Colonial Knowledge Research Articles

Rooted in Wonder

Rooted in WonderTales of Indigenous Activism and Community Organizing Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada (bio) and Aiko Yamashiro (bio) On August 9, 2015, 10,000 people marched in Waikīkī. They were a sea of red—the color of our ali‘i, our chiefs, the color of ‘āweoweo swimming in schools, the color of our blood that has nourished this land for generations. Some marched to speak out against land abuse related to pesticide use and GMO (genetically modified organism) testing; others marched to stop the urbanization of agricultural land. But the vast majority of the people marching, the indigenous Kānaka Maoli and their allies, all of us who call this place home, were marching in support of the sacred mountain, Mauna Kea, to prevent its further desecration. Throughout the march—and this whole struggle, in fact—we have heard the wondrous names of our akua, our gods: Wākea, Poli‘ahu, Mo‘oinanea, Kūkahau‘ula. The mo‘olelo (story, legend, tradition, or history) and practices that Hawaiians have passed on, often mainly within family traditions, were on the lips of the entire Hawaiian community, across our islands, and even on Turtle Island, where some of our family now lives. The movement for Mauna Kea, often seen on social media through the #WeAreMaunakea and #TMT-Shutdown hashtags, has captured the imaginations of our community in a way that no other issue has in decades, some say since the mass mobilization of Hawaiians protesting the overthrow in 1893 and subsequent illegal annexation to the United States in 1898. Kanaka Maoli stories have persisted through this time of struggle, but we have often been looking to other places for the magic that came with them. Now, our mo‘olelo have energized us, awakened us, moved us. Part of it is the awe and [End Page 17] wonder that we feel at the top of the mountain. Even if we have not been to the peak of Mauna Kea, we know the awe and reverence of being in such a place: the wonder at the dedication of the protectors who have camped on the mountain—as we write this in September 2015, for over six months now1—in the thin air and cold that comes from being 9,000 feet above sea level, but also the wonder at the power of our collectivity, what happens when we tell our stories and do our chants, in larger and larger numbers across the world. After a day of pule, of chant and ceremony, carried out across the Pacific, during the middle of the hottest July we have experienced in some years, it snowed at the top of Mauna Kea, shutting down the road leading to the telescope’s construction site. What has really set this movement apart is the visibility of the younger generation leading the movement. They are still guided by the kūpuna who have come before them, but it is clear that they are taking the reins in their own hands. The previous generations of activists and others who fought to protect our sacred spaces and revive and maintain Indigenous language and cultural practices set the stage for the emergence of this new generation of politically active and culturally aware aloha ‘āina, the deep connection to land that motivates so many of our actions. They are both activists and keepers of story at the same time, recognizing the responsibility that has been given to them with the knowledge of our wonder-filled traditions. Historically, Indigenous wisdom and wonder have had a fraught relationship with the fields of folklore and fairy-tale studies, cultural anthropology, and ethnography, with Indigenous knowledges being relegated to folk wisdom or fairy tales as a way to undermine their authority in colonial knowledge systems, to make way for colonial projects of modernization or development on Indigenous lands. Critical folklore and fairy-tale scholars, however, have also worked to map the global circuits and world making of these colonial traditions (Naithani) and to repoliticize the power of wonder—a potentially transgressive power of questioning, curiosity, amazement, and awe that call forth “our own active—and even more so, activist—responses to and participation in the process of...

“A Hindu is white although he is black”: Hindu Alterity and the Performativity of Religion and Race between the United States and the Caribbean

AbstractThis essay uses the controversies surrounding the enigmatic Ismet Ali, a yogi working in Chicago and New York in the 1920s, to illuminate the complexities of how the performativity of religion and race are interrelated. I examine several moments in which Ali's “authenticity” as Indian is brought into doubt to open up larger questions regarding the global flows of colonial knowledge, racial tropes, and groups of people between India, the United States, and the Caribbean. I explore the ways in which, in the early twentieth-century United States, East Indian “authenticity” only became legible via identificatory practices that engaged with and adapted orientalized stereotypes. The practices of the yogi persona and its sartorial stylings meant to signify “East Indianness” in the United States, particularly the donning of a turban and beard, were one mode through which both South Asian and African Americans repurposed “Hindoo” stereotypes as models for self-formation. By taking on “Hindoo” identities, peoples of color could circumvent the U.S. black/white racial binary and the violence of Jim Crow. This act of racial passing was also an act of religious passing. However, the ways in which identities had to and could be performed changed with context as individuals moved across national and colonial boundaries.

