VERNACULAR INTELLIGENCE: COLONIAL PEDAGOGY AND THE LANGUAGE QUESTION IN MINANGKABAU

In the late 1920s the Dutch colonial government resolved to use local languages instead of Malay as the medium of instruction in indigenous schools throughout the Netherlands East Indies. In West Sumatra, this programme was launched in the academic year 1931–1932, and the government required schools to use the first series of textbooks published in the Minangkabau language – Lakēh pandai [Learn quickly], Kini lah pandai [Now I have learnt] and Dangakanlah [Listen!] – written by the Dutch linguist M.G. Emeis. This essay traces Minangkabau resistance to Emeis' works, and examines the confrontation between Dutch colonial policy and local expectations regarding the language of instruction used in the school system of West Sumatra. It also documents the philological efforts of Dutch experts to render the spoken Minangkabau language in a written romanised form, and looks at the scholarly discourse on Minangkabau language in the colonial period.     

(RE)MAPPING INDIGENOUS ‘RACE’/PLACE IN POSTCOLONIAL PENINSULAR MALAYSIA1

ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on how indigeneity has been constructed, deployed and ruptured in postcolonial Malay(si)a. Prior to the independence of Malaya in 1957, British colonial administrators designated certain groups of inhabitants as being ‘indigenous’ to the land through European imaginings of ‘race’. The majority, politically dominant Malays were deemed the definitive peoples of this geographical territory, and the terrain was naturalized as ‘the Malay Peninsula’. Under the postcolonial government, British conceptions of the peninsula were retained; the Malays were given political power and recognition of their ‘special (indigenous) position’ in ways that Orang Asli minorities—also considered indigenous ‐ were not. This uneven recognition is evident in current postcolonial political, economic, administrative and legal arrangements for Malays and Orang Asli. In recent years, Orang Asli advocates have been articulating their struggles over land rights by drawing upon transnational discourses concerning indigenous peoples. Recent judicial decisions concerning native title for the Orang Asli potentially disrupt ethno‐nationalist assertions of the peninsula as belonging to the ‘native’ Malays. These contemporary contests in postcolonial identity formations unsettle hegemonic geopolitical ‘race’/place narratives of Peninsular Malaysia.     

‘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.     

Expanding the Australian Empire?: The Australian Council for the World Council of Churches,the Menzies Government and the New Hebrides in the late 1950s

In the late 1950s the Australian Council for the World Council of Churches (AC‐WCC) inspired primarily by the Presbyterian Church, undertook a concerted campaign to pressure the Australian government to assume a greater role in the affairs of the New Hebrides. The AC‐WCC wanted the Australian government to take over the United Kingdom's role in the administration of the Anglo‐French Condominium. It was motivated to undertake this campaign by the dismal social and economic conditions in the islands, the neglect of the British and French colonial authorities, and their failure to offer the indigenous people a way forward to self‐government. The high point of the campaign was a meeting between Robert Menzies, the Australian prime minister and a delegation from the AC‐WCC in early 1958. As a result of this meeting Australian ministers and officials, for the final time, gave extended consideration to expanding Australia's empire in the South Pacific to include the New Hebrides. This article examines the AC‐WCC's campaign, explores the Australian government's response, and analyses the outcome of this important episode in Australia's involvement in the colonial territories of the South Pacific.     

„Fremde Körperwelten”︁. Russische Anthropologie und Medizin im kolonialen Diskurs des ausgehenden Zarenreiches

?Exotic Bodies”?: Russian Anthropology and Medicine in the Colonial Discours of Late Imperial Russia. In the nineteenth century Russian anthropologists adopted Western theories on the biological superiority of the white man in order to justify Russian colonization at the Asiatic periphery. After the Great Reforms the imperial process of acculturation was discussed in the context of modernization that also touched the institutionalization of colonial medicine. Whereas Russian armchair anthropologists were operating with racial idioms, physicians as practitioners on the colonial spot were not receptive to the ideology of “white man's burden”. From experience with the socioeconomic backwardness of Russia's Asiatic periphery physicians stood up for the vital rights of the indigenous population in the colonial Public Health. With deep respect for indigenous medicine Russian physicians were not advocates of Russian colonial expansion and racial discrimination that made them different to their Western colleagues. On the basis of Russian nineteenth century medical literature and Siberian archival sources this paper outlines the critical reflections of Russian physicians on Tsarist colonialism     

‘Moving a little with the tide’: Malay monarchy and the development of modern malay nationalism

From the early twentieth century, the ideological hegemony of Malay monarchy has been challenged by emerging Malay nationalism. Despite the more radical manifestations, however, nationalism has rarely sought to overturn monarchy. Indeed, monarchy and nationalism have co-existed, sometimes uneasily, until the present. This co-existence has been facilitated by a number of factors, not least the linkages between the two: during the colonial period and beyond many prominent nationalists came from aristocratic, even royal backgrounds, while the Malay Rulers themselves were prepared to give their patronage to conservative forms of nationalism. Mutual interest in maintaining political and religious conservatism, nevertheless, has not prevented periodic disputes between princes and politicians as the two have competed for the loyalty of the Malay community. Despite such controversies, the continuing hold exercised by monarchy over Malays has placed a limit on the extent to which the Rulers have been supplanted by alternative representations of loyalty and identity. The ability of Malay monarchy to ‘move a little with the tide’, moreover, has assisted its weathering of the nationalist challenge during Malaya's transition from colonialism to independence.     

