CLIO/ANTHROPOS

Exploring the Boundaries Between History and Anthropology

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6020-1

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………………………v 1 History and Anthropology: Strange Bedfellows Eric Tagliacozzo and Andrew Willford……………………………………………….1 2 In Search of the Colonial Subject David Arnold………………………………………………………………………………27 3 Laughing at Leviathan: John Furnivall, Dutch New Guinea, and the Ridiculousness of Colonial Rule Danilyn Rutherford…………………50 4 Export Ceramics in Philippine Societies: Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives Eric Tagliacozzo………………………………..78 5 Chronotopes of a Dystopic Nation: The Birth of “Dependency” in Late Porfirian Mexico Claudio Lomnitz………………………………102 6 Foretelling Ethnicity in Trinidad: The Post-emancipation “Labor Problem” Viranjini Munasinghe…………………………………….139 7 The Nationalization of Anthropology: Japan and China in Manchuria Prasenjit Duara……………………………………………….187 8 The Figure of the Tamil in Modern Malaysia Andrew Willford……………………………………………………………………223 9 Unsettled Stories and Inadequate Metaphors: The Movement to Historical Anthropology David William Cohen……………………………273Contributors…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………295Index……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….299

Chapter One

1 History and Anthropology: Strange Bedfellows Eric Tagliacozzo and Andrew Willford

Academic disciplines, like political regimes, seem to generate their most assertive moments of self-rationalization when they perceive themselves to be responding to a “crisis” that casts doubt on the foundations upon which they stand. Academic and political processes are, of course, not simply parallel formations or the product of an odd juxtaposition. Rather, they are mutually constitutive forces in the workings of modernity. That is, the production of disciplines, cultures, and archives are part of the workings of power. This very observation has inspired much historical ethnography. The present volume recognizes and builds upon this understanding of power and knowledge but also suggests further that an unsettling of academic disciplinarity-as one possible response to a perceived crisis of knowledge-opens up new opportunities for examining the inner workings of power, culture, and the archive. Put boldly, the authors in this volume, in varied ways, use the interdisciplinary boundaries of history and anthropology to reveal the contingencies of knowledge-production. By this we refer not only to the terminologies of expertise that produce disciplinary knowledge and evidentiary-based truth claims but also to the servicing of such truths in the name of political and cultural projects. Several of the essays in this volume reveal a parallel between the workings of cultural and political knowledge and the dynamic logic of the interstitial boundaries that animate disciplinary truths in academic life. In turn, this revelation proves particularly useful for producing a critique of the contradictions and contingencies within political identifications and ideologies, particularly within the various spaces of the colonial and postcolonial world.

The recent so-called crisis of representation in the social sciences (and, increasingly, in the humanities as well) has made crossing disciplines more and more common in history and anthropology. A sense of persisting urgency has been lent to this process by the publication of several seminal texts, such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture (1986), and by the growth of the Subaltern, Postcolonial, and Cultural Studies fields since that time. These critiques have refashioned scholarship primarily on the non-Western world, yet their combined influence has also been felt strongly in studies on Europe and North America. Anthropologists and historians alike have been grappling with these changes in vantage and representation and have increasingly been looking toward each other’s methods for answers on how to proceed. The present volume aims to tease out and explain the ramifications of each of these disciplines’ cadences increasingly turning toward each other for inspiration and for authorization. We were specifically interested in rethinking the relationship between power and culture, in reevaluating ideas and concepts of incorporation and resistance, and in examining hegemony and history in an increasingly asymmetrical global system.

As Nicholas Dirks has suggested, the imbrication of history and anthropology emerged at a time when the “colonial state changed from a ‘revenue state’ to an ‘ethnographic state'” (2002: 56). Dirks argues that the colonial state authorized an “ethnographic imperative” to know its subjects-that is, to archive through an explosion of writings and classifications about caste and various other “barbaric” native practices. As an ethnographic archive and as a primary historical source, the state, he suggests, “produces, adjudicates, organizes, and maintains the discourses that become available as the primary texts of history” (2002: 59). In a word, the ethnographic archive became a “principal form of governmentality at the same time that governmentality expressed itself through the categories of historical thought and writing” (61). The sedimentation and classification of knowledge, in other words, took place through ethnographic practice, a legacy of historical anthropologizing that is troubling, to say the least. Dirks reminds us, as have many Subaltern Studies scholars, that the archive already bears the traces of the state’s anxious regimes of classificatory knowledge- production in all cases.

This troubling of the archive need not, of course, invalidate various truths of these same repositories (or of ethnography, for that matter), though it opens up to us alternative readings of both. The so-called state is not a monolithic or unitary subject, and the authorizing voice of its documents often betrays anxieties of rule. One of the principal contributions of this volume, as demonstrated in several of its essays, is that it lays bare various reasons behind the anxieties of rule, or of authorizing knowledges in general. This, we maintain, is felicitously deciphered through the disciplinary boundary-crossing of anthropology and history, its troubling history notwithstanding. Yet Dirks’s points are worth further reflection.