THE MISSIONARY MOVEMENT IN AFRICAN AND WORLD HISTORY: MISSION SOURCES AND RELIGIOUS ENCOUNTER

AbstractThis article is a revised and expanded version of my inaugural lecture as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on 12 March 2014. It highlights the evolution of Ecclesiastical History to include the study of Christianity in the global south and shows how recent developments in the study of African and world history have produced a dynamic and multi-faceted model of religious encounter, an encounter which includes the agency of indigenous Christians alongside the activities of missionaries. Investigating the contribution of faith missionaries to the production of colonial knowledge in Belgian Congo, the article challenges stereotypes about the relations between Pentecostalism and modernity, and between mission and empire. Throughout, consideration is given to the range of missionary sources, textual, visual, and material, and their utility in reconstructing social differentiation in African societies, particularly in revealing indigenous African criticism of ‘custom’.

Anthropologists and Viceroys: Colonial knowledge and policy making in India, 1871–1911

AbstractThe anthropology of caste was a pivotal part of colonial knowledge in British India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Denzil Ibbetson and Herbert Risley, then the two leading official anthropologists, both made major contributions to the study of caste, which this article discusses. Ibbetson and Risley assumed high office in the imperial government in 1902 and played important roles in policy making during the partition of Bengal (1903–5) and the Morley-Minto legislative councils reforms (1906–9); Ibbetson was also influential in deciding Punjab land policy in the 1890s. Contemporary policy documents, which this article examines, show that the two men's anthropological knowledge had limited influence on their deliberations. Moreover, caste was irrelevant to their thinking about agrarian policy, the promotion of Muslim interests, and the urban, educated middle class, whose growing nationalism was challenging British rule. No ethnographic information was collected about this class, because the scope of anthropology was restricted to ‘traditional’ rural society. At the turn of the twentieth century, colonial anthropological knowledge, especially about caste, had little value for the imperial government confronting Indian nationalism, and was less critical in constituting the Indian colonial state than it previously had been.

Educating the nation. German history textbooks since 1900 : representations of colonialism

Empires and colonies had a distinctive impact on the formation of national identities in Europe and school history education helped to translate the colonial experience into national histories. As the German colonial experience was rather short-lived one could argue that it bore little on German national identity. However, a close reading of German history textbooks since the turn of the 20th century illustrates that colonialism affected the lesser imperial powers in a similar way. Germany perceived itself as a colonial power since it participated in the European project of expansion and even after Germany had lost its colonies history textbooks did not fundamentally alter their outlook on the nation. Still conceiving national identity as backed by European superiority and modernity textbooks perpetuated the dichotomic epistemology of colonial knowledge. In fact, German textbooks presented national history very much in tune with European developments and they educated the nation almost until today as if the colonial world order was still stable.

“A People Forgotten by History”: Soviet Studies of the Kurds

The Russian/Soviet experience raises complex general questions concerning orientalism, conceptual hegemony, and the politics of (post-)colonial knowledge. Russia was not an empire in Said's sense, and drew much of its orientalist categories from non-imperialist German sources; the Soviet Union was explicitly anti-imperialist, and was dedicated to the emancipation of subaltern classes and nationalities. Yet Soviet orientalism in part reproduced hegemonic categories of “bourgeois” knowledge, notably concerning language and national identity. This becomes especially clear in the case of Soviet studies of Kurdish, a language subaltern with respect to Persian, Arabic, and, increasingly, Turkish. In the 1920s and early 1930s, native scholars like Erebê Shemo, Qanatê Kurdo, and Heciyê Cindî pioneered the creation of both an alphabet and a literature in Kurdish and of scholarly linguistic studies. Their work was shaped (and encouraged) by Nikolaj Marr's rejection of the idea of genetic links between Indo-Persian languages, and of the reification of “national characters.” Marr's “japhetic” linguistics dovetailed with Stalin's nationality policies in the 1920s and 1930s; it is rightly rejected as unscientific, but it did have positive emancipatory effects. It criticized ethnocentric and racist assumptions in contemporary Indo-European linguistics, and emphasized the value of spoken subaltern vernaculars like Ossetian and Kurdish against hegemonic written languages like Sanskrit and Persian. It also had the paradoxical effect of both countering bourgeois nationalism and encouraging national consciousness. The article concludes with a discussion of how the Soviet experience may affect our view of the Gramscian concept of hegemony and of the linguistic turn in later postcolonial studies.

Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion by Anna Morcom (review)

Reviewed by: Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion by Anna Morcom Claire Pamment ILLICIT WORLDS OF INDIAN DANCE: CULTURES OF EXCLUSION. By Anna Morcom. London: Hurst and Company, 2013. 286 pp. Paper, $30. In her ambitious new monograph, Anna Morcom examines the mechanisms of cultural exclusion in colonial and postcolonial India that have eroded the livelihood, identity, and status of erotic dancers. While the South Asian reader may be familiar with the nineteenth-century anti-nautch campaigns against female hereditary performers (A. Srinivasan 1985; D. Srinavasan 2006; Soneji 2012), Morcom opens new territory in exploring how similar marginalzations continue to be played out in contemporary India. With a focus on present-day Mumbai bar dance girls and transgender female (kothi) performers, she brings ethnographic and archival research to trace out these communities’ artistic and hereditary lineages and current struggles against stigma, decline of traditional patronage, and direct bans. Like the historical tawa’if and devadasi courtesan dancers, these individuals are often branded as prostitutes, problems, or at best victims, and isolated from their performer identities. Pitched as external to culture, they operate in the shadow of legitimate classical performing arts and now a middle-class Bollywood dance craze. Morcom offers an insightful reading of the colonial knowledge and categorization, nationalist bourgeois morality, and contemporary development rescue narratives that have produced these cultural exclusions, while also considering challenges to the binary topography of legitimate and illegitimate dance worlds. Morcom’s discussion highlights over a decade of marginalization through three loosely interrelated narratives concerning female hereditary performers, transgender women, and legitimate Bollywood. Her strongest material is on female hereditary performers, who take the focus of the book over three chapters. Chapter 1 provides a rich overview of the factors that have pushed female hereditary performers out of legitimate courtesan-type roles (tawa’if, nautch, baijis), Parsi and nautanki theatre, and early cinema, and into an illicit realm of sexualized performance and increasing prostitution. Through the colonial caste and tribe classifications, venereal disease regulation, and Criminal Tribes Act to the anti-nautch campaigns, she demonstrates the moral imperatives that went into defining these artists as prostitutes, which, on the whole, isolated them from the reformed, de-eroticized, and respectable classical performing arts. She shows that their identity as performers continues to be undermined, in twenty-first-century laws, academia, literature, development discourse, and the broader public sphere. Chapter 2 draws upon colonial ethnography and contemporary fieldwork to illustrate [End Page 689] the impact of these categorizations upon contemporary performers’ lives, whereby, for many, prostitution has become reality. In this rather technical chapter, targeted toward the specialist reader, Morcom traces out the history of underresearched and interconnected professional castes, such as the Nat, Bedia, Kanjar, Ganharva, and Kolhati. She traces out the lineages of these groups, from their fluid social mobility in the Mughal Empire and classification as prostitutes in the colonial period, and explores their contemporary struggles for livelihood in professions ranging from bar dancers to sex workers. We return to these performers in chapter 5, through North Indian female dancers who had congregated in Mumbai bars from the 1980s, recreating Nawabi culture for a Maharashtrian middle-class male audience in erotic dance to Bollywood tunes, until 2005 when a ban was levied upon these dancers. Interpreting this ban as anti-nautch II, Morcom eloquently argues that discourse around the ban illustrated a progression of the nineteenth-century purity campaigns. On the one hand were universalistic rights-based arguments of saving women from exploitation, and on the other arguments of protecting society from moral ruin. Both negated the history, agency, and livelihood of the performers themselves. While these acts cemented old prejudices and pushed dancers further into illicit terrains of sex work, performers offered their own legal challenge, appropriating rights discourses to defend performance in terms of labor and livelihood. Chapters 3 and 6 enter seemingly different territory, by introducing kothis (zennanas), men who see themselves as females in gender and sexuality, for whom dance has constituted a traditional occupation. Like female hereditary artists, she argues that kothis are often discussed as problems and victims, and relegated to frameworks of HIV/AIDS, gender, sexuality, marginality, and prostitution, and...

Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery, by Juanita de Barros

Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery, by Juanita de Barros. Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xii, 297 pp. $32.95 US (paper). This fascinating study opens with the powerful imagery of a homeless woman delivering a child in a mule pen in St. George parish, Barbados in 1893. As De Barros notes, this woman's story comes to us filtered through the lens of T. Law Gaskin, a physician who recorded his concern over the impact such incidents might have on the island's reputation and used it to push for the establishment of colonial maternity services. Gaskin was not alone. As De Barros convincingly demonstrates, women's reproductive labour was a subject of deep anxiety among local and metropolitan officials, doctors, ministers, and newspaper editors (among others) throughout the British Caribbean in the first century following emancipation. Some worried that high infant mortality rates and low population growth threatened the plantation labour supply, while others saw the provision of maternity services as a humanitarian imperative and/or an index of civilization. These concerns led to much debate across the region, while also prompting practical efforts to develop medical services and collect statistics (chapters one and two), regulate midwifery (chapter three), educate mothers on infant welfare (chapter four), and eliminate contagious diseases (chapter five). Along the way, these often limited and disjointed campaigns pulled in a broader range of actors--from social welfare workers to grannies--who left their own mark. While the book focuses on Barbados, Jamaica, and Guyana, many themes are relevant to the region as a whole and the British colonial project in general. The book also examines population in a broad sense, providing a wealth of new information on the development of public health infrastructure, the production of colonial knowledge, the impact of malaria, cholera, and venereal diseases, reforms of bastardy laws and poor relief systems, the growth of nursing and social welfare organizations, discourses surrounding Caribbean family formation, and the expansion of American philanthropy. It will thus appeal to a broad audience of scholars and students exploring not only Caribbean and British imperial history, but also the international history of public health, medicine, demography, sociology, and philanthropy. For those interested more specifically in the themes of sex and gender, there is much offered here. De Barros skillfully traces the development of the twin discourses of the so-called bad black working class mother/ midwife (whose perceived ignorance was often blamed for infant mortality) and the maternalist white nurse matron (charged most often with civilizing the former). These discourses drew on and reinforced the colonial race-class-gender hierarchy. But De Barros also moves past these narratives by highlighting stories of working class women who challenged these characterizations and pointed to the impact poverty and insecurity had on their ability to care for their children, a fact that was only occasionally recognized by officials. …

Colonialism and religion: colonial knowledge productions on Sri Pada as 'Adam's Peak'

This paper is directed to discuss the ‘effective’aspect of colonial knowledge in the discursive constructions of one of the popular pilgrimage sites, Sri Pada in Sri Lanka. What explored here is how different authoritative discourses emerge about Sri Pada from the different colonial powers: Portuguese (1505-1687), Dutch (1687-1896) and British (1896-1948). Authoritative discourse on the ‘colonised’ was largely produced through the agents of the colonial governments, military personnel, Christian missionaries, philologists and administrators. In this regard, Sri Pada, or Adam's Peak1 as it was called by colonial powers, was not exceptional. These forms of knowledge production change with changes in the practices of colonialism. In this respect, this paper investigates what gets identified and counted by colonial authorized knowledge as ‘Adam’s Peak’. Such an investigation is not new to anthropology and the human sciences in general. A large body of knowledge has been produced in the last two decades to unpack ‘a particular construction of colonial knowledge’ (Pels, 1997). However, a limitation in such an analysis can be seen, because most of the ‘decolonising projects’ in South Asia (India and Sri Lanka) have located their fields of work and expertise in the 19th and 20th centuries to unpack ‘British colonial knowledge production’ and they have paid scanty attention to ‘pre-British knowledge production’; for example, as far as India and Sri Lanka are concerned, the Portuguese and the Dutch ‘colonial knowledge productions’. A reasonably comprehensive understanding of culture, religion and history of the various sub-continental regions in the early 18th century and before is a prerequisite for the understanding of the transformations which the British instituted.

From Acharam to Knowledge: Claims of Caste Dominance in Twentieth-century Malabar

Exploring the caste practices of Namboothiris (Kerala Brahmins) in the first half of the twentieth century, this article analyses the transformation of Brahminical claims of superiority over other castes, in interaction with colonial knowledge practices. The article maps the historical process by which claims of Brahminical superiority transformed from ritual to knowledge—from claims based on acharam (the daily practices of rituals) into a claim of possession of traditional knowledge. By analysing the upper caste world of Namboothiris, the article explores the tension between emerging order of colonial knowledge and the existing order of acharam. The article shows that until the reform movement in the 1920s, Namboothiris as a community were not part of either traditional or colonial knowledge practices. Even in the reform movement the attempt was not to wholeheartedly enter into the domains of knowledge but to incorporate the elements of acharam into the order of colonial knowledge.

