Provocative Readings in Intransigent Archives: Finding Aneityumese Women

Anticolonialists — my past self included — tend to read colonial texts with hostile but literal eyes, assuming that colonial intentions were realised and taking at face value colonisers' representations of their own centrality for indigenous people. In such discursive settings, indigenous — especially female — agency is likely to be elided or denied. I argue instead for a reading strategy that decentres colonial representations by identifying and decoding the traces of indigenous actions and presence which are sedimented in, and surreptitiously help shape, dominant texts. Decentred, such representations are susceptible to reverse colonisation: to appropriation and exploitation in writing historical narratives which can envisage indigenous agency and naturalisation of the alien and the novel in even the most repressive colonial arenas. I illustrate the principles and method via a narrative vignette which exemplifies, interrogates and exploits demeaning missionary tropes for indigenous women in mid-nineteenth century Aneityum, Vanuatu. The story evokes key issues in the politics of representation: the need to problematise assumptions that the discursively dominant are necessarily central in subaltern affairs; the need to dislodge the romanticism and ethnocentrism which bemoan the involvement of indigenous women in Christian domesticity, especially sewing, because it looks like submission to missionary hegemony.     

Editorial Introduction

Abstract

Developing holistic accounts of indigenous peoples’ lifeways in colonial intercultural settings requires data that provide insights into patterns of landscape use and variations in social, economic, and cultural practices away from nodes of colonial activity. However, the mobile settlement patterns of some indigenous peoples mean that the data necessary for such investigations can be rare. In western Cape York Peninsula of northeastern Australia, culturally modified trees (CMTs) associated with the collection of wild honey or “sugarbag” provide opportunities to investigate indigenous patterns of landscape use and processes of economic change within colonial settings. Here we use CMT data to suggest that increased engagement with invader-settlers resulted in intensification of indigenous wild food production. This study exemplifies the complexity of socioeconomic shifts that accompanied European colonization worldwide, and illustrates how landscape-level data can provide information on the broader histories of indigenous peoples within colonial settings.     

Disease,Microbiology, and the Construction of a Colonial Space: Romania and the Central Powers in the First World War

Microbiology, developed in the decades before the First World War, encouraged a particular vision of disease and human social relationships. Some of the consequences of that can be seen in the way in which the Central Powers engaged with Romania during combat operations and during the occupation. Much as with colonial approaches to disease in tropical Africa, parasitology encouraged Germans to focus on bacteria and vectors of disease rather than on social relations or indigenous humans. As a consequence, medical care was segregated: it focused on protecting occupiers, and encouraged Germans to construct Romania and Romanians as colonial.     

Indigenous management of teak woodland in Zimbabwe, 1850–1900

African forests provide the focus for a growing body of historical research. This study draws on economic and environmental history approaches in exploring the exploitation and conservation of woodland, respectively. The main focus of the investigation is the consumption–conservation relationship between pre-colonial African people and the forest zone, an interaction viewed by colonial foresters in Zimbabwe as wasteful and based on religious superstition. In spite of the open criticism of rapacious timber cutting by mining companies and poor farming techniques by settlers, colonial perceptions over time stressed the notion of ‘improvident Africans’ as the prime cause of environmental destruction, in particular, deforestation and erosion. Within the African context, historical forest literature is bound to reject colonial misconceptions regarding the scope of indigenous woodland management. Customary forest practice in the Zambezi teak or Baikiea woodland points towards a better understanding on the subject, informed by a wide range of sources; oral tradition, missionary records, travel accounts and colonial documents. In reconstructing pre-colonial resource use from interviews and archival data, this study adopts a multi-source approach, while guarding against an overly romanticised view of indigenous practice.     

Goldsmithing traditions and innovations in colonial Colombia: an analytical study of crucibles from Santa Cruz de Mompox

SUMMARY: The 16th-century Spanish conquest of Colombia brought new technologies that altered and interacted with native metalworking traditions. In the colonial village of Santa Cruz de Mompox, renowned because of its goldsmithing tradition, indigenous groups and Spaniards experienced momentous encounters of individuals, metallurgical technologies and knowledge. However, little is known concerning colonial metallurgy, its continuities and changes with regards to the pre-Columbian period. Here we present the analytical characterization of five crucibles recovered in Mompox, together with discussion of relevant archival evidence. We find evidence for the local manufacture of crucibles as well as for the melting of unrefined gold dust, tumbaga (gold-copper-silver alloys) and silver. These metallurgical practices illustrate some likely illegal activities, continuities with pre-Columbian traditions in the use of tumbagas, and the Spanish-led introduction of silver in northern Colombia. It is argued that metallurgical remains can be informative of wider social and economic negotiations that engaged indigenous peoples, mestizos and Spaniards, which are critical to understand the configuration of the colonial reality.     

