Indigenous Elites Research Articles

Ornamentalism, Empire and Race: Indigenous Leaders and Honours in Australia and New Zealand

The imperial honours system, David Cannadine has argued, was a means for binding together ‘the British proconsular elite’ and ‘indigenous colonial elites’ throughout the settler colonies and dominions of the British Empire (Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. London: Penguin, 2002). Yet in settler colonies like Australia and New Zealand indigenous populations were marginalised and often disregarded, and it was local white elites who became knights of St Michael and St George, the Bath and the British Empire. Focusing on Australia and New Zealand, this article explores the complex relationships Aboriginal and Māori leaders have had with honours during the twentieth century. Building upon Cannadine's analysis, I examine the ways in which indigenous leaders navigated the political complexities involved in the offer of an honour, and how their acceptance of awards was received by others, shedding light on how honours systems intersected with post-war struggles for indigenous rights in the former dominions.

Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire by Nicholas Thomas (review)

NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 Reviews 131 COLL THRUSH Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire by Nicholas Thomas Yale University Press, 2010 BEST KNOWN FOR HIS BOOK Entangled Objects (1991), Nicholas Thomas begins the award-winning Islanders with one of those moments of colonial entanglement that continue to fascinate scholars and confound expectations. Rather than opening this excellent history of the long nineteenth century in the South Pacific with the arrival of a European on some beach, Thomas opens with a scene involving Kualelo, a Kanaka Maoli teenager, aboard a small boat in the Thames, taking in London’s late Georgian skyline. From this starting point, Thomas offers us a compelling, detailed history of Indigenous encounters with European presences that will be of interest to scholars of Indigenous studies. The book is divided into two parts, covering respectively the first and second halves of the nineteenth century. The rough boundary between these periods has to do with differing levels of political and physical presence of Europeans in the Pacific, including the increasing trend toward labor extraction and formal annexation in the 1860s and afterward. While necessarily overly simplistic, as Thomas admits, this structure does help make some sense out of a bewilderingly complex region involving incredibly diverse Indigenous polities, vast distances, and several colonial powers. At the same time, there are commonalities that stretch across this temporal boundary: the presence, often halting, of Christian missionaries; the canny responses of Indigenous elites to European goods, ideas, and political networks; and the ease with which events could slip into all-out war. Ultimately, this is a book of stories: of the fine-grained, on-the-ground lived experiences of nascent and not-so-nascent colonialism or, as Thomas writes, “what empire really was, not so much at the level of colour on the map, or the policy and diplomacy of the metropolitan powers, but in bibles and blood on the beaches of the islands, and in the imaginations that these novel artefacts and intrusions engendered” (25). Some of the stories contained in Islanders will be familiar to many readers with some knowledge of the Pacific’s history: the diversity and legacy of Captain James Cook’s voyages through the region; the social and environmental collapse of Rapa Nui (Easter Island); the complex machinations of the Pōmare dynasty of Tahiti; and the killing of missionary John Williams on Erromanga that fueled missionary fears and fantasies of martyrdom. Thomas also spends several chapters Reviews NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 132 detailing the rise of capitalist labor extraction in the Pacific, in which Indigenous men were “recruited”—often through lies, coercion, or outright violence —into networks of plantation servitude that stretched from Australia to South America. Others will be far less familiar except to specialists. They include Keatonui , an adroit Marquesan leader who navigated early encounters with missionaries and other foreigners in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and Veidovi, a Fijian headman taken as a captive as part of the United States Exploring Expedition in the 1830s. He also offers detailed insight to one of the bloodiest wars of the nineteenth-century Pacific, which rocked the interior of Fiji’s Viti Levu in the late nineteenth century. And wherever possible in these stories, Thomas includes contemporary Indigenous sources in his discussion of events. Of particular interest are the Kanak chronicles of an outbreak of violence in 1870s New Caledonia, carved in great detail into sections of ­bamboo. Islanders is at times short on interpretive framing or theoretical heft; it is possible to get lost in the details. And despite its title, the book focuses primarily on only select regions of the Pacific, something Thomas acknowledges . Tonga, Fiji, Tahiti, Sāmoa, and parts of Melanesia receive most of the attention, while places like Aotearoa/New Zealand, Guam, and Hawai‘i receive short shrift. And, like most “Pacific” studies, the topic at hand is in fact merely the southwestern Pacific. Despite increasing oceanic entanglements during the nineteenth century, eastern and northern Pacific regions appear rarely if at all. (The one exception in Islanders is Peru, the destination of many Pacific laborers.) These small criticisms aside, Thomas’s book is of critical value...