The “Criminal Tribe” in India before the British

AbstractThis 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 colonialusesof 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.

Pierre Singaravélou, Professer l’Empire. Les « sciences coloniales » en France sous la IIIe République

In the last three decades, the study of colonial knowledge has become central to the scholarship on Western colonialism. The notion that culture, science, literature, and knowledge, or “discourse”, in general was deeply complicit with the violence and politics of Europe’s colonizing endeavours became the flag of “postcolonial studies”—a thriving cross-disciplinary field in the social sciences and humanities, now well established in many universities. This critical scholarship about the coloni...

Book Review: Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India (2011) Indira Sengupta & Daud Ali, editors

Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India, edited by Sengupta and Ali, belongs to a body of literature that attempts to provide scholarly understandings of colonial societies and imperial history through the lens of colonial knowledge. Colonial knowledge is conceived as the form and content of knowledge that was produced out of and facilitated the process of colonization. The idea that colonialism could be understood by focusing on the production and dissemination of knowledge that accompanied it owes much to Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, which foregrounded representation as a key aspect of imperialism. The idea of representation made possible the understanding that colonial authorities exercised power over colonized people not only through military conquest or economic dominance but also through the command of knowledge that they had over the colonized people. Therefore, scholarly work inspired by Said (1978) views colonialism as much a cultural project as a military or an economic one.

Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures by Kelly Wisecup (review)

Reviewed by: Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures by Kelly Wisecup Kelly L. Bezio (bio) Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures Kelly Wisecup Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013 272 pp. Until the publication of Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures, scholars tended to proceed from the assumption that European colonists’ texts offered little, if any, access to Native American or African knowledge systems (see for example works by Stephen Greenblatt, Anthony Pagen, Ed White, Joyce Chaplin, and Cristobal Silva). Reading colonial texts for nonimperial perspectives, it seemed, would be like standing in front of a one-way mirror expecting to see reflected back a person standing directly behind it. And yet hard to shake is the suspicion that Native American and African ways of knowing surely influenced colonial writing and knowledge making, meaning that such ideas and cosmologies would, therefore, be present in the archive—and available to analysis. What early American scholarship invested in studying interculturalism required was a way to read for that epistemological influence without being blinded by colonialist perspectives or, worse yet, reifying colonizing processes in our research. Medical Encounters offers us that sorely needed critical methodology. Reading for “texture,” Kelly Wisecup argues, turns inquiry toward places where European, Native American, and African knowledge sources, whether they collaborated or clashed, remain present. In its most basic sense, texture is defined as a surface’s consistency and appearance—an apt [End Page 596] metaphor for Wisecup’s approach since her analysis begins from what we might imagine as the rough “bumps,” “knots,” and “tears” in colonial texts. For instance, she examines how in the hands of colonists a genre such as historia (used in early modern Europe to describe the course of diseases) ends without typical narrative conclusions. Instead, lists, recipes, satires, and footnotes show us where to look for Native American and African influence on colonists’ ways of knowing. Native and African alterations to the fabric of colonial knowledge become visible in the “rhetorical discontinuities” located in “shifts from historia to non-narrative literary strategies and finally to classificatory forms” (32). Of course, texture is not simply a metaphor. Building from the work of anthropologist Neil L. Whitehead and literary critic Myra Jehlen, Wisecup locates in the textual anomalies, inconsistencies, lapses, and incoherencies discussed by these other scholars the opportunity to avoid “read[ing] colonial texts transparently” and begin parsing “the contexts that colonists, Natives, and Africans shared and … the ways in which these people responded to colonial encounters” (12). Wisecup may be focusing on medical writing (and the way in which it was constituted by more than Euro-American discourses), but her book is a model for how, regardless of the textual archive to be examined, texture gives unprecedented access to encounter’s various facets. This methodology allows Wisecup to offer an important insight into the triangulated nature of colonial identity construction. To be sure, binaries such as black versus white or savage versus civilized would come to characterize the way that difference was articulated during the nineteenth century. But as Medical Encounters emphasizes, “before the end of the eighteenth century colonists employed a triangulated notion of identity by comparing themselves to Natives and Africans on the one hand and to Europeans on the other” (20). Such a critical intervention matters because it corrects the way we understand why certain colonial views came to be standard. For example, we know that colonial interpretations of Native American and African knowledge equated it with witchcraft. We might be tempted to think that colonists were simply relying on Old World natural philosophies or that they found the knowledge systems of other cultures “incompatible with a focus on natural causes and mechanical theories” (31). But rather than assume that such a view was “characteristic” of Europeans in the New World, Wisecup uncovers the process that crystallized it (32). Back in the metropole, it was commonly held that American climates caused colonists’ [End Page 597] bodies and mental faculties to degenerate, making the medical knowledge they gathered suspect. By casting Native American and African knowledge as “diabolic, inappropriate magic,” colonists defended their intellectual products from bias and made “religion and...

