Historicizing Edai Siabo: a Contemporary Argument about the Pre‐colonial Past among the Motu‐Koita of Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT In the 1970s the Motu‐Koita, traditional inhabitants of what is now the National Capital District of Papua New Guinea, inaugurated a yearly cultural festival thematically based on traditional coastal trading voyages known as hiri. Contestation over the location and commercialization of the festival in the capital city developed in the new century as one distant village claimed to ‘own’ the hiri. The Motu‐Koita view of their past and their identity has been affected by their encounter with Christianity, colonialism and its aftermath, and the rhetoric of the villagers’ claims drew on criteria of authenticity, cultural purity, and exclusiveness which are arguably contemporary rather than ‘traditional’. This article reviews Motu‐Koita history, the story of the origin of the hiri, and the local politics of the cultural festival. It attempts to understand the way the past, which was formerly mythopoeically invoked, is being historicized and thereby fixed in new local discourses of cultural and heritage rights and ownership, as Melanesians come to terms with the effects of global processes on their traditions and other resources.     

Rethinking Western Motu Descent Groups

The Motu‐Koitabu are the traditional inhabitants of the site of Papua New Guinea's capital city, Port Moresby, and well represented in a body of literature, from the 1870s on, encompassing oral history, archaeology and social anthropology. A basic unit of Motu‐Koitabu society is the iduhu, a corporate group which is nowadays conventionally glossed locally as a ‘clan’ in English, but represented in anthropological literature as more ambiguous in nature than the gloss implies. Considering the literature in the light of recent fieldwork in a Motu‐Koitabu village, this article takes issue with an argument developed in the 1950s, which has become an accepted wisdom, that the structure of iduhu was threatened by the social consequences of missionisation and colonialism, and that iduhu were saved from collapse by new leaders, church deacons, who replaced traditional leaders. A re‐examination of the nature of iduhu, a partial reinterpretation of notions of leadership and prestige and an account of two recent disputes brought to a village court inform an argument that iduhu have been more resilient than previous researchers have thought. In this regard concepts of leadership among the Motu‐Koitabu need clarification, and it is suggested that the importance of landholding has been underestimated in previous attempts to understand what iduhu are.     

Contested Sources of Authority: Re‐claiming State Sovereignty by Formalizing Traditional Authority in Mozambique

In Mozambique, the current legal framework institutionalizes a rural–urban differentiation of local governance, allowing for elected representation in thirty‐three urban settings and the recognition of ‘community authorities’ in rural areas. This article deals with the latter by exploring the implementation of Decree 15/2000, which is the first legislation in post‐colonial Mozambique to formalize ‘traditional authority’. Views of traditional authority as either a ‘genuine’ African form of authority legitimized by traditional beliefs and practices, or as a form of power ‘corrupted’ by colonial rule, are inadequate for understanding the current situation. In formerly war‐torn Sussundenga District, kin‐based authorities drew on elements from ‘traditional’ and ‘state‐administrative’ domains of authority in order to be recognized. Varied definitions of tradition came to justify leadership, but the content on which legitimization was based defies any generalized Weberian dichotomy between traditional and modern/state types of office. Different sources of legitimacy sometimes foregrounded administrative needs and at other times maintained what became defined as traditional.     

Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into ‘Houseboys’

In Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal men made up more than half of the domestic servant population by 1938. They replaced the Chinese and Malay male servants who had worked for British colonists in the early colonial period. Much of the historical work on male domestic servants in colonial situations plots the construction of the ‘houseboy’ as emasculated, feminised and submissive. In contrast, colonial constructions of Aboriginal men as ‘houseboys’ in Darwin emphasise the masculinity of the Aboriginal hunter. Aboriginal men were characterised as requiring constant discipline and training, and this paternalistic discourse led to a corresponding denial of manhood or adulthood for Aboriginal men. While male domestic servants in other colonial settings were allowed some privileges of masculinity in relation to female workers, amongst Aboriginal domestic workers, it was so‐called ‘half‐caste’ women who, in acknowledgment of their ‘white blood’, received nominally higher wages and privileges for domestic work. Aboriginal men were denied what was referred to as a ‘breadwinning’ wage; an Australian wage awarded to white men with families. Despite this, their role as husbands was encouraged by the administration as a method of controlling sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women. These sometimes contradictory images can be understood as manifestations of the racialised construction of gender in Australia.     