The State and Political Corruption in Nigeria: An Anatomy of a Perverse Pathology

Corruption is a terrible and endemic sickness of developing world; Nigeria inclusive Embezzlement, fraud, bribery, payoff, nepotism and extortion are so common in the activities of Nigerians since from colonial era to post independence, military and civilian regimes. The paper examined the problem of corruption in Nigeria with special reference on corrupt practices by different governments (1960-20013). Secondary source of data was employed in this study. The paper traced the background of corrupt practices in Nigeria which emerged since colonial era, then first indigenous elites as well as the military regimes (1966-1979) and (19831999), second and third republic down to the current democratic dispensation of fourth republic. The paper reveals that political corruption paved the way for the elites to institutionalize other forms of corruption such as bureaucratic, electoral, economic, judiciary and among others which has negative effect on national development. The paper recommended among others that the federal government should make a law for executing corrupt people as in the case of China as well as to strengthen its anti-graft agencies (i.e. EFCC and CPC) with fairness and equity to all tiers of government and private sectors.

Spanish

The studies about the Catholic missionary education in Mozambique have highlighted how their role was subordinated to the colonial interests and their weak educational outcomes. Nevertheless, neither the evolution of church-state relations during the long period of the Salazar dictatorship nor the heterogeneity of views and actions of the Catholic hierarchy have been taken into account. The study of the educational reports of the Diocese of Beira (1950-1973) supports not only the overall weakness of the results but also the administrative authority’s derelictions of duty. The government only assumed their responsibilities to the imminence of war, against the interest and the almost exclusive role of religious education agents in expanding and improving the indigenous school network. The commitment of a significant part of the clergy of the central region of Mozambique to an unfair social reality which was contrary to the Gospel, led to educational and pastoral options whose result was the political awareness of indigenous elites who had been educated by the church. Received: 14/11/2013 / Accepted: 17/12/2013 How to reference this article Aguadero Miguel, R., Sanchidrián Blanco, C. (2014). Superando el modelo de balance general de la educación colonial en Mozambique. Una contextualización de la enseñanza misionera durante el Estado Novo a partir de las memorias educativas de la diócesis de Beira. Espacio, Tiempo y Educación , 1(2), pp. 39-63 . doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14516/ete.2014.001.002.002

Imperial contagions: medicine, hygiene, and cultures of planning in Asia

Imperial Contagions argues that there was no straightforward shift from older, enclavist models of colonial medicine to a newer emphasis prevention and treatment of disease among indigenous populations as well as European residents. It shows that colonial medicine was not at all homogeneous on the ground but was riven with tensions and contradictions. Indigenous elites contested and appropriated Western medical knowledge and practices for their own purposes. Colonial policies contained contradictory and cross-cutting impulses. This book challenges assumptions that colonial regimes were uniformly able to regulate indigenous bodies and that colonial medicine served as a tool of empire.

The Genesis of the “Dutch Approach” to Asymmetric Conflicts

From a theory on occupying regimes and from traditional concepts of counterinsurgency theory, the author traces back the development of the Dutch discourse regarding present day missions. The genesis of the so-called Dutch approach is studied, and the case of Uruzgan is reviewed by scrutinizing political, security, economic, and governance aspects of the use of the military in the aforementioned province of Afghanistan. The case is studied to determine whether there really is something Dutch about this approach. We learn that the “Dutch approach” is predominantly a narrative whose main objective is the appeasement of Dutch public opinion and the legitimation of Dutch policy making. At the same time and even though more comparative case studies are necessary, it seems plausible that the Dutch approach is different. But the difference is not typical Dutch; it lies in the manner of collaborating with and co-opting indigenous elites. Studying the genesis of the “Dutch approach” is therefore an analysis of a discourse and a study in operational effectiveness at the same time.

