Introduction: Anthropology,Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities

This special issue contributes to an emerging literature on the materialities of colonial government by considering the changing relations between practices of data collecting, styles of anthropological knowing and modes of governing which target the conduct of colonial and metropolitan populations. Drawing on comparative studies from Australia; the Australian administered territory of Papua; France; French Indo-China; New Zealand; North America and the UK; the papers consider the implications of different forms of knowledge associated with practices of collecting—anthropology, archaeology, folklore studies, demography—in apparatuses of rule in various late nineteenth and early twentieth-century contexts. This introduction outlines the rationale for the volume and elaborates the concept of “anthropological assemblage” which helps focus the authors' explorations of the socio-technical agencements which connected museum, field, metropolis and colony during this period. In doing so, it points towards a series of broader themes—the relationship between pastoral power and ethnographic expertise; the Antipodean career of the Americanist culture concept; and the role of colonial centres of calculation in the circulation of knowledge, practices of collecting and regimes of governing—which suggest productive future lines of inquiry for “practical histories” of anthropology.     

The Grammar of Domination and the Subjection of Agency: Colonial Texts and Modes of Evidence

This article focuses on colonial accounts of the killing of the Xhosa chief, Hintsa, in 1835 at the hands of British forces along what came to be known as the eastern Cape frontier. It explores the evidentiary procedures and protocols through which the event came to be narrated in colonial frames of intelligibility. In proposing a strategy for reading the colonial archive, the paper strategically interrupts the flow from an apartheid historiography to what is commonly referred to as ‘alternative history.’ The aim in effecting this interruption is to call attention to the enabling possibilities of critical history. This is achieved not by way of declaration but rather through a practice whereby the foundational category of evidence is problematized. The paper alludes to the limits of alternative history and its approaches to evidence on the one hand, and the conditions of complicity within which evidence is produced on the other. Whereas alternative history identifies its task as one of rewriting South African history, critical history, it issuggested, offers the opportunity to reconstitute the field of history by addressing the sites of its production and also its practices. In exploring the production of the colonial record on the killing of Hintsa, the paper seeks to complicate alternative history's slippage in and out of the evidentiary rules established by colonial domination even as it constitutes the category ofevidence as an object for a politics of history of the present.     

The Legacy of Planter Jean My: Analysis of Two Private Colonial Homes in Southern Melanesia

This paper discusses two private houses built by New Hebrides planter Jean Marot dit My, one on Santo Island, northern Vanuatu, and another in Nouméa, New Caledonia. The former is relatively well known in Vanuatu, as it is assumed to be the inspiration behind the octagonally shaped mansion of the character Emile de Becque, a French planter in James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. Mr My’s houses are linked to French Art Deco style and are here compared to one another. Through the study of their similarities and differences, and of their interiors, the integration of Art Deco style and design can be demonstrated. While they represent two very different ways of life, they show the inspiration, aspirations and trajectory of a colonial French family in southern Melanesia. Hopefully, this research will help promote the protection of both houses, through emphasising the importance of their historical and literary connections.     

历史与实践:纽约大都会博物馆的中国艺术收藏

纽约大都会博物馆的中国艺术收藏已有130年的历程。其间收藏的器类始于制作精美、雅俗共赏的明清瓷器,继而扩展到玉器、金银器、珐琅器、牙雕等整个明清时代的装饰艺术,再进一步扩展到中国古代的青铜礼器、玉器、陶塑和佛教造像,并且随着西方对于中国艺术的研究的深入,观众和收藏家逐渐领略到中国书画艺术深邃的文化内涵,最终全面地了解绵延不断的中华五千年文明;其收藏历程则见证了美国,或是说西方对中国文化艺术的认知过程,收藏过程中所形成的收藏家、赞助人和博物馆业务主任成功的合作模式和经验或许可以给中国的博物馆提供有益的借鉴。     

Agency,Periodisation and Change in the Gender and Women's History of Colonial India

The paper begins with a critique of the ‘imperialism‐nationalism’ paradigm and its concomitant privileging of the period 1885–1947, which has dominated the writing of modern Indian history. It is argued here that the fixation with the ‘birth‐of‐the‐nation’ theme has led to the neglect of women's agency; that it has resulted in many inconsistencies, dilemmas and unresolved issues regarding a range of topics within Indian gender‐relations; and that this periodisation inhibits the reclamation of terms such as ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism’. The second half of the essay proposes that women's agency can be recovered via a new chronology and a new template for understanding agency within which scholars will be enabled to retrieve the conscious voices of Indian women and record change in gender relations.     

The Dutch Colonial House And the Colonial Revival

The Colonial Revival was a major movement in twentieth-century American domestic architecture. The Dutch Colonial house, one of many Revival styles, provides a useful index of Colonial Revival popularity, which was greatest between 1905 and 1940. This popularity was based upon a nostalgic idealization of the nation's colonial past, and was apparently tied to white Protestant dissatisfaction with urbanizing, industrializing America. The persistence of Colonial Revival styles in the landscape throughout this century and a recent resurgence in their popularity suggest that the idealization of colonial America continues to be an important feature of American popular culture and cultural geography.     

The Archaic Period in the south-central Andes

Although the Archaic Period of the south-central Andes is not well-known beyond Latin America, there is much of interest in it to archaeologists working with foraging populations. Like the North American Archaic and European Mesolithic, the Archaic in the region is characterized by ethnic differentiation, changes in the scale and frequency of residential mobility, resource intensification and specialization, and population growth. The origin and evolutionary trajectory of these trends are discussed within the context of the development of ecological complementarity, a strategy of land use that exploits the vertically stratified distribution of resources in the Andean environment.     

Feminist Theorizing of Patriarchal Colonialism,Power Dynamics,and Social Agency Materialized in Colonial Institutions

In the twenty-first century historical archaeologists have increasingly drawn on post-colonial theory to analyze the European conquest and colonization of the Americas, Australasia, and Africa. However, few have employed feminist theories to gain insights into the patriarchal power dynamics that were fundamental to institutionalized colonial ideologies and practices. This paper provides feminist theorizing of new concepts and a heterarchical model of multiple interacting powers that increase understanding of complex gender and sexual power dynamics between colonizers and colonized.