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.     

(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.     

Plant Cultivation on the Northwest Coast: A Reconsideration

Conventional wisdom suggests that the peoples of the Northwest Coast did not cultivate plants prior to European contact. Considerable evidence suggests the contrary, however, particularly the well-documented practice of estuarine root gardening among the Kwakwaka'wakw and other indigenous peoples of the region. These gardens were maintained through transplanting, weeding, selective harvesting, soil modifications, and the production of mounds or low terrace-like structures within individually demarcated root plots. The scholarly oversight of these practices can be attributed to a number of biases rooted in the colonial and academic agendas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In turn, scholarly legitimation of the region's “nonagricultural” label has served to undermine indigenous land claims on estuarine sites into the present day.     

Reactionary modernism: Technology,culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich

Scholarship on European imperialism in the Americas has become increasingly prominent in the historiography of early America after a long period when the subject was hardly discussed. Historians have come to see that local experience in the Americas needs to be placed in a wider, comparative Atlantic context. They have realised that what united most peoples’ experiences in the Americas was that they lived as colonial subjects within colonies that were part of imperial polities. This article examines recent writings on European empires in the Americas, relating imperial history to related developments in fields such as Atlantic history. It suggests that renewed attention to imperialism allows historians to discuss in a fruitful fashion the relationship between power and authority in the formation of colonial societies and draws attention to the continuing importance of metropolitan influence in the articulation of colonial identities.     

‘An Alternative to Imperialism’: Leonard Woolf,The Labour Party and Imperial Internationalism, 1915–1922

This article examines writings by the British Labour Party theorist Leonard Woolf on international government, imperialism, and the League of Nations. Woolf was a leading member of a group of party officials who supported a deepening commitment to the League of Nations in the immediate post First World War period. Woolf, and his colleagues in the Labour Party, argued that transforming the practice of economic imperialism in European colonies would help to ease tensions between the European powers. The result of such arguments was to present empire as a canvas for displaying an improved sense of European virtue. In particular, abandoning the practice of economic imperialism could instead allow colonial powers to meet their responsibility to ready colonial peoples for self-government and full participation in the global economy. The reforms proposed by Woolf and his Labour Party colleagues could be considered a last gasp of early twentieth century British imperial internationalism.     

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.     

A landscape of powers in Highland Papua,C. 1899-1918

The article proposes that anthropologists and historians attend to a 'landscape of powers' to understand the ways colonial and mission projects become actualised in on-going social relations. An expanding body of scholarship for the Melanesian region has focused on the way missionaries and colonial agents, as much as the diverse Melanesian peoples, attain power through rendering persons and places in specific forms. This is documented here for Fuyuge-speakers relations with colonial and mission projects during their early phase. Although the forms and consequences of power among each--Fuyuge, colonial, mission--is different, attention is devoted to the resultant and emerging patterns of these long-standing interactions and interventions. In particular, the article maintains that when such projects become locally actualised a landscape of powers is established. A landscape of powers is the multiply constituted arrangement of persons and places in an historical and ethnographically delineated context.     

Iqbal’s and Hassan’s Complaints: A Study of “To the Holy Prophet” and “SMS to Sir Muhammad Iqbal”

Muhammad Iqbal and Mohd. Kamal Hassan respectively wrote “To the Holy Prophet” and “SMS to Sir Muhammad Iqbal” in the 1930s and in the 2000s – two extremely challenging times, as in the former most Muslim-majority countries were under European colonial rule and in the latter, Western global powers wove an all-pervasive web of domination and exploitation of them. They focus on the internal weaknesses of subjugated Muslims and lament that, since the attitude of many of them is characterized by inaction and reliance on others, domination by foreign powers became an inevitable corollary. A culture of self-indulgence, stagnation, and complacency precipitated their decline and facilitated their exploitation by powerful outside interests. In their pursuit to understand the reasons for Western domination over Muslim societies, they studied the “moral paralysis” of colonized Muslims in order to reform them. Accordingly, their analysis of the subordinate position of Muslim peoples and countries can clearly be viewed through the lens of Bennabi’s notion of “colonizability,” as Iqbal’s and Hassan’s complaints in the poems mostly involve exposing several of their weaknesses that prevented them from playing their actual role, and hindered them from realising their potential, in the world.     

