The Prison and Power in Colonial Korea

This article explores the dynamics of the colonial prisons constructed by the Japanese and the power they wielded and projected as a dual project of modernisation and colonisation in Korea. Japanese colonialism and its disciplinary power made colonial prisoners docile subjects by utilising the mechanisms of close surveillance, scientific correction and ideological conversion while excluding and oppressing political offenders as “imperial others” through the exercise of cruel corporal punishment. The article offers an in-depth analysis of colonial modernity in Korea by examining how colonial power operated throughout the birth and evolution of the modern prison, and the mechanisms through which it governed Korean subjects in its prison system.     

晚清出版的生理卫生书籍及其读者

There were numerous books of physiology and hygiene published in the cultural market of the late Qing Dynasty. Their writing and translating purposes, hygienic concepts and hygienic identification in these books displayed the intellectual elites’ efforts in constructing “hygienic modernity” and establishing a national state. Books of physiology and hygiene published in the late Qing Dynasty were firstly translated and edited by missionaries and it was not until 1894 that many Chinese began to edit, translate, and write books of this kind. About one hundred and thirty varieties of books of physiology and hygiene were published in the late Qing Dynasty, most of them were textbooks widely read by people and commonly accepted as books of “hygiene” or “medical science” together with the then published books of Western medical science and books on how to keep a good health. At that time, hygiene was not only a guideline for people’s life and consumption, but also became an ideology to distinguish civilization and savageness with its significance gradually connected with race and nation.     

The Politics of Incorporation: Masculinity,Spatiality and Modernity among the Ngaing of Papua New Guinea

In this paper I argue that the way in which masculinity and spatiality are reconstituted among the Ngaing men of Madang Province (Papua New Guinea) is pivotally implicated in how they articulate their ongoing claim to incorporation in modernity. The manner in which they strive for progress is indicative of identifications coupling Christianity and whiteness with the hope of redemption from a condition of blackness, inferiority and marginality. With the help of recent discourses and secret ritual practices, in which Christian components combine with local cultural patterns, the men make clear that indigenous participation in modernity is prefigured on the inside of external manifestations of body and space. This discursive and ritual empowerment of the men rests on a culturally specific construction of the inside and the outside in which the knowledge, power and mobility possessed by whites are construed as an integral part of the local world.     

It Takes Modern Means to be Traditional: On Recognizing Indigenous Cultural Communities in the Philippines

The main thesis of this essay is that being recognized as traditional or indigenous requires the employment of modern means. A form of ‘Bureaucratic Orientalism’ has been devised, constructing and reaffirming ‘the Other’ through the minutiae of administrative procedures and contemporary representational processes. These procedures exist for the twin purposes of establishing the right to act as an indigenous group, and of circumscribing the obligations of the state, and possibly of other institutions of governance. The entire debate is the expression of a dilemma that has no solution but is actually an expression of modernity. The three pillars upon which indigeneity is affirmed are a national (internationally legitimized) legal system, the contemporary world of NGOs, and the institutions of local government. Thus, through the very process of being recognized as ‘indigenous’, these groups enter the realms of modernity. The Philippines provide a case study for these explorations.     

Re-analysing the Baining: The Mytho-Poetics of Race,Gender and Art

This article criticises primitivist caricatures of the Baining in Melanesia as a society that lacks exegesis, symbolic logics, religion, structures of power and control, and even an interest in play. The mytho-poetics of gender and procreation in Mali Baining society are documented by focusing on how art and sexuality are traced onto each other. The formative power of painting, barkcloth, dancing masks, netbags and music are merged with the formative power of women. Art and sexuality are made to inform each other's generative potential, and even each other's aesthetic charm. These fertile mytho-poetic practices also underpin Mali political practices. Mali indigenous identity is celebrated as local control over the original powers of creation, which continue to reside in the earth, in the local landscape and, above all, in that which underpins all creation, women's procreative bodies with their creative potential to bring forth something new. The Mali localise creative processes so as to empower and revalue themselves within a culture of resistance to the hegemony of colonialism, modernity, settlers and regional ethnic elites.     

