Colonial Categories Research Articles

Dilemmas of Difference: Indigenous Women and the Limits of Postcolonial Development Policy by Sarah A. Radcliffe

Reviewed by: Dilemmas of Difference: Indigenous Women and the Limits of Postcolonial Development Policy by Sarah A. Radcliffe Emily Billo Dilemmas of Difference: Indigenous Women and the Limits of Postcolonial Development Policy. Sarah A. Radcliffe. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015. xii & 372 pp. Maps, tables, figures, photos, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. $99.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8223-5978-4), $27.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8223-6010-0), and $27.95 e-book (978-0-8223-7502-9). [End Page 211] In this dynamic book, Sarah Radcliffe uses a postcolonial intersectional analysis to unpack and critique Ecuador’s development policy and practice. This macro-scale approach demonstrates the way in which social categories of difference in development are rooted in the power-laden colonial gaze of dominant groups, producing development policies that have never been for indigenous women. Radcliffe draws on seven years of research with two indigenous groups in Ecuador, Kichwa communities in Chimborazo province in the Andean highlands, and Tsáchila communities in the Pacific lowlands, in the province of Santo Domingo. Even as indigenous women are consistently marginalized by development policy, they resist its interventions to produce situated knowledges that “create an alternative vision of postcolonial social difference” (p. 30). The book is organized in seven chapters plus an introduction. In the introduction, Radciffe outlines her argument and theoretical approach. Chapters 1 and 2 help the reader understand how social categories of development, rooted in colonial understandings of difference, produce indigenous women as inferior. In particular, Chapter 2 mobilizes Cindi Katz’s concept of counter-topographies (“On the Grounds of Globalization,” Signs, 2001) to trace lines of power that make structural processes of discrimination and dispossession visible across both Kichwa and Tsáchila groups. The remaining chapters explore different approaches to development policy, and the ways in which indigenous women are consistently excluded from these policy processes. These trends include: participatory development, “indigenous women in development” policy, sexual and reproductive health, citizenship and rights, and finally post-neoliberal development policy rooted in a rights-based agenda of sumak kawsay. Following chapters 2 and 4, Radcliffe includes “interludes” in which indigenous women speak in their own voices of their struggles, organizing, and desire for change. These interludes also serve as organizational dividers, between historical constructions of colonial categories in development policy in chapters 1 and 2, neoliberal development policy in chapters 3 and 4, and, in the last three chapters, indigenous women critiquing and creating the space for their own voices to be heard, producing situated knowledges based on their own embodied experiences. As Radcliffe suggests, the book can be read chronologically, or each chapter can be explored individually. Radcliffe’s methodology, while not outlined in tremendous detail, does point to extensive outreach before beginning fieldwork, as well as careful collaborative efforts during fieldwork. Before beginning her field-based research, Radcliffe met with differently positioned women in Ecuador who held leadership positions as “ethnic movement leaders, elected women’s representatives, NGO workers, and civil servants,” some of whom were indigenous (p. 28). Her goal was to establish key themes that indigenous women were interested in, and to which her project could contribute. These conversations, continued via email, produced her research questions. Radcliffe writes that she engaged in a “decolonial approach” that attempted to make the invisible visible, while also attending to the knowledge produced by the invisible (p. 28). Indeed, she writes on the last page of the book, “Indigenous women’s insights suggest that epistemological doubt, analytical enquiry, and critique are not uniquely a privilege of a subject centered in the West” (p. 290). Between 2009–2011, Radcliffe returned to Ecuador to visit Kichwa and Tsáchila communities. She writes, “Questions about access and mutually agreed qualitative methods [End Page 212] [with the women in each province] were negotiated through sustained interactions with provincial federation and indigenous group leaders” (p. 29). In the remainder of this review, I examine Radcliffe’s theoretical approach, and consider its implications for geographers. I argue that the critique Radcliffe builds in this book offers a provocative, essential analysis of development policy, and is usefully applied to other political and social contexts. Moreover, her analysis of development policy in...

