non-Western Peoples Research Articles

On the state of nature and social life: thinking about humans and chimpanzees1

The anatomical similarity observed in chimpanzees and humans has been recognized since Linnaeus. The debates on the attribution of the human condition to non-Western people date back to the 15th century. However, only in the 20th century did Social and Cultural Anthropology demonstrate through ethnography that the Enlightenment project of defining an universal and unique humankind has a consistent and real face as a result of research and reformulation of ideas. Only since the 1960s has the cumulative knowledge on wild chimpanzee behavior informed us about their ability to produce and use tools, for social learning, and to produce unique patterns of collective behavior. Ever since, primatological and human evolutionary research has contributed to an understanding of a surprising and uncomfortable similarity of human and non-human behaviors as well as to their deep differences. The practice of studying similarities and differences lead us to the same dead end: nature (on the genetic, biological and ecological level) is highly influential in determining that chimpanzees and humans live as social or sociocultural beings. Furthermore, considering these discoveries we need to reflect on the new meanings and the new places of nature in our knowledge when considering the social life of chimpanzees and humans. Taking into account how the influence of nature is deeply associated with the way of life of chimpanzees and humans, we must ask to what extent nature influences the social or cultural processes and to what extent they are autonomous. Even though considering my previous propositions that only humans produce culture, which is an essentially symbolic phenomenon, wild chimpanzees also have an intense and complex social life. In other words, this text proposes reflecting on the degrees of autonomy of social and cultural phenomena in relation to chimpanzee and human evolutionary predisposition to social life and to symbolic production as well as on the adaptive and non-adaptive aspects of these phenomena. This analysis adopted Rousseau's theory on the “State of Nature” and “State of Society” considering modern primatology from an anthropological point of view resulting in the invention of two concepts: “nature social primate” “primate social nature” and “human cultural nature”.

Is conversion a ‘colonization of consciousness’?

The trope in which conversion – especially of non-Western people to Christianity – is envisioned as a type of conquest is one many scholars have found compelling. This article examines the implicit moral psychology behind the idea that conversion is a ‘colonization of consciousness’, which it identifies as rooted in a secular liberal model of the self and of religion. The appeal of the conversion-as-conquest trope lies in its focus on power, but by building secular liberal assumptions into its theoretical optic it remains ironically blind to some of the most pervasive ways power operates today – namely, through the production of secular truths about religion, and by authorizing ‘autonomous’ secular subjectivities as normative. Drawing on examples from the author’s research on Pentecostal conversion in Indian slums, and on a national context where violent anti-conversion activism is prevalent, the article argues that while both conversion and opposition to it entail power, this power is not well understood on the model of mental colonization, or ‘resistance’ by uncolonized subjectivities.

‘This age is the age of associations’: committees, petitions, and the roots of interwar Middle Eastern internationalism

AbstractThis article examines three diasporic campaigns orchestrated by Middle Eastern political entrepreneurs in Paris, New York, and Cairo, in the years bookending the First World War. Mobilizing across borders, their organizers were exemplary denizens of the transnational public sphere created by Ottoman migrants from the 1880s onwards. Exponents of globalism, they regarded the body politic as a diasporic construct unconstrained by territory. Furthermore, they saw the associations that they founded both as instruments of civility capable of reforming society and as practical political vehicles, mouthpieces for the claims that they communicated to the ‘community of nations’ through petitions and telegrams. Such strategies of appeal suggest that many of the features of ‘interwar’ Middle Eastern internationalism emerged not in response to the post-war settlement but in the last decades of Ottoman rule. This article therefore contributes to our understanding of the histories of globalism, the practices and perceptions of public life, and the engagement of non-Western people with international society.