Border historicity and ethnographic rupture: Pirates,Korean Kings and borderlanders in transnational Tsushima Island,Japan

Tsushima’s community festival commemorates Tsushima’s admirable borderland diplomacy in the pre-modern East Asian politics. This indigenous historicization in performance, nevertheless, fails to resonate with ethnographic reality: anthropological fieldwork revealed that local culture differs considerably from postcolonial ritual imaginings and historicity, illuminating a discontinuity between the past performed and the present observed. A rupture exists between borderland imagery as a coherent Japanese state boundary and the ethnographic reality of an uneven liminal frontier between Korea and Japan. In order to make sense of the ethnographic ruptures, this article constructs the border-centric ethnohistory through the lens of and experiences of the border, defying a state-centric past. I de-essentialize border-state relationship, accentuating border spontaneity and contingency between and beyond the power of sovereignty – a paradoxical Janus-faced process of contradiction and negotiation. I argue that it is Tsushima’s historical metamorphosis that stands out in history, not its subjugation to the power of either state.     

A Bayesian Radiocarbon Chronology of the Early Neolithic of Yorkshire and Humberside

The Mesolithic-Neolithic transition is one of the mostly hotly (and vociferously) debated periods of British prehistory. Chronology has been key to this discussion. Informal ‘visual’ interpretations of radiocarbon data used both to argue for a rapid uptake of Neolithic practices by indigenous Mesolithic populations, and for the introduction by Continental settlers and then the rapid acculturation by local populations. This paper offers new evidence for the timing of the beginning of the Neolithic in Yorkshire and Humberside, an area with a range of monuments that have been a focus of research into early Neolithic communities. From this new synthesis it is possible to suggest implications for our understanding of ‘neolithization’, but also as to provide the basis for critical future research themes.     

甲午战争与近代日本国民的形成——近代媒体的发展与作用

培养近代国民是国民国家建设的重要目标,同时具备民族特质和公民特质是国民的内在属性。甲午战争是日本进入近代以来的第一次大规模对外战争,＂印刷资本主义＂的出现和发展形成了能够构成民族共同体的舆论条件。战争与媒体交互影响,使＂日本人＂的自我意识得以强化,对外形成了对朝鲜和中国的优越感和蔑视感,军人被英雄化、神圣化,围绕战争也形成教育方式多样性,民众由此达成了对天皇和国家的认同,甲午战争成为近代日本国民＂民族＂特质的重要标志。     

Post-colonial heritage conservation in Africa: perspectives from drystone wall restorations at Khami World Heritage site,Zimbabwe

Abstract

Before colonialism, heritage sites such as Khami were considered resting places for ancestors, valued more for the spirit of place than their monumentality. In this context, local custodians hardly intervened with the fabric of the site. With the introduction of modern conservation principles, which persist to this day, vegetation control and wall restorations became part of routine conservation measures. This paper discusses drystone wall restorations carried out at Khami between 2000 and 2015 focusing on the disjuncture between indigenous and local concepts of heritage, concerned with access and preserving the spirit of ancestors, and ‘western’ principles of restoration. It argues that while ignoring the structural disintegration of Khami would have resulted in possible delisting from the World Heritage List, the ‘neglect’ which Khami experienced was in tandem with its local social context; being a resting place for ancestors. While the reconstructions interfered with an acceptable physical context of local beliefs, restorations maintained the integrity of the site as a tourist destination with positive local economic benefits. Although compromises are by their nature unsatisfactory, modern heritage conservation in Africa must adapt and improvise to achieve a mix of local and international practices to reflect changed and changing realities.     

A Collision of Masculinities: Men,Modernity and Urban Transportation in American-Colonial Manila

Abstract:

Early twentieth-century Manila saw the motorisation of its urban transport system. This was a significant transformation not only because of the technological changes it brought about but more importantly because of its role in shaping the highly gendered discourse of colonial modernity. Motorised vehicles, like the streetcar and the automobile, were trumpeted as masculine and modern machines by America’s civilising mission. This colonial discourse was continuously shaped and subverted by a collision of masculinities coming from different directions. This essay will focus on four different male groups in an effort to understand how transport motorisation influenced their sense of masculinity. White American colonisers imagined themselves as modern men destined to bring civilisation to the colony through technology. The native elites used the coloniser as their model by appropriating the symbols of masculine modernity. While the male workers of the modern transport sector gained knowledge of and access to the domains of those in power, those in the traditional sector became targets of vilification by the native and colonial elites. Instead of a duel between two sets of masculinity (coloniser vs. colonised) what emerged was a complex set of relationships influenced by the socioeconomic differences that separated these four groups.     