Colonial ethnology and political rationality in french west Africa

This article explores the circular and mutually reinforcing relationship between professional anthropology and new technologies of administration that emerged after the First World War in French West Africa. Local administrators wrote fieldwork monographs that were formative for metropolitan science, while new native policies concerned with protecting yet improving indigenous social institutions incorporated the methods and insights of professional ethnologists. Together they created a shared field of colonial ethnology, a scientific‐administrative complex through which practical science and scientific administration constituted one another, whether deliberately or despite actors' self‐understanding. The goal is neither to dismiss anthropology as tainted by colonial history nor to accuse individual anthropologists of supporting colonial violence. Instead, this article analyzes how ethnologists' (contradictory) characterizations of African social relations and (contradictory) native policies were intrinsically related to, and did not simply influence, one another. These administrative and scientific imperatives constituted colonial humanism, a doubled and contradictory political rationality, even as they were its products. The French administration thus produced terms and data taken up by French ethnology that then shaped policies, which fueled administrative ethnographies that generated metropolitan scholarship and vice versa.     

‘Blindness which we mistake for sight’: British officials and the economic world of the cultivator in colonial Burma

Prompted by the recent completion of a study of the economic – and, to a degree, social and political – strategies used by Burma's rice cultivator to mitigate the potentially devastating impact of the economic crisis of the early 1930s on his material circumstances, this article explores some of the major methodological issues faced by the historian seeking an understanding of the economic behaviour of the cultivator in Burma under colonial rule. One set of issues concerns the need to locate that economic behaviour in a distinctive cultural context. A second rises from the fact that since almost the sole source for the Burma research is the surviving records of the colonial administration, the historian is forced to peer into the economic world of the Burmese rice cultivator through the eyes of British officials, whose sight of that world was far from complete and commonly distorted by cultural preconceptions. Here the article pays attention to the historian's use of colonial statistical data and impressionistic reports.     

From Crime to Coercion: Policing Dissent in Abeokuta,Nigeria, 1900–1940

Indirect rule figured prominently in Nigeria’s colonial administration, but historians understand more about the abstract tenets of this administrative strategy than they do about its everyday implementation. This article investigates the early history of the Native Authority Police Force in the town of Abeokuta in order to trace a larger move towards coercive forms of administration in the early twentieth century. In this period the police in Abeokuta developed from a primarily civil force tasked with managing crime in the rapidly growing town, into a political implement of the colonial government. It became critical in preserving the authority of both the local traditional ruler and the colonial administration behind him. In Abeokuta, this transition was largely precipitated by the 1918 Adubi War and the period of increased surveillance that followed it. This created new responsibilities and powers for the police, expanding their role in Abeokuta’s administration and raising their stock in the colonial administrative hierarchy.     

Māori “Conversion” to the Rule of Law and Nineteenth‐Century Imperial Loyalties

Missionaries were among the first Europeans to interact with the New Zealand Māori, bringing an evangelical message with a strict set of “laws” for Māori to follow. Māori, whose own religious beliefs required rigid observance to ritual, took time to convert to missionary Christianity but, like many Oceanic peoples, did so with fervour, regulating their daily lives according to the Laws of the missionaries’ God. With the advent of British rule in New Zealand in 1840, the Treaty of Waitangi gave Māori the same rights as British subjects, but also (in the Māori‐language version) guaranteed tribal autonomy. As the British administration established itself, it slowly attempted to bring Māori under the authority of the Queen's Laws, using persuasion rather than force. This article, using Māori‐language newspapers of the mid‐nineteenth century, discusses how some Māori approached the question of Law in a similar way to how they had converted to Christianity. This was partly due to their own, now Christianised, worldview, but it was also due to how the colonial authorities presented the principles of Law to them.     

Politicians,Merchants, and Colonial Maritime War: The Political and Economic Background of the American Act of 1708

During the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13), there were attempts to support colonial maritime war by legislation, and the American Act of 1708 can be seen as their culmination. Historians who study privateering or colonial history have referred to this act in several contexts, such as reform in prize administration, naval impressment in American colonies, and Spanish‐American trade. However, the political and economic interests behind this act have not been fully investigated. By examining the process of the enactment of the American Act together with antecedent attempts to promote colonial maritime war in parliament, this article reveals the political and vested interests involved in the act, the relations between them, and the influence they had on the content of the act. This analysis will show the complex interaction between politics, trade, and colonial maritime war in the early‐18th‐century American colonies.     