RETHINKING THE BUILDING BLOCKS: ONTOLOGICAL PLURALISM AND THE IDEA OF 'MANAGEMENT'

ABSTRACT. The persistence of indigenous ontologies rooted in human systems that pre-date the creation of colonial property rights and assertions of frontier conquest and dispossession unsettles the dominant idea that 'management' is an unproblematic and universally endorsed goal for communities, regions and nations in their environmental and development discourses. This paper argues that conceptual building blocks which render management, be it of environments, economies or people, as unquestionably good, need to be reconsidered. Drawing on diverse indigenous knowledges in Australia, particularly in relation to wildlife management, the paper examines the hidden cultural specificity of management, planning, institutional strengthening and capacity building as well as their implicit silencing of alternative narratives of the economic, environmental and cultural dimensions of social life.     

Ethnic cleansing and the formation of settler colonial geographies

Taking into account that ethnic cleansing not only undoes the legal and spatial formations within a given territory but also is a productive force aimed at securing and normalizing a new political order within a contested territory, we examine its impact on settler colonial geographies. We show that the relative completeness or incompleteness of ethnic cleansing helps shape the specific configuration of two intricately tied sites of social management – spatial reproduction and legal governance – within settler colonial regimes. We claim that complete ethnic cleansing produces a ‘refined’ form of settler colonialism resembling the colonial geographies of North America and Australia and is more readily normalized, while incomplete ethnic cleansing produces an ‘intermediate’ form of settler colonialism similar to the colonial regime in Rhodesia before the settlers lost power and is impossible to normalize due to a series of contradictions stemming from the presence of the ‘indigenous other’. To uncover this less acknowledged feature of ethnic cleansing we compare two territories that were colonized by Israel during the 1967 War: the Syrian Golan Heights and the Palestinian West Bank.     

‘For Purposes of Political Camouflage’: Intelligence Gathering in Colonial Burma, 1933–35

Histories of colonial rule in Burma have noted the difficulties the British government had in ruling the population of that country and the state's reliance on the colonial army to suppress uprisings. However, the role of intelligence in sustaining colonial rule has been neglected in the historiography of Burma. This article discusses the efforts by the colonial state in Burma during the years 1933–35 to develop an intelligence-gathering bureau that reported on the affairs of the indigenous population with a view to preventing the outbreak of anti-government disorder. It illustrates the reliance of the colonial government on information gathered from indigenous informers in order to rule the country and the limitations of over-reliance on that intelligence.     

PANGAEA'S RETURN: TOWARDS AN ONTOLOGY OF INVASIVE LIFE

Invasive life has received much attention in recent years, being a prime example of the complex socio‐natural entanglements characterizing the present condition of the world. In this article we argue for an ontology of invasive life, consisting of three aspects. First, invasive life does indeed exist; second, it is deeply entangled with political action; and third, it has the capacity to produce new assemblages of socio‐natural phenomena. A recognition of these ontological premises opens up for analyses that go beyond the discussions of scientific moral judgement, and which will be a necessary part of reformulating the politics of human–nonhuman relations. The articulation of an invasive life ontology and its associated political project is inspired by, and vice versa serves as an introduction for, the following articles in this special issue, which address various aspects of these concerns.     

Seductive Landscapes: Gender,Race and European Representations of Nature in the Dutch East Indies during the Late Colonial Period

A common assumption in current scholarship on imperialism is that representations of colonised landscapes were gendered female and that European expansion was a male‐gendered enterprise. In the Dutch East Indies (colonial Indonesia), a Dutch possession in south‐east Asia, this association was by no means consistent in artistic and literary representations of nature and landscape. The gendering of Indies landscapes as feminine and their association with erotic conquest in colonial representations was most strongly evident in paintings. However, in photographs and literature, race figured more prominently in the designation of colonised landscapes as tropical and other. This was particularly true from the late nineteenth century onwards, when an ideological shift towards increased racial segregation occurred among colonial intellectuals and officials. In literature particularly, Indies landscapes and nature appeared as gender‐neutral, but were clearly raced native. In such instances, colonial representations were more likely to convey a fear of seduction and engulfment by Indies nature than titillation at the prospect of erotic opportunity or colonial conquest.     