For instance, in locating a classificatory truth that is attempted by various authorizing gestures (states, laws, authorities, institutions) but never fully achieved, one might find that the logic of the supplement (Derrida 1976: 141-164) is at work in the generation of ethnographic truths about colonial or postcolonial subjects. That is, an originary lack in the Law itself may be haunted by its own violent suppression of its arbitrariness (i.e., a performative founding act). The historicity and contingency of the state’s truth claims, for instance, may require compensatory elaboration in a chain of substitutions, signifiable in time and space as ethnographic Others, thus deferring and displacing this originary lack with supplementary violence. As Derrida argues, there is a “mystical” dimension to authority and the Law, in its performative utterance: “There is here a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding act; walled up, walled in because this silence is not exterior to language” (2002: 242). The act is haunted, he adds, as “its ghostliness deconstructs from within all assurance of presence, all certainty no criteriology assuring us of the justice of a decision…. But as a performative cannot be just, in the sense of justice, except by grounding itself in the conventions and so on of other performatives, buried or not, it always maintains within itself some irruptive violence” (2002: 253-256). In this sense, an originary lack inherent in the “irruptive violence” of Law is supplemented through the “archive fever” (Derrida 1995) of an ethnographic state. Grounding itself “in conventions” provides an aura of retroactive historicity to the violence of the state and Law; and the ethnographic archive, in turn, is a critical part of this exercise and the exercising of the Law’s ghostliness. That is, the contingency inherent in the violence of the letter of the Law, or the colonial or postcolonial state more generally, requires a continuous source of exteriority as a source of authority. This is the function of the ethnographic archive.

Read in such a light, our understanding of the governmentality of the colonial state is enriched. The limits and excess inherent in the practices of the “ethnographic state” allow us to see, paradoxically perhaps, how scholars can deconstruct, interrogate, and critique official historiographies while simultaneously theorizing the dialectical push and pull between state imaginaries and various subjects as they are constituted, circumscribed, and affected by the illocutionary force of state practices, ideologies, and discourses.

The authors in this book are concerned with the problem of agency and subjectivity vis–vis the powers of the law or the state. As David Arnold (Chapter 2) argues, through an optic first opened by Foucault, “colonial governmentality … allows for seeing colonialism as a form of modernity sufficiently powerful and persuasive to impel (in his case) Indians to rethink themselves. Second, it exemplifies agency in that Indians alone are capable of translating, negotiating, and reconstituting that modernity as their own.” The instability of the state, law, or authority does not necessarily lead to an agency or intentionality that is not subject to the gaze of the state’s disciplinary arm or identificatory imago. Put simply, subalterns are not making history of their own choosing, free from the force of law, or the traces of the historical archive. Nevertheless, in the “silences” and “elisions” of the disciplinary gaze, as David William Cohen (Chapter 9) argues, there is fertile ground for rethinking both knowledge-production and subject-making.

In our view, the stark choices between subjection and intentionality, or between closure and openness, are not tenable intellectual positions. Rather, in seeing oscillations within disciplines and subjects, an interpretive spectrum opens that avoids historicism or romanticism. That is, just as the apparent historicism of context appears to determine how actual subjects would think, feel, and identify, we see an interruption coming from two juxtapositions of authoritative knowledge. First, the purported governmentality of power structures that be-and with them the state practices including, though certainly not limited to, the ethnographic archiving of difference-is itself supplemented through the agentive practices of discrete subjects. Through this the lacking force of law is reiterated by subaltern subjects who appropriate authorized knowledge to their own ends (but not of their own free choosing, of course). That is, the suturing of ideological gaps occurs in the face of suppressed or contingent knowledges through the work of agentive subjects who complete or silence the ideological gaps, rather than piercing the veil of ideology, which would represent a more romantic view of subaltern agency. Indeed, the excess of identification that often occurs where ideology appears most absurd and untenable suggests that the tenacious hold of ethnic and religious hierarchies, purities, and boundaries is contingent upon the “irruptive violence” (and the supplementary archive practice of the ethnographic state), as Derrida would have it, of colonial and postcolonial statecraft. “The ghostliness that deconstructs from within” does not, in other words, (necessarily) produce critical reflection, but rather, excessive identification in the shadow of the Other’s lack, as in Lacan’s designation of neurotic and compulsive identification. The impossibility-yet tenacity-of certain identifications are elucidated in several of these essays, though in different theoretical registers, be they Foulcauldian, Marxian, Lacanian, or Derridean.