Imaginative geography, neoliberal globalization, and colonial distinctions: docile and dangerous bodies in medical transcription ‘outsourcing’

Information Technology (IT) ‘outsourcing,’ of which medical transcription in India is a part, has received relatively little attention from geographers. Most often, it has been bracketed more broadly within IT and its role in transforming transnational space-time configurations has been analyzed. IT outsourcing, more specifically, medical transcription outsourcing, which is the focus of this article, is not only marked by tensions, hierarchies, and ambivalences, it also reflects an emergent ‘imaginative geography’ of neoliberal globalization. This imaginative geography, as we argue in this article, is deceptively ambiguous because of its ambivalent articulation. Medical transcription outsourcing, for example, seems to operate on two contradictory registers, particularly in the United States and some European nations from where outsourcing to countries such as India is taking place. There is an acknowledgement and even celebration of the ‘flattening’ and inter-connectedness of different parts of the world, even while there is widespread criticism and fear of these transnational activities, as well as that of the non-western people engaged in them. The criticism and fear are often articulated in relation to instances of data theft. Nevertheless, a closer look shows that there is something more going on. We argue that such discursive constructions exemplify an imaginative geography that is rooted in an ambivalent desire for a reformed and recognizable ‘other’ who could be ‘best global citizens.’ This ambivalence undergirds a forked biopolitical strategy, which seeks to make the neoliberal worker docile and yet continually marks him/her as dangerous. We call this biopolitical strategy colonial governmentality to signify its forked operation as an art of government that seeks to define agenda/non-agenda (and not population or people), but continually draws upon colonial distinctions and practices.

Marginalization and the Multiplicity of Rationalities: A Discourse Theory of Poverty

The roots of global poverty are often explored from a purely economic perspective. Its main causes have been attributed to the exploitative practices of the dominant economies of the first world and the continued imposition of unfair and unjust trade relations with the global south. From the dire and unabashed exploitation of natural resources and manpower during the colonial era to today's almost manic imposition of free trade policies on the world market, Western nations work hard to keep the world order subjugated under policies which keep exploited former colonies from developing their own higher income-producing industries or from realizing models of development and progress that are more advantageous to non-western peoples. These same practices confine the so-called developing world to the role of low-cost labor and raw material supplier whose produce not even traded fairly. The current regime of intellectual property protection and the imposition of WTO policies that allow the unregulated dumping of manufactured goods from the west illustrate effectively how poverty maintained in the so-called developing world.Aside from the exploitative policies that the economically dominant nations impose on the world that keep developing nations from actually developing, we can also look at exploitative structures within nations where the elite effectively control all the resources and means by which incomes can be generated and wealth created. Exploitative structures exist in poor nations that allow the elite to capture all forms of political and economic power thus depriving the vast majority of the opportunity to earn better incomes or create new forms of wealth.Often, the prescribed remedy for poverty to reform existing market systems and economic structures in order for facilitate the entry to the poor into mainstream systems of production and income generation. Global market systems are also being reformed in order to create what economists view as genuinely free markets that will allow poor nations to engage fairly in trade with other nations based on each one's comparative advantage. Whatever prescription of reform for poverty given, reformers always look for ways to equalize the existing economic system in order to allow the economically marginalized to fruitfully participate in it. However, these prescriptions do not genuinely respond to the roots of poverty. This because they fail to see how the way out of poverty demands more than just the inclusion of the poor in the existing economic systems. A deeper, more radical reform than this needed and genuine liberation from poverty can only be achieved if it understood from its root cause. In this paper, I will argue that the poor are impoverished because their rationalities are rendered inutile by existing socio-political and economic systems. Certainly they are poor because of oppressive policies of the dominant countries of wealth and because of the unfair practices of those who dominate the markets, however, more fundamentally than that, the poor are poor because they are unable to participate in the dominant systems as creative participants. And the root of this the marginalization of their rationalities by the existing systems. The just and effective reform of the existing system would be to address this marginalization so that the marginalized other of the world global economic order will be given a chance to reshape this world order to be more responsive to their conception of development, progress, and a good, human life.THE MARGINALIZED RENDERED INUTILEIn the dominant world order where modern, market driven, Western economic systems prevail, traditional peoples and their wisdom are alienated from productive activity. This because modernization, which the foundation of economic development, is authored on an implicit belief in the value of western rational scientific thought and 'objective' truths, that discredit and erase individual people's interests1 and not to mention their unique conceptions of the good human life. …