Investigating Empire: Humanitarians,Reform and the Commission of Eastern Inquiry

In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, British debates about colonial rule and, in particular, the treatment of subject peoples brought practical, financial and religious concerns together. As a means of addressing these problems, the British government despatched a series of travelling commissions to survey and reform the governance of its empire. British-based humanitarians and abolitionists drew on anxieties about the corrupting influence of empire on metropolitan society to press for commissions as vectors of imperial probity; their colonial counterparts harnessed the commissions' authority to inform and persuade a metropolitan audience of the need for specific colonial reforms. This article explores humanitarian attempts to influence colonial and imperial policy by considering the Commission of Eastern Inquiry, appointed in 1822 to investigate successively the Cape Colony, Mauritius and Ceylon. The Commission's history underscores links between networks of metropolitan and colonial humanitarians, and between anti-slavery activists and supporters of indigenous rights.     

Ornamentalism,Empire and Race: Indigenous Leaders and Honours in Australia and New Zealand

The imperial honours system, David Cannadine has argued, was a means for binding together ‘the British proconsular elite’ and ‘indigenous colonial elites’ throughout the settler colonies and dominions of the British Empire (Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. London: Penguin, 2002). Yet in settler colonies like Australia and New Zealand indigenous populations were marginalised and often disregarded, and it was local white elites who became knights of St Michael and St George, the Bath and the British Empire. Focusing on Australia and New Zealand, this article explores the complex relationships Aboriginal and Māori leaders have had with honours during the twentieth century. Building upon Cannadine's analysis, I examine the ways in which indigenous leaders navigated the political complexities involved in the offer of an honour, and how their acceptance of awards was received by others, shedding light on how honours systems intersected with post-war struggles for indigenous rights in the former dominions.     

A bloodied bond: Fly River heads and body image in Beatrice Grimshaw's colonial landscapes

In a paper published previously in the Irish Studies Review I discuss the anthropomorphic features of Beatrice Grimshaw's landscapes in relation to colonial fears of the unknown. Following on from this I argue in the present work that this trope, ubiquitous in colonial literature, is exacerbated in Grimshaw's oeuvre by a body image or body image tendencies associated with penetrability, the foundations of which would have been laid long before she first saw the delphinium skies of the south. Grimshaw's body image, her realisation of her own physicality, is the primary focus of this essay. Drawing on the research of psychologists Seymour Fisher and Sidney E. Cleveland, I explore Grimshaw's conception of body boundaries, the boundaries of the touristic self and the indigenous Other. Such an analysis requires an examination not only of the body, and its extension dress, but also of physical terrain, the spaces and places, landscapes of the past and the present, home and the away, within which these cartographies of flesh and bone move.     

Cartographic conflicts within a union: Finding land for Nagaland in India

Colonial-era borders continue to be sites of intra- and inter-national territorial conflicts across the Indian Sub-continent. The State of Nagaland in North East India has been witness to one of the oldest armed struggles in the region to redraw colonial borders. The Nagaland government finds itself sandwiched between an irredentist insurgency and the union government. This paper examines the cartographic-statistical fallout of the Nagaland government's balancing act that is reflected in, among other things, the diversity of conflicting maps published by different tiers and wings of the government. The paper suggests that the cartographic/territorial conflicts between Nagaland and its neighbouring states are driven by the use of political-geographic arguments to advance political-economic interests along contested borders. These conflicts are not amenable to a technical resolution as they are rooted in the as yet inconclusive search for a stable basis for Naga identity and the ongoing dispute over Nagaland's place within the Union of India. Nagaland's borders are, in fact, sites of collision of different conceptions of nationhood (Indian and Naga) and understandings of constitutional federalism. The union government tolerates Nagaland's parchment transgressions and occasional physical “encroachments.” Its cartographic laxity is motivated by the need to avoid a strictly legalistic approach that would necessitate the use of force to implement a singular, exclusive solution to protracted territorial disputes involving several states.     