‘The Sun Always Shines in Perth’: a Post‐Colonial Geography of Identity,Memory and Place

In this paper I explore some of the textual possibilities of post‐colonial geography. Using the conceptual tool of place as a palimpsest, I trace some geographies of memory across selected colonial and post‐colonial texts. By focusing on the relationship between representations of ‘sunny Perth’ and ‘Nyungah Perth’, I tease out some of the more general theoretical issues which pertain to a politics of place and space within this (post)colonial Australian context. The nexus of memory, place and cultural identity is central to my analysis. I give particular attention to the ways in which cultural memories are inscribed in some very specific and very ordinary places, and how these places become site‐markers of the remembering process and of identity itself.     

Researching and Writing in the Twilight of an Imagined Conquest: Anthropology in Northern Rhodesia 1930–1960

The rich corpus of material produced by the anthropologists of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute (RLI) has come to dominate our understanding of Zambian societies and Zambia's past. The RLI was primarily concerned with the socio‐cultural effects of migrant labour. The paper argues that the anthropologists of the RLI worked from within a paradigm that was dominated by the experience of colonial conquest in South Africa. RLI anthropologists transferred their understanding of colonial conquest in South Africa to the Northern Rhodesian situation, without ever truly analysing the manner in which colonial rule had come to be established in Northern Rhodesia. As such the RLI anthropologists operated within a flawed understanding of the past. The paper argues that a historical paradigm of colonial conquest that was applicable to the South African situation came to be unquestioningly applied by anthropologists to the Northern Rhodesian situation, and discusses what the consequences of this paradigm are for our understanding of Zambian history.     

The Tywerrenge as an Artefact of Rule: The (Post) Colonial Life of a Secret/Sacred Aboriginal Object

In this article, I examine an Aboriginal ritual object, the secret/sacred tywerrenge which in many respects lies at the heart of Central Australian Aboriginal religious belief. Given its ritual power, the tywerrenge has always held a special place in the administrative rationalities of both colonial and post-colonial authorities. For certain missionaries, the tywerrenge was seen as an object to be eliminated as it constituted an impediment to Aboriginal “salvation”. For early anthropologists such as Baldwin Spencer, they offered material evidence supporting social evolutionist theories regarding the “staged” transformation of “primitive” religious beliefs into science. More recently, tywerrenge have been subject to an intensive regime of inspection and evaluation by government authorities, museums, and land councils. Indeed, they have come to play a significant role in the enforcement of Australian law under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act since the possession of a tywerrenge can decide the ownership of traditional lands. In short, these religious objects—and the beliefs associated with them—have been co-opted and employed by a variety of authorities in order to achieve a range of governmental ends. In this sense, tywerrenge have been transformed into instruments of colonial and post-colonial rule.     

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 ‘bullets to water’ belief complex: a pan-southern African cognate epistemology for protective medicines and the control of projectiles

Remarkable similarities across colonial encounters where Africans believed projectiles could be influenced by ritual practices (medicines, behaviours, observances) demand enquiry into their conception and trajectory. Although suggestion of pan-subcontinental phenomena may elicit suspicion of a generalisation, here evidence is examined from the late-independent and colonial periods that shows that a general belief, held cognate between groups, may indeed have existed. The focus is on precolonial¹ southern African beliefs in the manipulation of projectiles and how these may have affected ritual responses to firearms during colonisation. At least a millennium of interactions between hunters, herders and farmers appear to have resulted in commonly held beliefs, albeit with differential emphases. From first contact, and into sustained colonisation, it became necessary for Africans to highlight and/or adapt indigenous beliefs as mechanisms by which to cope with firearms and settler aggressive expansion.     

Post‐Colonialism,Orientalism, and Understanding: Religious Studies and the Christian Missionary Imperative

This article explores issues related to the worldviews of Friedrich Max Müller and Monier Monier‐Williams, and contemporary critique of their work. Their indebtedness to their own age is explored, especially fulfilment theology and the missionary imperative, noting similarities and differences in their agendas. The conclusion considers how post‐colonial critique can be applied. While accepting the validity of such critique, it is suggested that it makes vast and sweeping judgments, engaging in a totalising narrative. It is argued that, applied too harshly, such critiques can ignore the positive contributions to understanding other faiths and cultures made by such figures. It ends with some reflections upon both their and our place within the evolving tradition of the study of religion, and the need for both understanding and critical judgment.     

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.     