Material meanings: ‘waste’ as a performative category of land in colonial India

Nearly seven decades after ‘decolonization’, policymaking in India continues to be haunted by colonial categories. Focusing on the category ‘wastelands’, which has been central to recent debates on India's biofuel policies, we study how it was heterogeneously constituted during the Permanent Settlement of land revenue in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century colonial India. In particular, we trace how this category took on multiple meanings through its encounters with different human and nonhuman entities in disparate spatio-temporal settings. The entities encountered included not only ideas and moralities derived from theoretical notions such as Locke's ‘natural rights’, but also the soil and water on diverse lands, and the beings living or made to live on these lands. The multiple meanings of the category led to debates and controversies between colonial administrators regarding the ways in which the Permanent Settlement should be introduced and extended. By mapping these debates and controversies, we attempt to accomplish two things. First, we construct a narrative in which dominant colonial categories and associated rules do not possess unidirectional power to reformat colonized realities and practices. Second, we attempt to account for and recognize realities and practices that were marginalized or disregarded in the formulation of colonial administrative rules. Narratives such as ours, we hope, can help proliferate possibilities for enacting new decolonial and decolonizing practices of making, using and transforming meanings.

Writing Disability into Colonial Histories of Humanitarianism

In this paper, the relation between humanity and disability is addressed by discussing the agency of people with disabilities in colonial histories of humanitarianism. People with disabilities were often—as indicated by relevant sources—regarded and treated as passive, suffering fellow humans, in particular in the making and distribution of colonial photography. In the context of humanitarianism, is it possible to understand these photographs differently? This paper analyzes one photograph—from the collection of the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam—of people with leprosy in the protestant leprosarium Bethesda, in the Dutch colony Suriname, at the beginning of the twentieth century. It discusses the way the sitters in the photograph have been framed, and how the photograph has been made and used. The photograph makes it difficult to register agency, but easily reaffirms existing colonial categories. Therefore, this paper also uses another strategy of analysis. By following Actor-Network Theory, focusing on non-human actors, the second part of this paper offers a new and more convincing interpretation of the photograph. This strategy (a) understands agency as a phenomenon of interdependence instead of independence, and (b) approaches photographs as both real and performed. Combining the written history of humanitarianism and disability, it allows new histories of people with disabilities to develop, histories that move beyond the categories of colonialism.

African Musical Hybridity in the Colonial Context: An Analysis of Ephraim Amu’s “Yɛn Ara Asase Ni”

Abstract This essay describes how the creative hybridity of “Yɛn Ara Asase Ni,” a choral composition by Ephraim Amu, contributed to the emergence of national consciousness in Ghana. Originally composed for a colonial holiday in 1929, this piece spread through schools, radio broadcasts, and live performances, and was heard throughout the country around the time of independence. Based on postcolonial theory, secondary sources, archival research, and interviews, I present a history and analysis of “Yɛn Ara Asase Ni” that demonstrates how it disrupted colonial categories, such as religion and culture, and prepared the way for an independence movement informed by Pan-Africanism and Christianity.

Introduction: Biographies Between Spheres of Empire

ABSTRACTBiographical research offers a promising approach to the study of empire, imperialism and colonialism. The careers and life stories of individuals and generations show particularly clearly the disruptions and constraints, but also the new possibilities and mobilities, that were created by colonial rule. This special issue focuses on practices and experiences of boundary crossing in imperial and colonial history. It explores how ‘ordinary’ individuals and groups navigated between the different imperial spaces and spheres into which they were categorised according to the ideologies and regulations of the well-ordered colonial world. Africa offers particularly interesting cases for studying these issues because, first, it was a field of particularly rigid colonial distinctions and, second, different colonial empires overlapped and competed there with particular intensity. This introduction outlines briefly the relevance of biographical research for new approaches in imperial, colonial and African history, and highlights the major themes of the five articles comprising this special issue. It is argued that these new biographical approaches tell us much not only about life in Africa on the eve of and under colonial rule, but also more generally about both the power and the permeability of imperial domination and of colonial categories.

Gendered violence and displacement of devadasis in the early twentieth-century south India

ABSTRACTThe early twentieth-century nationalist movements redefined Indian citizenship as gendered by appropriating the colonial categories religion/secular, marginalising the subaltern groups. Using Critical Religion and Cavanaugh, this article analyses the implications of these developments on devadasis, traditionally performers of music and dance, that resulted in their violent displacement to the fringes of the society. In doing so, this article shows that violence in the context of devadasi communities must be understood with a broader definition. The article will also argue that, albeit colonial categories, religion/secular categories had a different understanding among the indigenous/nationalists. In doing so, this article provides a postcolonial perspective to Critical Religion.