FLORAL HAZARDS: NOOTKA LUPIN IN ICELAND AND THE COMPLEX POLITICS OF INVASIVE LIFE

Once established in new spaces, exotic plants not only impact the “native” biota, but also affect environmental politics in often complex ways. This article looks into one instance of such politics: that of the Nootka lupin (Lupinus nootkatensis), a leguminous plant of North American origin. Imported to Iceland in 1945 to stem soil degradation and recover vegetation, it soon became firmly established in Icelandic landscapes. Its spreading was actively assisted by human actors as part of fulfilling a moral duty to heal a land scarred by unsustainable past land use practices. Changing perspectives in environmental management have brought about a radical reversal in the lupin's status. It is now seen by many as a “floral hazard”, and has been declared an “invasive alien species” by the Ministry for the Environment. New lines of defence are being established to curb its spread into the deserts of the central highlands. A polarized debate has ensued about the politics of invasive life. Increased research by natural scientists has not led to any resolution. It is argued that such seemingly intractable controversies cannot be resolved unless close attention is paid to the historical construction of values and moralities underwriting the production of the discursive communities involved. Conditions of radical uncertainty with the advent of the Anthropocene further complicate the politics of invasive life.     

The Activist Polis: Topologies of Conflict in Indigenous Solidarity Activism

Interpersonal conflict poses a serious threat to social justice activism. In the context of indigenous solidarity activism in southern Arizona, conflicts are often born of the challenges accompanying differentials in social privilege due to differences in race and ethnicity relative to white supremacist settler colonialism. This paper examines activist collaboration between Tohono O'odham and non‐Native anarchist activists in southern Arizona, arguing that a topological activist polis is a useful lens through which we can better understand the roots of conflict in social justice activism. Non‐Native activists are often aware of the ways white supremacist settler colonial society privileges particular identities while marginalizing others. Nonetheless, settler and white privilege give rise to tensions which can be seen topologically through the very different relationships non‐Native and indigenous activists have to ongoing processes of white supremacy and to histories of the genocide of indigenous peoples.     

An archaeological test of the “Exchange Expansion Model” of contact era change on the Northwest Coast

Recent anthropological studies show that traditional views of indigenous communities in the wake of European colonialism are constrained by Eurocentric biases. These biases can be overcome, in part, by greater reliance on archaeological data as an independent line of evidence and increased attention to indigenous internal sociocultural processes. This study uses these strategies to examine colonial era shifts in indigenous exchange systems on the Northwest Coast of North America. Obsidian artifact data from late precontact and early postcontact deposits are used to test what I call the “Exchange Expansion Model” (EEM) of colonial period shifts in Northwest Coast exchange systems. According to the EEM, both the volume and geographic scope of supralocal exchange among indigenous communities increased as a result of European influences. This study tests the model using obsidian artifact data from three Lower Columbia River sites – Cathlapotle (45CL1), Clahclellah (45SA11), and Meier (35C05). The results support the hypothesized increase in volume, but not the hypothesized increase in geographic scope, of indigenous supralocal exchange. To explain the departure from expectations, I propose a revised version of the EEM which considers more fully how Native demography and internal sociocultural dynamics developed in the context of introduced diseases, horses, and the fur trade. I suggest these variables facilitated increases in the flow of prestige goods, but declines in the flow of less valued goods such as obsidian, from interior sources to the Lower Columbia River. Exchange alliances between Lower Columbia Chinookans and nearby Willamette Valley inhabitants were more resistant to disruption, so obsidian importation from the Willamette Valley to the Lower Columbia stabilized, and perhaps intensified, during the postcontact era. These findings illustrate the power of archaeology for empirically testing ethnohistorical models of colonialism and for illuminating the significance of indigenous internal sociocultural processes in colonial entanglements.     

Threads: Collecting Cloth in the North American French Colonies

Trade of European-produced cloth and clothing enabled indigenous and non-indigenous inhabitants of colonial New France to rethink the “hand-woven”, impacting how self could be presented through dress. At the same time, objects were being collected in New France for cabinets of curiosities and museums. These different collections resonated in different ways through history, subsequently influencing modern understandings of colonial cloth and clothing. This paper examines colonial experiences of cloth by looking at archaeological remnants of cloth and cloth production as compared to how indigenous and non-indigenous colonial peoples were and are being represented by cloth and clothing in museum collections.     