Peasant Settlers and the ‘Civilising Mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865–1917

This article provides an introduction to one of the lesser-known examples of European settler colonialism, the settlement of European (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) peasants in Southern Central Asia (Turkestan) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It establishes the legal background and demographic impact of peasant settlement, and the role played by the state in organising and encouraging it. It explores official attitudes towards the settlers (which were often very negative), and their relations with the local Kazakh and Kyrgyz population. The article adopts a comparative framework, looking at Turkestan alongside Algeria and Southern Africa, and seeking to establish whether paradigms developed in the study of other settler societies (such as the ‘poor white’) are of any relevance in understanding Slavic peasant settlement in Turkestan. It concludes that there are many close parallels with European settlement in other regions with large indigenous populations, but that racial ideology played a much less important role in the Russian case compared to religious divisions and fears of cultural backsliding. This did not prevent relations between settlers and the ‘native’ population deteriorating markedly in the years before the First World War, resulting in large-scale rebellion in 1916.     

20世纪初期革命精神的生成——以话语分析为径

民族精神的生成与培育,有赖于语言的承载与传播.20世纪初,革命上升为民族精神,一定意义上可视作中国现代性革命话语由渐到顿的变化过程.中国现代性革命话语既受儒家传统的影响,又吸收英语、日语中的现代性因素,到20世纪二三十年代,革命已由此前为人禁忌的词汇变为强势话语,由少数人的思想变为广大民众的精神追求.     

‘Good order and the police’

The emergence of police ordinances and police authorities in the early modern period has traditionally been seen as a way to discipline society in order to increase the power of the absolutist state. However, recent investigations of early modern policing in German and French regions show that ‘good order and police’ was in demand by the subjects and also adapted to local needs. Inspired by this research this article investigates the enforcement of police ordinances in the Danish market towns of Aalborg and Sæby and the country district of Børglum-Jerslev. The results show that policing remained focused on local needs even after the creation of a royal police office in 1682. Policing mainly concerned the welfare and privileges of burghers in market towns until the introduction of a country police in 1791, when agrarian reforms began to erode the patriarchal order in the countryside. As a new way of governing, ‘police’ was a way both to govern free burghers and preserve traditional order.     

Topographies of citizenship: Purhépechan Mexican women claiming political subjectivities

A variety of politics are waged through recourse to the language of ‘citizenship’ and ‘democracy’: from George W. Bush's selling of free trade for the Americas by invoking freedom and democracy, to the calls for citizenship and equality by popular movements throughout Latin America and other regions. This article links these paradoxical and transnational constructions of ‘citizenship’ to the daily economic and political struggles of indigenous women in rural Mexico. A transnational and what Cindi Katz calls a ‘topographical’ analysis of local processes deepens and complicates our understanding of local changes as they articulate with global dynamics, and it transforms how we conceptualize the global. Drawing on an ethnography of local gendered political transformation in Cherán, Mexico, I map processes visible locally onto spatialities of power and meaning across scales, weaving together various symbolic and material processes—the intentional actions and negotiations of individual women; the history of Cherán as a place and community; neoliberal economic globalization; and the effects of profoundly gendered and racialized nationalisms—in order to produce a situated knowledge of global citizenship politics. This approach highlights how women in Cherán, situated within global political economic relations and the symbolic horizons of ‘modernity’, transform the meaning and practice of citizenship and political subjectivity.     

