Colonial Tutelage and Industrial Colonialism: reindeer husbandry and early 20th-century hydroelectric development in Sweden

The incentives for large-scale hydropower development in Sweden are usually explained in terms of the early 20th-century belief in progress and the need for energy to fuel industrialization and modernization. For reindeer husbandry, the consequences and cumulative effects of this large-scale landscape conversion, and the societal changes it entailed are still largely a story to be told as impacts and effects constantly evolve in the socio-ecological system of the reindeer grazing lands. The present article ¹ 1 This article is part of the multi-disciplinary research project ‘Adaptations of Natural Resource-based Communities to Climatic and Societal Changes: Sami Reindeer Herding in the Past, Present and Future’ funded by The Swedish Research Council, FORMAS, The National Space Board and Faculty of Humanities, Umeå University. investigates hydropower development in the northern parts of Sweden, and how the reindeer husbandry of the indigenous Sami people was involved, through a case study of three hydropower projects in the early 20th century. An additional perspective is illuminated: how early hydroelectric development in the reindeer grazing areas was made possible through an immersed colonialism.     

Purity and Power: Anthropology From Colonialism to the Global Hierarchy of Value

These four books focalize the links between sociocultural anthropology and the national or cultural identities of its theoreticians and empirical practitioners. Historically caught between the forces of nationalism and colonialism, the subdiscipline has largely transcended its now rejected past, of which significant traces nonetheless remain embedded in its conceptual inheritance. Ranging from vernacular as well as English-language Indian writings to the compromised achievements of German scholars and to the sharp divergences within and among the dominant traditions, the material of these books indexes the emergence of a self-conscious marginality that has engendered a distinctive and productive idiom of sociocultural critique.     

Italian Colonialism in Africa as a Connected System: Institutions,Men and Colonial Troops

ABSTRACT

In the last two decades studies on Italian colonialism have shown remarkable vitality and many positive results. But in spite of this undoubted progress there still remain some limitations of approach that prevent any real outstripping of the interpretive schemes hitherto used. The research being conducted largely follows the nation state paradigm: the Italian colonies are viewed and studied as essentially independent entities, devoid of relations with the surrounding territories and, above all, between each of these and the others.

This article offers an interpretive scheme that stresses the intimate relationship among the Italian colonial possessions in Africa, their status as a system, by moving away from a representation that has always favoured a rigorously individualised treatment of Italy’s colonies. It emphasises three main levels of interconnection: administrative structures, officials and colonial troops. While the first two were also common to other colonial entities, the extreme recourse to the mobility of colonial troops was a distinctive feature of the Italian version and the main factor of interconnection among Italy’s territories.

Our analysis also enables us to better understand the place violence held in Italian colonialism. Along with analyzing the deportations, massacres and use of gas, we must consider the uninterrupted cycle of campaigns that from 1911 to 1941 Italy inflicted on its colonies. For the most part, wars were delegated to colonial troops who for thirty years, moving from one colony to another, made war and violence a fundamental aspect of the Italian colonial experience.     

Losing the Blanket,Building a Fence: Australian Anxiety and the End of Military Colonialism in Malaysia

From 1955 to 1988, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) maintained a large airbase in Northern Malaysia. For the first 15 years of its existence, RAAF Butterworth had a modest and incomplete perimeter fence. With the end of British military colonialism in Malaysia and Singapore following the implementation of the ‘East of Suez’ policy, the Australians became preoccupied with their physical security and the role of the perimeter fence. By exploring the adoption of practices of exclusion via physical barriers in the wake of British withdrawal, this paper argues that the changing psychological outlook of Australian military officials reflected broader Australian anxieties about their own sense of ‘Britishness’ and the nation’s place in a decolonising Asia. As the Australians lost their British ‘blanket’ they built a fence.     

Moving Words: Christian Language and the Modern World

Within the anthropology of Christianity, much attention has been paid to the convergence of Christianity with modern understandings of language. In this essay, I review scholarship that traces the historical connections between modern and Christian views of language, particularly in British colonial attacks on Hindu language practices, and I examine two recent ethnographies that offer different vantage points on the variety of ways in which contemporary Christians use language in a self-consciously modern way.     