Ethnohistory and Iroquoia

Ethnohistory and Iroquoia Christopher J. Bilodeau (bio) David J. Norton . Rebellious Younger Brother: Oneida Leadership and Diplomacy, 1750-1800. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. x + 239 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $38.00. Kurt A. Jordan . The Seneca Restoration, 1715-1754: An Iroquois Local Political Economy. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. xiii + 426 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $69.95 (cloth); $32.95 (paper). What is ethnohistory? Scholars have pondered that question for decades. The American Society for Ethnohistory published its first issues of Ethnohistory in 1954, and its editor, the anthropologist Erminie W. Voegelin, defined it as "the study of identities, location, contacts, movements, numbers, and cultural activities of primitive peoples from the earliest written records concerning them, onward in point of time."1 Those affiliated with the society have come up with increasingly sophisticated definitions since then, paying rigorous attention to the problems of epistemology, subjectivity, language, and power. Some emphasize its subject matter of American Indians, non-Western peoples, or those who did not produce their own written documents. Others (including the society's website) emphasize a method that goes "beyond the standard use of books and manuscripts" to "maps, music, paintings, photography, folklore, oral tradition, ecology, site exploration, archaeological materials, museum collections, enduring customs, language, and place names . . . in ways that make for a more in-depth analysis than the average historian is capable of doing based solely on written documents produced by and for one group."2 Finally, many others emphasize a combination of the two. Defining the term proved so vexing that, in the 1980s, the society, at least officially, gave up.3 Certainly, thinking about the two works under review only accentuates this confusion over what ethnohistory is and what the term is supposed to do for us today. Both books, at first glance from the average historian or anthropologist, seem ethnohistorical. Both books focus on a venerable Indian group in ethnohistorical scholarship: the Iroquois Confederacy, or Six Nations, of what is now upstate New York. (After all, Lewis Henry Morgan's The League of the Ho-de-no-sau-ee, or Iroquois came out in 1851).4 And both books attempt to revise [End Page 18] a general narrative of eighteenth-century Iroquois decline, which had been a feature of much of the previous scholarship. But in other respects these two works seem far apart. One is a narrowly focused work on the political history of the Oneidas, the other a broad archaeological/anthropological/historical monograph on the Senecas. Their similarities and differences provide us with a fruitful example of the epistemological problems raised by defining ethnohistory at all. David Norton's work on the Oneida focuses on politics. Norton argues that the Oneidas maintained a unique vision within the Iroquois Confederacy that at times dovetailed, and at times clashed, with its other tribes (the Mohawks, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and, after 1713, the Tuscaroras). The Oneidas faced unprecedented challenges after 1750, he claims, but had "utilitarian reasons" (p. 4) for their political calculations, including their decision to leave the Confederacy to join the Americans during the American Revolution and become the Six Nations' "rebellious younger brothers" (p. 4). Each nation in the Confederacy, whether an Elder Brother (the Senecas, Onondagas, and Mohawks) or a Younger Brother (the Cayugas and the Oneidas), had a specific role to play. The Senecas on the western boundary and the Mohawks on the eastern were responsible for "trade, security, and diplomacy" (p. 6). The Onondagas, with lands in the center of Iroquoia, kept the council fires lit and the ceremonies intact. And the Cayugas and Oneidas received and conveyed information throughout the Confederacy for the "reflection and reaction required to make informed decisions" (p. 6). As the Oneidas were central to diplomacy, Norton argues, paying close attention to Oneida politics with other groups "provides evidence indicating that the resilience and adaptability of their leaders in the face of constantly changing conditions negates the theory that they, and their Iroquois confederates, were spiraling with their people into political oblivion" (p. 13). The Oneidas' task was not easy, however. In the 1750s, they found themselves the spokespeople at conferences for...

The Great Delusion: Post-Colonial Language Policy for Mission and Development in Africa Reviewed

This paper demonstrates the importance of the use of indigenous languages in formal contexts for the future of Africa’s peoples. Inter-cultural communication using one language wrongly assumes that the unfamiliar can be expressed using familiar terms. This author argues that long-term immersion by a Westerner amongst a non-Western people is a singular means of acquiring insights about them. Long-term participant observation forms the basis of the research for this article. When communicated globally, anti- racism strategies are found to be problematic in their apparent denial of realities of non-Western cultures. The failure of many African communities to recognize and deal with the peculiarities of their own cultural contexts has potentially tragic consequences. Use of European languages (especially in Africa) is contributing to enormous dependence on the West and/or magic, and to gross under-development. Vulnerable intercultural exposure using non-Western languages and resources with concentrated efforts at understanding people’s theologies is advocated as the way forward.