Unsettling Time: Persistence and Memory in Spanish Colonial Peru

In this paper, I explore the politics of memory during the Toledan reforms—a series of ambitious administrative changes legislated in colonial Peru between 1569 and 1581, by viceroy Francisco de Toledo. At the center of Toledo’s project was an initiative to resettle the entire native population of the audiencias of Lima and Charcas into a series of planned towns called reducciones. This movement—reducción—sought to transform Andean indigenous peoples into subjects of the Catholic Church and the Spanish crown through a series of explicitly spatial operations, including regional population nucleation and settlement planning. But the terms of these changes were also temporal: as reducción shaped landscapes and built environments, it also sought to transform indigenous historicity, bringing native peoples into the Era of Christ and carefully regulating the social institutions and practices by which they accounted for their pasts. The Toledan reforms therefore present a clear example of one empire’s attempts to subjugate conquered peoples through mnemonic practices. Yet archaeological research in one corner of the viceroyalty—Peru’s Zaña valley—suggests that the story of how indigenous memories were actually shaped during the course of resettlement and its aftermath was far from straightforward. To understand these transformations, I argue that we must explore not only the short-term dialectic of Spanish designs and their indigenous responses, but also the “afterlives” of reduccion in the 17th and 18th centuries. Over the longer term, reducción achieved staying power through a series of unanticipated pathways, in which landscape change, demography, and indigenous agency all played essential roles. I argue that these developments ultimately resulted in much more complex forms of remembering than those implicit in reducción legislation and that they underscore the importance for archaeological studies of memory of attending both to the materiality of imperial landscapes and long-term processes of subject formation.     

Translation And The Colonial Imaginary: Ibn Khaldûn Orientalist

Despite the increasing interest in translation in the last two decades, there has been no investigation of the translation of historiography and its transformation from one language to another. This article takes as a case study the translation into French of Ibn Khaldûn, the fourteenth–century North African historian. It considers specifically the translation done by William de Slane in the context of the colonization of Algeria. The Histoire des Berbères , the French narrative of Ibn Khaldûn that relates to the history of Arabs and Berbers in the Maghreb, has become since then the source of French knowledge of North Africa. It is upon that French narrative that colonial and post–colonial historians have constructed their knowledge of North Africa, of Arabs, and of Berbers. The article shows how a portion of the writing of Ibn Khaldûn was translated and transformed in the process in such a way as to become a French narrative with colonial categories specific to the nineteenth century. Using a semiotic approach and analyzing both the French text and its original, the article shows how colonialism introduced what Castoriadis calls an "imaginary" by transforming local knowledge and converting it into colonial knowledge. In showing this the essay reveals that not only is translation not the transmission of a message from one language to another, it is indeed the production of a new text. For translation is itself the product of an imaginary, a creation–in Ricoeur's words, a "restructuring of semantic fields."     

Land,Labor, and Indigenous Response: Huaquechula (Mexico), 1521–1633

During New Spain's early colonial period, the Crown pursued a seemingly contradictory policy of exploiting and protecting its indigenous subjects. On a continuum of possible responses, many indigenous peoples chose to appeal to the Crown to defend their interests against arbitrary abuse by Spanish settlers. Based on early colonial-period documents, this article focuses on the case of Huaquechula, a town with deep prehispanic roots in the fertile Valley of Altixco, to describe its attempts to fend off land encroachment and excessive demands for labor. It is suggested that, by using rhetorical strategies that resonated with the Crown, in conjunction with a combination of characteristics specific to it, Huaquechula's attempts were relatively successful.     

Reproducing the indigenous: John Møller’s studio portraits of Greenlanders in context

Between 1889 and 1922, John Møller (1867–1935), the first professional Greenlandic photographer, produced more than 3000 glass plate negatives documenting life in Western Greenland around the turn of the twentieth century. Rooted in an internal understanding of self, Møller’s photographs played an important part in the formation of a contemporary image of Greenlandic indigenous identity. At the same time, Møller’s photographic practice was arguably entangled in and delimited by a historical reality that was structured by colonial relations of power. This paper examines the social and art-historical contexts of Møller’s work, focusing in particular on a selection of his formal studio portraits. My reading of these portraits suggests a case in which conflicting impulses coincide. On the one hand, Møller produced images that played out the “ethnographic convention”, a European form of representation dating back to the sixteenth century used for the documentation of non-Western indigenous peoples as specimens. However, in acting out that convention, Møller’s photographs hint at a subtle, progressive building-up of identity that reclaimed images of Greenlanders for themselves, and turned an originally negative, external image of indigeneity into a positive sense of self.     