How Jews Are Made in the East

Eliyana R. Adler. In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011. Pp. xi + 196.Eugene M. Avrutin. Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010. Pp. xvi + 216.IF AN EARLIER GENERATION of scholars of Russian Jews focused on the constraining forces of tsarist policy on Jewish physical and socioeconomic survival in the East, then the current cohort of scholars is all about cutting the Romanovs and their autocratic power down to size, analyzing Jewish policies in the context of broader imperial concerns, and rereading Jewish activity and agency back into the narrative of Jews in Eastern Europe. Where a centuiy ago we understood the Pale of Settlement as a supersized ghetto of Jewish isolation and last outpost of medieval Jewish communal autonomy and unadulterated traditionalism in Europe, a new cohort of scholars tells tales of Baltic German women helping to spearhead female Jewish education long before Puah Rakovsky and Sarah Schenirer, and of a Russian state increasingly anxious about controlling its Jewish population because it could not easily identify Jews within the heterogeneous, sociable, and peripatetic population of its western borderlands. These new works do not construct a history of Jewish Eastern Europe that is redeemed or subsumed by the rise of America as the Zion of the West but offer an explanation of how the competing imperial concerns of religious tolerance and interventionism, together with Jewish innovation, resistance, and manipulation, could pave the way for the modernization of Jewish society and culture in the East. In their recent scholarship, Eliyana Adler and Eugene Avrutin signal the new avenues that research on the East can take if we continue to comb the archives and allow imperial policy to serve as a platform for Jewish activity rather than a brake on it.The two works under review here, Eliyana Adler's In Her Handy and Eugene Avrutin's Jem and the Imperial State, look at how Jews made room for their own cultural and socioeconomic activity within a state that beginning with Tsar Alexander I was interested in minimizing Jewish difference and as of Tsar Nicholas I's reign became increasingly interventionist in managing and reaching the tolerated confessions of the empire. The key to their fresh read is that they take as a given by now that the imperial interest in reforming the Jews was conditioned throughout the imperial period by religious toleration and ongoing reliance on indigenous elites and religious clerics to identify, manage, and educate the Jews. Avrutin's study does most of the heavy theoretical lifting in this regard, drawing on colonial theoiy and explicitly situating Russian Jewish life in a diverse imperial polity that proved resistant to full tsarist control through the end of the old regime, due in equal measure to bureaucratic ineptitude and indigenous resistance. While Adler's social and cultural histoiy of Jewish girls' education is less explicitly engaged in comparative imperial histoiy or reading Jewish cultural activity as a form of colonial resistance, her approach to the sources and ability to see the unintended benefits of greater imperial direction of Jewish education places her squarely in the camp of reading Russian Jewish histoiy against the grain of anti-Semitism and policy constraint.MOVE OVER SARAH SCHENIRER, MEET FRAU EKERTFollowing the landmark studies of Shaul Stampfer, Chava Weissler, and Iris Parush, Eliyana Adler expands our understanding of Jewish women's knowledge and literacy within an Ashkenazi culture that looked askance at female Torah study and channeled communal educational resources and collective responsibility to the education of boys.1 Like her scholarly predecessors, Adler is attuned to the disjuncture between ideals and reality, especially the widespread anecdotal evidence of Jewish girls attending hederj, learning with tutors at home (especially foreign languages and the arts), and eventually joining Jewish boys in the Russian Jewish exodus to gymnasia and institutions of higher education in the 1860s. …

"Moral Influence" in Asia: Political Practice and Electoral Corruption in the Spanish Philippines

Proceeding from a microhistory of local elections at the end of the nineteenth century in one municipality, this article traces the mechanisms of representation and exercise of local power in the Spanish Philippines. Within the colonial apparatus the municipal sphere was one of the few areas of tangible power for the principalia (indigenous elites). The local elites, who were selected by colonial authorities based on political, economic, and religious criteria, played an important role in the fealties and resistances in the colony. This article examines the significance of the Maura Law, or the electoral reforms of 1893, and the obstacles encountered in the eradication of electoral abuse—“moral influence”—that colonial authorities, through action or inaction, had promoted over the years. Keywords: municipal elections • reformS • local power • native elite • Spanish colonialism

Of Colonial Notaries, Inca Utopias, and Emerging Indigenous Elites: Some Noteworthy Titles in Andean Historiography