Freedom without Slavery? “Coolies,” Prostitutes, and Outcastes in Meiji Japan's “Emancipation Moment”

IN HIS ACCLAIMED WORK Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, sociologist Orlando Patterson argues that “the Western world” has come to embrace freedom as its “supreme value” as the result of a particular relationship to the history of slavery, which began in antiquity and evolved throughout the Middle Ages.1 In the “nonWest,” on the other hand, Patterson tells us that freedom was “stillborn,” unable to develop and grow because, in the absence of this uniquely Western constellation of ideas about slavery, it was associated primarily with the unbridled power of a ruler (an Oriental despot), protection from whom required “not personal freedom or freedoms but submission to controlled, countervailing authority, the tight protective bondage of the kin-based group.”2 In all, Patterson devotes just twenty-four pages (out of a total of more than four hundred) to his explanation of the failure of freedom in the non-West, in effect presenting us with little more than the familiar Orientalist binary of a West in which individual freedoms are paramount and a non-West in which the individual remains subservient to the group.3 “Non-Western peoples,” we

Postcolonial Curatorial Strategies

Searches for new methodologies and theories of exhibitionary practice for postcolonial agendas, including a proposal for ways to display African arts, particularly from Guinea, in relation to performance (Cohen), a satirical but serious performance-intervention that recalls nineteenth century displays of non-Western peoples (Sakamoto), and the ways that museums as well as state officials have a stake in the exhibitionary construction of cultural and technological narratives in Tamil Nadu, India (Jeychandran).

AIDS, behavior, and culture: understanding evidence-based prevention

AIDS, Behavior, and Culture presents a bold challenge to prevailing wisdom of the global AIDS industry and offers an alternative framework for understanding what works in HIV prevention. Arguing for a behavior-based approach, Green and Ruark make case that most effective programs are those that encourage fundamental behavioral changes such as abstinence, delay of sex, faithfulness, and cessation of injection drug use. Successful programs are locally based, low cost, low tech, innovative, and built on existing cultural structures. In contrast, they argue that anthropologists and public health practitioners focus on counseling, testing, condoms, and treatment, and impose their Western values, culture, and political ideologies in an attempt to liberate non-Western people from sexual repression and homophobia. This provocative book is essential reading for anyone working in HIV/AIDS prevention, and a stimulating introduction to key controversies and approaches in global health and medical anthropology for students and general readers.

Non-Western Peoples as Filipinos: Mediating Notions of “Otherness” in Photographs from the National Geographic Magazine in the Early 20th Century

Non-Western Peoples as Filipinos: Mediating Notions of “Otherness” in Photographs from the National Geographic Magazine in the Early 20th Century

A contemporaneidade da obra Mitológicas de Lévi-Strauss

This article proves and analyses the actuality of the book “Mitologiques” by Levi Strauss, more specifically the first book “O cru e o cozido”. The unleashing of the narrative of the myths leads the readers to a thought which redefines otherness and social relations questions such as the relations between the nature and the culture in non-European and in non-western peoples. This kind of discussion is in the everyday life not only in universities which very often do not work with this tetralogy in the graduation courses for considering its reading difficult, but also when we analyze the cultural industry which has recently shown the film “Avatar” by James Cameron (2009) which arises questions which could easily be linked to Levi-Strauss’ masterpiece. More than a reflection about the “savage thought”, the book is not covered with dust in distant frameworks but it is an essential attachment, the focus of relevant discussions both in and out of the academy.