Conocimiento y explotación de los pueblos del Noroeste hispano en la tradición literaria grecolatina

The campaigns of Brutus and Caepio brought the Iberian Northwest to the light for Greco-Roman civilization. Previous information relied on colonial knowledge. That very process of appropriation included denomination, based primarily on Roman experience and classical tradition. The way space was defined and territorial organization occurred in parallel. In both of those, Augustus played a role of paramount importance, by creating the new provincial system and providing the basis for Agrippa’s cartography.

Imaging Caste: Photography, the Housing Question and the Making of Sociology in Colonial Bombay, 1900–1939

This paper studies photographs of Bombay's built environment, especially Dalit and working-class houses, taken by two social scientists in the 1920s and 1930s. The photographs are situated at the intersection of four discursive temporalities: (a) social reforms initiated by Indian nationalists of the late nineteenth to twentieth centuries; (b) sanitary reforms and urban restructuring undertaken by city administrators and the colonial state, which reappeared vigorously after the plague epidemic of 1896; (c) colonial knowledge production, including census, labour and housing reports that informed academic social–scientific knowledge; and (d) Dalit and working-class social movements that aspired to transgressing the limits of reform in order to re-define self and the collective, and demand the redistribution of material resources.

‘I never beheld a more piteous object’: abductions and the production of colonial knowledge in maritime Asia

This article argues that European seafarers systematically abducted Asian sailors and coastal inhabitants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This practice was originally utilised in first contact situations, where kidnappings could defuse the security dilemma between ship and shore or facilitate the collection of cultural, geographic and economic information. These two abduction logics – which were often contradictory – continued to be relevant in post-contact encounters in maritime Asia. This article critically analyses several episodes of maritime captive-taking by East India Company trading vessels, British warships and privateers in the Indian Ocean and South-East Asia between the years 1591 and 1792 through a close reading of contemporary printed sources. These incidents demonstrate that Asian sailors were frequently targeted because of their local knowledge. In fact, captive pilots were often essential for European ships conducting war, trade and diplomacy. Unlike the permanent abductions that characterised first contact encounters, later captivities were comparatively benign in that victims were detained for short periods of time and remunerated for their services. Although shorter abductions and monetary compensation can create ambiguity in our sources, acts of resistance play a key role in re-centring the coercion involved in these transactions. Even temporary abductions were traumatic and violent acts. Asian sailors resisted by fleeing, fighting back and through subtle acts of subversion. Critically revisiting these temporary abductions, including the perpetrators' justifications for their violent acts, serves to highlight the importance of Asian knowledge, not just labour, to early modern European seafarers.

Of texts and textiles … : colonial ethnography and contemporary Moroccan material heritage

Conducting ethnographic research on ‘traditional’ craftsmanship and its objects in contemporary Morocco, one cannot help but acknowledge an uncomfortable proximity to French colonial scholarship. In no small part current constructions of ‘traditional’ handicrafts reflect the discursive residues of colonial knowledge production. The massive Protectorate project of ethnographic documentation and description focused in large part on mapping out craft guild structures, handicraft techniques, types of objects and regional styles of dress. These earlier French models treat handicrafts as expressions of collective identities, categorised in terms of gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, residency, and tribe. Present day representations of artisans and handicraft objects recapitulate these early definitions and standardisations in multiple ways. This is particularly true in the case of ‘traditional’ textiles and dress, which are defined in relation to the nation's past but whose forms and iconography are drawn heavily from early twentieth century documentation. This paper explores ethnographically how colonial knowledge production continues to play a role both materially – that is, in the ways in which artisans and their objects are discussed and represented – and conceptually, in terms of the policies and economic initiatives that embrace a particular way of characterising the crafts and the identities that go with them.

The Imperial Security State: British colonial knowledge and empire-building in Asia by James Hevia (review)

The Imperial Security State: British colonial knowledge and empire-building in Asia by James Hevia (review)

The Imperial Security State. British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia by James Hevia (review)

The Imperial Security State. British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia by James Hevia (review)