From colonial categories to local culture: Evolving state practices of ethnic enumeration in Oceania, 1965–2014

Numerous scholars have examined how governments in particular times and places have classified their populations by ethnicity, but studies that are both cross-national and longitudinal are rare. Using a unique database of census questionnaires, we examine state practices of ethnic enumeration over a 50-year period (1965–2014) in the 24 countries and areas that comprise Oceania. The region’s extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, combined with its complex colonial history and indigenous politics, make it an ideal site for comparative analyses. We find a shift from biological conceptions of difference to a more cultural understanding of group identity, exemplified by a sharp rise in language questions and the decline of race-based inquiries. While local identity labels have largely displaced colonial categories, the imprimatur of previous regimes still lingers, particularly in Melanesia. These shifts in official constructions of ethnoracial differences reflect a gradual lessening of colonial influences on demographic practices.

Planters, Eskimos, and Indians: Race and the Organization of Trade under the Hudson’s Bay Company in Labrador, 1830–50

Focusing on the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) 1830–50, this paper examines the unsettling and reconstitution of racial categories in Labrador. It argues that in Labrador these categories reflected the particular class-based logic that emerged as the company sought to assert itself in this region in the face of resistance to encroachment. In particular, in this setting, social categories were tied to access to the distribution of credit in the prevailing system of merchant capitalism (“truck”) in the region. And, while understanding the foundations of colonial categories in Labrador is obviously important for grasping the history of this locale, the centrality of the credit system to racial distinctions in the region also has wider implications for our understanding of nineteenth century colonialism. After all, relations of exchange figured prominently as mechanisms through which Europeans asserted authority over colonial spaces in a wide variety of “contact zones,” especially in the middling years of the nineteenth century. It is likely that the pattern of relations and mode of categorization under the HBC in Labrador had parallels elsewhere.

Multiracial Women and the African Press in Post-World War II Lourenço Marques, Mozambique

Based on original research of the biweekly publication of the women's pages in Lourenço Marques' only ‘African’ newspaper, O Brado Africano, this paper addresses racial and class dimensions of urban ideals of feminine modernity in the colonial capital of Mozambique. Between 1948 and 1958 the Pagina para a mulher produced rich and at times radical content. During this period, an urban multiracial middle class of Christian, educated women used the Pagina para a mulher to transmit, discuss, and debate ideas of what it meant to be a modern woman, mother, wife, daughter, and contributing member of society. The article looks specifically at feminine ideals of modernity that gave meaning to colonial categories of ‘civilised’ and ‘non-civilised’ Africans within an assimilationist legal framework of ‘native’ African subject and ‘non-native’ African citizen, and the racial tensions produced by a colonial ideology of European racial and cultural superiority. I argue that the content of the women's pages of O Brado Africano merits scholarly attention as a site of female social and political discourse and aspiration in a post-WWII era of possibility.

The Arson of a Museum: Ethnography of historical experience and plant fiber use in northern Coclé Province, Panama

The use of tree cambium to make cucua dance outfits attracted the attention of international plant and culture conservationists. Scholarly narratives, media interpretations, and publications for the tourism market about cucua often reiterate racialized colonial categories as the origin point for a history construed as Panamanian. Implementation of conservation programs, like the construction of a museum and cultural center, ignored existing social structures among dancers. Arsonists allegedly destroyed the museum. This article presents data collected in anthropological participant observation methodologies and describes why conservation programs were rejected through the ethnography of historical experience that shows how people make sense of the past. Local explanations of plant uses that include power accessed through the ruptures of social structures during liminal times, such as Spanish colonialism, are real and not just symbolic. This article places cucua plant use in cultural context with other plant fibers used in northern Coclé for baskets, all called “weaving.”

Theory in Time

To define or describe the middle ages is to take a political stance, wittingly or not. Controversy accompanies any period definition, of course, as recent skirmishes over the early modern, the modern, and modernity attest. But the politics of the Middle Ages has generally gone under the radar of literary and cultural critique, precisely because of the nature of its formation and its relation to the modern. In fact “the Middle Ages” is a colonial category, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as (primarily western) Europeans worked to legitimize, classify, and make sense of colonial policies, practices, and encounters. The formation of medieval studies as a discipline, vital to the then incipient discipline of history, was also fully integrated with colonial bureaucracy and administration (Frantzen; Biddick; Dagenais and Greer; Ganim; Kabir; Davis; Davis and Altschul; Lampert-Weissig). As a form of temporal spacing, the category of the Middle Ages enabled the thought of Europe's difference from itself, thus making it possible not only to define European nations across time but also to establish a scale of comparison by which to measure others and to deny them coeval status—that is, equal standing as human beings in regard to law, trade, the capacity for self-rule, and so on.