Contesting Hegemony through Genealogy

Much of organizational theory emanating from the field of management studies has been predicated on the Westocentric assumption of universality and has, therefore, been bereft of cultural contextualization. This is problematic insofar as such theories negate the lived realities of many non-Western peoples, particularly those who constitute members of systematically oppressed classes. With the aim to subvert the ethnocentric foundation upon which organizational studies has been traditionally grounded, this article illuminates the utility of Foucauldian thought on cross-cultural management research. It contends that Foucault’s concept of genealogy can potentially serve as a theoretical purveyor from which to destabilize the myth of universality in organizational studies, and to contest the epistemological hegemony that has been afforded to Western organizational analysis. Finally, it concludes that the conscientious deployment of Foucauldian genealogy can discursively open up a multiplicity of perspectives in understanding cross-cultural organizational life.

A Pilot Study on the Living-Alone, Socio-Economically Deprived Older Chinese People’s Self-Reported Successful Aging: A Case of Hongkong

This study fills the gap of literature review in the field of successful aging among non-Western older people. It identifies predictors of self-reported successful aging for living-alone older Chinese people with a relatively low socioeconomic status. Also, it records these respondents’ typical interpretations of the concept of successful aging in their own words. This study employed a single-item, subjective approach to enable elderly respondents to define their own successful aging. It made use of an open-ended question to collect respondents’ interpretations of the concept of successful aging. This study successfully interviewed, at home, 109 randomly selected older Chinese people living alone in two public housing estates. The response rate was 75.6%. Life satisfaction, sex, self-reported health status, satisfaction with living environment and major source of income were crucial predictors of these older Chinese people’s self-reported successful aging. The explanatory power was 50.9%. Several typical interpretations of the concept of successful aging obtained from these respondents were categorized into the following groups: (1) health-related issues, (2) financial issues, (3) personal issues, (4) family issues, (5) psychological issues, and (6) housing issues. Many of their interpretations were consistent with some of this study’s predictors. Living-alone, relatively deprived older Chinese respondents’ self-reported successful aging seems to focus more on subjective predictors than on objective ones. Their interpretations of the concept of successful aging are culturally and socio-economically oriented. These older people’s cognitive assessment of their successful aging is thus largely a personal experience of their daily lives.

Rethinking rights: historical, political, and philosophical perspectives

As reports of genocide, terrorism, and political violence fill today's newscasts, more attention has been given to issues of human rights - but all too often the sound bytes seem overly simplistic. Many Westerners presume that non-Western peoples yearn for democratic rights, while liberal values of toleration give way to xenophobia.This book shows that the identification of rights with contemporary liberal democracy is inaccurate and questions the assumptions of many politicians and scholars that rights are self-evident in all circumstances and will overcome any conflicts of thought or interest. Rethinking Rights offers a radical reconsideration of the origins, nature, and role of rights in public life, interweaving perspectives of leading scholars in history, political science, philosophy, and law to emphasize rights as a natural outgrowth of a social understanding of human nature and dignity.The authors argue that every person comes to consciousness in a historical and cultural milieu that must be taken into account in understanding human rights, and they describe the omnipresence of concrete, practical rights in their historical, political, and philosophical contexts. By rooting our understanding of rights in both history and the order of existence, they show that it is possible to understand rights as essential to our lives as social beings but also open to refinement within communities.An initial group of essays retraces the origins and historical development of rights in the West, assessing the influence of such thinkers as Locke, Burke, and the authors of the Declaration of Independence to clarify the experience of rights within the Western tradition. A second group addresses the need to rethink our understanding of the nature of existence if we are to understand rights and their place in any decent life, examining the ontological basis of rights, the influence of custom on rights, the social nature of the human person, and the importance of institutional rights.Steering a middle course between radical individualist and extreme egalitarian views, Rethinking Rights proposes a new philosophy of rights appropriate to today's world, showing that rights need to be rethought in a manner that brings them back into accord with human nature and experience so that they may again truly serve the human good. By engaging both the history of rights in the West and the multicultural challenge of rights in an international context, Rethinking Rights offers a provocative and coherent new argument to advance the field of rights studies.