After Gentrification: Social Mix,Settler Colonialism,and Cruel Optimism in the Transformation of Neighbourhood Space

Social mix policies have emerged as a prominent mechanism to legitimate neighbourhood redevelopment efforts across the US. Despite integrationist rhetoric, results often disabuse marginalised communities of their claims to the city. This paper employs a hybrid spatio‐temporal analysis at the intersection of political‐economic theories of gentrification and post‐colonial and Black geographies literatures to examine underlying cultural logics and affective experiences animating such processes of neighbourhood transformation, contestation, and succession. Reflecting on 15 years of experience researching Over‐the‐Rhine (OTR), Cincinnati, we contribute a stylised distinction between the foundational, mature, and ongoing legacies of urban settler colonial relations. Our account discloses the power geometries shaping neighbourhood space by illustrating the impact of the discourses, tactics, and strategies employed by pro‐development actors and neighbourhood activists as OTR's socio‐political landscape shifted over time. In conclusion, we engage the thorny questions these dynamics raise surrounding how inner‐city neighbourhoods are theorised and struggled over after gentrification.     

Saving the Girls: Medical Colonialism and the HPV Programme

ABSTRACT

Mass immunisation is a central aspiration of global health programmes, such as in the 2000 Millennium Development Goals (MDG), as a means of addressing the glaring inequalities in life expectancy that separate the Global North and South. A recent initiative, the Human Papillomaviruses (HPV) vaccine, is being rolled out in so-called developing countries to prevent a number of sexually transmitted diseases, including one of the rarer forms of cervical cancer. Despite its apparent good intentions, resistance to the vaccine has occurred, in developed as well as in developing countries, not least because it constitutes a largely gendered form of medical intervention which is promoted according to Western concepts of risk, biomedical knowledge and normative understandings of female sexual behaviour. As a major component of the MDG health strategy aimed at developing countries, the HPV vaccine initiative carries implicit tendencies towards ‘medical colonialism’ underpinned as it is by hegemonic scientific masculinity, in which gendered forms of structural violence are legitimised through the discursive affiliations of progress and global health. This paper will examine the intersecting themes of political economy, gendered structural violence and hegemonic medical masculinity underpinning HPV immunisation programmes within the context of development. It interrogates how masculine scientific narratives of disease prevention, which legitimises the state-endorsed (and increasingly mandated) pharmaceuticalised protection of young women as objects of patriarchal care and control, have become the new missionary voices, saving bodies rather than souls.     

On the Margins of Colonialism: Contact Zones in the Aru Islands

ABSTRACT

The Aru Islands are situated at the eastern end of the Indian Ocean, in the southern Moluccas. They are also one of the easternmost places in the world where Islam and Christianity gained a (limited) foothold in the early-modern period, and marked the outer reach of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The present article discusses Western-Arunese relations in the seventeenth century in terms of economic exchange and political networks. Although Aru society was stateless and relatively egalitarian and eluded strong colonial control up to the late colonial period, it was still a source of natural products, such as pearls, birds-of-paradise, turtle-shells, destined for luxury consumption in Asia and Europe. Aru society was thus positioned in a global economic network while leaving it largely ungoverned. Colonial archival data yield important information about the indigenous responses to European attempts to control the flow of goods. They both support Roy Ellen’s claim that the economic flows in eastern Indonesia extended beyond the control of VOC, and provide parallels to James Scott’s thesis of state-avoidance among the ethnic minorities in mainland Southeast Asia.     