Native American Women in a Contemporary World

Most scholarly literature of Native American peoples and cultures focuses on the ill effects that colonialism has had on their societies and cultures. However, recent scholarship explores the creative adaptations that Native Americans have made to modern life. There is also more research on the lives of women. Finally, current research is often conducted as a collaborative venture, with the scholars/editors giving up some of their power and authority to their Native American collaborators. This review discusses two recent books, Grandmother's Grandchild and Blood and Voice, that reflect this new scholarship.     

《三国志》日译本得失谈

随着全球化时代的到来,汉籍古典名著的今注今译工作,越来越受到学术界的重视。就《三国志》而言,近二十年以来,中文及外文译本已多达十来种。然而有些译注者疏于校释,以至时有错谬。日本学者今鹰真等三人的《正史三国志》。(含裴注)日译本,有些地方还胜过了中文今译本。本文对日译本与中文今译本的译文进行了初步比对,从语言解释、底本校勘等角度列举了二者的得失,藉以说明进行汉籍今译工作时中日学术交流的重要性。     

Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.     

Creating Mosquitia: mapping Amerindian spatial practices in eastern Central America, 1629–1779

By examining the spatial practices of Mosquito Indians, this paper contends that colonial maps reflect the activities of colonized peoples. Situated between the Spanish and British empires in eastern Central America, the Mosquito carved out an independent kingdom for themselves between 1629 and 1779, and far beyond. My argument is that many period maps respond to, and re-present, Mosquito spatial practices. I define a spatial practice as any political feat, economic activity, forceful claim, or social performance that asserts and demonstrates authority over people and space. Through a chronological and thematic reconstruction of primary documents, my objective is to show that colonial subjects in general, and the Mosquito in particular, can and do contribute to their own spatialized representations through their actions and discourses. Without Mosquito spatial practices, there would have been no Mosquitia to map, only some other place.     

Colonial Encounters,European Kettles,and the Magic of Mimesis in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century Indigenous Northeast and Great Lakes

Copper kettles, in high demand among indigenous communities of the Northeast/Great Lakes, became prominent items in the exchange repertoires of early Basque, French and Dutch traders. Kettles’ origin with these “Others” and its connection to a medium (copper) that had held symbolic significance for millennia led them to be used in an indigenous ‘metaphorical’ value regime influencing trade during the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century. An artisan living on the threshold of colonial encounter in Northern Michigan between 1470 and 1660 CE—having seen European goods but not having access to them—harnessed the mimetic faculty to make a small, miniature, ceramic imitation or skeuomorph of a European trade kettle. Rather than the sincerest form of flattery, I suggest this imitation was made to acquire the power of the original to fend off the colonial danger and to connect to this symbolic value regime. I suggest the “magic” of mimesis offered personal and organizational power in the indigenous Northeast/Great Lakes during early contact. This specific case speaks more broadly to how mimesis can provide a robust framework for exploring the material cultures of colonial encounter.     

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.     

Mission Encounters in the Colonial World: British Columbia and South-West Australia

This paper considers various aspects of the interactions of missions and indigenous peoples in regions of Canada and Australia. An analysis of first encounters indicates that the introduction of Christianity was dependent on both evangelist and client population agreeing to a modus operandi for the mission. The structure and operation of the mission were determined by the pre-existing indigenous society and the financial and personnel resources of the mission organizations. Attitudes towards, and acceptance of, Christianity were not static, they depended on changing material and political circumstances both within and outside indigenous communities. This comparative analysis indicates that religious change was not only negotiated between missionary and "convert," but among indigenous peoples themselves. The decision to profess Christianity was not a one-off decision made by individuals or communities. Rather it was a long process of change which was contingent on the perceived advantages and disadvantages of the mission world and countervailingpressures from within indigenous and colonial societies.