Of Colonial Notaries, Inca Utopias, and Emerging Indigenous Elites:Some Noteworthy Titles in Andean Historiography Shawn England Burns, Kathryn — Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Pp. 246. Galindo, Alberto Flores — In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes. Edited and translated by Carlos Aguirre, Charles F. Walker, and Wyllie Hiatt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 270. Klein, Herbert S. — A Concise History of Bolivia. Second edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. 360. The three titles reviewed here focus on aspects of the Andean past, and each one presents remarkably varying approaches to writing about history. Herbert S. Klein’s A Concise History of Bolivia is the latest and greatest incarnation of a staid national narrative by an exceptionally knowledgeable expert. Alberto Flores Galindo died in 1986, but his influential In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes is an important collection of essays only now available to English readers with this translation. Finally, Kathryn Burns offers Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru, an intriguing exploration of colonial notaries and the bureaucratic foundations of Spanish imperial authority in the Andes. Each of these three volumes—offering some newer ideas and interpretations along with older ones—are important additions (though not necessarily brand new ones) to Andean historiography. First consider A Concise History of Bolivia by Herbert S. Klein, a solid national history now in its second edition. It remains a solid installment in Cambridge University Press’s excellent Concise Histories series; however, this is actually the fourth version of Klein’s profile of Bolivia, as this particular “concise history” was first published as Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society in 1982 (and updated in 1992) by Oxford University Press. The first eight chapters originate from the Oxford editions, but the first Cambridge edition ended with chapter nine, covering 1982-2002. The latest—and possibly last edition by Klein—covers the remarkable changes that took place in Bolivia between 2002 and 2010. Is it too soon for Klein to offer a balanced historian’s appraisal of this recent period? He acknowledges in his preface to the Cambridge second edition that [End Page 523] “unanticipated developments” might derail some of his conclusions concerning Bolivia’s more recent history. Nevertheless, if any single scholar can be counted on to render a reliable assessment of the last decade’s developments in Bolivia, that person would be Herbert S. Klein. His career has been long and fruitful, and today he is the Governor Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, a fitting honor for an astonishingly prolific (22 books and 163 articles!) and noteworthy historian of Latin America in general, and Bolivia in particular. As Klein points out in the preface, “I felt that I could offer some insights, even at this early stage in the process of change, based on my reading of the past and my long experience with this country that has fascinated me for most of my academic career” (p. x). Even if Klein never completes a third edition, the second edition of A Concise History of Bolivia will serve as an admirable distillation of his extensive knowledge in an engaging narrative destined to endure for the foreseeable future. Obviously any single volume national history will fail to satisfy all readers, but this book is an introduction—and a concise one at that—to Bolivian history. Klein’s interpretations reflect his areas of specialization (social, demographic, and economic history), but other aspects of the past are examined where appropriate. This reviewer tried to find some important exclusions and/or erroneous inclusions, but gave up quickly in favor of enjoying a smoothly written overview of one of Latin America’s most ethnically complex societies. The unifying theme in this survey is the resilience of ethnic complexity in Bolivia. The population of the southern Andes defied easy categorization even prior to the Spanish arrival, leading Klein to label Bolivia a “complex amalgam” (p. xi). Chapter 1 does an outstanding job of summarizing the pre-Columbia development of indigenous civilizations within a challenging environment. By the time of Pizarro’s...

Post-war reconstruction, policy transfer and the World Bank: the case of Afghanistan's National Solidarity Programme

This article investigates the role of the World Bank as an agent of international policy transfer in post-war reconstruction and development. A heuristic method which integrates policy transfer network theory, participant observation and implementation analysis is developed and then used to map the process of policy-oriented learning underpinning the emergence and development of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan's National Solidarity Programme (NSP). Drawing on the findings of a mid-term evaluation conducted by the authors for the World Bank it reveals that initial World Bank funding of the NSP was opportunistic; a voluntary form of policy transfer emerged from a cohesive policy transfer network which mainly drew lessons from the Kecamatan Development Project (KDP) in Indonesia, leading to the development of a culturally insensitive model of community-driven development; but due to the technocratic expertise of key indigenous actors and the technical support of facilitating partners, these elements of the programme were successfully mitigated during operational delivery. It concludes that ‘Rational’ lesson-drawing which avoids the ‘learning paradox’ – learning that leads to inappropriate transfer – can be successful. In other words, lesson-drawing can be a progressive learning activity, but only if the programme is culturally assimilated through comprehensive evaluation and piloting, builds on existing organisational strengths and is transferred by high-quality indigenous knowledge elites. Local solutions must be found to local problems which deliver public value in terms of direct social or economic benefits to the citizenry. Indeed, although development outcomes have been less than impressive, the NSP has delivered significant gains to the Afghan people with regard to institution-building and social solidarity at the national and community levels.

Three Families: Genealogies and Processes among the Sixteenth-Century Kaqchikel Maya

The new political offices introduced after the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica created new challenges and opportunities for indigenous elites and their supporters. This article traces the careers of three Kaqchikel-Maya families in sixteenth-century Guatemala and reveals a range of concerns about and strategies for maintaining and enhancing aspects of their preconquest social status.