A second point, and one that parallels the first, concerns the production of knowledge at the interstices of disciplinary authority. One might ask, as does David William Cohen here, whether gesturing toward another discipline acts to complete or to further authorize the disciplinary status that is “borrowing” or “smuggling” from the other. The logic of the supplement again shadows the interdisciplinary move. Is anthropology’s or history’s lack supplemented or reauthorized through their respective boundary crossings? Are new gaps and fissures created by the cross-boundary intervention leading to a reiteration of the very notion of disciplinarity, and the very need to fill in those gaps with the authority of the archive and ethnography, respectively? As Cohen puts it succinctly, “the blurring model (with regards to interdisciplinarity) evades epistemological reflection.” Rather, what we call for, and hopefully achieve, is a critical reflection upon the processes of authoritative action and disciplinarity. This is a call for seeing without the enframing disciplinary logics of vision. The interweaving of, and parallels between, academic knowledge-production and knowledge, power, and subjection in the political field are, we claim, better understood through this attentiveness to the interstices and boundaries that lie at the heart of these essays.

Toward that end, the editors invited essays from several prominent practitioners within both fields, whose interests, methodologies, and expertise spanned disciplinary and geographic boundaries. For the anthropologists, the editors selected Claudio Lomnitz of Columbia University, two of whose books, Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space (1992) and Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (2001), spoke directly to these processes. Also invited was Danilyn Rutherford of the Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago. Rutherford’s recent book, Raiding the Land of Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier (2003), exemplifies the interdisciplinary spirit we were seeking in its combination of theoretical innovation, ethnographic sensitivity, and historical breadth and depth. The third anthropologist asked to present work was Viranjini Munasinghe of Cornell University, whose book Calaloo or Tossed Salad: East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad (2002) is an ethnography simultaneously concerned with the processes of history.

The historians are represented through David Arnold of Warwick University, formerly at the University of London (SOAS), who is the author of two works which themselves cross boundaries, this time in India-Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (1993) and Police Power and Colonial Rule, Madras, 1859-1947 (1986). A second historian invited was David William Cohen of the University of Michigan, whose books (including Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape [1989] and The Combing of History [1994]) have dealt with these themes in Africa. Our third historian was Prasenjit Duara of the University of Chicago/National University of Singapore, whose books Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (1988) and Rescuing History from the Nation (1995) cross the boundaries between history and anthropological approaches as well. Both of the editors then wrote a chapter for the ensuing volume too, Willford tacking from the anthropological side of things and Tagliacozzo leaning in historically. The geographical expertise covered in this volume is quite global, therefore; Mexico, the Caribbean, Africa, India, China, Southeast Asia, and Oceania are all explored.

The turn toward anthropological methods and questions by scholars engaged with history has been under way for quite some time now. Though we will not offer a comprehensive assessment here, perhaps the signal moment in this process was the series of essays that appeared in the Journal of Modern History in the 1980s; these came in direct response to the publication of Robert Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre (1984). Darnton, heavily influenced by his Princeton-area colleague in anthropology, Clifford Geertz, undertook a social history of events surrounding Carnival in Paris in the 1730s. His avenue of vision was explicitly symbolic, following ideas first suggested by Geertz in “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight” (1973). This was history as it had not been done before, and the results both pleased and outraged a range of specialists on both sides of the Atlantic. Since this great debate, other historians have made use of the techniques and methodologies of anthropology; some of the better-known practitioners include Prasenjit Duara (for China), Robert Harms (for Africa), and Ann Stoler (for Indonesia, and, increasingly, for colonial societies generally). The successes (or failures) of these experiments have been judged differently by different scholars, but the debate on how historians see has certainly been richer as a result.

From the anthropological side, Eric Wolf’s influential Europe and the People Without History (1982), aside from providing a masterful political-economic history of the last five centuries, provoked anthropologists to reconsider their privileging of fieldwork-derived “hypothetical isolates.” Wolf historicized the largely synchronic paradigms in sociocultural anthropology of the 1950s and 1960s by demonstrating their emergence in reaction to the ethnocentric excesses of cultural evolutionism. While synchronic analyses attempted to demonstrate the functional validity of non-Western societies and institutions, the elision of history and questions of power within such studies privileged structure over agency and stasis over change. While Clifford Geertz’s ideas may have inspired some historians, his focus on the semiotic process-his famous ever-changing “webs of meaning”-suggested the importance of temporal inquiry. Indeed, much of Geertz’s writing incorporated a long-range analysis (Islam Observed, 1968; Negara, 1980; The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973). However, Geertz, while inspiring interest among historians, also inspired a historical and political-economic critique of his analysis of “meaning.” Both the camps of Marxian theorists interested in the social production of value within and between societies (e.g., Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz) and the postcolonial- and Foucault-inspired scholars of the genealogies of cultural/political discourses (e.g., Bernard Cohn [1990], John and Jean Comaroff [1993-1997], Nicholas Dirks [1987], Renato Rosaldo [1980], Talal Asad [1993], and Michel-Rolf Trouillot [1995]) are attentive to power and hierarchies of knowledge. Also, the more structurally oriented analyses of social continuity and dialectical engagement within global systems (Marshall Sahlins [1982], Jonathan Friedman [1994], and Bruce Kapferer [1998], for example) looked to questions of practice and agency through history. It might be said, particularly for Sahlins and Kapferer, that indigenous notions of “history” were always already theorized through culturally distinct logics that generated their own understandings of temporality.

(Continues…)

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