6. WHAT'S IN A CONCEPT? THE KINETIC EMPIRE OF THE COMANCHES

This essay revisits the main themes and arguments put forward in The Comanche Empire: indigenous agency; spatial reorientation in the writing of colonial histories; the composition of the Comanche empire and its impact on the history of North America. It also responds to a number of specific issues raised by the roundtable participants: differences and similarities between indigenous and Euro‐colonial power regimes; balancing of culture‐specific frameworks with broad‐gauge political economic analysis; linkages between indigenous agency and indigenous sovereignty in colonial encounters; the question of periodization in writing Native American and colonial histories. Finally, the essay points to new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and comparing nonterritorial nomadic empires by introducing the concept of “kinetic empire,” which refers to a flexible imperial organization that revolves around a set of mobile activities and relies on selective nodal control of key resources.     

The Burning of Sampati Kuer: Sati and the Politics of Imperialism,Nationalism and Revivalism in 1920s India

Sati, the immolation of a Hindu widow on her husband's funeral pyre, is a rare, but highly controversial practice. It has inspired a surfeit of scholarly studies in the last twenty years, most of which concentrate on one of two main historical sati ‘episodes’: that of early‐colonial Bengal, culminating with the British prohibition of 1829, and that of late twentieth‐century Rajasthan, epitomised by the immolation of Roop Kanwar in 1987. Comparatively little detailed historical analysis exists on sati cases between these two events, however, a lacuna this paper seeks to address by exploring British and Indian discourses on sati as they existed in late‐colonial India. The paper argues that sati remained a site of ideological and actual confrontation in the early twentieth century, with important implications for ongoing debates about Hindu religion, identity and nation. It focuses on the intersection between various colonial debates and contemporaneous Indian social and political concerns during the controversy surrounding the immolation of Sampati Kuer in Barh, Bihar, in 1927, emphasising resonances with postcolonial interpretations of sati and the dissonance of early nineteenth‐century tropes when reproduced in the Patna High Court in 1928. Thus, while Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid have suggested that ‘ad hoc’ attempts to piece together a ‘modern’ narrative of widow immolation began in the 1950s, this paper will suggest that various contemporary discursive formations on sati can be observed in late‐colonial India, when discussions of sati became entwined with Indian nationalism and Hindu identity politics and evoked the first organised female response to sati from an emergent women's movement that saw it as an ideological, as well as physical, violation of women.     

The Sun and the Shakers,Again: Enga,Ipili, and Somaip Perspectives on the Cult of Ain

ABSTRACT The ‘Sun and the Shakers, Again’ resumes the conversation begun by Mervyn J. Meggitt in his 1973 article ‘The Sun and the Shakers’ concerning the circumstances and mindset of Enga and Ipili speakers on the eve (or in the early stages) of colonial penetration. The ‘Cult of Ain,’ as Meggitt termed a regional cult that broke out in the mid‐1940s, followed on the heels of devastating epidemics and famine and was in some measure, at least in most areas where it caught on, a response to those traumas. Yet there were other dimensions: apparent cargo cultism and millenarianism. Widening the geographical scope of reporting beyond that of Meggitt's article to include both the Somaip, as reported on by Hans Reithofer in The Python Spirit and the Cross, and the Ipili speakers of the western Porgera valley and the Paiela valley, this second and final installment reviews and critiques existing interpretations of the Cult of Ain in light of the ethnohistorical detail offered in the first installment and goes on to offer an interpretation of the cult that is inspired by the cosmological symbols common to all cult versions: most obviously the sun but also the sky. The Cult of Ain is viewed by participants and their descendants alike as the prelude to colonialism and missionization, and understanding it is crucial to writing the cultural history of the last 65+ years.     

Writing on the edge: the poet,the printer,and the colonial frontier in Ercilla’s La Araucana (1569–1590)

It took Alonso de Ercilla (1533–1594) thirty years to finish La Araucana, a first-person narrative epic poem about the brutal war of Arauco, in southern Chile, and one of the most canonical texts of colonial Latin America. By focusing on a crucial episode of Ercilla's eyewitness account, this essay revisits a number of scholarly discussions that have been central for our understanding of the text. First, it takes into consideration previous scholarship overlooked by specialists, as well as hitherto unstudied copies of the poem, in order to offer a thorough reevaluation of the textual and editorial history of the poem. Moreover, it explores the frontier as a chronotope and as a locus of enunciation for colonial epic, a space that is also crucial for Ercilla's carefully crafted authorial persona. Finally, it interrogates the ways in which the discursive representations of colonial frontier spaces were mediated by the material practices of early modern book production, arguing for a more fruitful relation between ecdotics and poetics, between material bibliography and theories of authorship and textuality in our approaches to colonial texts.