Dual Discovery, Dual Dialogue : Reflections on the Global Modernization of Historical Writing

Dual Discovery, Dual Dialogue :Reflections on the Global Modernization of Historical Writing Q. Edward Wang (bio) In the 19th century, when Western colonialism was in full swing, non-Westerners made tremendous efforts to accommodate and integrate Western influences. These efforts determined how and when Western cultural influences appeared in non-Western regions. Non-Western intellectuals searched for ways to appropriate Western influences without totally giving up their own traditions. Moreover, the spread of modern Western culture was usually facilitated by Western military superiority and violence, which naturally fueled both resentment and resistance. These feelings, in turn, generated a strong interest among non-Westerners in reviving and reinforcing indigenous cultures and identities. Confronted by Western power, non-Western peoples harkened back to their past and searched for useful indigenous traits. Once non Western peoples discovered the efficacy of nationalism in fighting off Western incursions, historiography and nationalism became intertwined. To be sure, nationalism is a Western product. But it became attractive worldwide exactly because it offered a useful way for people to strengthen their native traditions in the face of Western incursions. Consider the case of Japan. The professionalization of historical study occurred in Japan almost at the same time as it did in major Western countries. In 1889 Japanese historians established a national association, which published Japan's first professional historical journal, Shigaku zasshi. By comparison, the Historische Zeitshrift was first published in 1859, the Revue historique in 1876, the English Historical Review in 1886, and the American Historical Review in 1895. In 1887 Japanese historians invited Ludwig Riess (1861-1928), a disciple of Ranke, to become Tokyo University's first history professor. Riess accepted, and he played an instrumental role in professionalizing the study of history in Japan after the German model. It was no accident that the Japanese singled out Riess, a Rankean. The Japanese historians who decided to issue the invitation favored Rankean historiography over other historiographical schools in the West because they found that Ranke's emphasis on source critique corresponded squarely to their own scholarly tradition, known in East Asia as "evidential learning" (kaozheng xue). "Evidential learning" originated in 18th-century China. By the end of the 18th century it had spread to Japan, where it flourished during the first half of the 19th century, just in time to prepare Japanese historians to receive Rankean historiography, which they deemed a Western form of "evidential learning." Not only did an extant paradigm influence how Western culture was received, it also determined when the reception took place. Click for larger view View full resolution Principals and students of the Peking University, 1902. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-94915]. The case of China illustrates a different kind of cultural exchange. Repeatedly defeated by Western powers in the 19th century, and then by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), the Chinese launched a series of reforms, including the establishment of a modern university. At first, Chinese intellectuals were more attracted to Herbert Spencer's interpretation of Darwinism and historical progress than they were to Ranke's "scientific" method. These intellectuals felt a pressing need to persuade the rulers that change was necessary for the survival of China. To this end, they used the Confucian tradition to argue that the idea of evolution was not alien to Chinese culture; indeed, according to them, Confucius had anticipated it in his works. Thanks to this representation of Confucianism, Darwinism became a dominant trend of thought in China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The early 20th century witnessed the end of imperial China, as well as a shift in Chinese historiography. In the newly founded Republic of China (1912-1949) more serious efforts were made to turn historical study into a profession. Peking University became its main base, though other universities sprang up elsewhere. At these institutions history became an academic subject. Many of the new history professors had received advanced degrees either in the West or in Japan. They founded research institutions, published journals, and organized professional associations devoted to the study of history. In this process, Chinese historians demonstrated a serious interest in the "scientific history" of the West. Their...

Non-Western interpreters’ experiences of trauma: the protective role of culture following exposure to oppression

Objectives. Many people flee their countries of origin after suffering severe trauma and there is a need to explore how socio-cultural factors are implicated in the experience of both trauma and posttraumatic growth. Interpreters who have been through a trauma are in a unique position to be able to reflect on cultural context. This study explored how interpreters working in the UK who had formerly suffered trauma in their country of origin, and who identified themselves as coping well, managed their experience of trauma. Design. The qualitative method Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used. Nine interpreters were interviewed following a semi-structured guide and the resulting transcripts were analysed according to IPA principles. Results. Three key themes emerged from the data that were labelled as: trauma in the context of wider shared oppression; resisting and responding; and cultural protection and growth. Many participants described their lives prior to arriving in the UK as involving a collective traumatisation as a result of being a victim of oppression related to their cultural identity. The participants described the importance of staying connected to their culture. Giving and providing social support, religious practices, and the role of interpreter facilitated remaining connected. Conclusions. A sense of shared victimisation provided a protective backdrop from which the participants could make sense of the personal traumas they had experienced. The role of interpreting was important as it helped maintain cultural identity. The findings are discussed in relation to theories of both PTSD and Posttraumatic Growth. The results have implications for the work of clinicians supporting non-Western people who have been traumatised.