The Transcolonial Politics of Chinese Domestic Mastery in Singapore and Darwin 1910s-1930s

Feminist and postcolonial scholars have long argued that the home was a microcosm and a symbol of the colony. To exercise power in the home, to practice domestic mastery over colonised servants, was an expression of colonial power. At the same time, intimate contact and domestic conflicts between non-white and their employers had the potential to destabilise hierarchical distinctions, thereby threatening the stability of colonial rule. As Ann Laura Stoler puts it, the home was a site where racial classifications were defined and defied and where relations between coloniser and colonised could sustain or challenge colonial rule. The vast majority of the literature on the colonial home focuses on European homes and the domestic service relationship as one between a master/mistress and a native servant. The 2007 special issue of Frontiers, for example, focuses on white-native encounters. Yet, in many colonial contexts, Asian and Indigenous elites employed domestic in their homes. As Swapna Banerjee has shown in her study of Bengal in British India, the relationship of subordination in colonial societies was not unique to white masters/mistresses and native/black servants but crossed class and ethnic lines. This paper rethinks understandings of colonial power and intimacy by analysing domestic service in Chinese homes in the neighbouring tropical British colonies of Singapore, in the Straits Settlements, and Darwin, in Australia's Northern Territory, from the 1910s to the 1930s. A comparison of this sort might, at first glance, seem implausible. Singapore was an exploitation colony where the aim was to extract labour and produce. Darwin, on the other hand, was part of a settler colony where the intended outcome of colonialism was permanent settlement based on the dispossession of the Indigenous populations. The different colonial objectives in Singapore and Darwin became more obvious following the federation of Australia in 1901, at which point Darwin became part of a settler nation rather than a British colony. However, as Penny Edwards and Deana Heath have shown, the process of analysing settler and non-settler colonies side-by-side enables historians to draw broader conclusions about colonialism itself. In this case, such a comparison highlights the extent to which the position of coloniser was ambiguous, bound up with issues of race and class, and dependent on colonial context.

“Pure and Noble Indians, Untainted by Inferior Idolatrous Races”: Native Elites and the Discourse of Blood Purity in Late Colonial Mexico

Abstract As sixteenth-century Spaniards constructed their global empire, they carried with them the racial-religious concept of “limpieza de sangre,” or blood purity, which restricted marginalized communities from exercising prestige and authority. However, the complex demographic arena of early modern America, so different from the late medieval Iberia that gave rise to the discourse, necessarily destabilized and complicated limpieza’s meanings and modes of expression. This article explores a variety of ways by which indigenous elites in late colonial Mexico sought to take advantage of these ambiguities and describe themselves as “pure-blooded,” thereby reframing their local authority in terms recognized and respected by Spanish authorities. Specifically, savvy native lords naturalized the concept by portraying their own ancestors as the originators of “pure” bloodlines in America. In doing so, they reoriented the imagined metrics of purity so as to distinguish themselves from native commoners, mestizos, and the descendants of Africans. However, applying limpieza in native communities could backfire: after two centuries of extensive race mixing, many native lords found themselves vulnerable to accusations of uncleanliness and ancestral shame. Yet successful or not, indigenous participation in the discourse of limpieza helped influence what it meant in New Spain to be “honorable” and “pure,” and therefore eligible for social mobility.

Court, Chora , and Culture in Late Ptolemaic Egypt

Indigenous Egyptian elites who held titles in the late Ptolemaic court hierarchy offer a counterpoint to the typical model of Hellenistic court society as a culturally and ethnically exclusive social space. Though underrepresented in standard accounts, several Egyptians held the honorific title of "kinsman" of the king ( syngenes ). Statues of these men wearing the mitra of the syngenes in the forecourts of temples, together with Greek and Egyptian epigraphic evidence, show that indigenous elites who circulated between Alexandria and Upper Egypt contributed to the creation of a transcultural space that was critical for maintaining the power of the Ptolemaic state in the Egyptian chora during the troubled conditions of the second and first centuries B.C.E.

The Obligatory Indian

Anthropologists are prone to convolution, and one reason is our penchant for thriving on category errors. One such error dates back to Columbus?that the first human inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere were Indians. This was an appealing misapprehension of a wide spectrum of people that has become essential to how other category errors?such as the white and black races?apprehend themselves. The many different indigenous peoples were promoted to a mythic realm, a doorway to Utopia, which anthropologists have been slow to abandon. Now that more indigenous people are acquiring public voices and speaking with many different voices, serving as a doorway to Utopia is frequently missing from their priorities. Elders who care deeply about their traditions do not know what to do with indigenous youth who want what their non-indigenous peers want?big-screen televisions, motor vehicles, and other high-end forms of consumption. In the United States, it has become prestigious to be indigenous and financially rewarding for some, so the number of people claiming indigenous identity gallops forward with every national census; but in Latin America, where official multiculturalism has multiplied the ceremonial recognition of indigeneity, ordinary people who are stuck with indigenous identity still face lots of discrimination. Even when Latin Americans use indigenous markers to mobilize politically, they typically want what Nancy Postero and Leon Zamosc (2004 14) have called "a fluid mixture of livelihood and culture" in which ethnic demands seem less important than class demands. Anthropologists who wish to believe that indigenous peoples are inherent critics of capitalism must contend with indigenous elites who decide to capitalize themselves. Perhaps worst of all, many of the Latin Americans whom anthropologists regard as indigenous seem less interested in claiming this identity than shedding it.