In their own hands: domestic medicine and ‘the cure of all kinds of tertian and quartan fevers’ in late-colonial Lima

This paper examines the ways in which the men and women of Lima sought to cure or ward off ‘tertian and quartan fevers’, by all accounts one of the city's most ubiquitous illnesses during the last decades of Spanish colonial rule. The paper's particular emphasis therein rests on practices of self-medication and household medicine: it traces how Lima's inhabitants were able to practice elementary medicine and to concoct remedies ‘for the cure of tertian and quartan fevers’ by themselves, and how they consulted various genres of popular print to circulate health advice–the yearly almanac and a range of ‘enlightened’ home medical guides–and notebooks of medical recipes to safeguard their own health in the face of that ailment. The paper argues that these practices of vernacular medical healing, and the ‘ways of knowing’ that informed and sustained them, were shared both across different sectors of colonial society and with societies across the Atlantic. The study of vernacular, domestic medical practices in the face of a quotidian, commonplace ailment thus not only provides a rare window into sickness episodes, medical learning and skilfulness, in late-colonial Lima households, it also contributes to an on-going reworking of the historiography of Spanish American science and medicine by thinking beyond, and fragmenting a ‘dichotomous view of knowledge’–of polarizations of professional versus lay, popular versus elite, Iberian versus Northern European, or, indeed, ‘indigenous’ versus ‘Western’     

Material constraints to popular imaginaries: The extractive economy and resource nationalism in Bolivia

Widespread neoliberal-era privatizations in South America's extractive economies rekindled longstanding social movement demands for nationalist control of non-renewable resources and propelled the region's left political turn over the last decade. In Bolivia, where resource extraction has dominated exports since colonial times, social movements employing resource nationalist master frames overturned governments in 1952, 2003, and 2005. In 2005 indigenous leader Evo Morales was elected president promising to direct resource wealth to generate economic development, but the structural constraints created by an extractive economy have made these goals impossible to achieve over the short and medium term. This article suggests that the clash between resource nationalist imaginaries embedded in contentious social movements and the realities of long-term extractive dependent economies not only limits government policy options but also fuels continued social protest.     

Decolonising,Multiplicities and Mining in the Eastern Goldfields,Western Australia

In this ‘postcolonial’ era, peoples and places around the globe continue to face ongoing colonisation. Indigenous peoples in particular experience colonisation in numerous forms. Despite recent attempts to ‘decolonise’ indigenous spaces, hegemonic systems of production, governance and thinking often perpetuate colonial structures and relationships, resulting in further entrenched colonisation or ‘deep colonising’ (Rose, 1999). The interface between indigenous communities and the mining industry provides fertile ground for the tensions emerging between decolonising and deep colonising. Gold mining operations at Placer Dome's Granny Smith mine in the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia present a valuable case study for examining this tension. Changes taking place at the mine site are decolonising in intent, though outcomes may be deep colonising in effect. Recent discussions among cultural geographers over meanings of place, Ollman's (1993) notion of vantage point and a broadly postcolonial literature inform consideration of this tension. Acknowledgment and incorporation of multiple vantage points into new resource management systems allows current hegemonic approaches to be rethought, and provides insights for the shift towards genuinely decolonising processes.     

Shifting Sands: Towards an Anthropological Praxis

This paper reflects on some of the dilemmas within my shifting roles over the last twenty years as helper/friend/member of the Katherine Indigenous community in the Northern Territory of Australia and then, as anthropologist. During this period, indigenous calls for land rights have been increasingly interpreted in the terms of ‘bourgeois law’ (Collier et al. 1995). Indigenous identities have become the focus of intense public scrutiny as they define eligibility for scarce resources. Fighting over the scraps of what was once a wholistic indigenous landscape, some of Australia's indigenous peoples have begun to turn upon each other, in the struggle for recognition. Anthropologists as the scribes of indigenous identities are placed in invidious positions, and are easily accused of participating in (neo)colonial endeavours. This paper takes some small steps towards locating an anthropological praxis in this land rights/native title arena of power.     

'Chiefs and Thieves and Other People Besides': The Making of George Speight's Coup

In August 1899, US Naval and Marine forces arrived on Guam to establish an American military government that would replace more than two centuries of Spanish colonial rule. Within the first month of Captain Richard Leary's term as naval governor, he directed a number of decisive actions specifically against the Roman Catholic Church. These included a ban on the annual celebration of village fiestas, a prohibition on the ringing of church bells and, most dramatically, the expulsion of the island's Spanish priests. While the existing scholarship interprets these events as political actions to establish a uniquely American governmental system that enforces the separation of Church and State, this paper interrogates an additional array of intersecting economic and cultural issues to tell a story about some of the desires and anxieties regarding colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism in the Pacific.     