Some reflections on potential abuses of psychology’s knowledge and practices

This article identifies ten implicit and explicit assumptions of Western psychology that are rooted within its cultural history, traditions, and values. Unfortunately, these assumptions have informed and dominated the knowledge and practice of psychology across the world because of historic, cultural, political, and economic reasons. It is now clear, however, that the indiscriminate acceptance and application of Western psychological knowledge and practices constitutes a serious abuse for non-Western people and for ethnic/racial minorities in Western nations. This abuse is often transmitted and exacerbated via the training of international and ethnic minority students who learn to accept Western psychology as universal. In a global community in which all our lives have become interdependent, it is essential Western psychology be re-considered as a “cultural construction” with all the ethnocentric limitations this implies. As a counter, efforts must be made to acknowledge, develop, and transmit the diverse indigenous/national psychologies from across the world.

Gulliver as Slave Trader: Racism Reviled by Jonathan Swift by Eleanor L. Robinson

66 David Womersley. ‘‘Confessional Politics in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year’’ Anne Barbeau Gardiner John Jay College, CUNY BOOKS BRIEFLY NOTED ELEANOR L. ROBINSON. Gulliver as Slave Trader: Racism Reviled by Jonathan Swift. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2006. Pp. x ⫹ 241. $35. One of the contexts for Swift’s Gulliver ’s Travels has long been seen as the aggressive subjugation of non-Western peoples by white colonizers. Swift draws attention to this dark issue near the end of the book, after Gulliver has returned from his final voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms. In a wellknown passage, Gulliver declares that he will break from his sovereign duty in declining to declare to the crown authorities the existence of any of his discovered territories in order to avoid what would surely otherwise happen: namely, the expedition of an ‘‘execrable Crew of Butchers’’ sent to dispossess the native people of their land and to indulge themselves in the process in ‘‘all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust.’’ Of course, Swift takes the most ironic pains to insist that such actions could not for a moment be associated with Britain, a nation committed to the utmost ‘‘Wisdom , Care, and Justice in planting colonies .’’ The appreciation that Swift’s book supports a burden of racial guilt, however , still stops well short of the thesis advanced in Ms. Robinson’s dogmatic and unappealing study. Her thesis, which admits little nuance, is that Gulliver is depicted as a slave-trader, or at least a ship’s surgeon specifically associated with voyages of enslavement, and that the whole fable can be read as a satire on the mania of white supremacism. The fundamentals of her case rest on the conviction that Swift must have been aware of the realities of the slave trade and that the named ships in which Gulliver travels, and the parts of the world which he visits, are ones that unerringly support an association with the slave trade. Her argument is not that these references are explicit, but rather that they remain silently encoded in the text, as a truth too unpalatable to be made manifest to Swift’s reader. The book relies, then, on enterprising acts of exegesis, at times illuminating, but on other occasions rather baffling. One such is her etymological unpacking of the word ‘‘Lilliput ’’ in which ‘‘Lilli’’ is taken to mean lily white, and ‘‘put’’ is understood in terms of the medieval acceptation ‘‘to launch persons, a boat, a fleet’’ (presumably as in ‘‘put to sea’’), the whole word thus being taken to mean ‘‘Lily-white men launching ships across the oceans to capture innocent black human beings to forcefully carry across an ocean.’’ Another typical piece of exposition occurs in relation to Gulliver’s departure from Brobdingnag when an eagle seizes his box by the ring on its top and carries 67 it up into the air. Ms. Robinson sees Gulliver’s fright at being buffeted by the eagle’s flight, not knowing where he is being transported, as an allegory of the plight of thousands of African slaves, shackled deep in the cargo holds of the slaving vessels. Gulliver’s petrified complaint about being ‘‘four Hours under these circumstances’’ only elicits the chilly reprimand: ‘‘What’s four hours compared to four months in the hold of a slave ship?’’ While Gulliver as a Slave Trader represents an arresting statement of a particular thesis about Swift’s book, it seems to me to be vitiated by overstating the case, by zealously crushing all aspects of the work into a single thesis. Moreover, Ms. Robinson confuses a thesis with indisputable fact. On p. 2, she announces ‘‘the fact that the Travels is a protest at white supremacy and the African slave trade’’ (italics added), and on page 27 associates this fact with her own personal discovery, made in the early eighties. Later Gulliver’s supposed participation in slaving is escalated into his ‘‘insatiable desire’’ for the slave trade. Some of Ms. Robinson’s later critical remarks and rhetorical flights are explicitly and rather incautiously based on the absolute and unavoidable rectitude of her principal claim. Part of this overstatement concerns the yahoos, who are seen as...