Paleopathology and health of native and introduced animals on Southern Peruvian and Bolivian Spanish Colonial sites

Spanish colonial sites in southern Peru and Bolivia contain remains of native camelids and introduced bovids with examples of degenerative paleopathologies that are interpreted as reflecting changes in herd management, animal use and animal health following the Spanish conquest. The archaeological contexts include three Spanish colonial wineries from Moquegua in southern Peru and the nearby colonial village of Torata Alta where indigenous people were forced to resettle under Spanish control. Also from Peru is faunal material from the 14th to 16th century rural agropastoral village of Pillistay located near Camana. Animal remains with bone abnormalities are also present in residential, commercial and industrial sites associated with Spanish silver mining near Potosí, Bolivia at Tarapaya and Cruz Pampa. Eighteen pathological specimens are described including examples of degenerative changes to phalanges, vertebrae, tarsals, limb elements and ribs. Paleopathologies present include exostoses, osteophytes, porosity, grooving and eburnation. Examples of phalangeal exostoses on bovid phalanges indicate the use of these introduced animals as draught cattle. Exostoses on camelid first phalanges suggests their use as cargo animals as do thoracic vertebrae with severe cases of degenerative pathology. Introduced caprines contain few pathologies indicating their primary use as food animals. The bone abnormalities from colonial sites are more severe than those reported for prehispanic faunal assemblages. These data provide insights into the health and work behaviour of indigenous Andean camelids and introduced Eurasian animals following the Spanish conquest. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Australia: a continuing genocide?

Debates about genocide in Australia have for the most part focussed on past frontier killings and child removal practices. This article, however, focuses on contemporary culturally destructive policies, and the colonial structures that produce them, through the analytical lens of the concept of genocide. The article begins with a discussion of the meaning of cultural genocide, locating the idea firmly in Lemkin's work before moving on to engage with the debates around Lemkin's distinction between genocide and cultural 'diffusion.' In contrast to those scholars who prefer the word 'ethnocide,' the underlying conceptual contention is that the term 'cultural genocide' simply describes a key method of genocide and should be viewed, without the need for qualification, as genocide. While direct physical killing and genocidal child removal practices may have ceased in Australia, some indigenous activists persuasively contend that genocide is a continuing process in an Australia that has failed to decolonise. Concurring with these views the article argues that the contemporary expression of continuing genocidal relations in Australia can be seen principally, and perversely, in the colonial state's official reconciliation process, native title land rights regime and the recent interventionist 'solutions' to indigenous 'problems' in the Northern Territory.     

A history of the African people

Abstract

Colonialism entailed numerous changes in Swazi socio-economic configurations, including a growing recourse to waged employment. Yet little is known about the dynamics that drove indigenous Swazi women to work for wages. This article argues that colonial policy, by adversely impacting areas of production involving Swazi people, drove women to seek wage employment. Moreover, this was not a smooth process, but a contested issue. Swazi men, chiefs, the monarchy and colonial administrators all attempted to frustrate female participation in wage employment. In spite of such barriers, as oral interviews with mid-twentieth century working women show, women continued to take up wage employment, and eventually secured the implicit support of colonial administrators in the service of the colonial economy.     

6. WHAT'S IN A CONCEPT? THE KINETIC EMPIRE OF THE COMANCHES

This essay revisits the main themes and arguments put forward in The Comanche Empire: indigenous agency; spatial reorientation in the writing of colonial histories; the composition of the Comanche empire and its impact on the history of North America. It also responds to a number of specific issues raised by the roundtable participants: differences and similarities between indigenous and Euro‐colonial power regimes; balancing of culture‐specific frameworks with broad‐gauge political economic analysis; linkages between indigenous agency and indigenous sovereignty in colonial encounters; the question of periodization in writing Native American and colonial histories. Finally, the essay points to new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and comparing nonterritorial nomadic empires by introducing the concept of “kinetic empire,” which refers to a flexible imperial organization that revolves around a set of mobile activities and relies on selective nodal control of key resources.     

Trials,Blunders and Profits: The Changing Contexts of Currencies in Sierra Leone

The work presented here is in the form of a case study that connects currencies with merchants in Sierra Leone from the early fragmentary British presence in 1787 to wide-scale colonisation late in the century. Through accounts from archival research, it traces particularly early examples of monetary instabilities prior to formal colonial rule as well as the first attempts made by the British to regulate indigenous currency systems and standardise them into a homogeneous currency system. Through a monetary perspective, the article shows that colonial authorities did not succeed in having full control over the currencies nor did local ways of using them determine their circulation but merchants, who were responsible for shipping specie to the region, also had a degree of control over the circulation of currencies. As such, the article provides very interesting—and complex—cases that emerged from the interfaces in situ among indigenous populations, merchant companies, international traders, settler communities and British colonial officials.