The transnationalisation of indigenous peoples' movements and the emergence of new indigenous elites

International Social Science JournalVolume 61, Issue 202 p. 377-388 Original Article The transnationalisation of indigenous peoples' movements and the emergence of new indigenous elites Sabine Kradolfer, Sabine KradolferSearch for more papers by this author Sabine Kradolfer, Sabine KradolferSearch for more papers by this author First published: 13 October 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2451.2011.01779.xCitations: 2Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume61, Issue202December 2010Pages 377-388 RelatedInformation

Biomedicine as a Contested Site: Some Revelations in Imperial Contexts (review)

Reviewed by: Biomedicine as a Contested Site: Some Revelations in Imperial Contexts David Arnold Poonam Bala , ed. Biomedicine as a Contested Site: Some Revelations in Imperial Contexts. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2009. ix + 197 pp. $65.00 (cloth, ISBN-10: 0-7391-2460-9, ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2460-4), $26.95 (paperbound, ISBN-10: 0-7391-2461-7, ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2461-1). Over the past twenty years, the field of what has come to be described as "colonial medicine" has spread both in chronological and geographical range and in the diversity of issues addressed. The present collection of essays illustrates the extent of this engagement. Three essays relate to the Americas: Flavio Coelho Edler writes about the development of medical knowledge and professional power in Brazil both before and after its emancipation from Portugal, Martha Eugenia Rodriguez discusses the development of medical ideas and medical education in Mexico from the Spanish conquest to the early nineteenth century, and Mariola Espinosa focuses on yellow fever's role in weakening Spanish rule in Cuba and in enabling American occupation. In the three essays on Africa, Hibba Abugideiri traces the emergence of a modern medical discourse that fostered the creation of approved ideas of "Mother Egypt"; Amy Kaler considers how new contraceptive technology bred a kind of "intimate colonialism" that divided Rhodesian society in the 1960s and 1970s along lines of gender and race; and Russel Stafford Viljoen examines the "scandal" that occurred in 1880s South Africa when medical authority, [End Page 793] allied with capitalist imperialism, was deployed to deny the existence of a major smallpox outbreak. The medical history of Asia is represented by Poonam Bala's discussion of the changing medical outlook of indigenous elites in colonial India; Angelika C. Messner's essay on the changing definitions of madness resulting from the intervention of Western medical missionaries in China; and Laurence Monnais's explanation of the varied response of the Vietnamese to colonial medicine in the early twentieth century, from the hostility shown to smallpox vaccination to the ready acceptance of Western pharmaceutics. The volume closes with Sally Wilde's essay on the responses of Australian patients to surgery in the 1890s. The essays thus cover a wide gamut of colonial medical history, from the early phases of European expansion almost to the present (though only a few seek to make explicit connections with the present, notably Viljoen's linking of the cover-up of the 1880s smallpox epidemic and contemporary responses to HIV/AIDS in South Africa). The colonial regimes discussed represent very different medical epistemologies and imperial eras, though the weight of the discussion falls, predictably, on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some essays focus on a specific epidemic or medical/public health issue (smallpox, yellow fever, contraception, surgery), whereas others, less successfully, range widely over a vast terrain of ideas, institutions, and practices. Do the essays share common ground? In their introduction, Bala and Kaler point to the way in which medicine "engages power, resistance and agency at the most primal level—that of the individual body," adding that contestations over medical practices "reveal much about the unstable and contested nature of power in colonial times and places" (p. 7). This is a fair summary of what many (but not all) of the essays aspire to demonstrate. In a broadly Foucauldian manner, the general concern is how medicine and its engagement with colonized bodies serve as an index of wider power relations. But if the primary stress is on discursive power, there is a qualifying emphasis on the ways in which the seemingly hegemonic discourse of empire can be appropriated to serve other agendas or give fresh agency to discerning patients and consumers. Responses to disease might be aligned with military goals and political objectives, but, at least in the modern era, the economics of labor control and capitalist exploitation seldom lurk far from view. A more explicit discussion of common themes and shared agenda would have been helpful and, given that contributors include sociologists as well as historians, so would a stronger theoretical orientation. This is a useful collection, albeit one of mixed quality: some essays are excessively descriptive...

Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco

This book makes an outstanding contribution to the music history of colonial Latin America from a perspective — urban and social — that in the Hispanic world has not received the attention it deserves. Previous versions of some chapters have been published as articles, but this volume presents for the first time an integrated vision of musical activity in Cuzco, the old capital of the Inca Empire, which had a predominantly indigenous population during the colonial period. The book, dealing mostly with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, begins with a chapter devoted to the urban sound-scape (with particular attention to the role of bells, processions, and domestic music), followed by a chapter about the Cathedral and the Seminario de San Antonio Abad (institutions whose music began to be studied by Robert Stevenson and Samuel Claro Valdés). The remaining three chapters discuss convents and monasteries, urban parishes, and rural Indian parishes. The book’s structure has some parallels with the classic Music in Late Medieval Bruges by Reinhard Strohm (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, rev. in 1999), but Baker does not discuss the music. He states that “focusing on musical practices rather than on musical works, we are better able to demonstrate the central role of music in colonial society, and thereby to combat any temptation to relegate cultural activities to the margins of historical inquiry” (p. 9). Notwithstanding the limitations of Cuzco Cathedral’s sources and the difficulty of access to them, the author utilizes a wide variety of administrative and legal sources from archives in Cuzco (Archivo Arzobispal, Archivo Departamental), Lima (Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, Archivo Arzobispal, Archivo General de la Nación), and Seville (Archivo General de Indias).One of the most original contributions in this book is the study of the unceasing musical activity in the eight Indian parishes surrounding Cuzco Cathedral and in the doctrinas de indios or Indian rural parishes of the Cuzco diocese. Numerous confraternities established in the parishes fostered performances by indigenous musicians, whose repertory included European polyphony as well as pieces related to Andean tradition. Parish musicians usually belonged to these confraternities. Following pre-Hispanic traditions, they received part of their salary not in cash but in kind and sometimes worked for free as a form of contribution to the community. By controlling parish music, the leading Andeans could promote their own interests, maintaining their preeminent position within the colonial social hierarchy. Thus “the development of European-derived music in indigenous parishes cannot, then, be slotted into a vision of colonial power relations based on the polarities of ‘Spanish domination’ and ‘Andean resistance’. There is ample evidence that its adoption was negotiated rather than straightforwardly imposed” (p. 236).A peculiarity in Cuzco was the scarcity of cathedral prebends for musicians. For this reason the cathedral music chapel depended upon local musicians (particularly singers) trained at the Seminario de San Antonio Abad. There were some Indian cantores (singers) who worked at the Cathedral, but Baker suggests that in this case the term referred to instrumentalists. It should be pointed out, however, that musicians were not always local, and that there must have been a certain degree of mobility, as suggested by the fact that the important composer Gutierre Fernández Hidalgo (not mentioned in Baker’s book) was chapelmaster at Cuzco after having served in other Spanish and American cathedrals. According to Baker, the Spanish model, with “a dominant cathedral capilla de música surrounded by weaker, dependent institutions,” was very different from the one in Cuzco, “where many churches strove for a high degree of musical self-sufficiency and no single group dominated the city’s musical life” (p. 88). This comparison, though, is somewhat adventurous, since studies are lacking about Spanish musical institutions other than cathedrals. Particularly relevant in this book is Baker’s study of women’s participation in performances (sometimes of challenging polyphonic works) at the Cuzco convents, and the importance of Indian women for the music performed in beaterios, in contrast to the apparently lesser musical splendor of performances in male monasteries, even though the latter were open to the participation of Indian musicians and others from the Cathedral and the Seminario.In the last section of the book, “Negotiating Harmony,” Baker proposes an idea documented several times throughout the volume: “To a large extent, it was indigenous elites who enabled the propagation of European music in the hemisphere” (p. 248). Since this is such an important statement, perhaps Negotiating Harmony (instead of Imposing Harmony) would have been another appropriate title for this most attractive book. Baker’s agile prose presents a vivid narrative of interest to both musicologists and historians, placing Cuzco on the map of Spanish and Latin American music history during the Modern Age.