Placing Angola: Racialisation,Anthropocentrism, and Settler Colonialism at the Louisiana State Penitentiary's Angola Rodeo

The Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) is a site embedded with historical legacies of plantation slavery and settler colonialism; as the largest maximum security penitentiary in the United States, the prison also reflects the racial injustice of contemporary US mass incarceration. Situated on the site of an old plantation, the prison hosts the Angola Rodeo twice a year, an event that crystallises violent multispecies social relations in the merging of the US West and South as two distinct kinds of colonial projects. Whereas much scholarship and activism has worked against the wholesale dehumanisation inherent in chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and mass incarceration, this paper works to interrogate and disrupt the human–animal binary through which processes of dehumanisation are sustained. Drawing together postcolonial studies and animal studies, the paper centres empirical research on the Angola Rodeo to highlight how racialisation and anthropocentrism are intertwined logics of subordination and exclusion that carry forward into the present. Ultimately, the paper suggests the need for a mode of analysis and action that does not maintain the subordination of the animal, and instead, takes a de‐anthropocentric and decolonial approach to injustice.     

Contesting the Settler City: Indigenous Self‐Determination,New Urban Reserves,and the Neoliberalization of Colonialism

In settler colonial contexts the historical and ongoing dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples is foundational to understanding the production of urban space. What does it mean that cities in what is now known as Canada are Indigenous places and premised on the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples? What roles do new urban reserves play in subverting or reinforcing the colonial‐capitalist sociospatial order? This paper examines these questions in relation to new urban reserves in Canada. Most common in the Prairie provinces, new urban reserves are satellite land holdings of First Nation communities located outside of the city. While the settler state narrowly confines new urban reserves to neoliberal agendas, First Nations are successfully advancing reserve creation to generate economic self‐sufficiency, exercise self‐determination, and subvert settler state boundaries. I argue that new urban reserves are contradictory spaces, as products and vehicles of settler‐colonial state power and Indigenous resistance and place‐making.     

The Infrastructures of Internal Colonialism: State,Environment, and Race in Lerma,Mexico

This article explores the relations between infrastructures, labour, and internal colonialism in Lerma, Mexico. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research of two hydraulic projects there, the article argues that infrastructures are productive of the racial, environmental, and political relations that constitute internal colonialism both historically and contemporarily. I show how these infrastructural projects imagined and produced colonial relations between the environment, racialised workers, and the nation-state, and how these colonial logics endure today through infrastructures and the forms of racialised labour that maintain them. In doing so, this article contributes to literature that interrogates the relations between infrastructure and coloniality by focusing on how infrastructural labour makes internal colonialism enduring. The article concludes by reflecting on how the labour practices that make internal colonialism enduring also point to ways of producing infrastructures otherwise.     

Sub‐surface Property,Free‐entry Mineral Staking and Settler Colonialism in Canada

This article examines mineral rights and claim staking in northern Canada, with a focus on settler colonialism and how liberal understandings of property are embedded in the legal geography of the right to explore for minerals. The history of these legal systems is explained through the “free‐entry” principle understood as the right to stake a mineral claim without consulting with private landholders or Indigenous peoples. Free‐entry debate highlights how ideologies of property are assumed neutral through staking regulations. Based on an analysis of interviews with key informants involved in mining regulation, I analyze the geographic stratification of land into two categories, above and below the surface, as an avenue to understand how dominant ideologies of property reveal a critical site of contestation.     

Sensitivity of Dental Phenotypic Data for the Identification of Biological Relatives

Using modern samples of known kin, this paper evaluates two fundamental aspects of kinship analysis in archaeological contexts: (1) choice of data (dental metrics or morphology) and (2) analytical approach (multivariate, distance‐based approach or a ‘rare trait’ analysis). Stone dental casts were analysed from 155 female individuals from four sampling locations in Kenya. Of these 155 individuals, only three pairs were close kin: mother–daughter, sister–sister, and first‐cousin–first‐cousin dyads. After variable winnowing, inter‐individual distances or similarities were calculated using 11 odontometric variables and 25 dental morphological variables. Resulting distance matrices were ordinated in two dimensions using multidimensional scaling. Odontometric data performed relatively well at identifying known relative pairs, but the results were heavily affected by choice of similarity measure (e.g. Euclidean distances vs. Gower coefficients) and pre‐analysis data treatments (e.g. raw data vs. principal components). Dental morphological data performed comparably with odontometric data but were slightly less effective. Rare traits were identified and compared among relative pairs for concordance, with mixed results. Rare morphological features were randomly distributed throughout the population and were not exclusively found in close kin. In combination, results indicated the sister–sister dyad was most consistently identified; however, in no analysis were relatives more phenotypically similar than all random pairs of unrelated individuals. A multivariate, distance‐based approach was more effective than rare traits at identifying relative pairs, but even under ideal circumstances, there is not enough variation present in the dentition to faithfully identify close relatives in the absence of contextual archaeological data. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Colonialism, Material Culture, and Identity in the Rio Grande and Hudson River Valleys