Rethinking Postcolonial Studies in the Age of Transnationalism

The need for (re)evaluation of postcolonial studies is currently on the intellectual scene at the cultural / postcolonial studies departments in Western universities. The eruption of cultural studies and postcolonial theories in the decade of the 1990s have not only brought a Tsunami in the humanities and social sciences programs across Western and non-Western universities, but have also changed our respective views on the orient and the occident. Certainly the West is forced to see what is wrong in its colonialism and imperialism, its slavery and genocide, its anti-Semitism and oppression of women, its suppression of minorities, homosexuals and the working classes, its destruction and insensitivity to indigenous cultural forms of life all over the world, and its cruel abuse of other cultural traditions and values. The surge goes on with a more vibrant ring in non-Western locations. People in the non-Western countries began to dig out their cultural pasts and to attempt to see the germs of colonialism and recent day's imperialism polluting their history, cultural and essential identity. From Conrad's Heart of Darkness to Foucault's History of Sexuality, from Darwin's The Origin of Species to Nietzsche's The Will to Power, they tried to trace the stereotypes and exclusive ideology embedded in the textual practices of the writers of colonial countries. All this development can certainly be understood as a positive phenomenon, which has not only challenged Western values as universal but has also set our identity in the decolonialized process in order to regain our essential identities and cultural values. Despite all these positive developments, the further initiative, as it appears to me, postcolonial studies ought to make (which it has not sufficiently done so far) is to encourage the people of non-Western countries in taking initiative for the nation-building and making them properly reread their cultural past more in self-referential terms--in terms of their own cultural achievements--striving towards their [true] identities. What we need more today is to rebuild our nations politically, economically, socially and culturally, rather than just decolonization. I mean, at least we cannot overshadow our former necessity with the latter. They can go together, but it is sad to say that we have not paid sufficient attention to nation-building. We preach for decolonization, but do not think about national (re)building. Our unstable political systems, superstitious belief systems, and cultural values are more responsible for our condition in some ways than the West's colonial exploitation. Therefore the causes of our backwardness are not wholly outside of us; they are more within us. Postcolonial studies now has to turn inward. So far it has more or less turned outward looking for causes of the impoverished situation and eclipsed identity of non-Western peoples. Also, our identities can be properly defined in self-referential values than by projecting them toward 'other.' We are not thereby good because others are evil. We are good (or evil) because historical testimonies establish and support our goodness--or do not. In this regard, I see an ingrained herd morality behind the postcolonial theoretical orientation, which is required to rethink after/beyond postcolonialism. As Nietzsche says, herds define themselves in terms of what others are: "You are evil, therefore I am good." To read it in terms of colonizer and colonialized for the present purpose we can say that it is our herd mentality that inclines us to say you are a colonialist, therefore I am a colonized (You are the cause, therefore I am the effect). I am what you made me. To elaborate with a popular illustration, I drink your Coca Cola and eat McDonalds, and the denounce it as an imperialist cococolization and mcdonaldization of me. But I cannot produce the drinks tastier than those you produce. I love to consume your drinks, emptying my pockets, and since your drinks empty my pocket you are an imperialist. …