The economics of housing programmes in Ghana, 1929–66

Researchers have generally assumed that housing policies of the colonial and the immediate post‐colonial governments were shaped solely by social and political considerations. From a social perspective, some have argued that governments intervened in the housing field purely on health grounds to create good sanitary conditions and prevent the spread of diseases, especially amongst the colonizers and indigenous educated elites. From a political perspective, writers have argued that the key goal for most housing programmes was to prevent unrest and ensure political longevity. Even though each of these arguments has some merit, little, if any, consideration has been given to the economic logic of housing policies and programmes. Indeed, researchers have generally assumed that colonial and immediate post‐colonial governments never considered the economic significance of housing. This assumption is incorrect. Through surveying published and archival sources, this paper aims to rectify the neglect of the economic logic of housing policies by demonstrating that economic implications were considered in the implementation of housing policies and programmes. As will be shown, housing was seen not only as a necessary tool to secure labour and improve productivity, but also as an essential element for the success of economic development projects, especially industrialization programmes.

Creating a Failed State – The US and Canada in Afghanistan (review)

Reviewed by: Creating a Failed State – The US and Canada in Afghanistan Julian Schofield Creating a Failed State – The US and Canada in Afghanistan by John W. Warnock. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2008, 209 pp. This volume provides a comprehensive and popular discussion of international developments leading up to and including Canada’s current involvement in [End Page 266] Afghanistan. John Warnock argues that major power interests and elite political interests in Canada have produced policies that are creating a failed state in Afghanistan. He concludes that Canada should focus on providing health care, housing, food, and agricultural development rather than the heavy emphasis on military operations. The text itself consists of nine chapters. Chapter 1 provides a broad overview of the deleterious consequences of US counter-insurgency in Afghanistan. Chapter 2 explores the concept of a failed state and critiques its polemics. Chapter 3 gives a balanced historical summary of Afghanistan. Chapter 4 examines US strategic interests in Central Asia. Chapter 5 is an historical survey of the US reaction to al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks. Chapter 6 presents a history of the creation of the current regime in Afghanistan. Chapter 7 discusses women’s rights in Afghanistan. Chapter 8 discusses Canada’s role in Afghanistan up until early 2008. Chapter 9 examines different policy options and attempts to ascertain the state of public opinion and the emerging unpopularity of the direction of Canada’s Afghan policy. The discussion of the politics of women’s rights (Chapter 7) is the strongest in the book. It provides an insightful anthropological, historical, cultural, and political survey of a hot button issue in both Canada and Afghanistan. Women’s rights are in many ways key to the policy justification pursued by the Canadian government, as well as one of the principal causes of local resistance to foreign occupation in Afghanistan. Warnock convincingly outlines the complexity and difficulty of naively and precipitously imposing social reforms. However, throughout the book he recalls periods in Afghanistan where wide-ranging reforms were at least begun, and in some cases (1964) successfully implemented, by indigenous elites. Chapters 2 and 3 are also well argued. Exploding the failed state concept and exposing the US’s neo-liberal development project in Afghanistan, Warnock briefly shows how state-led industrial development was successful in the past. His historical survey is also parsimonious and provides an excellent context to show how contemporary Western policy is in part a recurrence of previous colonial enterprises. Creating a Failed State is intended for a non-academic audience. Consequently there are many controversial claims that have no citation and need more than the bibliographic discussion provided at the end of the text. Many of the claims made in Chapter 3 (on 9/11) come from the online “9/11 Truth Campaign,” which is academically suspect, in my opinion. For example, it is implied that Timothy McVeigh’s associate was not Terry Nichols but a “Middle Easterner,” and that Terry Nichols had received training from the al Qaeda-associated Abu Sayyaf movement in the Philippines. There are also the usual insinuations that 9/11 was preceded by stock manipulations, suggesting widespread insider knowledge of an imminent al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center. Warnock proposes that Canada return to its role of peacemaker and disengage militarily. This is the commonsense approach most of our NATO allies have taken. However, he does not examine the political repercussions this would have with the United States. Warnock assumes that the Afghans prefer a negotiated solution to end the current insurgency, to exclude warlords from government, and to achieve state-directed industrialization, and that they are capable of establishing their own system of governance. In these assumptions I believe he is correct. He exaggerates the extent of failure as much as the Canadian establishment has exaggerated its success. The insurgency in Afghanistan is at a persistently low level of intensity. Consequently, he criticizes the “no choice” strategy of remaining involved in a war without end. If citizens continue to volunteer to serve in Afghanistan and there is no major political upheaval against this policy, especially in Quebec, then this is an eminently sustainable policy, however pointless. Warnock attributes this to...