Can the post-colonial be post-religious? Reflections from the secular metropolis

If, following Masuzawa, Fitzgerald and others we assume that “the religious” is a category produced by Western colonial regimes in tandem with that of “the secular,” then consequently the post-secular would need to be post-religious, as well. Here I demonstrate how in one metropolitan case, Germany, the religious and secular divide is evoked to produce a particular exclusivist narrative of national identity. A substantial part of German civil society, media, and legal establishment mobilize an imagined culturally Christian vision of Germany in order to exclude from public visibility and political participation German born Muslims of Turkish descent. The colonial twin categories of secular-religious still operate in the shaping of the German polity. Decolonizing it would thus require not only to enter a post-secular dialogue with religious presentations in the public sphere, as Habermas contends; rather a post-secular polity would require the post-religious.

Gender, Colonialism, and the Queerness of Dreams: Seventeenth-Century Dreamwork

This essay focuses attention on the cognitive and spiritual work of the dream and the devotional labor of the Jesuit missionary in seventeenth-century Quebec, and views these often passionately opposed spiritual efforts—performed by the various and often passionately opposed peoples of Catholic France and “New France”—through the lens of gender. In the case of early modern Atlantic dreaming, gender and its confusions in the social imaginary are not tied to the historical practice of female-bodied persons. The femininity investigated here is positional and symbolic. There are many kinds of “female” in the early modern shake-up: the terms of sex and gender lose purchase in an avalanche of novel categories at least transitionally operative in the social and epistemological chaos of the period. Confronted by the colonial New World, European gender and other fundamental categories are visible as fragile arrays of power relations, grounded in opposing forms of consciousness.

Duration of development of males in colonies of Polistes dominula (Christ) (Hymenoptera, Vespidae: Polistinae) in the south of Ukraine

The relation between the duration of ontogenesis of Polistes dominula males and the social structure of their colonies was studied in July–August 2012. Males developing in successful colonies with a foundress passed through the later-instar larval and pupal stages more quickly than those in orphaned colonies. Successful colonies more often produced males with weakly melanized mesopleura as compared with orphaned ones. Males from the two categories of colonies did not differ in the head and wing size. The influence of mechanical stress and nutrition during larval development and the specific signaling behavior of the foundresses on the male phenotypic diversity in P. dominula is discussed.

Negotiating Ethnic Recognition Systems in the UK: the soft pan-ethnic identifications of Latin American migrants in the north of England

Despite aiming to provide minority ethnic groups with material equality and protection from discrimination, the British ethno-cultural system of recognition has perpetuated social differentiation which is difficult to transcend. Drawing from interviews with informants and 10 in-depth case studies with Latin American and Latino-British families in the Yorkshire and Greater Manchester regions of the north of England, the paper explores the fraught relationship between these migrants and their multicultural framework of incorporation. Significant here are the contested understandings of the Latin American collective identity, combined with the diversity of migration trajectories, socioeconomic backgrounds and life-course needs of migrants and their children, which contribute to soft pan-ethnic identifications among the participant population. It is argued that, by encouraging migrants and their descendants to seek recognition through absolute ethnic differences, multicultural recognition systems can reproduce colonial categories and fail to respond to the diverse social and life-course needs of migrants.

Aproximaciones cientificas al mestizo mexicano

The colonial category of mestizo was an ideological tool that shaped national identity in the post-revolutionary period in Mexico. The Indian-mestizo axis functioned to organize the ethnic and political interactions of the state. Doctors and anthropologists reinforced this dual taxonomy in studies of human populations, using biomedical markers to produce differentiated descriptions of the Indian and the mestizo. Genomic descriptions have contributed both to the construction of the scientistic notion of the mestizo based on the percentage of Indian, European and African ancestry, and also to the rise of two technoscientific objects that we call the molecular mestizo and the bioinformatic mestizo. Here we describe the interactions between the ideological and scientific incarnations of the mestizo.

Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity by Mahmood Mamdani (review)

Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.168 pp.In an intellectual climate where scholars are increasingly wary of catego- ries like tribal, and traditional, Mahmood Mamdani's lat- est work offers a satisfying unmasking of colonial constructions, and an antidote to their legal and political legacies. As a scholar whose work fre- quently straddles border between law, politics, and culture, Mamdani has a reputation for revealing rational bases for otherwise unconscio- nable histories. From his examination of Rwandan genocide in When Victims Become Killers (2001), to more recent works examining politics, identity, and terrorism such as Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, Cold War and Roots of Terror (2004) and Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and War on Terror (2009), Mamdani convincingly traces philosophical foundations of community, citizenship, and policy to evi- dence influence of colonial categories. His latest work stems squarely from this tradition, offering added value of comparative analysis, and demonstrating holding power of as a political identity in post-colonial world.Indeed, while decades of anthropological literature on technolo- gies, philosophies, and legacies of imperialism have located origins of racism in practices of colonial rule, Mamdani asserts that racism is only half story. Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity, Mamdani ar- gues that colonial from British India to Dutch East Indies was specifically based on two different axes of discrimination-race and tribe-through which natives and settlers were legally distinguished, differently ruled, and confined to separate social and political destinies. Mamdani further argues that shift from direct to indirect colonial rule, rather than lax control over colonized populations (which promises of non-interference might suggest), masked colonizers' vast ambitions to renegotiate native's subjectivity. Binding movement to indirect rule with parallel shifts-from civilizing missions to projects of protection, from assimilationism to a preoccupation with defining and managing dif- ference, and towards a new form of govern mentality dependent upon an emerging settler/native binary-Mamdani powerfully asserts that the native was creation of theorists of an empire-in-crisis (6). No longer under clear control of crown rule, colonial subjects became objects in need of stricter rule and, therefore, necessarily more subversive forms of subjugation.1Mamdani places colonial crisis point at 1857 Sepoy Mutiny in India: In reflection that followed crisis, Mamdani explains, the colonial mission was redefined-from civilization to conservation and from progress to (8). The movement culminated in 1858 with Queen Victoria's proclaimed doctrine of noninterference in India (8). While this doctrine superficially diluted colonial control of region by abandon- ing assimilationist projects in favor of protecting customary practices, Mamdani suggests that indirect rule achieved opposite, for the pre- rogative to define boundary, substance and of 'customary,' gave vast scope to powers of occupying authority (27). Combining political necessity of social order with an interest in conserving custom, administrators capitalized upon bureaucratic im- plications of indirect rule to emphasize differences that would keep masses divided among themselves.With great attention to colonial political history, Mamdani traces this movement from Indian subcontinent through reforms in British Malaya, Dutch East Indies, and several African colonies, arguing that colonial intellectuals undertook process of defining, and by extension trans- forming, race and tribe as academic and administrative shortcuts to gain- ing control of subject populations. …

A Hybrid Identity in a Pluralistic Nineteenth-Century Colonial Context

The colonial process often occurs within a pluralistic context in which all the actors continuously renegotiate their identities. Traditionally, this context has been framed within a colonizer/colonized dichotomy, but recent scholarship has embraced a more-complex interpretation, such that colonizers and colonized are not homogenizing categories, and variations in experience are accepted. The deconstruction of colonial categories further complicates pluralistic contexts and allows for a more nuanced reading of the past; however, the colonial discourse continues to have difficulty exploring and discussing identities that do not fit neatly into either a colonizer or colonized identity. This paper explores how the Labrador Metis, a self-defined hybrid identity, do not cleanly fit within the current discourse and highlights the need to begin reconceptualizing the actors within the colonial process.

“Muchos negros, mulatos y otros colores”: Visual Culture and Colonial Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century

Hispanic-American societies of the colonial period are traditionally described as being hierarchized along a system of racial classification. Indeed, the Spanish term casta has been translated as race for that very purpose. Considering both terms as synonymous, however, leads to a conflation of colonial categories and contemporary concepts, thus simplifying a highly complex and lengthy process. This article focuses on the distinctly colonial elements that contributed to transforming a notion derived from nobiliary terminology into a science of phenotypes. The study of this visual culture and vocabulary, initially rooted in Mesoamerica, reveals the regional and interimperial dialogue that established a Euro-American space of shared conceptual creation.

Producing Localities and Nationhood in a Globalizing Southeast Asian City

This essay discusses social imaginaries and their associated anxieties and varying scales and provenances that overlap and intersect at the site of the “local.” Based on a long-term fieldwork at an urban poor Hindu-Indian “squatter” settlement situated on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), how local survival strategies have morphed alongside the stabilizing imperatives of nation-hood formation are examined. In the case of Malaysia, this has involved perpetuating the colonial categories of “race” and “religion” in tandem with appropriating the newer constructs of “globalization” and the drive to remake Kuala Lumpur into a “World Class City.”