Foucault and Technology

This article offers the first comprehensive analysis of the ways in which the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) employed the terms ‘technology’ and the ‘technique’ over the course of his intellectual career. His use of these words in his mature writings, it is argued, reflects a profound ambivalence: Foucault sought to denounce the pernicious effects of what he called modern ‘technologies of power,’ but also deliberately evoked the more positive values associated with ‘technology’ to develop a philosophical standpoint shorn of the ‘humanist’ values he associated with existentialism and phenomenology. The article situates Foucault’s condemnation of power technologies within the broader skepticism towards ‘technological society’ that pervaded French intellectual circles following World War II. In the first phase of his career (1954-1960), Foucault built on these attitudes to articulate a conventional critique of technology’s alienating effects. Between 1961 and 1972, the theme of ‘technology’ fell into abeyance in his work, though he often suggested a connection between the rise of technology and the advent of the ‘human sciences.’ Between 1973 and 1979, ‘technology’ became a keyword in Foucault’s lexicon, notably when he coined the phrase ‘technologies of power’. He continued to use the term in the final stage of his career (1980-1984), when his emphasis shifted from power to ‘technologies of the self.’ The essay concludes by addressing Paul Forman’s thesis on the primacy of science in modernity and of technology in modernity, suggesting that in many respects Foucault is more of a modernist than a postmodernist.     

‘No More Violence nor War’:

This paper is a synoptic history of racial geography in the ‘fifth part of the world’ or Oceania — an extended region embracing what are now Australia, Island Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. The period in question stretches from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment, to focus on the consolidation of European racial thinking with the marriage of geography and raciology in the early 19th century. The paper investigates the naming of places by Europeans and its ultimate entanglement with their racial classifications of people. The formulation of geographical and anthropological knowledge is located at the interface of metropolitan discourses and local experience. This necessitates unpacking the relationships between, on the one hand, the deductive reasoning of metropolitan savants, and, on the other hand, the empirical logic of voyagers and settlers who had visited or lived in particular places, encountered their inhabitants, and been exposed, often unwittingly, to indigenous agency and knowledge.     

现代性与社会政策改革——1890-1933年间德国社会政策探析

1890-1933年间德国社会政策的演进,正是以"制度化"与"民主化"为目标的现代性在"国家/社会"这一权力结构中的又一展演.这一发展实现了现代国家在统治模式上的"理性化",从而成为德国现代化的一次尝试.然而"现代性的病态"却注定了这种尝试以失败告终.德国社会政策改革的这一历史将成为学界反思现代性的又一途径.     

Exposing Necroburbia: Suburban Relocation,Necropolitics, and Violent Geographies in Manila

When accumulation in southern cities entails the dispossession of informal settlers, where do they go and what spatialities emerge out of their dispossession? In Manila, this occurs through a violent form of suburbanisation. To make way for modern and investment-friendly spaces, informal settlers are exiled to relocation sites in the suburban fringe. This process of accumulation by suburban relocation engenders necroburbia, a dystopic suburban periphery constituted by distant relocation sites where evicted settlers are subjected into violent and asphyxiating everyday geographies. It serves as a spatial fix to enable metropolitan accumulation. Drawing on Achilles Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, I expose necroburbia as a deceptive and violent space, produced through three spatialities: (1) demolition; (2) relocation; (3) necro-suburbanisms, or everyday ways of necropolitical living. These processes illustrate how urban fantasies of growth in cities like Manila are predicated upon necropolitical realities rendering informal settlers as expendable populations, deserving of everyday brutalities.     

Cosmopolitanism nationalism and the heritage of shame: comfort women memorials and the legacy of slavery in the United States

During World War II the Japanese military used approximately 200,000 women, mainly Koreans, as bonded workers they euphemistically labeled, ‘comfort women’. Since 2010, six memorial sites dedicated to the suffering of these women have been built in the United States. Campaigns for these memorials have been led by Korean-Americans, reflecting the importance this issue has in South Korea and within the Korean Diaspora. While a growing body of research has examined the political, social, and gender ramifications of the ‘Comfort Women’ issue in South Korea and on Korean-Japanese relations, less attention has been given to the transnational aspects of this memorializing campaign. What is the purpose of these memorials in the United States? How might visitors to such sites remember and memorialize trauma they know little about and which occurred far away? And how do these memorial sites dedicated to such distant trauma contrast with the absence of memorials for events much closer at hand, such as the historical realities of slavery? I examine these questions through an analysis of a ‘Comfort Women’s Memorial Peace Garden’ dedicated at the Fairfax County (Virginia) Government Center in May, 2014.