Between political emancipation and creole hegemony: Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans (c. 1791)

Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans inaugurates a tradition of nonconformist political writing against Spanish colonial rule during the second half of the eighteenth century, a period characterized by the Crown’s attempt to reorganize several aspects of the colonial administration. As an ex-Jesuit living in exile after the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from all Spanish territories in 1767, Viscardo had a political as much as a personal motive in designing a project that would cut the colonial ties between Spain and the New World. His plans for emancipation included the instauration of a monarchical form of government, but his design was out of touch with reality and would have hardly been taken seriously by the inhabitants had a British-backed expeditionary force reached the coasts of Chile and Peru, as he had planned. While Viscardo’s Letter may have stirred a sense of creole patriotism some years after his death, the political scruples of the ancien regime based on social privileges and racial distinctions were too strong to be dismantled by mere ideals of freedom, justice and equality. Thus, effective political participation was restricted to the creole elite, whom Viscardo saw as the legitimate guarantor of social order and economic prosperity.     

Jihadism au rebours: Orientalism and Occidentalism for a Counter‐Hegemonic Liberation Theology

Following its colonial project, Western Europe imposed a political and cultural understanding of state nationalism and religious homogeneity on the entire world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In parallel with this twofold process, “Religious Nationalism” emerged during the Cold War, affecting the Middle East and framing an updated Abrahamic version of religious supremacism: Wahhabi Islam, the Iranian Revolution, and Israeli Orthodox Judaism were politically backed, becoming the frontrunners of a new Global‐Religious narrative of conflict. This article aims to critically analyse the Western‐Islamic manipulation of “Jihadism” as an artificial and fabricated product, starting from the “deconstruction” of Jihad–Jihadism as an anti‐hegemonic narrative. The anti‐colonial “Islamic” framework of resistance to the Empire (United States) has effectively adopted the same colonial methodology: using violence and sectarianism in trying to reach its goals. Is the Islamic Supremacist “narrative” more influenced by Western thought than by a real understanding of Islam? At the same time, this article aims to stress the historical reasons why the Arab world has been artificially affected by a peculiar form of “Religious Revanchism” which can be understood only if O. Roy's Holy Ignorance dialogues with Steve Biko's Consciousness in emphasising the need for an updated Islamic Liberation Theology.     

The Governor's vale levu: Architecture and Hybridity at Nasova House, Levuka, Fiji Islands

As an integral component of colonial culture, colonial architecture provides a tangible expression of western presence and domination throughout various colonial settings. In tropical colonies, such as Fiji, western architecture was not simply transplanted, but became transformed through the conscious integration of western and nonwestern architectural elements and grammars. Thus hybrid colonial architecture played a significant role within the sociopolitical strategies of both colonizer and colonized elites. Nasova House, the main government building of the autonomous Cakobau polity (1873–74) and British colonial regime (1874–82), provides a unique example of the use of colonial hybrid architecture in late nineteenth century Fiji.     

Local Governments and Indigenous Australians: Developments and Dilemmas in Contrasting Circumstances

This paper examines developments and dilemmas in relations between local governments and indigenous Australians over the last quarter century. It establishes a framework for analysis based on differences in local government systems, circumstances and populations. It then examines two sets of developments in relations which have occurred in contrasting circumstances. The first is ongoing poor relations in incorporated local government areas, focusing on a complex of issues surrounding landownership, rates and services. The second is discrete predominantly Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander communities in sparsely settled areas themselves becoming local governments. Both of these sets of developments are seen as being accompanied by significant dilemmas. In relation to the first, the major dilemma identified is how superordinate levels of government should best proceed in attempts to improve relations. In relation to the second, major dilemmas are identified relating to indigenous 'ownership' of the resulting local government structures and the weakness of the financial position of these newly emerging local governments. The paper suggests there have been some very significant and quite complex developments in relations between local governments and indigenous Australians over the last quarter century. However, these developments have only tentatively moved relations in a more positive direction, if indeed at all. Poor relations still predominate between local governments and indigenous Australians.     

The Reverend Dr Louis Giustiniani and Anglican Conflict in the Swan River Colony,Western Australia 1836–1838*

In 1835, the Western Australian Missionary Society appointed the Reverend Dr Louis Giustiniani to establish a Moravian‐style mission in the Swan River Colony. The land grant essential for such a mission was not forthcoming from the government but Giustiniani established a small mission farm employing Aborigines at Guildford and started ministry among the settlers. This change of mission focus set the stage for conflict within the Anglican establishment of the colony, conflict which destroyed Dr Giustiniani's ministry. Giustiniani was well qualified and exerted himself to achieve the mission's objectives and many accusations made against him were essentially false; they reveal much about the prevailing culture and prejudices of the colony. He was defeated, however, because his ideas of church and mission differed from those of the colonial Church and society and because he did not conform to their expectations of the behaviour of a clergyman.