Cosmopolitan Encounters Research Articles

Language learning versus vocational training: French, Arab and British voices speak about indigenous girls’ education in nineteenth-century colonial Algeria

This article focuses on the first school for indigenous girls in Algeria that opened in Algiers in 1845. The founder, Eugénie Luce, taught girls the rudiments – French language and grammar, reading, arithmetic, and Arabic, while the afternoon hours were devoted to sewing. This early focus on teaching French in order to achieve the “fusion of the races” by forming women who would be intermediaries between the French colonisers and indigenous families, foundered in the early 1860s. In the place of language learning, the colonial administration decided to support vocational training and transformed the existing schools into embroidery workshops. The workshop continued to exist until 1906 under the responsibility of Luce’s granddaughter, Henriette Benaben. The two women’s friendship with British women tourists had an impact on the way they promoted their activities and played a role in the shift toward teaching vocational skills. An analysis of the debates and discussion surrounding the nature of the Luce–Benaben school and workshop provide a way to question how cosmopolitan encounters and imperial examples shaped educational experiments in Algeria. By including the voices of French colonial administrators, Arab notables, British women visitors, and, of course, Luce herself, the article argues for the importance of considering trans-imperial encounters, as well as the weight of individual actors, in the interpretation of shifting colonial educational policy.

The experimental hut: hosting vectors

In southeast Tanzania, ten canvas huts raised on wooden foundations occupy a plot of cleared rice field. Designed to simulate malaria transmission on the domestic scale, the experimental hut is constructed in the fashion of indigenous homes (complete with villagers, paid to spend the night), but is structurally modified to render mosquito behaviours visible. The experiment's domestic camouflage provides the setting for multiple, and reciprocal, hostings: between parasite, mosquito, and human, and between villagers, volunteers, and scientists. This paper explores the valences of hospitality when the ‘home’ becomes a site of experimentation, and the cosmopolitan encounters these experiments entail.RésuméDans le sud‐est de la Tanzanie, dix cases en toile dressées sur des fondations en bois occupent une parcelle de rizière dégagée. Conçue pour simuler la transmission du paludisme à l'échelle domestique, la case expérimentale est construite à la manière des maisons indigènes (avec même des villageois, payés pour y passer la nuit), mais sa structure est modifiée de façon à rendre le comportement des moustiques visible. Le camouflage domestique de l'expérience crée le cadre de multiples hébergements réciproques : entre le parasite, le moustique et l'homme, entre villageois, bénévoles et scientifiques. Le présent article explore les valences de l'hospitalité quand « la maison » devient un lieu d'expérimentation, ainsi que les rencontres cosmopolites qu'impliquent ces expériences.

Indigeneity across borders: Hemispheric migrations and cosmopolitan encounters

ABSTRACTThe increasing migration of indigenous people from Latin America to the United States signals a new horizon for the study of indigeneity—complexly understood as subjectivities, knowledge, and practices of the earliest human inhabitants of a particular place and including legal and racial identities that refer to these people. Focusing on indigenous migration to San Francisco, California, I explore how government, service providers, and community organizations respond to the arrival of new ethnic groups while also contributing to an expanding Urban Indian collective identity. In addition to reviewing such governmental practices as the creation of new census categories and related responses to indigenous ethnic diversity, I illustrate how some members of a diverse Urban Indian population unite through participation in rituals such as the Maya Waqxaqi’ B’atz’ (Day of Human Perfection), transplanted to San Francisco from Guatemala. The rituals recall homelands near and far in a broader social imagination about being and belonging in the world. The social imagination, borne in part through migration and diaspora, acknowledges the local and the particular in a framework of shared values about what it means to be human. I analyze this meaning making as cosmopolitanism in practice. By merging indigeneity and cosmopolitanism, I join other scholars who strive to decenter classical notions of cosmopolitan “worldliness,” drawing attention to alternative sources of beneficent sociality and for cultivating humanity.