on unenclosed fields (vaine pâture). Finally, the seminal role played by rural depopulation in the reforestation of France goes unmentioned.

Technology in Support of Languages of The Pacific: Neo-Colonial or Post-Colonial?

The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) has been digitising recordings of traditional cultural expression, oral tradition, and music (TCE) for 17 years. A major motivation for this work is the return of these recordings to where they were made. On the one hand there is social justice in preserving records of languages that are under-represented in the internet and cultural institutions, and making them accessible in what can be characterised as a postcolonial restitution of these records. On the other hand, if it is first world academics doing this work, it risks being yet another colonial appropriation of Indigenous knowledge. In this paper I explore some of these issues to help set directions both for our own work, and for future similar projects. “From ancient times to the present, disquieting use has been made of archival records to establish, document, and perpetuate the influence of power elites.” (Jimerson, 2007: 254). A quarter of the world’s languages are found in the Pacific. In communities sustained over many hundreds of years by local economies, the globalised world impinges through urbanisation and encroaching metropolitan languages, particularly in media, accelerating language change and language shift. Technology, in the form of computers, digital files, and ways of working with them, is a first world product, access to it is costly, and the interface to it is never in a local language but always in a major metropolitan language. Training and experience in using technology is not easily obtained, leading to a divide between those who are able to use it and those who are consumers of it, typically via expensive internet connections. How can a new kind of archival enterprise “establish, document, and perpetuate” the languages and their speakers, in order to counter what Jimerson calls the influence of power elites.

Becoming Indigenous: the ‘speculative turn’ in anthropology and the (re)colonisation of indigeneity

ABSTRACT The Indigenous have become central to contemporary critical and governmental imaginaries as the West tries to cope with planetary crises imbricated in the legacies of modernity and settler colonialism. As such, Indigenous methods and practices are increasingly constructed as offering futural possibilities for ‘becoming’ rather than belonging to the archives of an underdeveloped past. Central to this transformation has been the speculative or ontological turn in anthropological discourse, which we argue has opened up new possibilities for a Western and colonial appropriation of indigeneity. This turn is the subject of this article and is critically engaged with to pursue a number of avenues which problematise this form of ‘ontopolitical anthropology’. The reduction of Indigenous lives to the speculative ‘other’ of Western modernity inherently tends to reify or ‘exoticise’ Indigenous thought and practices or, as we state, to ‘ontologize indigeneity’. This, we argue, is particularly problematic in the context where critical imaginaries of precarious ‘life in the ruins’ tend to affirm contemporary governmental approaches rather than challenge them. Ironically, rather than opening up alternative possibilities, these approaches reduce the reality of Indigenous struggles and sufferings to a mere foil for the speculative imaginaries of a privileged white Eurocentric academic elite.