A comparison of two seventeenth-century colonial encounters in North America, examining the Pueblo–Spanish interaction in New Mexico and the Mohawk–Dutch situation in New York. I focus on material culture flows, the role of women, forms of labor that were extracted in each setting and how each of these contributed to power relations and identity construction.

Accumulating Minerals and Dispossessing Indigenous Australians: Native Title Recognition as Settler‐Colonialism

The changes in regulation of mineral development on Indigenous people's lands, wrought by the advent of native title in Australia, created an impression that the political economy of mining on Indigenous people's lands would be fundamentally transformed. In this paper we argue, in reality, a deeply seated settler‐colonial mentality endures in Australia within the institutions presiding over mineral governance, particularly in those States that are heavily dependent upon resource extraction. Focusing on the governance of mineral development in Queensland, Australia, we offer an analysis of the rationalities that inform the endurance of an inequitable architecture of extractive governance in that State. Our conceptual framework draws on a synthesis of the concepts of “accumulation by dispossession”, “settler colonialism”, and Indigenous critiques of the politics of recognition, to argue that liberal states remain deeply committed to the facilitation of mineral development on Indigenous people's lands in direct contravention to international norms.     

A racial triangle: physical anthropology and race theories between Germans,Jews and Poles

The last decades of the nineteenth century saw a growing prominence of German racial sciences. This article documents how East Central European scholars responded to their potential marginalization within the scientific community due to German racial theories in the field of physical anthropology and the popularization of science. Three personalities represent a sample of this variety: Ludwik Gumplowicz, a Polish-Jewish sociologist; Mateusz Mieses, a Galician Jewish amateur anthropologist; and Jan Czekanowski, professor of anthropology and spiritus rector of the Lwów school of anthropology. All three cases illustrate the contradictions inscribed into the concept of transnationalism. To varying extents, they belonged to the German-speaking scientific community, through which they gained access to international science. Their reactions to anti-Jewish and anti-Slavic positions among the dominant racial theories of their time shines light on the tensions which were present within the academic community, as well as on the tensions that appeared between their own (semi-)professional status, self-perception and their group identities. The international communication and contacts came into conflict with the exclusionary philosophy of racial theories, thus perpetually challenging their transnational position. The responses of these actors sought to redefine spatial and methodological frameworks amid the dominant discourses. Each making attempts in their own way, they aimed at reversing what they perceived as aberrations of racial theories while persistently remaining within this discourse.     

Amplified British Aviation Authority in Africa, 1947–1960: Regulation of Low-cost Overseas Airlines

ABSTRACT

Britain first exerted considerable civil and military aerial authority in Africa in the 1920s and 1930s. The occasional but striking presence of British pioneer pilots and aircraft was soon followed by formal agreements about Empire airbases, and operation of imperial airline service. During the Second World War, all British aviation resources in Africa were tailored to mobilising and executing military action. At the end of the War, Britain’s nationalised airline resumed scheduled commercial services to and from Africa. In the post-War Commonwealth there was demand for air services at lower prices than Britain’s flag-carrying airline offered. Private charter airlines provided long-haul but low-cost ‘trooping’ flights, ‘colonial coach’ passenger flights, and ‘tramp’ cargo flights, and consolidated and extended British aerial presence and influence in Africa. Mostly, London set and managed the regulatory regime under which they operated. Coloniality provided a key licensing element. In the 1950s, before widespread decolonisation, the authority for the least expensive long-haul flying across Africa vested in layers of complex regulation in Britain.     

New Perspectives on Early Regional Interaction Networks of East African Trade: A View from Tsavo National Park,Kenya

Archaeologists are interested in understanding whether cross-cultural contact catalyzed by exchange of commodities is a means for people to acquire new technology and cultural ideas. This paper reports the results and analysis of archaeological investigations in Tsavo National Park, Kenya in 2001 and 2004 that have recovered evidence of indirect contact between late pastoral neolithic (PN) herders and early iron working (EIW) communities. Analysis of stylistic motifs on ceramics used by both PN and EIW people show that socially constructed notions of aesthetics are similar, implying that a strong cultural connection between the two groups may be possible. New lexico-statistical analyses and archaeological data from Tanzania corroborate that the prehistoric East African milieu was more complex than previously believed. However, pastoralists in Tsavo show no evidence of utilizing iron technology or altering their subsistence strategies among the > 10,000 artifacts spanning 4,000+ years of prehistory recovered in the 2001 field season. Thus, long-distance and long-term contact between socially connected groups possessing different technological and subsistence foundations does not necessarily lead to a diffusion of new survival strategies.Les archéologues sont intéressés à comprendre la diffusion technologique et culturelle préhistorique [Les archeologues se sont interestesa comprendre la diffusion prehistorique de la technologie et de la culture]. Le contact entre les cultures catalysées par l'échange des produits est des moyens pour que les personnes acquièrent la nouvelle technologie et les idées culturelles. Cependant, le point auquel certaines idées sont acceptées ou rejetées demeure irrésolu. [Quand le contact contre-culturelle s'allie avec l'exchange de produits, les deux fournissent les nouvelles idees culturelles et technologiques aux gens. Mais, le point d D'autres données sont nécessaires pour augmenter nos compréhension de l'échange des idées entre les groupes de personnes et comment des changements de technologie. Les investigations archéologiques en parc national de Tsavo, Kenya dans 2001 ont récupéré l'évidence du contact indirect entre les bouviers néolithiques pastoraux (PN) en retard et les premières communautés du fondre de fer (EIW). L'analyse des motifs stylistiques sur la céramique utiliser par des personnes de PN et d'EIW prouvent que les notions socialement construites de l'esthétique sont semblables, impliquant qu'un raccordement culturel fort entre les deux groupes peut être possible. Les nouvelles analyses lexico-statistiques et les données archéologiques de Tanzanie corroborent que le milieu africain est préhistorique était plus complexe que précédemment cru. Cependant, les bouviers préhistorique dans Tsavo ne montrent aucune évidence d'utiliser la technologie de fer ou de changer leurs stratégies de subsistance parmi les > 10.000 objets façonnés enjambant les années 4.000+ de la préhistoire récupérées dans la saison de 2001 champs. Ainsi, contact à longue distance et long terme entre les groupes socialement reliés possédant différentes bases technologiques et de subsistance ne mène pas nécessairement à une diffusion de nouvelles strategies de survival.     

Islam and the Dutch in the East Indies: Oppression or Opportunity?

ABSTRACT

Dutch colonial ambitions in the East Indies had to contend with Islam, and this contention intensified as colonisation progressed and Islamisation deepened. The Dutch made pragmatic alliances with Muslim leaders and sultans in pursuit of trade dominance and profits. This, combined with protestant reformation in the Netherlands, allowed for significant religious freedom in the East Indies. The Dutch did proselytize Christianity, with most success in the Outer Islands to the east, mostly because of an absence of a major established religion in those areas. They favoured coexistence over religious wars. In order to improve the lives of locals, Islamic movements were permitted to establish enduring institutions. In the early twentieth century, this included the two largest Muslims groups in the world, the traditionalist Nahdlatul Ulama and the reformist Muhammadiyah, which coincided with the emergence of political Islam in the form of the Islamic Traders Party. These formed important socio-religious structures that influenced political thought and modern state institutions, including the state ideology, the Pancasila, and the constitution, which obliged the state to accommodate religion.     

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.